The City of Spirits

The City of Spirits
Eric Singletary

A low, but fast-burning mist hung over the water, twisting the riparian tangle of cypress and Spanish moss into alien shapes in the dim morning light. There was a heavy silence in the air and even the rush of the Missippi and the churning of the harbor turbines seemed muted and far away. The swampy lagoon was empty except for a single plank raft making its way through the tangle of roots, its sole occupant a thin, dark-skinned girl of about sixteen in a white hemp sarong. She was sleepy, but on edge, and it didn’t take anything more than a sight of a ragged shape breaking the water for her to start and crouch low, reaching her hand for a knife in the backpack she always carried with her. She stared intently for a few moments at what turned out to be nothing more than a fallen cypress tree, its wood rotting in the murky water. She let out a heavy sigh and wiped the sweat out of her eyes, then made another futile attempt to beat her bushy mane of dark red hair back under her headwrap. “You bes watch it, Lucida!” She reprimanded herself. She’d seen kaymanes much larger than that fallen log in these swamps before and knew that it wasn’t wise to go through them at this hour. The ceremony started early though, and the waters of the lagoon were calmer. It was usually the faster, easier way to the Beele from Madrina Beso’s houseboat. Lucida pushed off of the log with her rafting pole and maneuvered into deeper water.

For the final lomèt of the swamp she was constantly on edge, jumping at every log or splash, thinking about the ten mèt long python one of the riverboat captains had pulled into market last year. She barely dared breathe until she saw the massive concrete statue of Ela’ya, the city’s chief spirit, and the guardian of all the rivers and roadways leaning on his rafting pole and nonchalantly puffing a cigar at the place where the lagoon fed into the wider river. A forest of ship masts waited in the distance, and the smell of spice and roasting meat was already filling her nostrils, but she had work to do first. She pulled her raft up onto the Mud Island bank, took out some smoked gator meat, laid it at the statue’s feet, and muttered “O Pa Lebba, gen wib an ben me joday a?” She could imagine Madrina Beso thumping her ears for that one—she wasn’t supposed to talk to the spirits in riverspeak, and even though Ma Beso liked to hint that the strict lines the Obás liked to draw between the Haus Orijas and the Lwa of the Riverfolk were more the ideas of flesh than of spirit, calling the city’s most important spirit by a Vodun name probably wasn’t the sort of thing she meant. Hopefully the right spirit would understand and ken her prayer—she needed him today. She pushed her raft back into the river and let the current carry her the rest of the way, enjoying the view of the concrete slopes and ancient statues of the river landing.

Market day started when the sun rose and the Memfis Beele was already a mad swirl of exotic colors, smells, and sounds. Seaports never lasted long down where the Missippi opened into the Norlins Bay. There were a few forts where Guerros from Habana kept watch for contraband, but they were corrupt and easily bribed. That meant that as far as most sailors were concerned, the Beele was the gateway to the Missippi and the heart of the Gòlf. That also made it one of the only places on Mayá’s green world where you could hear voices from every language and see faces from every nation. Most of the sailors could at least speak Naponè or Almán, and Lucida’s father as landing master had made sure she could too, but there was always something she didn’t recognize. Two heavily armed men with beards brushed past her. They were speaking to each other in what sounded like Pèsek, and the symbols on their armor suggested she was right. They were probably just buying up Tennasí rubber for their perpetual war with the Chinos, she tried to reassure herself. She couldn’t shake the feeling though that something about them didn’t seem right. There were often Pèseks in the landing. Their god, Alá favored merchants and traders and some even had seasonal homes in the foreign quarter, but she only knew their armor from the grainy celluloid photographs that were sometimes sold at the merchant stalls. If they needed rubber, they wouldn’t send soldiers half way across the ocean in the middle of a holy war. Pirates was more like it . . . perhaps mercenaries shamed for offending the laws of their faith hired to take slaves to sell in Ewòpa. She pushed further into the crowd and shoved a gold peso into the hands of the nearest pedal-cab. She didn’t want to walk past the warehouses alone. As soon as she saw the familiar blue bandanas and canes of the west city guards standing beneath the Blue Star of the Nation Headquarters, she hopped off the cab and thanked the driver. She’d be safe here.

