Until, at last, the Great River entered the inner delta. A stream that had been as broad as the Amazon at Manaos, wide enough to make a fisherman suddenly believe he was lost at sea with the two banks fallen far below his horizon, suddenly fractured, shattered, ran away into the swampy jungle in a maze of lesser streams. From outer space, on Google Earth, the River Gir seemed to be constructed like one of the great trees that stood along its lost and silent upper reaches. Twigs of streams ran down from mountainsides and in from the edges of deserts, gathering into branches that flowed inevitably into one huge trunk — a trunk more than five hundred miles long; a trunk that became twisted, wandering, widespread, but coherent. Until it met the green wall of the delta. And here, like the trunk of a tree entering the ground, it spread its roots as widely and wildly as it had spread its branches far inland. There remained a tap-root, true; one stream stronger than the rest, still calling itself the River. Still the Gir. But no longer the Great River. Its greatness was lost in the delta.
The Ghost, too, would have been lost, but for the force of the flood which held its floating island in midstream so that it followed that tap-root of the River Gir straight into the heart of the inner delta. Here the flood had all but swamped even the hardiest mangroves. But they still reached out, like deadly reefs and sandbars, swaying and shifting, until one at last snagged the matted roots of water hyacinth. The mares’ nest of vegetation swung inwards towards the shore and became more firmly anchored. It had reached its final resting place, seemingly almost as high as the simple wooden cross on top of the missionary church which was the first sign of current human habitation half a kilometre inland on a knoll miraculously above the floodwater.
Then the flood beneath both chapel and orchid crested and began to recede. The force of the falling water sucked at the hyacinth raft with sufficient force to start it breaking up. The mangroves tore at it as the current began to release them. Ripping at it as they sprang back like the claws of the great leopards that had once hunted here, with branches as powerful as the arms of the huge silverback gorillas that had once ruled the impenetrable jungle on far Mount Karisoke. The hyacinth raft began to come apart. Dr Koizumi’s skull rolled away into the receding waters. Much of the rest of the matted vegetation fell into the mud of the river’s shore. But the Ghost, sitting on a high, tough fork of mangrove branch, remained miraculously unscathed. As the rains eased during the next few days and the water continued to fall until the Gir at last resumed its accustomed river course, running gently enough to allow the first couple of orphans from the church school near the chapel to come down to the bank and begin to explore the aftermath of the flood, like creatures recently released from the Ark, unaware of the beautiful flower sitting like a white dove just above their heads.
Until the soldier crushed it out of existence by resting the barrel of his Kalashnikov on the tree-fork so that he could get a steady platform for observation and assessment of a good field of fire for the moment when the rest of the Army of Christ the Infant caught up with him. The fork offered the soldier a sufficiently steady lookout point for his purposes, for he was lying on what remained of the bed of water hyacinths and it made a perfect hiding place and observation platform. At this stage the soldier only wanted to spy on the unsuspecting children still wandering between the riverbank and the school, which was the army’s next objective because of the number of potential recruits its students represented — and because of the two women who were in charge of the place.
A bell in the chapel began to ring. It had struck perhaps half a dozen times before its dominance over the breathless silence of the jungle was overwhelmed by a distant roaring from high in the sky. Thunder, perhaps — and the sultry air certainly threatened it. Or an airliner’s engines going into noisy reverse thrust somewhere high above the green jungle canopy as it settled towards its landing at the distant Granville Harbour International Airport. The soldier paid scant attention to the distant thunder — diminishing already — as he watched the children hurrying towards the chapel, blissfully unaware of his presence — and the impending arrival of his comrades. They were a mixture of boys and girls. It was hard to tell their ages, but they looked young to him. Young and soft and tender. His stomach grumbled in an internal echo of the distant thunder — and his mouth flooded with saliva.
The soldier’s name was Esan, which meant ‘Nine’ in Yoruba. The soldier had been nine when Moses Nlong had recruited him into the Army of Christ the Infant by making him kill his cousin with his sharp-bladed matchet and eat part of her heart. Not General Nlong alone, of course, but the power of Obi that he controlled through Ngoboi, his own terrifying devil, with its magic mask and his matted raffia costume, who embodied the most terrifying of the Obi spirits of the Great Dark Forest and gave the general much of his power. A devil which would soon be here, with the army and with General Nlong, hungry for recruits in more ways than one.
In the years since he joined the Army of Christ the Infant, Esan had risen to the rank of corporal and had been given the trusted role of pathfinder and scout, for, unlike many of the others, he was contained and icily quiet. He did not suffer from nightmares and he did not need to be motivated with cocaine. He had grown tall and strong in body as well as in spirit. He believed in the power of the spirits the devil embodied but he wore only one small fetish — and did not rely on bizarre magical wigs, costumes or make-up to make him invincible; the green-brown camouflage of his corporal’s uniform was what he preferred to wear. Consequently he blended into the forest and could be relied upon to give accurate reports. So the general came to know him. To trust him. And he had killed many more people and eaten many more hearts.
He was thirteen years old.
TWO
Turbulence
KLM Flight 1330 from Paris swung low over the delta, fighting to complete its landing at Benin la Bas’s Granville Harbour International before the threatening weather closed in again. The Boeing 737’s engines thundered as it settled into the lower air, rolling to the left as it swung on to a westerly heading, the better part of three hundred miles east of the runway, a little more than twenty minutes out. The captain’s voice crackled through the PA system, ‘Please ensure that your seat belts are tightened. We may experience a little turbulence.’
Richard Mariner sat, looking down out of the window below his left shoulder, his big fists motionless in his lap. His belt was already as tight as it could go — and would have been so even if he hadn’t managed to get a seat with extra legroom. A necessity given his massive size, but nevertheless a slightly unnerving prospect whereby any kind of emergency landing would throw him bodily through the side wall of the lavatory if his belt proved less than perfect. In any case, he was expecting all kinds of turbulence in all sorts of ways. During the next few minutes, the next few hours, perhaps even during the next few days. His bright blue eyes were narrow and his throat felt dry — and almost as tight as his seat belt.
The sight of the delta always had that effect on him, he thought. The simple, bone-deep disgust he always felt when coming close to it. The way the cancerous outgrowth of dark green jungle and mangrove bellied into the bay and spread like a dark stain back far beyond the horizon inland. The bulbous, almost brain-like swelling of it reaching into an inner delta, then giving way to a riverine plain reaching deeper into the impenetrable jungle of the volcanic hinterland a thousand miles away.