Midnight Robber

Toussaint Planet

Quashee and Ione? For true? His good good friend and his wife? Mayor Antonio of Cockpit County stepped up into the pedicab. “What you staring at?” he growled at the runner. “Is home I going.”

“Yes, Compère,” the runner said through a mouthful of betel nut. She set off, and every slap her two feet-them in their alpagat sandals slapped against the ground, it sounded to Antonio like “Quashee-Ione, Quashee-Ione.” He could feel his mouth pursing up into a scowl. He sat up straight, tapping impatient fingers on one hard thigh. Not there yet? He slumped back against the seat. A trickle of sweat beaded down from the nape of his neck to pool at his dampening collar. Ione, running a fingertip down he head-back and grinning to see how the touch make he shiver. Antonio muttered, “What a thing to love a woman, oui?”

The runner heard him. She glanced back over her shoulder. Corded muscle twisted along her back, stretched on either side from her spine to the wings of her shoulder blades. Grinning, she panted out, “What a great thing for true, Compère. Three z’amie wives I have. Woman so sweet, I tell you.”

Nothing to say to that. Antonio made a sucking sound of impatience between his teeth. He tapped his temple to alert his earbug; started to identify himself out loud to the pedicab’s ancient four-eye, but remembered in time that pedicab runners only used headblind machines. This cab couldn’t transmit to his earbug. He sighed, powered the transmission console on manually and selected a music station. Old-time mento rhythms gambolled noisily in the air round him. He settled back against the soft jumbie leather seat, trying to get into the music. It jangled in his ears like “Quashee-Ione, Quashee-Ione, eh-eh.”

Ione, mother of his one daughter. Ione, that toolum-brown beauty, the most radiant, the loveliest in Cockpit County. When Ione smile, is like the poui trees bloom, filling the skies with bright yellow flowers. A laugh from Ione could thief hearts the way mongoose thief chicken.

Ione and Antonio had grown up neighbours on two wisdom weed farms. Fell in love as children, almost. Time was, Ione used to laugh her poui flower laugh for Antonio alone. Time was, Antonio and Ione were the night cradling the moon.

Maybe all that done now? How it could done?

Antonio tapped the music off. Under his breath, he ordered his earbug to punch up his home. It bleeped a confirmation at him in nannysong, and his eshu appeared in his mind’s eye.

“Hot day, Master,” grumbled the house eshu.

Today the a.i. had chosen to show itself as a dancing skeleton. Its bones clicked together as it jigged, an image the eshu was writing onto Antonio’s optic nerve. It sweated robustly, drops the size of fists rolling down its body to splash praps! on the “ground” then disappear. “What I could do for you?” The eshu made a ridiculously huge black lace fan appear in one hand and waved it at its own death’s head face.

“Where Ione?”

“Mistress taking siesta. You want to leave a message?”

“Backside. No, never mind. Out.” Antonio flicked the music station on again, then nearly went flying from his seat as the pedicab hit a rut in the road.

“Sorry, Compère,” laughed the runner. “But I guess you is big mayor, you could get that hole fill up in no time, ain’t?”

Runners didn’t respect nobody, not even their own mother-rass mayor. “Turn left here so,” Antonio said. “That road will take we to the side entrance.” And it was usually deserted too. He didn’t feel like playing the skin-teeth grinning game today with any of his constituents he might run into: Afternoon, Brer Pompous, how the ugly wife, how the runny-nose little pickney-them? What, Brer Pompous, Brer Boasty, Brer Halitosis? Performance at the Arawak Theatre last night? A disgrace, you say? Community standards? Must surely be some explanation, Brer Prudish, Brer Prune-face. Promise I go look into it, call you back soon. No, Antonio had no patience for none of that today.

Slap-slap of the runner’s feet. Quashee-Ione. Jangling quattro music in the air. Quashee-Ione, eh-eh.

Too many hard feelings between him and Ione, oui? Too much silence. When she had gotten pregnant, it had helped for a little while, stilled some of her restlessness. And his. He had been delighted to know he would have a child soon. Someone who would listen to him, look up to him. Like Ione when she’d been a green young woman. When little Tan-Tan had arrived, she’d been everything Antonio could have wished for.

In a hard-crack voice, the runner broke into a raucous song about a skittish woman and the lizard that had run up her leg. Antonio clenched his teeth into a smile. “Compère!” he shouted. She didn’t reply. Blasted woman heard him easy enough when it suited her. “Compère!”

“Yes, Compère?” Sweety-sweety voice like molasses dripping.

“Please. Keep it quiet, nuh?”

The woman laughed sarcastically.

“Well, at least when we get closer to my home? Uh… my wife sleeping.”

“Of course, Compère. Wouldn’t want she for hear you creeping home so early in the day.”

Bitch. Antonio stared hard at her wide, rippling back, but only said, “Thank you.”

Antonio knew full well that his work as mayor was making him unpopular to certain people in this little town behind God back. Like this pedicab operator right here.

And like she’d read his mind, the blasted woman nuh start for chat? “Compère, me must tell you, it warm my heart to know important man like you does take pedicab.”

“Thank you, Compère,” Antonio said smoothly. He knew where this was going. Let her work up to it, though.

“Pedicab is a conscious way to travel, you see? A good-minded way. All like how the cab open to the air, you could see your neighbours and them could see you. You could greet people, seen?”

“Seen,” Antonio agreed. The runner flashed a puzzled look at him over her shoulder. She made a misstep, but caught herself in the pedicab’s traces. “Careful, Compère,” Antonio said solicitously. “You all right?”

“Yes, man.” She continued running. Antonio leaned forward so she could hear him better.

“A-true what you say. Is exactly that I forever telling Palaver House,” he said in his warmest voice. “In a pedicab, you does be part of your community, not sealed away in a closed car. I tired telling Palaver House allyou is one of the most important services to the town.”

The runner turned right around in her traces and started jogging backwards. She frowned at him. “So if we so important, why the rass you taxing away we livelihood? We have to have license and thing now.” Her betel-red teeth were fascinating. “I working ten more hours a week to pay your new tariff. Sometimes I don’t see my pickney-them for days; sleeping when I leave home, sleeping when I come back. My baby father and my woman-them complaining how I don’t spend time with them no more. Why you do this thing, Antonio?”