The headquarters was a massive block of a building identifiable only by a white banner that bore a blue six pointed star on its center. It had been a theatre for the very wealthy, back when that still meant something, but got closed down after the last Great War when the old dreams died. A few years later, during the hunger riots, the Coronas, a gang that used to make its turf in the Memfis Westside, burned it down along with half the city. Those were the years when Mayá wept and drowned the cities of the wicked with her shaking sobs, sending desperate and displaced crowds up the river. Those were the years of the Llanto de Reina, the Weeping Queen. They were also the years of the legendary Snakehead Agudo and his gang, the Zuras, who made their fortunes selling escape to Memfis boojies too lost in their own decadence to do anything but drown in despair. He put his gang and their money to work rebuilding the city and helping the homeless and plague-ridden. His Zuras and the Eniya alliance he created with the Razas and a few other city gangs remade the city anew, and it was said that even the police of the time turned their pistols over to his cause. That’s when he made his move and drove out the Coronas and other Wat set gangs and took the city for himself. They took the old theatre too, gutted the charred ruins, turned the stage into a training area, and installed an armory and dorms. They’d had it ever since. Today the Zuras ruled the landing and the river of West Memfis, and the Razas had the Midtown rubber and cacao plantations. They kept the order in the city. It was an order written in blood and fear, but it held life in balance.

And there, leaning in the doorway underneath the banner was a friendly and familiar face in khaki shorts and a blue bandana. His bare chest gleamed in the hot sun like melting saptar. His skin was blotched from growing sunrot and he was covered in scars from his service to the city and to the folk but he always had a twinkle in his eye and Lucida loved him. He was her father’s chief guard and the oldest Zura in the service but he was also like family. To Lucida he was like the grandfather she'd never known. She called out to him, beaming and slipping into a bit of the river tongue, “Ji Oscar! Kan eddin me to di Haus a?” She punched him playfully and threw her arms around him.

Oscar smiled his gentle, toothless smile, and replied in more proper Anglesh as if to remind her how the daughter of one of the city’s Familia bosses should be talking. “Of course. Your papa’s waitin for you. I’ll turn the guard, piti child, just a mo. This the bid day init? The shells at your Kenzy tellin you to join the Kay and take up your collares.” Whistling an old river tune, he turned and went inside the building. Some time later he returned with a replacement, a teenaged boy wearing nothing but white shorts and a pistol, and motioned the way, slinging his blue cane over his shoulder and adjusting the pistol strap across his chest.

This part of the city would have lifted Lucida’s heart even without an escort. It was the heart of the Missippi and the lifeblood of the inland Gòlf, and it showed. There were some stretches of Old World brick road and standing buildings that were centuries old. Lucida drank in the delicious smell of ribs slow-roasting in the tabernas. Everywhere she looked there were live goats, chickens, rabbits, and wild dogs being sold for food or for ebó. And above the sounds of the crowd and the merchants peddling their wares or trying to persuade visitors into purchasing “genuine French Quarter Relics” (supposedly dredged from the depths of the Norlins Bay itself!) wailed the greatest music in the world: Jazz blended with the sounds of beat boxers keeping rhythm while poets rapped and sang the blues. It was all Lucida could do not to break her taboos and step into the King’s Palace for their famous chapulin gumbo or join the people dancing to an old world tune. She persisted, looking firmly ahead until the road veered off into the spirit walk.

The Beele ended abruptly at a rickety chain fence just past a few clubs and brothels. Beyond that, the brick road trailed off into the jungle where vines choked the eerie stone ruins that lay there. That place belonged to the dead, and though criminals would sometimes trespass to bully service out of the souls of the wicked, the only ones who were supposed to go there were Haus Lorijas bearing offerings to soothe and appease the restless ghosts that wandered there. To the right, a small paved roadway wound off through the darkness of the trees. It was lit by a row of dim electric saltwater lamps and the candles of what must have been a thousand shrines. This was the spirit walk. The trees shut out the busy sounds of the harbor, but there was more than that. The whole place had a hushed, contemplative energy that brought silence to even the loosest lips. The sounds and smells of the market gave way to the hum of gently chanted prayers and the scent of candle dressings and incense.

The first few hundred mèts of the walk were dominated by foreign shrines and temples. Outside the market itself, and a few houseboats along the river, most of West Memfis was populated by immigrants, refugees, or foreign traders, and this was where their homes intersected with the Beele. Most of the Krestians worshipped in their own homes, since it was against their teachings to worship their god in public squares, and the Pèsek traders prayed to their Alá without any art or ebó, but most other faiths had some sort of place here.

