down the screen? Why don’t you use your mind a little when we actually need it? They’re mad at me, Kaiser. Haven’t you noticed? They’re peeved. They’re peeved at you, too, gracious agricultural consultant that you might have been. Our friends have been had, darling. They want in here. No one is sliding down that back pole without someone else at this window with a gun. It may be only a scepter but it still packs a punch. Now pack up and get the hell out of here before it’s too late, and we both end up skewered on the same spear like one big messianic brochette.”
“But, Charles, why don’t I take the gun and you slide down the pole?”
Charles looked at her squarely. “Is that an offer?”
“Yes,” said Gray. She drew her blanket closer around her and looked away from Charles, embarrassed. She didn’t know what she was doing. She’d said yes because it sounded nice. That wasn’t enough.
Charles said nothing until she looked back at him, at a face that was haggard and regretful. It was a face that knew what it was doing. “You couldn’t,” said Charles. “Your arm … Besides, I might be able to talk them out of this. You’d never swing that. You don’t have the clout.”
“But all those Kenyans you’ve shot. If one, why not two … Remember?”
“Your first morning here. You were excellent,” said Charles with satisfaction. “You impressed me enormously that day.”
“But you said there was no limit.”
“And you said there was.” Charles smiled philosophically, glancing out the window to find the natives were getting restless. Once more, though, he did not fire into the crowd but shot off a tree branch over their heads. It crackled and fell, scattering Africans beneath it. Charles turned back to Gray. “Well, touché. You were right.”
“What’s the limit, Charles?”
“You,” he said readily.
“That’s it?”
“Yep. Just you.” The simplicity seemed to please him.
Gray would not understand this for a long time. Already projecting herself into this coming confusion, Gray asked Charles one more thing: “Even if I make it—later, how is this going to make me feel?”
“Alive, for one thing,” said Charles. “Swell. And maybe lousy, too.” Gray still didn’t move, so Charles had to explain patiently, “You’ll feel like you owe somebody something. And you will. Just not me. Pass it on. Give him my regards.” And then Charles looked out the window again, in a pang of jealousy over someone who, as it turns out, was not yet born.
Gray went to her corner, dressed, and packed her knapsack. It must have sickened her to remember to take the rolls of film, the tapes, all her notes—to even now be planning on cashing in on her “study” should she succeed in returning home. It would have been a relief then, when Corgie instructed her from the window, “Don’t forget those notes of yours, Kaiser. You write all this up and you get this published, understand? I want to be immortal somehow.”
When she finished packing, Charles carefully threaded the strap of her knapsack around the sling. A spear flew through the window and lodged in Corgie’s mattress. They did not make a joke about it. Gray looked at the spear, deep in the bed. Feathers from the hole floated up through the air and caught in Gray’s hair. Corgie picked them out one by one. All the sourness was gone from his face, the vengeful glimmer. There were a lot of things to say, but it was too late for all of them, so the two kept quiet and stones rattled against the door and Charles Corgie kissed Gray Kaiser, ol-murani, goodbye.
In the oddest way, Gray did not quite enjoy it. It was, simply, not the kiss of two people who had loved each other hard and had to part. It was the kiss of two people who had fought each other up until the very last minute. It was a reminder, in its unfamiliarity, of what they had not been doing.
Charles helped her down the pole from above. That hand extended, keeping her poised above the ground for a moment before it let go—the long, tired tendons, the skin still dark and oily from cleaning his gun—was the last she saw of him. Silently she crept through the brushy pathway to the forest, making her way to the trail she’d followed down the cliffs on the way here. Deftly, dutifully, quietly, she hiked the narrow switchbacks, while behind her the rhythm of Corgie’s rifle increased steadily, like a final salute. Yet soon after she started up the mountain, the firing stopped altogether. Gray decided she was too high to hear anymore. Later, when she could no longer see into the valley, she was sure she heard an explosion she couldn’t explain.
While the pain in her arm was keen, Gray was grateful for its steady distraction. It was despite the wound rather than because of it that Il-Ororen might have made out down her cheeks the tears which far more than blood proved her a human being.
The trip back was grueling work, and Gray bore down on it. She slept poorly, with the snarl of cheetahs at the edge of her ear. Gray told Errol later that those days on the trail she was as close to being “an animal” as she’d ever come, in a compulsive, dead migration to the rest of her herd. The body persevered. The mind went numb, speaking only to say: Don’t step there; avoid those ants; this branch is in your way.
She did make it to Hassatti’s tribe. Though in a fever, she refused to rest more than a couple of hours and insisted on being taken to Nairobi right away. She wouldn’t talk about what had happened, and made the bumpy trip in a pickup truck in silence. When she reached the city, she hired a man to take her in a small prop plane over the peaks of Kilimanjaro.
During most of this trip, too, she didn’t speak, nor did she explain her purpose. She gave her pilot directions until she recognized the deep valley surrounded by the plunging cliffs she’d stared up at so often from the hammock on Corgie’s veranda. She told the pilot to fly closer; circling, the plane drew lower. Trees obscured the muddy huts, but Gray was not looking for traditional architecture.
“Wait,” she said, “this might not be the place.” Gray scanned back and forth across the valley. “Closer.”
The plane swept lower, and Gray wondered how Il-Ororen must feel, seeing another god fly by—were they ready for their next messiah? No, surely they’d made do with the old one. Charles was such a resourceful man, he had that way of talking to them—and they’d always listened to him in the end, always. Well, they enjoyed him, didn’t they? He was a fun god. Most certainly he’d pulled something. And wouldn’t Charles be surprised when they landed roughly between banana trees and Gray Kaiser stepped out of the cockpit, smiling, finally able to kiss him and take him up in the sky with the credits rolling?
Gray’s eyes darted across the familiar valley, panicked. “This can’t be right,” she said. “Maybe these valleys look a lot the same, I don’t know …”
There was no tower. There was no treehouse, no gym, no cathedral. The plane flew closer in, at Gray’s insistence, to the pilot’s distress, until, there—she got her bearings. Gray fell back in her seat.
“Msabu wish to land? There is not space—”
“No,” said Gray. “Take it back up. Take me to Nairobi.”
“If Msabu wish to more look—”
“No,” said Gray. “I’ve seen enough.”
The small plane soared back up, its passengers’ ears popping. Below, the long, narrow valley grew smaller, but Gray couldn’t help but see even as the plane rose quite high the four black scars of charred flat earth and a few wisps of smoke trailing from these patches, like the last sad smoldering of crematory ash.
Errol scanned the compound in the dying light. The sites of Corgie’s projects had seeded nicely and were overgrown. Despite their disregard for history, none among Il-Ororen had yet dared plant his own manyatta