Work, he was forever working. And the blasted woman making herself such a freeness with his name, not even a proper “Compère.” Antonio ignored her rudeness, put on his concerned face. “I feel for you and your family, sister, but what you want me do? Higglers paying their share, masque camps paying theirs, pleasure workers and rum shops paying theirs. Why pedicab runners should be any different?”

She had her head turned slightly backwards; one eye on him, one on the road. He saw the impatient eye-roll on the half of her face that she presented. “Them does only pay a pittance compared to we. Let we stop with the party line, all right?”

“But…”

“Hold on.” She wasn’t listening, was jogging smartly backwards to the road’s median to avoid a boulderstone. Her feet slapped: Quashee-Ione. Quashee-Ione? She pulled the pedicab back into the lane, turned her back to him, picked up speed. Over her shoulder: “Truth to tell, we come to understand allyou. The taxes is because of the pedicabs, ain’t?”

Antonio noted how businesslike her voice had become, how “me” had multiplied into “we.” Guardedly he asked her, “How you mean, sister?”

“Is because we don’t use a.i.’s in the pedicabs.”

An autocar passed in the opposite direction. The woman reclining inside it looked up from her book long enough to acknowledge Antonio with a dip of her head. He gave a gracious wave back. Took a breath. Said to the runner, “Is a labour tax. For the way allyou insist on using people when a a.i. could run a cab like this. You know how it does bother citizens to see allyou doing manual labor so. Back-break ain’t for people.” Blasted luddites.

“Honest work is for people. Work you could see, could measure. Pedicab runners, we know how much weight we could pull, how many kilometres we done travel.”

“Then…” Antonio shrugged his shoulders. What for do? A-so them want it, a-so it going to stay.

The woman ran a few more steps, feet slip-slapping Ione? Ione? An autocar zoomed past them. The four people inside it had their seats turned to face one another over a table set for afternoon tea. Antonio briefly smelt cocoa, and roast breadfruit. He barely had time to notice the runner give a little hop in the traces. Then with a jolt and a shudder the pedicab clattered through another pothole. Antonio grabbed for the armrests. “What the rass…?”

“Sorry, Compère, so sorry.”

“You deliberately…”

“You all right, Compère? Let me just climb up and see.”

“No…” But the woman was already in the cab beside him. She smelt strongly of sweat. She hummed something that sounded like nannysong, but fast, so fast, a snatch of notes that hemidemisemiquavered into tones he couldn’t distinguish. Then Antonio heard static in his ear. It faded to an almost inaudible crackle. He tapped his earbug. Dead. He chirped a query to his eshu. No answer. He’d been taken offline? How the rass had she done that? So many times he’d wished he could.

The woman was big, her arms muscled as thighs, her thighs bellied with muscle. Antonio stood to give himself some height over her. “What you do that for?” he demanded.

“No harm, Antonio; me just want to tell you something, seen? While nanny ear everywhere can’t hear we.”

“Tell me what?”

She indicated that he should sit again. She planted her behind in the seat next to him. Antonio edged away from her rankness. “The co-operative had a meeting,” she said.

“Co-operative?”

“Membership meeting of the Sou-Sou Co-operative: all the pedicab runners in Cockpit County; Board of Directors, everybody.”

Why hadn’t he known they were organized? Damned people even lived in headblind houses, no way for the ’Nansi Web to gather complete data on them. “So you have a communication from your co-operative for me?” he asked irritably.

“A proposal, yes. A discreet, unlinked courier service. Special government rate for you and the whole Palaver House. We offering to bring and carry your private messages.”

Private messages! Privacy! The most precious commodity of any Marryshevite. The tools, the machines, the buildings; even the earth itself on Toussaint and all the Nation Worlds had been seeded with nanomites—Granny Nanny’s hands and her body. Nanomites had run the nation ships. The Nation Worlds were one enormous data-gathering system that exchanged information constantly through the Grande Nanotech Sentient Interface: Granny Nansi’s Web. They kept the Nation Worlds protected, guided and guarded its people. But a Marryshevite couldn’t even self take a piss without the toilet analyzing the chemical composition of the urine and logging the data in the health records. Except in pedicab runner communities. They were a new sect, about fifty years old. They lived in group households and claimed that it was their religious right to use only headblind tools. People laughed at them, called them a ridiculous pappyshow. Why do hard labour when Marryshow had made that forever unnecessary? But the Grande ’Nansi Web had said let them be. It had been designed to be flexible, to tolerate a variety of human expression, even dissension, so long as it didn’t upset the balance of the whole.

But what the runners were offering now was precious beyond description: an information exchange system of which the ’Nansi Web would be ignorant. The possibilities multiplied in Antonio’s mind. “The whole Palaver House?” he asked.

“Seen, brother. Some of we did want to extend the offer to you one, oui? But then we start to think; if we putting we trust in only you, what kind of guarantee that go give we? Not to say that you is anything but a honest man, Compère, but this way we have some, how you call it, checks and balances in the deal, right?”

“And what guarantees you offering we?” asked Antonio petulantly.

“Contract between we and you. On handmade paper, not datastock.”

“Headblind paper too? How?”

“We make it from wood pulp.”

Like very thin composition board, Antonio imagined. Koo ya, how these people were crafty. “And what your terms would be?”

“Some little payment for we services, and reduction of we taxes to the same level as the pleasure workers and them.”

Crafty, oui. Turn right away round from paying the government to having the government pay you. Palaver House would have to mask the activity as something else, probably a government-dedicated taxi service. Only the Inner Palaver House could be privy to it, but it ain’t have nothing unusual in something like that. Antonio found himself whispering, “We could do it…”

“Me know so. You going to come to terms with we?”

“Maybe. You have ahm, a private place where me and some next people could meet with your board?”

“Yes, man.” They set a meeting time. She told him the place. “One of we go come and get you. Look smart, partner. You coming online again.” She warbled again in impossibly intricate nannysong. Antonio’s ear popped. In a voice schooled to convey worry the runner said: “Sorry man, too sorry. It working again?”

“Yes.” He was still marvelling at the few minutes he’d been dead to the web. Never before since birth. He chirruped in nannysong for his house eshu.

“Master,” said the eshu, “you want me?” No visuals this time. It was capricious sometimes.