Lucida always felt her back tingling when she walked through this part of the market. The spirits were strong, but they were alien and the people were strange. She grasped Oscar’s elbow and nudged him to hurry as they walked past a colorful shrine to a woman wearing robes and holding a scythe, with a real human skull in the place of her head. She was well-tended, covered with beads and flowers as one of the most revered Santas of the Meksikan Catos. Like the River Folk, they honored spirits very similar to her own Orijas and she felt some kinship with them, but that statue had always unnerved her. To keep her mind busy the rest of the way she named off the altars and shrines she recognized. On one side of the walk stood a long line of wooden poles into which were carved the fierce faces of the Asir, the grim gods of the Almán sailors. On the other, bright red archways—tori, she recalled—marked the entrances to the Kami shrines of the seafaring Naponè. She also saw a Buda and a few shrines to the Devas that the Chinos honored. In the shadows a few more Santas and some of the River Folk Lwa lay hidden beyond the gaze of Haus inspectors on the watch for evidence of sincretismo. There were also a few new ones that she was pretty sure belonged to the Padres some of the people up in the Mericas had started praying to. They were inexpertly cobbled together; just a few old world coins, handmade flags, and a battered copy of the constitution from back when the Mericas were all one big country that even ruled parts of Meksiko and Habana. Lots of Mericans wanted those days back and were willing to fight for it. The shrine probably belonged to a refugee gang living in the camp nearby in the old estadio, which meant the wars up north were getting worse.

 She blinked back the rush of light as they passed out of the foreign walk and into the Habana walk at the foot of the Kay. The Habana walk was brighter and more open, and Lucida felt a little less of the rush of strange energies. She felt her ancestors and the spirits of her people, and she always felt like she was at the heart of the city when she was here. It was still quiet, but there was joy here, they even had shops. Not the lively market stalls of the Beele, but botánicas where people handed vendors lists of healing herbs, or carefully felt out the spirits of stones before choosing the ones they needed. And at the center of it all was the Kay de las Spiritas, or as everyone in Memfis called it, the Spirit Haus. It was enormous, made of pure white stone and still bore some of the old Krestian imagery from back when it was a holy place for their religion. The Lorijas had made it their home since the time of the Llanto de Reina. That was a story Lucida knew well, since she was named after its hero. According to the stories, Baball himself walked the earth in mortal form, mourning the great sadness of his mother, Mayá, and the wickedness of the people. Everywhere he walked, the blood fever followed, the bodies of the huddled refugees of the drowned cities of Kiba, Mami, and Norlins piled up and were burnt. It was during this time that one of Baball’s own priestesses, Lucida de Sanctos sought him out, kissed his feet and begged him to help her people. He took pity on her, and handed her his staff, promising her that with it, she would have the power to heal all she touched until the day he came to collect his price.

She set up a place of healing in an abandoned church and with Baball’s staff all who came to her recovered. Then, one day, Baball came in and took the staff away. The great healer died of the fever she had given her life to and went to be with her ancestors. Her followers stayed and set up a Spirit Haus for the worship of the Orijas and the healing of the sick. Today, it was the largest one west of the Isle of Mami, and to Lucida, it was going to be a home for many, many years until the shells told her otherwise. “There be your papa now, ya?” Oscar pointed at two figures standing beneath the great bronze statue of Lucida’s namesake, the healer. She walked towards them, but her eyes were lost in the sad, kind eyes of the Haus’s founder.

At the feet of the statue, standing among the shrines to the Orijas and Egun was her father, Fiel Santana, landing master of Memfis and local boss of the Zura familia of the Eniya nation. He was one of the most powerful people in the city, but to her he was just Papa Fiel. He was powerfully built, dressed in cargo pants and wearing a gold chain around his neck ending in a six pointed star. At his level he no longer needed to wear a bandana since everyone in the harbor knew him, but he still had an old blue cap that he wore with the visor turned to the right side. His arms, back, and broad chest were covered in tattoos that she could never quite remember the meaning of. Her little brother Caj was there too to wish her well. They wouldn’t be able to come in with her, since only people who worked and lived in the Kay could be present at her initiation. They were both carrying rollerboards, which suggested they had business that would take them somewhat further than just the Haus.

