Dancing In The Shadows of Love (6 page)

There was no time to respond. The door to the courthouse crashed open. The
Prioress
, and the rest of the holding camp, flooded in.

‘What happened?’ the
Prioress
asked as she knelt next to the two
Controllers
huddled on the floor. She lifted
Sub-Prioress
Kapera’s limp wrist, resting the tips of two fingers where there should have been a pulse.

‘Kapera is dead,’ she said and scowled at me as I stood over Dalia, her guardian or her comforter, I knew not which. The
Prioress
turned her gaze toward the holy man for answers, as he had known she would. ‘Who did this to her?’

There was a heartbeat when I nearly spoke the truth. I looked at the
Prior
. His lips shaped Dalia’s name: a wordless threat. Her shoulders shook beneath my arm and, unaware of her danger, she moaned for the loss of her lover. Her real love, which was never me, could never have been me. For hadn’t I always suspected that love for one such as I was a lie?

But I could not help myself. The urge to protect her was too strong and the flower of my love was not yet dead. I straightened, and stepped away from Dalia, who held the lifeless body of her ex-lover tight against her breast, her wet face covered in bloody stains. I ignored her, and the
Prior
, and stared straight at the
Prioress
. I
willed
her to believe; it was all too easy for her to believe.

‘I did it,’ I said. ‘I killed
Sub-Prioress
Kapera.’

I put on my idiot face and said nothing more, not even when the police arrived and subjected me to a harsh interrogation. No explanations were necessary. The truth would have been more difficult for them to accept than the lie. Almost as difficult as it was for me to accept Dalia’s silence when she let them take me away.

I did not look back.

I never saw her again. My beloved, my Dalia, whose betrayal lay not in loving another, but in never having loved me at all.

“Fling away ambition.
By that sin fell the angels.”

The vision of a benevolent
Spirit King
stayed with Jamila. From the moment she first drew strength from it, gleaming above the old school gates, he became her beloved, her beacon, a candle to illuminate her deliverance from the obscurity of her life.

When her resolve trembled with doubt, she thought of the
Spirit King’s
pain. Forgotten by his people, betrayed by his friends and sold into slavery as a sacrifice to save the tribe, the soundless scream etched on his death mask fortified her. She could bear whatever she had to, with the
Spirit King
at her side. To remind herself that he was always with her, she bought a wooden
Spirit King
necklace from the little shop at the local court.

She earned a meagre wage from the corner café where she worked on Saturdays. On the payday after she stared into the face of the
Spirit King
, she went straight to the court shop.

Prior
Devin unlocked the small office safe and smiled at her eager shuffles. ‘I’m going as fast as I can,’ he said, bemused by the determination in one so young. She had woken him from his rare afternoon sleep but he knew why she came straight from work: sometimes her father emptied her purse into his begging cup before she’d even changed into her house clothes. ‘This isn’t yours,’ her Papa said. ‘How must I feed the little ones when I haven’t got a job? Whatever you earn belongs to all of us.’

The
Prior
didn’t want her money. ‘I pay my way,’ Jamila insisted. ‘I’m not a charity case.’

They both knew she lied. Her mother, too ill from the coughing sickness to work and with a husband not good for anything but begging on a street corner, never had enough money to feed Jamila and her brothers. When Jamila’s wages from the café ran out, she went to the court for help. Understanding how her pride hurt her, the
Prior
took the coins, damp with her excitement, and handed over the pendant she wanted. Small as her thumb, its fine detail had the leopard skin coronet roughly imprinted around the
Spirit King’s
forehead, a coral plastic bead glued in the centre, a cheap replica of his divinity.

‘Thanks,
Prior
Devin.’ Her face and heart solemn, she slipped the pendant on its triple plastic string over her head. It hung low, for her neck—slender with youth—was too small. Jamila didn’t worry. She would grow into the wooden mask, and all it represented.

• • •

Five years later Jamila buried her mother in some dull, arid grave and worried about her younger siblings. She stroked her
Spirit King
-mask pendant, a perfect fit now she was older. She rubbed and rubbed the tiny coral bead and thought of Mama’s death and of what was left. Papa, his wife dead, didn’t even care enough to beg on the street corner. Three younger brothers, who all looked to her to replace their loss, and she, Jamila Anne Johnson: at nineteen years of age, what did she have to offer them?