“Yes. Something… malfunction in the blasted headblind four-eye in this pedicab, and I was only getting static for a second. I just making sure you still getting through.”

On the screen, the eshu appeared, spat. “Cho. Dead metal.” It winked out.

“I name Beata,” the woman said. She stuck out a paw. He shook it. Her palm was rough. From work, Antonio realised. How strange.

“Seen.” They had an agreement. Silently, she leapt onto the roadway, stepped into the traces and set off again.

They were at the entrance to Antonio’s house in minutes. “Here you go, Compère. Safe and sound and ready to ferret out your woman business.”

Quashee and Ione? Antonio felt jealousy turning like a worm in his belly. He didn’t like the weight of the cuckold’s horns settling on his brow. His mind was so worked up, he barely remembered to pay Beata. He got down from the cab and would have walked away, but she hauled it into his road and stood there sweaty and grimy, blocking his path. She poked a bit of betel out from between two teeth with a black-rimed nail. Flicked it away. Smiled redly at him. He threw some cash at her. She caught it, inspected the coin insolently and tucked it into her bubby-band. “Walk good, Compère. Remember what I say.”

He was sure he could still smell the sweat of her even though she had jogged off. He opened the white picket gates and walked up the long path towards the mayor house.

This day, Antonio couldn’t take no pleasure in his big, stoosh home, oui? He didn’t even self notice the tasteful mandala of rock that his Garden had built around the flag pole near the entrance when he first took office. The pale pink rockstone quarried from Shak-Shak Bay didn’t give him no joy. The sound of the Cockpit County flag cracking in the light breeze didn’t satisfy him. His eye passed right over the spouting fountain with the lilies floating in it and the statue of Mami Wata in the middle, arching her proud back to hold her split fishtail in her own two hands. The trinkling sound of the fountain didn’t soothe his soul. Is the first time he didn’t notice the perfection of his grounds: every tree healthy, every blade of grass green and fat and juicy. He didn’t remark on the snowcone colours of the high bougainvillaea hedge. He didn’t feel his chest swell with pride to see the marble walls of the mayor house gleaming white in the sun.

Quashee and Ione? For true?

On the way, Antonio found Tan-Tan playing all by herself up in the julie-mango tree in the front yard. Her minder was only scurrying round the tree, chicle body vibrating for anxious; its topmost green crystal eyes tracking, tracking, as it tried to make sure Tan-Tan was all right. “Mistress,” it was whining, “you don’t want to come down? You know Nursie say you mustn’t climb trees. You might fall, you know. Fall, yes, and Nursie go be vex with me. Come down, nuh? Come down, and I go tell you the story of Granny Nanny, Queen of the Maroons.”

Tan-Tan shouted back, “Later, all right? I busy now.”

Antonio felt liquid with love all over again for his doux-doux darling girl, his one pureness. Just so Ione had been as a young thing, climbing trees her parents had banned her from. Antonio loved his Tan-Tan more than songs could sing. When she was first born, he was forever going to watch at her sleeping in her bassinet. With the back of his hand he used to stroke the little face with the cocoa-butter skin soft like fowl breast feathers, and plant gentle butterfly kisses on the two closed-up eyes. Even in her sleep, little Tan-Tan would smile to feel her daddy near. And Antonio’s heart would swell with joy for the beautiful thing he had made, this one daughter, this chocolate girl. “My Tan-Tan. Sweet Tan-Tan. Pretty just like your mother.” When she woke she would yawn big, opening her tiny fists to flash little palms at him, pink like the shrimp in Shak-Shak Bay. Then she would see him, and smile at him with her mother’s smile. He could never hold her long enough, never touch her too much.

Antonio called out to his child in the tree: “Don’t tease the minder, doux-doux. What you doing up there?”

Tan-Tan screwed up her eyes and shaded them with one hand. Then: “It ain’t have no doux-doux here,” the pickney-girl answered back, flashing a big smile at her daddy. Sweet, facety child. “Me is Robber Queen, yes? This foliage is my subject, and nobody could object to my rule.” Tan-Tan had become fascinated with the Midnight Robber. Her favourite game was to play Carnival Robber King. She had a talent for the patter. “Why you home so early, Daddy?”

In spite of his worries, Antonio smiled to see his daughter looking so pretty. His sweetness, his doux-doux darling could give him any kinda back-talk, oui? “I just come to see your mother. You know is where she is?”

“She and uncle taking tea in the parlour, Daddy. Them tell me I musn’t come inside till they call me. I could go in now?”

“Not right now, darling. You stay up there; I go come and get you soon.”

Antonio dragged his feet towards the parlour, the way a condemned man might walk to a hanging tree. As he reached inside the detection field, the house eshu clicked on quiet-quiet inside his ear. “You reach, Master,” it said. “Straighten your shirt. Your collar get rumple. You want me announce you?”

“No. Is a surprise. Silence.”

“Yes, Master Antonio.” The eshu’s voice sounded like it had a mocking smile in it. Like even self Antonio’s house was laughing at him? Where Ione?

When Antonio stood outside the door, he could hear his wife inside laughing, laughing bright like the yellow poui flower, and the sound of a deep, low voice intertwined with the laugh. Antonio opened the parlour door.

Years after, Antonio still wouldn’t tell nobody what he saw in the parlour that day. “Rasscloth!” he would swear. “Some things, a man can’t stand to describe!”

Mayor Antonio, the most powerful man in the whole county, opened up his own parlour door that afternoon to behold his wife lounging off on the settee with her petticoat hitched up round her hips, and both feet wrapped round Quashee’s waist.

Antonio stood there for a while, his eyes burning. He knew then that whenever he shut them from now on, he would see that pretty white lace petticoat spread out all over the settee; Quashee’s porkpie hat on Ione’s head; the teasing, happy smile on her face; and Quashee’s bare behind pushing and pushing between Ione’s sprawled-opened knees.

Antonio never noticed that Tan-Tan had followed him to the parlour door. She stood there beside him, eyes staring, mouth hanging open. She must have cried out or something, because all of a sudden, Ione looked over Quashee’s shoulder to see the two of them in the doorway. She screamed: “Oh, God, Antonio; is you?”