“Leave us prided, piti girl. I look to many a good chans for the familia. May soon you make all the ebó for us and we pay no more, ya?” Though his robust voice was firm and joked with her, she saw his eyes well up a little. She knew he had mixed feelings about another of his children having a career with the Haus, especially after the departure of her older brother five years earlier, but her mother had always insisted on honoring the will of the spirits against all his best wishes. He was not a religious man and he was sometimes a little unnerved by the rituals he saw when he went to the Haus for blessings, but his wife had belonged to the Kay for a few years before malaria took her and a part of him always kept ties to it for her sake. He was also a practical man and knew that without the support of the Lorijas he could lose the support of the people, and that would spell disaster. Power was a delicate balance to keep in this world.

“An how your chansin been, piti Caj?” Lucida knelt down by her little brother. She hadn’t noticed how fast he’d been growing. He was already almost nine years old, and it was probably time for him to start learning a trade soon. He beamed, and pulled a crumpled green bandana from a pocket and crossed his wrists right over left.

“Papa talked with Paulo. I’m sitten in the tree on watch dis night!” Lucida shuddered at the thought of her little brother already running with a gang. She thought about some of the others she’d known who had died. Boys, yes, but all at least into the first of young manhood. Sure, he was only a lookout; they probably wouldn’t even give him a weapon, and he’d have people watching out for him, but still. . . . Her fists clenched and she turned to her father, dragging him a few paces out of the way.

“Wat mal in ju hed a!?” She swallowed and pushed herself to speak proper Anglesh. “Why you send him out so young? Him just a boy! Is this really wat chans you want of him?” Tears stood in her own eyes now, and her cheeks burned as several passersby turned to take notice of the excitement. “An why not you send him wit your own gang? Why not wit Oscar?” she added more quietly, ashamed at her outburst.

“I’m him papa, yes, and I choose what go for him, girl. Of course I wan him safe. I also wan my own head safe. Caj is security for the whole familia wit you in the Haus an all.” He gave her a significant look and left her feeling small and angry, then the moment passed. “Him safe, I’ll see to that. Right now I just wan him to make some friends, see how we move. I’m sending some Zuras too. Caj be fit and sound by my word.” Security. She knew what he was referring to. It made no sense, especially at this early stage in her training. For all she knew, she was going to just spend a year or two learning how to read the Obi, talk to the ancestors, and make the proper offerings to the spirits, maybe master a bit of the spirit tongue—then go back to regular life, not be sent off to an Ifá Haus in Lando like her brother Mané. She understood getting Caj in with Master Paulo’s gang someday—just not now. If he was a blood-brother, then that would join Westside and Midtown for good, every bit as certainly as—she didn’t want to follow that thought any further. She wasn’t sure she could do what he wanted her to do, even if none of her other obligations got in the way. There were things she could never tell her father, though she was pretty sure the Lorijas and whoever else was there tonight would force her to talk about it.

“I’ll take her from here—you can go now.” A curt, familiar voice spoke behind her. Madrina Beso was an intimidating person, but there was a softer side to her that most people didn’t see—that her father, at least, seemed unable to see. As fearless as he usually was, she was one person, as far as Lucida could tell, who unsettled him, who could get under his skin—and she seemed to have a pretty keen sense of that as well. Fiel nudged Caj’s shoulder to get his attention and led him onto the main road toward Midtown.

“Are you well, child?” Madrina Beso asked, putting her hand on Lucida’s shoulder and leading her inside.

“Yes. Yes, fit and fine,” Lucida answered quickly. But her godmother wasn’t satisfied. “Papa Fiel wans me to join up with Master Paulo’s boy Marco. Thinks real blood between the Razas and the Zuras will be chansin for the city. Ony hold is, joinins not so chansin for me, ya.” Beso still wasn’t satisfied, but she didn’t press it any further. Lucida calmed herself and looked up at her godmother. Leandra Beso had a wild wisp of grey hair sticking out from underneath her headwrap, and piercing eyes that looked straight through everyone they met. There were wrinkles around those eyes, but to Lucida she still radiated a certain youthful beauty. Beso had been her mother’s godmother for years, and Lucida had practically grown up in her houseboat. When her mother died, she’d become more of a parent to Lucida than her father ever could be, with his tasks of running the city and keeping the peace. It was really no surprise that she’d wound up being called to work with the spirits. Madrina Beso herded her inside the Haus.