Hungry because she had given them the last of the food, and exhausted from cleaning and scrubbing and caring for them, the answer came to her one night as she tucked the children back into their beds. The
Spirit King
. The
Spirit King
was a good father—the Father of his people—and he would take care of them.

Early the next day she went to
Prior
Devin.

‘Let the children stay with me,’ he said. ‘Somewhere in the
Earth Palace
there must be a good holding camp. I’ll make sure the social welfare keeps them together.’ He drummed his fingers on his desk. ‘What about you? What will you do?’

‘I’ll manage,’ she said and clutched her pendant. He frowned, chewing his bottom lip. Abruptly, he pulled open a drawer and slapped a note pad on his desk. With a swirl of his
chuba
, he sat, took out his pen with the end chewed white, and scratched a long note, which he sealed in a thick brown envelope.

‘Go to the
Old Sea City
,’ he said, handing her the envelope. ‘My friend
Prior
Ajani at the
Court
of St Jerome will help you.’

Leaving her family without a backward glance, she beheld the vision offered by the
Spirit King’s
wounded face nailed to the
nova
, high above the school gate: the promise of a new life, a paradise.

Armed with her faith, the introductory letter from
Prior
Devin and a small bag of second-hand clothes, she escaped to the
Old Sea City
, which had nestled at the foot of the
Dark Continent
for centuries.

Arriving in the big city, far from her past, her devotion wavered when she saw its immensity, but her
fealty
in the
Spirit King’s
promise of a better life paid off for, on that same day, she met Dawud Templeton.

When she found
Prior
Ajani, her old prior’s friend, he stood under the shade of a giant bladdernut tree, a guardian at the gate leading into the
Court
of St Jerome, talking to a shrivelled old crone. He was a portly man of about sixty years of age, his thin white hair unruly and windblown. He took one look at her tired face and, before he’d even read her letter said, ‘You’ll be safe here, dear. I’ll take you to Granny Zahra Templeton; she’ll help you settle into the city.’

The affable
Prior
Ajani had packed her, and her small bag of clothes, into his battered green Fiat and driven her to a grandiose mansion, tucked away in a leafy suburb. High on the mountain, it had a scenic view of the ocean below and there, standing on the grand sweep of stairs beneath the high white gable, were two people.

One, formally dressed in a navy Chanel suit and low-heeled navy-and-white pumps despite the heat of the day, was an old woman, perhaps fifteen years older than the
Prior
. Upright and formidable, she was Zahra: matriarch of the prominent Templeton family, patroness of a host of charities and sponsor of
Prior
Ajani’s parish, the
Court
of St Jerome.

The other, a mousy-haired, good-looking young man, with soft brown eyes and a laughing mouth, was the old woman’s grandson, Dawud.

Dawud—Jamila’s other light, her other saviour—soon strengthened Jamila’s allegiance to the
Spirit King
and became the twin candle that lit her life with hope.

When her memories brought the dust of yesterday into her mouth, drying it with fear, she touched the pendant she wore around her neck, or she spoke to Dawud. The first, her old wooden pendant, comforted her. It told her that, in leaving her siblings and her past behind her, she had indeed surrendered her will to the
Spirit King’s
plan. The second, Dawud, was her reward for that surrender.

• • •

She wore her pendant until the day Dawud’s friend made her ashamed of it. Jamila, new to the city’s ways, was uncertain how to react when Daren Samanya lifted the triple string from its resting place. His hands brushed her skin and she shivered as he peered at the tiny face with its leopard skin coronet and faded coral bead.

‘What’s this?’ he asked.

She shifted, uneasy because she disliked the careful way his lips hugged his words and pulled her into her past even as he drew her closer, too close. ‘A n-n-necklace.’

‘It’s wood. On a plastic string!’ He laughed.

Then he tempted her.

He pressed her into the hardness of his body with drunken fervour and slid his other hand around her waist. ‘Give me a kiss and I’ll buy you a gold one, real gold.’

Jamila retreated into dignity. She was conscious—too conscious—of her mended underwear and the almost invisible patch in her best cotton dress where his hand clutched her waist.