Soft-soft, Antonio closed the parlour door back. He turned and walked out his yard. Tan-Tan ran after him, screaming, “Daddy! Daddy! Come back!” but he never even self said goodbye to his one daughter.

Little after Antonio had left, Ione came running alone out the house, her hair flying loose and her dress buttoned up wrong. She found Tan-Tan by the gate, crying for her daddy. Ione gave Tan-Tan a slap for making so much noise and attracting the attention of bad-minded neighbours. She bustled Tan-Tan inside the house, and the two of them settled down to wait for Antonio to come back.

But is like Antonio had taken up permanent residence in his office. Ione took Tan-Tan out of the pickney crêche where she went in the mornings to be schooled: said she wanted some company in the house, the eshu would give Tan-Tan her lessons. So Antonio couldn’t come and visit Tan-Tan during siesta like he used to. He had to call home on the four-eye to talk to her. He would ask her how her lessons with the eshu were going. He would tell her to mind not to give Nursie or the minder any trouble, but he never asked after Ione. And when Tan-Tan asked when he was coming back, he’d get quiet for a second then say, “Me nah know, darling.”

Well, darling, you know Cockpit County tongues start to wag. Kaiso, Mama; tell the tale! This one whisper to that one how he hear from a woman down Lagahoo way who is the offside sister of Nursie living in the mayor house how Ione send Quashee away, how she spend every day and night weeping for Antonio, and she won’t even self get out of bed and change out of she nightgown come morning. Another one tell a next one how he pass by Old Man Warren house one afternoon, and see he and Antonio sitting out on the porch in the hot hot sun, old-talking and making plans over a big pitcher of rum and coconut water. In the middle of the day, oui, when sensible people taking siesta!

All the way in Liguanea Town, people hear the story. They have it to say how even the calypsonian Mama Choonks hear what happen, and she writing a rapso about it, and boasting that she going to come in Road March Queen again this year, when she bust some style ’pon the crowd with she new tune “Workee in the Parlour.” And Sylvia the engineer tell she daughter husband that somebody else whisper to she how he see Quashee in the fight yard every day, practising cut and jab with he machète. But eh-eh! If Antonio going to call Quashee out to duel come Jour Ouvert morning, ain’t Antonio shoulda been practising too?

What you say, doux-doux? You thought this was Tan-Tan story?

You right. My mind get so work up with all that Antonio had to suffer, that I forget about poor Tan-Tan.

In fact it seemed like nobody wanted to pay any mind to Tan-Tan no more. People in her house would stop talking when Tan-Tan went into a room, even old Nursie. Ione was spending all her days locked up in her room in conference with Obi Mami-Bé, the witch woman. It looked like Antonio wasn’t coming back at all at all.

But truth to tell, Tan-Tan wasn’t so lonely, oui. She was used to staying out of Ione’s way, and playing Robber Queen and jacks with just the fretful minder for company. She liked leaning against the minder’s yielding chicle, humming along with the nursery rhymes it would sing to her. She had nearly outgrown the minder now, yes, but it did its level best to keep up with her. Tan-Tan used to play so hard, it come in like work:

“Minder, you see where my jacks gone? I could find the ball, but not the jacks. You think I left them under the settee yesterday?”

“Maybe, Mistress. Make I look.” And the old construct would flatten its body as best it could and squeeze itself into tight places to retrieve the jacks Tan-Tan was always losing.

Or, “Minder, let we play some old-time story, nuh? I go be Granny Nanny, Queen of the Maroons, and you have to be the planter boss.”

So the minder would access the Nanny history from the web and try to adapt it to Tan-Tan’s notions of how the story went.

Tan-Tan had a way to make up tales to pass the time, and like how time was hanging heavy on her hands nowadays, she started to imagine to herself how sweet it would be when her daddy would come to take her away from this boring old place where everybody was sad all the time, their faces hanging down like jackass when he sick. She was going to go and live with Daddy in the mayor office, and them would play Robber King and Queen in the evenings when Daddy finish work, and Daddy would tickle her and rub her tummy and tell how she come in pretty, just like her mother. And come Carnival time, them would ride down to town together in the big black limousine to see the Big Parade with masqueraders-them in their duppy and mako jumbie costumes, dancing in the streets.

Finally, it was Jonkanoo Season; the year-end time when all of Toussaint would celebrate the landing of the Marryshow Corporation nation ships that had brought their ancestors to this planet two centuries before. Time to give thanks to Granny Nanny for the Leaving Times, for her care, for life in this land, free from downpression and botheration. Time to remember the way their forefathers had toiled and sweated together: Taino Carib and Arawak; African; Asian; Indian; even the Euro, though some wasn’t too happy to acknowledge that-there bloodline. All the bloods flowing into one river, making a new home on a new planet. Come Jonkanoo Week, tout monde would find themselves home with family to drink red sorrel and eat black cake and read from Marryshow’s Mythic Revelations of a New Garveyite: Sing Freedom Come.

But Antonio still wouldn’t come home.

This Jonkanoo Season was the first time that Tan-Tan would get to sing parang with the Cockpit County Jubilante Mummers. She and eshu had practised the soprano line for “Sereno, Sereno” so till she had been singing it in her sleep and all. And she had done so well in rehearsals that the Mummers had decided to let her sing the solo in “Sweet Chariot.” Tan-Tan was so excited, she didn’t know what to do with herself. Daddy was going to be so proud!

Jonkanoo Night, Nursie dressed her up in her lacy frock to go from house to house with the Mummers. Nursie finished locksing Tan-Tan’s hair, and took a step back to admire her. “Nanny bless, doux-doux, you looking nice, you know? You make me think of my Aislin when she was a just a little pickney-girl. Just so she did love fancy frock, and she hair did thick and curly, just like yours.”

“Aislin?” Tan-Tan dragged her eyes from her own face in the mirror eshu had made of the wall. She had been trying to read her daddy’s features there. “You have a daughter, Nursie?”

Nursie frowned sadly. She looked down at her feet and shook her head. “Never mind, doux-doux; is more than twelve years now she climb the half-way tree and gone for good. Let we not speak of the departed.” She sucked her teeth, her face collapsing into an expression of old sorrow and frustration. “Aislin shoulda had more sense than to get mix up in Antonio business. I just grateful your daddy see fit to make this lonely old woman part of he household afterwards.”