There were more people inside than there usually were, and they were talking to each other urgently in hushed voices. She tried desperately not to listen, though she couldn’t help but catch a few references to a revolution in Ayiti, and some rising conflict between the Palo and Ocha Hauses. They were speaking Island Kreyo, too, not Espanish or Anglish, which meant they had come all the way from Kiba itself, not just some other Hauses in the inland Habana. She couldn’t see any of the elaborate dress of the Obás, but she did see some of the white robes they wore down at the Ifá Hauses in the Keyes, probably in from the Lando Haus on the Isle of Mami. Which might mean. . . . She craned her head to try to get a better look at their faces but Madrina Beso tugged at her arm and led her up the stairs towards one of the private rooms. The wide space downstairs was reserved for public ebó for the city as well as major feasts, and was usually empty. The heartbeat of the Kay, the initiations and cleansings, the readings, the healings and the classes for new initiates took place in private areas throughout the rest of the building.

The room they took Lucida to had a few washbasins, an altar, and a sheet laid out on the floor with a few floor cushions in it, but was otherwise mostly bare. “Did you keep the fire burning?” Madrina Beso gave Lucida a calculating look. She’d had to care for the houseboat and keep a flame burning to the Orijas for three days. She’d also had to not consume food or alcohol, or receive any suggestive touch from a man.

“Se Madrina, I did all. Even made ebó to Ela’ya floatin into the Missippi.” Her old godmother kept looking at her, almost as though looking for a lie buried somewhere in there.

“Very good. Wash.” She pointed to the wash basin and a pair of fresh clothes for her to put on after she had finished. She then left her alone. Alone with her thoughts. What was happening out in the Islands? She hoped it was just one of the usual sectarian disputes. She didn’t know much about the inner workings of the faith, but she did know that these things happened. The Ocha and Palo Hauses usually got along alright, and debates over practice and protocol usually wound up being just a matter of cross-reading or sincretismo and were easily settled. However, if the Palos had anything to do with the revolution, practices that were usually met with frowns and light reprimands might be met with much harsher punishments. It would be even worse if the Ayitan Voduns were involved, since that would affect the city’s relationship with the River Folk, who it depended on for trade and communication with the rest of the Missippi. More than that, many of the River Folk were like family to her, and if the truth got out about her godmother. . . .

Mostly, though, she felt anger. Her father knew that there had been a ship in from Kiba, and he’d told her nothing. Did he know something? There had been Balas from the Ifá Hauses in the Keyes among them and he hadn’t said a word. What if—? She scolded herself for letting her mind wander and got to the washing. The water was scented with something that made her skin tingle.

A few minutes later, there was a knock at the door, her Madrina came in, along with a plump, pleasant looking woman and a few of the visiting Balas and Lorijas. She gasped as she recognized among them a familiar face from a fondly remembered past. “Mané!” she started to cry out, but her brother gave her a look that said she’d better focus on the initiation instead of him. Her heart started pounding even more than it had been before, and for the first time she started to doubt whether she’d be able to make it through this.

“This is Bela. She’ll be teaching you and helping with your initiation.” Madrina Beso gestured to the plump woman, who, beaming, told Lucida to just call her Yubona Bela. “These other fine ladies and gentlemen are here to confirm the purity and quality of our Haus. Whatever you say here will not leave this room. Hide nothing.” She pulled Lucida in and whispered, “Please be on your best behavior,” then motioned for Lucida to sit down.

She lit some incense, laid out her casting cloth and cast her set of marked cowry shells, then began asking Lucida questions. Pointed questions, the sort that she knew Madrina Beso couldn’t possibly know to ask. In what seemed an ever-accelerating outpouring of words, she had told her godmother, her brother, and a room full of strangers everything about her life. She tried not to look at Mané when she talked about the pain of his leaving, and about her father’s attitude towards the Hauses, but she could tell he was struggling with all his might to keep from showing emotion. She started to understand that he must have been one of those rare few who were called to sever all ties to worldly relationships and affairs, all interests in the spirits of the ancestors and devote his interests and efforts completely to the mysteries of Orun. As she spoke, some of her anger changed into sympathy. It was a hard path to be called to and she finally understood why she would never be able to speak to him again. He was as someone dead to this world, like a ghost or a swamp wisp, nothing more.

