Diana Pho: Steampunk World

“But where?”

“Anywhere.”

Anywhere but here, she heard. “I can’t go back. You know I can’t.”

He stroked her arm. “I can’t stay here," he repeated. “I need to get away.”

“I like it here. I’m finally starting to attract better customers. I like our neighbours. I like your aunt. Please, don’t ask me to go back.”

“All right. I won’t ask.”

He left before the dawn, before she woke up. He didn’t take much, just a few clothes and a toolkit. She also discovered he'd cut off a lock of her hair.

She went through the motions of frantic queries and wailing in friends' arms. They checked the schedules of ships leaving the jetties, both sea and air. She burned joss paper and prayed for his safe return. She heard conflicting rumours of where he was. Even Subramaniam sin-sang came to look in on her out of concern. At night, she pulled herself into a tight ball, trying to contain the pain in her chest.

When she was born, she was so tiny, her parents thought she would die. So the fortune-teller told them to give her a name that would give her more strength. So they gave her a name that meant “three people" in hopes that three of her within the one body would suffice to help her survive.

She did not need three of herself, and while she was sure she did not actually need the love of her life, she was also sure she did not want to be without him, either. If he could live with her secret shame, she could live with his, too.

He had written her a poem once, a little after they had settled into a comfortable rhythm in Binlang. It took her a while to find someone who could read it, but when she did, she was tickled to hear that it was only three lines:

It was, she had decided, very bad poetry, but she embroidered it anyway and hung it up over the kitchen stove.

San Yan was finishing the final touches on the towkay soh’s new dress, feeling very satisfied with the result. It was pleasurable to work for a generous client, surrounded by supportive friends and substitutes for relatives. It was almost enough to fill the hole inside her chest.

She smelled the roast pork first, and felt a stab of envy for the neighbour who was obviously having a feast that night. If Heong had been home, she mused, he probably would have had the gall to track the smell with his nose and casually call on the neighbour for some favour, thus earning an invitation to dinner.

But the smell was coming closer and she heard the key rattle in the door lock. Heong tried to push the door open with aplomb but the dignity of the gesture was cut short since San Yan had the door hook in.

San Yan accidentally pricked her finger as she hastily put aside the dress. She unhooked the door and threw it open to the sight of Heong smiling shyly with a hock of roast pork in one hand. “I’m home,” he said with an air of embarrassment at having been gone so long.

In a moment, they both knew, she would burst into a tearful tantrum, but before that, she grabbed him tight, and smelled the sweat on his neck and back, the gear oil in his chest, the pork in his hand.

What a fragrance!

Kamina, January 1904

“Bury him.” A true Christian would not have pronounced that sentence so easily. The Reverend Lieutenant Thomas Jefferson Wilson pressed his forehead with the heel of one hand, leaned back in the throne they had made him assume, and closed his eyes.

He couldn’t close his ears, though. There was no escape from the prisoner’s pleading as the ushers dragged him to the pit they’d previously dug. Blessedly, Yoka refrained from further translation, but the captive’s wailing cries were obvious in their meaning. As was the hiss and slap of gravel being poured over his legs, body, and arms.

He comforted himself with knowledge born of earlier trials: the prisoner’s head would remain aboveground.

One of Wilson’s new African congregants helped him rise so the folding throne could be moved to a better vantage point. He had to open his eyes again to walk to the fast filling pit. Shadows cloaked the cavern’s walls. Currents of damp air bent the smallest lamp’s naked flame, and made the tiny golden points cast by the larger, shielded lamps shiver.

How had his noble-hearted intentions come to this? His and those of the other Negro missionaries.

Behind him, muffled clucking announced the coming of a speckled hen. Its handler gave it to him to hold while priests— other priests—his colleagues —traced symbols in the packed earth now spread round about the prisoner’s neck and head. Over this the youngest of them, a mere boy, threw kernels of dried corn.

Wilson resumed his seat. Best for all to begin and end this as quickly as possible. Afterwards he would pray for God’s forgiveness. Again. Perhaps someday he would receive an answer.

Surely he was yet deserving of one, despite the priests’ entreaties to commit himself to their heathenish cult.

He returned the hen to its handler, rolled back the cuffs of his sleeves and removed a clinging feather from the red sash they had insisted he wear.

“What were you doing on the slopes above Mwilambwe?” he asked. Yoka rendered the question into Bah-Sangah and then Lingala. Then the prisoner’s response into Bah-Sangah and English. The young man was good at his task.

The buried captive claimed he had been doing nothing, nothing, he had simply become lost and was wandering innocently when King Mwenda’s men found him near their camp. With a nod Wilson signaled that the hen should be allowed to peck. The captive regarded it with dread, his words failing. It freely chose the corn nearest the character for “big lie.”

The buried man began to shout, repeating the same phrase over and over.

“‘Don’t kill me! Don’t kill me!’ he is saying,” Yoka told Wilson. “Some peoples do similar ceremonies to accuse a person of practicing magic. Then they execute him. Shall I tell the prisoner he’s safe?”

“No.” For, in fact, he was in danger. Perhaps even a Christian court would have treated him no better. King Mwenda was an important ally of Everfair. Much of the land the colony had settled had originally belonged to him.

The handler picked up the bird. No witch could keep such an animal as a familiar—all history, all church tradition ran counter to the idea. Cats, dogs, toads, rats, lizards, yes. But not roosters. Not hens. They were too cleanly, too righteous, too irretrievably associated with the Lord.

“Who do you work for?”

Checking with Wilson, the handler set the bird back down. According to Yoka, the captive said he worked for no one, no one, unless they would hire him, of course, in which case—but Wilson stopped attending to the man’s words, for the hen had resumed its feeding. With three precise movements of its head it indicated that the prisoner was in the Belgian tyrant Leopold’s employ.

As they had naturally suspected when he was found creeping through the army’s perimeter guard. Validation, the first step, had taken place. The Urim and Thummim, so to speak.

Now for the difficult part. Wilson preferred a white cock for the latter portion of these interrogations. The handler took the hen away and relief filled the buried man’s face.

“What services do you offer us? What will you do?”

A torrent of eager words poured out of him. “He will work hard for us in any way we require,” Yoka told Wilson and the Bah-Sangah priests. “Digging in the mines, gathering rubber, paddling a boat, even cooking like a woman.”