And all Tan-Tan could do, Nursie wouldn’t talk about it any more after that. Tan-Tan just shrugged her shoulders. Is so it go; Toussaint people didn’t talk too much about the criminals they had exiled to New Half-Way Tree. Too bedsides, Tan-Tan was too nervous to listen to Old Nursie’s horse-dead-and-cow-fat story tonight. First parang! Nursie had had all the ruffles on Tan-Tan’s frock starched and her aoutchicongs, her tennis shoes-them, whitened till they gleamed.

Tan-Tan’s bedroom door chimed, the one that led outside to the garden. She had a visitor, just like big people! “You answer it, doux-doux,” said Nursie.

“Eshu, is who there?” asked Tan-Tan, as she’d heard her parents do.

“Is Ben, young Mistress,” the eshu said through the wall. “He bring a present for you.”

A present! She looked at Nursie, who smiled and nodded. “Let he in,” said Tan-Tan.

The door opened to admit the artisan who gave her father the benefit of his skill by programming and supervising Garden. As ever, he was barefoot, console touchpen tucked behind one ear and wearing a mud-stained pair of khaki shorts and a grubby shirt-jac whose pockets held shadowy bulges like babies’ diapers. Weeds hung out of the bulgy pockets. He had an enormous bouquet of fresh-cut ginger lilies in one hand. The red blooms stretched on long thumb-thick green stalks. Tan-Tan gasped at the present that Ben was balancing carefully in his other hand.

Nursie chided, “Ben, is why you always wearing such disgraceful clothes, eh? And you can’t even put on a pair of shoes to come into the house?”

But Ben just winked at her and presented her with the lilies. She relented, giggled girlishly and buried her nose in the blossoms. Finally he seemed to notice Tan-Tan gazing at the present. He smiled and held it out to her: a Jonkanoo hat. It was made from rattan, woven in the torus shape of a nation ship. “I design it myself,” Ben told her. “I get Garden to make it for you. Grow it into this shape right on the vine.”

“Oh, what a way it pretty, Ben!” The hat even had little portholes all round it and the words “Marryshow Corporation: Black Star Line II” etched into a flat blade of dried vine in its side.

“Look through the portholes.”

Tan-Tan had to close one eye to see through one of the holes. “I see little people! Sleeping in their bunk beds, and a little crêche with a teacher and some pickney, and I see the bridge with the captain and all the crew!”

“Is so we people reach here on Toussaint, child. And look…” Ben pulled six candles out of a pocket and wedged them into holders woven all along the ring of the ship. “Try it on let me see.”

Careful-careful, Tan-Tan slid the hat onto her head. It fit exactly.

“When you ready to go,” Ben said, “ask Mistress Ione to light the candle-them for you. Then you going to be playing Jonkanoo for real!”

Nursie fretted, “I don’t like this little girl walking round with them open flame ’pon she head like that, you know? You couldn’t use peeny-wallie bulb like everybody else, eh? Suppose the whole thing catch fire?”

“Ain’t Ione go be right there with Tan-Tan?” Ben reassured her. “She could look after she own pickney. This is the right way to play Jonkanoo, the old-time way. Long time, that hat woulda be make in the shape of a sea ship, not a rocket ship, and them black people inside woulda been lying pack-up head to toe in they own shit, with chains round them ankles. Let the child remember how black people make this crossing as free people this time.”

Tan-Tan squinched up her face at the nasty story. Crêche teacher had sung them that same tale. Vashti and Crab-back Joey had gotten scared. Tan-Tan too. For nights after she’d dreamt of being shut up in a tiny space, unable to move. Eshu had had to calm her when she woke bawling.

Nursie shut Ben up quick: “Shush now, don’t frighten the child with your old-time story.”

“All right. Time for me to get dressed, anyway. Fête tonight! Me and Rozena going to dance till ’fore-day morning, oui.” Ben knelt down and smiled into Tan-Tan’s eyes. “When you wear that hat, you carry yourself straight and tall, you hear? You go be Parang Queen–self tonight!”

“Yes, Ben. Thank you!”

When everything was ready, Nursie fetched Tan-Tan to Ione. Nursie carried the Jonkanoo hat in front of her like a wedding cake, candles and all.

Ione was too, too beautiful that night in her madras head wrap and long, pale yellow gown, tight so till Tan-Tan was afraid that Ione wouldn’t be able to catch breath enough to sing the high notes in “Rio Manzanares.” She looked so pretty, though, that Tan-Tan ran to hug her.

“No, Tan-Tan; don’t rampfle up me gown. Behave yourself, nuh? Come let we go. I could hear the parang singers practising in the dining room. Is for you that hat is?”

“From Ben, Mummy.”

Ione nodded approvingly. “A proper Jonkanoo gift. I go give you one from me tomorrow.” She put the nation ship hat on Tan-Tan’s head, and then lit all six candles.

“Candles for remembrance, Tan-Tan. Hold your head high now, you hear? You have to keep the candles-them straight and tall and burning bright.”

“Yes, Mummy.” Tan-Tan remembered Nursie’s posture lessons. Proper-proper, she took Ione’s hand, smoothed her frock down, and walked down the stairs with her mother to join the Cockpit County Jubilante Mummers. The John Canoe dancer in his suit of motley rags was leaping about the living room while the singers clapped out a rhythm.

Tan-Tan was Cockpit County queen that night for true! The Mummers went house to house, singing the old-time parang songs, and in every place, people were only feeding Tan-Tan tamarind balls and black cake and thing—“Candles for remembrance, doux-doux!”—till the ribbon sash round her waist was binding her stuffed belly. Everywhere she went, she could hear people whispering behind their hands: “Mayor little girl… sweet in that pretty frock… really have Ione eyes, don’t? Mayor heart must be hard… girl child alone so with no father!” But she didn’t pay them any mind. Tan-Tan was enjoying herself. All the same, she couldn’t wait to get to the town square to sing the final song of the night. Antonio would be there to greet the Mummers and make his annual Jonkanoo Night speech. For days he had been busy with the celebrations and he hadn’t called to speak to Tan-Tan.

At last the Mummers reached the town square. By now, Tan-Tan’s feet were throbbing. Her white aoutchicongs had turned brown with dust from walking all that distance, and her belly was beginning to pain her from too much food. Ione had blown out the candles on the nation ship hat long time, for with all the running round Tan-Tan was doing, the hat kept falling from her head. She had nearly set fire to Tantie Gilda’s velvet curtains.