She spoke about her fears for little Caj. She talked about the marriage her father wanted her to fall into someday with Marco the Raza, the marriage that she could never accept. And finally, even though she tried to lie and say she was finished, she had to tell them the reason she couldn’t follow her father’s wishes. She told the spirits, and her godmother, the strangers from Kiba, and even her brother about the river boy she’d met last year fishing. That she’d been with him, taken his seed, and then seen him killed in the crossfire when some Coronas came into the city from the other side of the river. A few people had guessed about the baby, but most assumed the father had also been one of the other young Eniyas who died that day. Most everyone had thought that she’d either put an end to it, or it had been born soulless, so nobody really gave it much thought. Instead a river child with nation blood had spent the last four months living in the Coyote club sucking the tetas off a wet whore for a few pesos a month.

She felt a chill as she noticed two of the visitors mutter something quietly to each other. She hoped it was general surprise, and didn’t have any impact on what was going on abroad. She was speaking in the context of an initiatory cleansing, and they were bound by oath not to speak a word, but she still worried. After what felt like ages, her godmother seemed satisfied with the questions, threw the shells a few more times, and jotted down some notes, which she gave to a young man in white who had come in a few minutes after everyone else. She knew he’d been sent to retrieve whatever ebó the spirits had demanded to help her spirit find balance before the rite could begin. She tried not to beat herself up, since she knew almost nobody passed their reading without a few sacrifices, but she had to let a part of her ego die.

Yubona Bela splashed some more of the stinging water on her, and began pulling herbs and pastes from a cabinet near the altar. Lucida grew dizzy with the heat and the smells, and felt herself nodding off. She’d have to be able to make vows later, and couldn’t allow herself to get groggy quite yet. The young man returned after a few minutes with a live chicken, and a basket full of fruits and vegetables and handed them over to Madrina Beso, who gently placed the plate of fruit on the altar, then crooning softly in the spirit tongue, picked up the chicken, slit its throat with a knife, and let the blood run into an empty basin, which she placed next to the other offerings. She then whispered some instructions to the boy and handed him the now dead bird. After a few more readings, she nodded at Yubona Bela who announced that the rite was ready to begin.

Bela instructed Lucida to stretch out her arms and began rubbing an ointment on her body. She’d done a kab cleaning before, but it was different in initiation, especially in the Memfis Haus, where initiates were meant to learn how to visit the spirits regularly to bring back word. She felt her body tingling, and her mind grow hazy, and the rest of the night ran together in a melting haze. She remembered saying words she’d rehearsed in the spirit tongue, and being given her beads one by one each fully fed and charged. The end of the ritual faded out as she left her body behind and crossed over into the world beyond this world to run with the spirits. Ela’ya, laughing his youthful laugh, took her hand and led her to meet the Orijas one by one, then took her to the lands of the ancestors and back through time.

She rose from her daze two or three times during the night, and could have sworn she heard her father’s raised voice coming from the sanctuary downstairs amidst the rabble of his gang. She felt someone moving in the room at another time, and heard a few more voices shouting just before morning. When she woke, the room was empty, and there was a scribbled note next to where she was sleeping. She recognized Mané’s handwriting, since he’d been the one who taught her to read and write a little before he left. It was in perfect Old World English, so she had some trouble making out the antiquarian spelling and turns of phrase, but she got the general message. He loved her, and he was sorry that his life had called him away, and he hoped that they could meet one day again in the city of spirits beyond the world. Sitting next to the letter was a drumstick from her ebó chicken on a metal plate breaded and fried with some steamed vegetables for her breakfast.

She ate quickly, folded the letter and placed it carefully in a pocket in her sack and went downstairs to see her Madrina and debrief her experiences from the night. The entry was empty, so she decided to step into the market outside, where she was met not with Haus folk, but with her father and Paulo, knives out, glaring at each other, surrounded by an array of green and blue bandanas holding pistols. Fiel turned towards her.

“Caj be gone, he snatched up in a raid last night,” her father said, behind gritted teeth. “I canna get but lies on who it was took my boy.” Lucida’s heart caught in her chest as the explanations started coming from both angles. Apparently, the fact that there had been an attack of some sort during the night was the only thing that could be established with any degree of certainty. They’d spent the night sailing up and down the river, but the attackers had vanished. Paulo claimed that he’d lost a few of his own, but Fiel insisted that his men were incompetent. Emotions had been running high when Lucida came out. The Haus Lorijas had turned her father away when he tried to get Lucida, insisting that a new Borija couldn’t be disturbed under any conditions, so he had even less than his usual scanty patience. The one thing that they could agree on was that the River Folk must have done it in retaliation for a massacre out in the Islands, word of which they’d just received and for which they blamed the people of Habana. The consensus was they were holding Caj hostage unless his father gave up his position as harbor master and withdrew Memfis from its alliances with Habana.

