Author's Note: This is the last installment of Zhura's second novella.
All comments and feedback are most welcome!
At midday the next day, Zhura's mind was still foggy, which seemed fitting under a hazy, cloud-studded sky. She'd had only a few hours to sleep before discussing strategies with her companions for raising coin to pay off House San. Then she returned alone to the Hazard, to meet with Shana.
Finding the right compound in the vast slum was like searching for an individual tree in the forest. Most of the homes looked similar. There were no symbols on the roads and buildings as there were in the districts. There were hardly roads at all. Instead, crooked pathways snaked between compounds, split around huts planted squarely in their middle, and ran blankly into walls.
The alleys were often choked with offal or flooded with fouled water. But the denizens of the Hazard somehow knew exactly where they were going.
Zhura could identify trees and shrubs -- at least, the ones that grew in the Sung valley, and those she had come to know in the months she'd lived in Namu. From the directions she had, she was able to get close to the compound, in part by spotting a stand of red-fruited waterberry trees. She gave Shana's father's name to a few locals before someone pointed her to the right compound. The gate was open.
It was hard to believe that the woman who had rutted Zhura into oblivion the night before was the same one pounding sorghum with mortar and pestle in the yard. Now Shana wore a calf-length dress with a side wrap, though the shape of her large breasts and wide hips could not be denied. When she saw Zhura, Shana offered a sweaty smile, and shooed away her sisters and the children who played nearby.
Without the kohl that had painted her eyes, Shana had a somewhat ordinary face, broad and honest. Nonetheless, she exuded a subtle strength -- both physical and spiritual -- that enthralled Zhura.
The herb-witch took up the abandoned wooden pestle next to Shana. She began to help with the work. It was a bond, it seemed, that women shared everywhere. In the Sung Valley, they prepared yams much the same way.
"When do you sleep?" Zhura quipped.
"In the morning," Shana replied. She brushed shoulder-length braids from her face. "In the afternoon before the Orchid opens. For the other women, it is much the same. My brother and I are the only ones earning coin in this house. We do what must be done."
Zhura nodded in empathy. If her budding plan was to have a chance, she would have to track down the green-haired woman, and meet with her
sanju
demon. She would spend hours today just traveling through the city.
"My father and his brothers built this house," Shana said, glancing around at the compound. "It is up to us to keep it running."
"I never knew my father." Nor could Zhura recall her mother. "You should always honor what yours did for you."
"If you truly want to do this work, there are safer places than the Orchid," Shana said in a lower voice. "We lost two of our number recently. One is dead. The other disappeared. With each loss, we become more afraid, and have to work that much harder. I cannot ask you to join us in that."
"Is there a way to make things better?" Zhura asked.
"It is the way of life in the Hazard. You might as well ask if there is a way to make storms gentler."
Zhura had no ready answer. Instead, she ground the sorghum beside Shana, losing herself for a few minutes in a familiar rhythm of village life. For that moment it was if she was home, listening to birdsong and the rush of the Little Mongoose. The two women worked to their own steady drumbeat, adding more flour and water, getting the consistency of the
ugali
dough just right.
"One of those women you lost was sold to slavers. Now those slavers are dead or captured, and she is safe."
Shana stopped pounding and gaped at Zhura. "What is her name?"
"Hani. She is alive and well."
"By the grace of the ancestors, is this true?"
Zhura leaned on the pestle, the smoothly worn wood feeling much like a staff in her practiced hands. "Shana, if there were a way to make things better at the Orchid, would you help to do it?"
"Who are you?"
"Someone who hopes we can help each other, Shana."
Shana went quiet. She knelt and rubbed the grainy brown dough between two callused fingers, as if she were passing judgment upon it. She eyed the huts where her nieces and nephews played, then turned back to Zhura.
"Tell me what can be done," she said.
"Just so. If you tell me where I can get one of those love potions."
*
"Shana is a leader," Hani said. "She will join us if she believes we can win, and she will pull others to our side."