Tan-Tan was ready to drop down with tiredness, oui, but as they entered the town square, she straightened up her little body and took her mummy’s hand.

“Light the candles again for me, Mummy.” Hand in hand with Ione, Tan-Tan marched right to her place in the front of the choir. She made believe she was the Tan-Tan from the Carnival, or maybe the Robber Queen, entering the town square in high state for all the people to bring her accolades and praise and their widows’ mites of gold and silver for saving them from the evil plantation boss (she wasn’t too sure what an “accolade” was, oui, but she had heard Ben say it when he played the Robber King masque at Carnival time the year before). Choirmaster Gomez smiled when he saw her in her pretty Jonkanoo hat. He pressed the microphone bead onto her collar. Tan-Tan lost all her tiredness one time.

The square was full up of people that night. One set of people standing round, waiting for the midnight anthem. It must be had two hundred souls there! Tan-Tan started to feel a little jittery. Suppose she got the starting note wrong? She took a trembling breath. She felt she was going to dead from nerves. Behind her, she heard Ione hissing, “Do good now, Tan-Tan. Don’t embarrass me tonight!”

Choirmaster Gomez gave the signal. The quattro players started to strum the tune, and the Cockpit County Jubilante Mummers launched into the final song of the night. Tan-Tan was so nervous, she nearly missed her solo. Ione tapped her on her shoulder, and she caught herself just in time. She took a quick breath and started to sing.

The first few notes were a little off, oui, but when she got to the second verse, she opened her eyes. Everybody in the square was swaying from side to side. She started to get some confidence. By the third verse, her voice was climbing high and strong to the sky, joyful in the ’fore-day morning.

As she sang, Tan-Tan glanced round. She saw old people rocking back and forth to the song, their lips forming the ancient words. She saw artisans standing round the Mercy Table, claiming the food and gifts that Cockpit Town people had made for them with their own hands in gratitude for their creations. Every man-jack had their eyes on her. People nodded their heads in time. She swung through the words, voice piping high. The Mummers clapped in time behind her. Then she spied a man standing near the edge of the crowd, cradling a sleeping little girl in his arms. He was the baby’s daddy. Tan-Tan’s soul came crashing back to earth. Tears began creeping down her face. She fought her way to the end of the song. When she put up her hand to wipe the tears away, an old lady near the front said, “Look how the sweet song make the child cry. What a thing!” Tan-Tan pulled the mike bead off and ran to Ione. The nation ship hat fell to the ground. Tan-Tan heard someone exclaim behind her, and the scuffing sound as he stamped out the flame of the candles. She didn’t pay it no mind. She buried her head in her mother’s skirt and cried for Antonio. Ione sighed and patted her head.

Soon after, her daddy did come, striding into the town square to give his speech. But he didn’t even self glance at Tan-Tan or Ione. Ione clutched Tan-Tan’s shoulder and hissed at her to stand still. Tan-Tan looked at her mother’s face; she was staring longingly and angrily at Antonio with bright, brimming eyes. Ione started to hustle Tan-Tan away. Tan-Tan pulled on her hand to slow her down. “No, Mummy, no; ain’t Daddy going to come with we?”

Ione stooped down in front of her daughter. “I know how you feel, doux-doux. Is Jonkanoo and we shoulda be together, all three of we; but Antonio ain’t have no mercy in he heart for we.”

“Why?”

“Tan-Tan, you daddy vex with me; he vex bad. He forget all the nights I spend alone, all the other women I catch he with.”

Tan-Tan ain’t business with that. “I want my daddy.” She started to cry.

Ione sighed. “You have to be strong for me, Tan-Tan. You is the only family I have now. I not going to act shame in front of Cockpit County people and they badtalk. Swallow those tears now and hold your head up high.”

Tan-Tan felt like her heart could crack apart with sorrow. Ione had to carry the burst nation ship. Scuffling her foot-them in the dirt, Tan-Tan dragged herself to the limousine that had been sent to the square to wait for them. They reached home at dayclean, just as the sun was rising. Tan-Tan was a sight when Nursie met her at the door: dirty tennis shoes, plaits coming loose, snail tracks of tears winding down her face.

“Take she, Nursie,” Ione said irritably. “I can’t talk no sense into she at all at all.”

“Oh, darling, is what do you so?” Nursie bent down to pick up the sad little girl.

Tan-Tan leaked tired tears, more salt than water. “Daddy ain’t come to talk to me. He ain’t tell me if he like how I sing. Is Jonkanoo, and he ain’t self even give me a Jonkanoo present!”

“I ain’t know what to do for she when she get like this,” Ione told Nursie. “Tan-Tan, stop your crying! Bawling ain’t go make it better.”

Nursie and Ione took Tan-Tan inside to bed, but is Nursie who washed Tan-Tan’s face and plaited up her hair nice again so it wouldn’t knot up while she slept. Is Nursie who dressed Tan-Tan in her favourite yellow nightie with the lace at the neck. Nursie held to her lips the cup of hot cocoa-tea that Cookie sent from the kitchen, and coaxed her to drink it. Cookie was an artisan too, had pledged his creations to whoever was living in the mayor house. Usually Tan-Tan loved his cocoa, hand-grated from lumps of raw chocolate still greasy with cocoa fat, then steeped in hot water with vanilla beans and Demerara sugar added to it. But this time it was more bitter than she liked, and she got so sleepy after drinking it! One more sip, and she felt she had was to close her eyes, just for a little bit. Nursie put Tan-Tan to bed with the covers pulled right up to her neck, and stroked her head while sleep came. Ione only paced back and forth the whole time, watching at the two of them.

But just as sleep was locking Tan-Tan’s eyes shut, is Ione’s sweet voice she heard, singing a lullaby to her from across the room.

And her earbug echoed it in her head as eshu sang along.

Tan-Tan slept right through the day until the next morning. When she woke up Ione told her irritably, “Your daddy come by to see you while you was sleeping.”

Tan-Tan leapt up in the bed. “Daddy here!”

“No, child. He gone about he business.”

