As noon approached, a cloud of iridescent blue-winged butterflies descended on her and made the horror she had become seem unutterably beautiful. For a long, lingering moment, she was transformed into the most delicate work of art, covered in trembling shards of bright blue lapis lazuli as they, too, feasted on her, as thoughtlessly and randomly as the soldiers had massacred her friends.
Within a day there was nothing left of her but bones.
Mizuki’s skeleton was never recovered. Nor was Dr Koizumi’s head. Both lay undisturbed through the succeeding decades as the Yakimoto Freshwater Pearl Company pulled out of Africa and went into liquidation. What little could be found of the other bodies was respectfully returned to Japan but the facility was left to moulder. Unknown to anyone, the orchids in the ruined orchidarium and the pearl-rich oysters on the bed of the black lake flourished. The creatures Mizuki had blundered into did not. Through more than thirty years of sporadic war, with well-armed armies marauding hungrily to and fro, they all became bush meat — or vanished eastward over the mountains as the creatures they relied on in their food chain became bush meat in turn.
The gorillas went first. The huge hands of their leader were sold in the great Ahia market of Cite La Bas as ashtrays. His hide became a rug, his head a massive paperweight. His flesh was smoked and eaten along with that of the rest of his troop. The murderous chimpanzees were worth nothing as ornaments in The Ahia so they too were smoked and sold for food. The black panther’s snarling head ended up on the wall of the minister of the interior in his offices in faraway Cite Matadi before even that great folly fell to ruin. His midnight-coloured pelt graced the floor of a Lebanese diamond trader in Granville Harbour. His bones were sold as tiger bones and followed Mizuki’s colleagues back to Japan.
As the turn of the millennium came, the last of the creatures in the high canopy were blasted out of existence, either by random gunfire from below or by strafing runs from above as warplanes and attack helicopters sought to terminate the uncontrolled comings and goings of the armies, to bring an end to the anarchy that followed so destructively in their wake as their names went into nightmare folklore: Simbas, Interahamwe, Boko Haram, M23, Lord’s Resistance Army, Army of Christ the Infant.
The rainforest became empty and silent, as did the whole country, from the volcanic chain at its heart right the way down to the delta. Even the mosquitoes and butterflies died out, for there was no blood for them to feed on. Moreover, the natural breeding ground of the mosquitoes in the warm, still waters of Lac Dudo were forbidden them by another form of invasive plants. Water hyacinth spread relentlessly upstream from the delta and managed to cover the obsidian surface of the lake in great mats thick enough to keep even mosquitoes at bay.
Eventually there was nothing living on the western slope of Karisoke above Cite La Bas and the black lake except the water hyacinth, the gigantic plant life of the virgin rainforest and such creatures as could find food in the plants but could not furnish sustenance for the endless succession of starving armies. Who then began, in the time-honoured tradition of the place, to eat each other.
The scarred man who cut off Dr Koizumi’s head was called Ajani, which is Matadi for ‘he fights for what is his’. In some ways the three decades after the massacre by Lac Dudo had been kind to Ajani — he was alive and relatively wealthy; he had a job and a shanty to live in. In other ways they had not — he was crippled and in constant pain, doomed to eke out the last of his days working as a cleaner in the main hospital in Cite La Bas. Unable to apply for what little social help there was — not with a past like his — nor able to afford the drugs he saw dispensed around him, he eked out his meagre wages by a little pilfering. Which saved doctor’s fees as he healed himself, and allowed a little extra income from street trading what was left over in The Ahia, where anything could be bought and sold. That was where he had bartered his battered AK-47 and rusty machet when he had finally escaped from the Army of Christ the Infant after twenty-five years of brutal service.
Although he was only in his early sixties, Ajani moved like an eighty-year-old, pushing his broom along the corridors with a stooped back and an unsteady gait. Increasingly regularly now he reeled and staggered as though the floor was heaving. Sometimes this was because of his pain but more often it was because of an overdose of self-administered painkillers.
Ajani was staggering badly as he began the last hour of his life. His legs were hurting unbearably. He had swallowed several handfuls of high-dose Keral tablets stolen from the already ill-supplied pharmacy. He was light-headed and thought his sense of balance must be failing him. But, in fact, the ground was quaking, an effect emphasized by the fact that Ajani was working on the topmost floor of the hospital, twelve stories above street level. The corridor he was sweeping so unsteadily ended with a panoramic window looking north across the city towards the volcanic caldera of Mount Karisoke. Ajani noted dreamily that the unsteadiness beneath his feet seemed to be matched by a disturbing amount of activity up there. He saw much more smoke than usual issuing from the massive crater, but there was no eruption. Karisoke often fumed and smoked — she had done so right throughout Ajani’s entire life. However, she had never yet erupted. He was not unduly disturbed.
But Karisoke was playing a trick on Ajani and his fellow citizens in Cite La Bas. She was not erupting — she had not done so this century. Instead she had been quietly filling the huge caldera on her crater with a lake of molten lava, some seven hundred and fifty million cubic metres in volume, fed by a magma chamber nearly twice as large below. The lava was largely composed of melilite nephelinite — light rare earth elements which made the molten rock almost as liquid as water.
The tremors that Ajani felt as he staggered towards the panoramic window and looked north up the vertiginous ten-mile slope towards the volcano’s rim were the effects on the lower slopes of a massive collapse in the southern wall of the caldera. The effect of the collapse was that of a dam bursting. Molten lava sprang out in a red-hot river more than two kilometres wide. The boiling rock was at a temperature in excess of one thousand degrees Celsius. Because it was so liquid, it ran like a tidal wave, guided by the heaves and folds of the mountain side round the eastern end of the lake and down through the blazing jungle towards the city below. It came down the mountainside at one hundred kilometres per hour. And that was the speed it was still going when it came flooding into the eastern suburbs of Cite La Bas.
On the twelfth storey of the hospital, Ajani was too high above the streets to see individuals. The window was double-glazed and the air-conditioning fitfully alive, so he heard nothing of their panicked flight southward. All he really saw was a wall of flame-footed smoke that swept incredibly rapidly into the city on his right. He reeled unsteadily, fighting to take in what his eyes were revealing to him in a kind of drug-enhanced slow motion. Fire ran relentlessly through city blocks. Vehicles of all sizes were swept aside, burning, exploding. Buildings reeled, collapsed, ignited. Petrol stations detonated as though hit by bunker-buster bombs. Power went out. The air-con choked — then the back-up generators kicked in and gave it the kiss of life. Ajani bashed his forehead against the glass as he strained to see more. He watched, unbelieving, as the red flood swept through the airport, covering the runway and sweeping at last into the massive avgas storage tanks. The explosion as they blew apart shook the hospital more forcefully than the collapse of the volcano wall had done.