Zhura could hardly think of Shana without recalling the thorough rutting the woman had given her the previous night. Her cunt throbbed with the memory. When all this was over, she hoped for a second turn with Shana and that halter.
"What changed her mind was you," Zhura said. "Knowing that you lived, and that the gang could be defeated."
Hani pursed her lips in thought. The Ikanjan woman had a certain devious charm, and her almond-shaped eyes belied a quick mind.
They all sat around the fire at Amina and Kaj's, finishing coconut rice and roasted meat that the smith had bought from street vendors.
"It is the green-haired woman we must find," Zhura said. "Shana said her name was Nyoki. We need to know what ships she was telling Maiko about, and where they are now."
"Nyoki will not be easy. She is aloof, and independent-minded." Hani said. "Her father was Bhataguran. She speaks the tongue fluently, and is popular with their sailors and traders. I know where to find her -- at her home in Tanga District."
"Can we do that today?"
Hani glanced up at the sky. The sun had already disappeared over the slope and spires of Gold City. "We'll need to move fast," she said. "But I have an idea of how to convince her."
"So we convince the girl, find the ships, nab the thieves, deal with Maiko, and grab the gold," Ngo said cheerfully. He snapped a bone and sucked the marrow. "Simple as mother's milk."
"There's so much that can go wrong," Amina said, shaking her head. "And what if everything goes right? If another gang sees a chance, they will move in on the Orchid next."
Everyone looked to Hani.
"If whoever comes next isn't getting us kidnapped and murdered, it will be an improvement," she said. "We whores will do what we have to, in order to protect ourselves."
"We have one advantage," Bayati said. "We know something about Maiko's gang. They know nothing about us. If it all works, they'll never know what got them. Just like the slavers on the beach."
"That could all fall apart once you talk to Nyoki," Kaj said.
"Let me go with Hani," Bayati offered. "She hasn't seen me yet."
Zhura eyed the Kichinka woman's arm. She had examined the wound each day. It was healing cleanly, faster than Zhura would have expected. Even so, it was her good arm, and she wouldn't be able to fight without reopening the torn flesh.
"Then we should go, and fast," Zhura said.
Later, Zhura, Bayati and Hani hastened through dusty streets, knowing Nyoki was due at the Orchid at nightfall. The main byways were lightly used now, with markets thinning out, and day laborers finishing their work.
"How will you convince her?" Zhura asked Hani as they walked.
"It was something you said, actually. The fact that I am free is proof that we can defy Maiko's gang."
"That's why you wanted to bring Bluejar's mask."
"Yes," Hani said.
"We should consider what we will do," Bayati said, "if she says no."
Zhura hadn't wanted to think about that. They couldn't threaten or hurt the girl. Not only would it make them no better than the gang, it would surely alert Maiko that something was wrong.
"I just won't let her refuse," Hani said.
They had to get the information they needed tonight. If they didn't know where the thieves would strike, they couldn't enlist the aid of the Goldshields -- especially the guards back at Dugong Marsh. They had gifted Bluejar and his slavers to that post, and hoped those guardsmen wouldn't pass up another chance to capture criminals in the act.
As they climbed their way up the uneven road that led to the east end of Tanga District, Zhura squirmed under the robe she wore over her regular halter and skirt. It chafed and confined her flesh, so accustomed was she to the breath of open air. Her staff, however, felt like it belonged in her hands. It was comforting to be armed again.
Late afternoon sun glinted off the spear points and pot-shaped helmets of the Goldshields, as the guards let them through the district gate. The inhabitants of the eastern tip of Tanga would have had a commanding view over the bay, if not for the high walls, which looked to have been built to withstand an assault from the sea. However, now the stones appeared aged, pockmarked and blanched by the salt spray.
The women entered a market. Traders were closing their stalls, packing up their wares of cheap fabrics and hand tools. An empty stage was constructed at the center of the market, much like others where Zhura had witnessed actors performing plays.