The disappointment and hurt were almost too much for breathing. Unbelieving, Tan-Tan just stared at Mummy. Daddy didn’t wait for her to wake up?

“Cho. Me ain’t able with you and your father. He leave this for you.” Ione laid out a costume on the bed, a little Robber Queen costume, just the right size for Tan-Tan. It had a white silk shirt with a high, pointy collar, a little black jumbie leather vest with a fringe all round the bottom, and a pair of wide red leather pants with more fringe down the sides. It even had a double holster to go round her waist, with two shiny cap guns sticking out. But the hat was the best part. A wide black sombrero, nearly as big as Tan-Tan herself, with pom-poms in different colours all round the brim, to hide her face in the best Robber Queen style. Inside the brim, it had little monkeys marching all round the crown of the hat, chasing tiny birds. The monkeys leapt, snatching at the swooping birds, but they always returned to the brim of the hat.

“Look, Tan-Tan!” Ione said, in that poui-bright voice she got when she wanted to please. “It have Brer Monkey in there, chasing Brer Woodpecker for making so much noise. Is a nice costume, ain’t?”

Tan-Tan looked at her present good, but her heart felt like a stone inside her chest. She pressed her lips together hard. She wasn’t even going to crack a smile.

“Yes, Mummy.”

“Your daddy say is for he little Jonkanoo Queen with the voice like honey. You must call he and tell he thanks.”

“Yes, Mummy.”

“You ain’t want to know what I get for you?”

“Yes, Mummy.”

Smiling, Ione reached under Tan-Tan’s bed and pulled out the strangest pair of shoes Tan-Tan had ever seen. They were black jumbie leather carved in the shape of alligators like in the zoo. The toes of the shoes were the alligators’ snouts. They had gleaming red eyes. The shoes were lined inside with jumbie feather fluff. “Try them on, nuh?” Ione urged.

Tan-Tan slid her feet into the shoes. They moulded themselves comfortably round her feet. She stood up. She took a step. As she set her foot down the alligator shoe opened its snout wide and barked. Red sparks flew from its bright white fangs. Tan-Tan gasped and froze where she was. Ione laughed until she looked at Tan-Tan’s face. “Oh doux-doux, is only a joke, a mamaguy. Don’t dig nothing. They only go make noise the first two steps you take.”

To test it, Tan-Tan stamped her next foot. The shoe barked obligingly. She jumped and landed hard on the floor. The shoes remained silent. “Thank you, Mummy.”

“You not even going bust one so-so smile for me, right?”

Tan-Tan looked solemnly at her mother. Ione rolled her eyes impatiently and flounced out of the room.

Tan-Tan waited till she could no longer hear Ione’s footsteps. She went to the door and looked up and down the corridor. No-one. Only then did she try on the Midnight Robber costume. It fit her perfect. She went and stood in front of a bare wall. “Eshu,” she whispered.

The a.i. clicked on in her ear. In her mind’s eye it showed itself as a little skeleton girl, dressed just like her. “Yes, young Mistress?”

“Make a mirror for me.”

Eshu disappeared. The wall silvered to show her reflection. Aces, she looked aces. Her lips wavered into a smile. She pulled one of the cap guns from its holster: “Plai! Plai! Thus the Robber Queen does be avengèd! Allyou make you eye pass me? Take that! Plai!” She swirled round to shoot at the pretend badjack sneaking up behind her. The cape flared out round her shoulders and the new leather of her shoes creaked. It was too sweet.

“Belle Starr…” said the eshu, soft in her ear.

“Who?” It wasn’t lesson time, but the eshu had made her curious.

“Time was, is only men used to play the Robber King masque,” eshu’s voice told her.

“Why?” Tan-Tan asked. What a stupid thing!

“Earth was like that for a long time. Men could only do some things, and women could only do others. In the beginning of Carnival, the early centuries, Midnight Robbers was always men. Except for the woman who take the name Belle Starr, the same name as a cowgirl performer from America. The Trini Belle Starr made she own costume and she uses to play Midnight Robber.”

“What she look like, eshu?”

“No pictures of she in the data banks, young Mistress. Is too long ago. But I have other pictures of Carnival on Earth. You want to see?”

“Yes.”

The mirrored wall opaqued into a viewing screen. The room went dark. Tan-Tan sat on the floor to watch. A huge stage appeared on the screen, with hundreds of people in the audience. Some old-time soca was playing. A masque King costume came out on stage; one mako big construction, supported by one man dancing in its traces. It looked like a spider, or a machine with claws for grasping. It had a sheet of white cotton suspended above its eight wicked-looking pincers. It towered a good three metres above the man who was wearing it, but he danced and pranced as though it weighed next to nothing.

“The Minshall Mancrab,” eshu told Tan-Tan. “Minshall made it to be king of his band ‘The River’ on Earth, Terran calendar 1983.”

“Peter Minshall?” Tan-Tan asked. She had heard a crêche teacher say the name once when reading from Marryshow’s Revelations.

“He same one.”

The sinister Mancrab advanced to the centre of the stage, its sheet billowing. Suddenly the edges of the sheet started to bleed. Tan-Tan heard the audience exclaim. The blood quickly soaked the sheet as the Mancrab opened its menacing pincers wide. People in the audience went wild, clapping and shouting and screaming their approval.

Tan-Tan was mesmerised. “Is scary,” she said.

“Is so headblind machines used to stay,” eshu told her. “Before people make Granny Nanny to rule the machines and give guidance. Look some different images here.”

The eshu showed her more pictures of old-time Earth Carnival: the Jour Ouvert mud masque, the Children’s Masquerades. When Nursie came to fetch her for breakfast, Tan-Tan was tailor-sat on the floor in the dark, still in her Robber Queen costume, staring at the eshu screen and asking it questions from time to time. The eshu answered in a gentle voice. Nursie smiled and had the minder bring Tan-Tan’s breakfast to her on a tray.

For two days straight Tan-Tan insisted on wearing her Robber Queen costume. She slept in it and all. Neither Ione nor Nursie could persuade her to change out of it. But she never called Antonio to thank him. Let him feel bad about boofing her on Jonkanoo Night.

She missed the crêche, missed Crab-back Joey and Vashti, and the brightly coloured minders that would sing and play games of “Brown Girl in the Ring” and “Jane and Louisa” with them. No-one else would play with her, so she talked to the eshu. Not just for her lessons in maths and history and art, but for all the questions the grownups wouldn’t answer for her.