Lucida knew the River Folk and her father well enough to know two things. The first was that the River Folk would never do such a thing: they were peaceful, and though some of them were less than scrupulous, prone to pocket the occasional trinket from the market, or con a traveler out of his drinking money, they were pretty well liked. The second was that her father would make up any ridiculous story if he thought it would gain him power or favor. This meant that her father had heard the news from Ayiti, and it confirmed her worst fears. At least a few of the Vodun Hauses had been involved in the revolution. It made sense in some ways. Kiba was wealthier, had a larger navy, and was the center of power for the entire Gòlf. Memfis had profited from being part of the Habanas, but not everyone had fared so well. She hated to admit that a part of her even kind of wanted to see the Ayitans win their independence. But if there was a war, it would mean the River Folk and other groups in the city who came from either Ayiti or from drowned Norlins would become suspect. Her father was taking preemptive advantage of what he saw as fortuitous circumstances. She could already see his eyes dancing with dreams of medals from the Kiban Consejo, and it made her sick.

It made her even sicker to see him using the disappearance of her brother as a justification for power play and persecution. In the face of everything she could only muster one small sentence. “Wat you wan me to do?”

“Was there any bad air hangin with anyone in the Beele gisteday? I wan in on the bager-muckin river rats an where they went.”

She stiffened. “I, um, they was Pèsek soldiers . . . in armor. Mebbe buying up rubber, but slaves seems more the chans they had eyes for. I gad em as pirates.” She didn’t say what was really going through her head, though, the thoughts that weighed so heavily in her mind that she was nearly convinced they would snap her neck in two. She was all but certain Fiel had already made up his mind about what he was going to do and she doubted he was really interested in finding little Caj. She kept her wits and held her tongue. It took everything she had to turn around as placidly as she could and walk away in silence, tears running down her dark face and eyes blazing. She knew that if the Pèseks really had taken Caj then they had long since made their way down the river, out the bay and were sailing back to the slave markets of Ewòpa. He was as lost as Mané, and belonged to a world as distant and alien as the city of spirits her older brother had talked about in his letter. He’d be growing up with a very different family, and if he survived, he’d be making a life in a very different world. She wasn’t sure why she was so certain that’s what had happened to him, but she was. She prayed that her father would search the river up and down, but she knew he wouldn’t. She made her way back up the road, avoiding making eye contact until she had slipped safely into the Coyote and been ushered into one of the open private rooms in the back. One of the dancers came in a bit later with her baby. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to name him yet, but the women had taken to calling him Grito. She held him, then took off her collares, feeling the living spirit within them as she set them aside to let them keep their purity, then let the baby nurse a little. She thought about everything she’d learned and everything that had changed since yesterday morning. She worried about her godmother. No wonder she’d been so insistent on Lucida’s behavior. She had grown up among the River Folk before joining the Haus, and Lucida had learned some of their ways from her over the years. She suspected that it was Madrina Beso’s intent to train her fully to work with the powers of the river in all its aspects, Lwa and Orija alike. But now, because of this baby, and because of a war thousands of lomèts away, Lucida found herself faced with a choice.

She could marry Marco, pass off the baby as the child of a green Raza, possibly even Paulo’s other son who had died the same night as the river boy, and make peace between the great families of Memfis. She’d be able to continue her studies, and perhaps the whole conflict would blow over, but she’d lose a part of herself if she let herself marry that boy. She could leave it all behind, jump on a river boat at midnight and travel with the very folk her father had targeted as his scapegoat. That would mean abandoning all of her training, living on the run, and possibly going against the will of the Orijas, which might poison her spirit and lead to disaster. Or she could come out with the truth, reveal the baby for who he was and hope for the best. Her father might kill the baby, or banish them, she didn’t know. She felt lost, and even though the sun was still low in the Eastern sky, she was tired. She curled up with her baby and tried to drown out the cacophony of music and lovemaking. In a little while she’d go back to the Kay and talk to Madrina Beso—she’d know what to do. For now, she’d rest, and let all confusion and thoughts of her future drift away in the peace-bringing oblivion of dreams. She sighed as sleep took her. Perhaps she’d see Caj on the other side of waking, or maybe Mané would pay her a visit, bearing answers or deeper mysteries. She let all that drift away, until she knew nothing—nothing, but the thin chicken-feather mat beneath her back, and the tiny child nestled against her breast.