‘Let me go. Please.’

‘You won’t miss one kiss, love.’

‘No!’ She thought of the
Spirit King
, who cleansed the temple of the
ezomos
with nothing but righteous anger and a whip. It gave her the strength to grind the sharp heel of her shoe into his foot.

‘
Kuntus
!’ He grunted and dropped his arms. ‘What did you do that for?’

She was steady and cool. ‘I asked you to let me go.’

‘What’s the big deal about a kiss?’ He grabbed another drink off the tray of a waiter who passed and hurled it down his throat. ‘We’re at a party!’

‘I’m with someone.’ Jamila searched for Dawud. She missed him. She wanted him near her, where she could see and touch him.

‘Who? I haven’t met you before.’ Daren stroked a finger down her cheek. He smelt of sweat and something else she couldn’t identify. She wanted to retch and jerked her face out of his reach. Her hand crept up to rub her talisman. The comfortable weight of the mask, its energy, its strength, eased her spirit.

‘I’m with Dawud Templeton.’ The pendant worked its magic. She sounded serene and calm, despite the panic fluttering inside.

He laughed, and threw his head back, his mouth so wide the row of gold fillings in his molars glittered with avaricious intent.

‘You’re Dawud’s Jamjar—the up-country girl! I heard him say Zahra’s latest charity case is a little beauty.’ His eyes, so unlike the soft brown of Dawud’s, touched her in places she’d never let any man touch her.

Not even Dawud. She already loved him and almost let him kiss her the previous night, but his grandmother, her face austere, had interrupted them.

Zahra Templeton frightened her. She watched Jamila all the time. Her gaze, as familiar in its intensity as the gazes of the people dropping their coins into her begging cup, told Jamila she wasn’t good enough. Beggar Sam’s daughter would always be a charity case.

The same glint was in Daren Samanya’s eyes.

Charity case. Charity case. Charity case.

Dawud loved her beyond the social ineptness and the mended clothes. She touched her necklace, and he loomed behind Daren. Her angel, her avenger. Her new beloved.

‘Unspoilt beauty is what I said, Dar.’

He handed Jamila her orange juice, and gave Daren a direct glower from under his brows, his mouth sterner than she’d ever seen it. He kept a possessive arm around her shoulder—not tall, yet so much taller than she, her head tucked under his arm and Jamila was safe.

‘I’d like her to stay that way, Dar.’

‘You’re not my keeper, Templeton,’ Samanya sneered, and disappeared into the darkness.

To Jamila, it was a revelation. When had a man ever taken care of her? After they left Daren and the party behind, she took Dawud into her room in Granny Zahra’s splendid mansion and, in the intense silence of a sacred ritual, she stripped off her clothes and offered herself to him. She tried not to care about the patches in her underwear, but Dawud, loving her as he did, knew how ashamed it made her.

The next day he bought her new underwear, and a new dress: expensive pale pink silk, with a demure round collar and a thin belt that pinched in her waist. As she packed her old clothes into the new shopping bag, she discreetly removed the little wooden
Spirit King
-mask on its three plastic strings. Unseen, she slipped it into her new purse and told herself she didn’t need it any more. She had Dawud. He was enough to keep her safe.

And she had no regrets. Not then.

Her
ezomo
had yet to find her.

• • •

Dawud changed everything. In a few short months, her life went from hopeless to hopeful. After he bought her that pink silk dress—after she gave her body to him as completely as she had once given her essence to the
Spirit King
—their love transformed her world.

Prior
Ajani had given her a job in the
Court
office and, when she arrived each day, she worked on automatic, while her mind flew free with dreams.

She dreamt of the time when she would be Mrs Dawud Templeton. ‘Soon,’ Dawud always promised as he rolled over on his back and held her in his arms after they had loved. ‘We’ll marry soon.’

‘I believe you,’ she said, but heard Papa’s sly echo.
I’ll find a job next week. You’ll never have to beg again. Your friends won’t laugh at you.
Papa had broken too many promises and so, in the musty cupboard that held her quintessential self, she doubted. But her heart spoke: Dawud is different, it said, Dawud will save you.