“Why Daddy gone away, eshu?”

“He mad at your mother and Quashee, young Mistress. Them shouldn’t have been hugging up behind Antonio back.”

“He mad at me too?”

The eshu said, “It look so, don’t it? Me can’t calculate no other reason for him to stay away from you. But Nanny say is classic jealousy behaviour, it don’t have to do with you. I tell you true, I don’t always understand people so good. Allyou does do things for different reasons than we. You certain you never do nothing to vex your father, young Mistress?”

Tan-Tan thought back to the day her daddy had left; the time when she’d been playing Robber Queen in the julie-mango tree and talking back so breezily to Daddy. Like slugs squirming in salt, she felt her lips twisting into a sad bow. “Maybe because I ain’t stay up in the tree when he tell me?”

“I not sure. Maybe is that, oui. ’Nuff respect, Mistress, but sometimes you hard ears, you know. You don’t always obey when adults talk to you.”

“No,” Tan-Tan agreed in a small voice.

“You want me to ask Antonio if is that why he vex?”

“No! Don’t tell he nothing!” When she felt like this, Nursie told her she was acting too proud. But she couldn’t bear to let Daddy know how bad she was pining for him.

“Seen,” agreed the eshu. It played a cartoon for her instead. Tan-Tan laughed at Brer Anansi, the cunning little man who could become a spider. Her heart eased for a time.

Jonkanoo Season ended as Old Year’s Night came round. Tan-Tan heard Nursie and Cookie talking about how Ione had scandalized the crowd at the Cannes Brûlées Ball by showing up dressed off in black like a widow (“Except that widows ain’t supposed to show off they chest in all kinda see-through lace,” said Cookie), and hanging on to the arm of a young swaggerboy, even more dressed up than she. But eh-eh! And she married to the mayor!

Tan-Tan had finally come to understand why her daddy wasn’t coming back: Ione had been bad, and Tan-Tan had been bad, and he didn’t want to be with them no more. He was disgusted at them. Sometimes Ione would get sad and drink too much red rum. Then she would bawl, and tell Tan-Tan how Antonio was a thoughtless, ungrateful man; look how he bring down all this scandal on he wife head! Sometimes Ione would say through tears, “But I miss he, child. Even with all he slackness and he plenty plenty women, I miss he too bad.”

Tan-Tan heard Ben telling Cookie that “A man have him pride, you know! How you could expect him to live with a woman who horning he steady? And he the mayor too besides! You don’t see the man have to have some respect in he own house?”

Tan-Tan didn’t understand all of that, it was big people story; all she knew was she wasn’t going to cry or complain, she was going to try to be real, real good so Daddy would come home again.

Come Carnival time, Antonio called to tell her he would take her to the Children’s Masquerade, as he had every year now since she was four. She opened her mouth to say, yes Daddy, thank you, Daddy. So why was her mouth saying politely, “No thank you, Daddy. Mummy go take me”? Pride. Nursie was always telling she she too prideful. Daddy’s face fell.

“All right, doux-doux,” he said sadly. “If is so you want it.”

The words chilled Tan-Tan’s heart to a ball of ice in her chest. But she set her lips together and nodded solemnly at her daddy. When he had signed off, Tan-Tan whispered to the air, “Eshu? Come and play with me.” That day, whispering directions through her earbug, eshu directed Tan-Tan out to the fountain to examine the pale pink rockstones from Shak-Shak Bay. It showed her how to see the fossils trapped in some of the stones. It told her about the animals that used to live on Toussaint before human people came and made it their own.

“You mean chicken and cow and so?”

“No, Mistress. Them is from Earth. I mean the indigenous fauna: the mako jumbie-them, the douen. The jumbie bird allyou does farm for meat and leather is a genesculpt. Allyou grow it from the original stock. It didn’t used to be small so.”

“Small! Eshu, jumbie bird does be big like cow, ain’t?”

“The mako jumbie could eat a cow for breakfast and be hungry again come noon.” The eshu must have heard the small noise Tan-Tan made in her throat, for it said; “Don’t frighten, young Mistress. It ain’t have no more mako jumbie on Toussaint no more. You safe.”

“And the douen? You said it had douen.”

“Searching…” the eshu whispered quietly. Usually it could get information instantly from the web data banks. “I don’t know plenty about them, young Mistress,” it said finally. “Indigenous fauna, now extinct.”

“Extinct?”

“No longer in this existence.”

“Why, eshu?”

“To make Toussaint safe for people from the nation ships.”

“Oh.”

Tan-Tan saw Antonio on the broadcasts, opening Carnival season for another year. Watching him on the screen she felt a little sad and vex. At him, at herself. But eshu always knew how to help her feel better. And Ione was trying to be nice to Tan-Tan, in a kind of a way. She was forever buying her new toys, even though she wouldn’t play Robber Queen or any old-time story, for she didn’t like to “bother up sheself with stupidness.”

Nursie was throwing word steady behind Ione’s back, whispering to Cookie and Ben that the mayor wife had bring all of this on she own head. Nursie took care that Ione never heard her, though. The eshu could hear, but it would only reveal private conversation if it judged the speakers meant harm to anyone. Simple badmouth didn’t warrant its attention.

One day before the big Carnival parade, the eshu told Nursie that Ione wanted to see Tan-Tan. When they reached Ione’s dressing room, they found Ione with a seamstress lacing her tight into her riding leathers. Tan-Tan could never understand why her mother had riding leathers, when she didn’t even self have a horse. But she looked pretty in them.

“Nursie,” Ione said, “ain’t the eshu tell you to get Tan-Tan ready?”

“No, Compère. You know it does make mischief sometimes.”

“Cho. Well, take she back and dress she up nice. I taking she to the fight yard to watch the practice.”

Tan-Tan could scarcely believe it. “For true, Mummy?” She had never seen the practice, just heard about it from Ben.

Mummy looked down at her, smiling. “You would like that, eh doux-doux?”

“Yes!”

Ione held out her arms, gleaming strong and firm through the translucent white linen of her best pirate blouse. The seamstress looked appraisingly at the blouse. “I think is soon time you stop wearing that style, Compère,” she said. “’Nuff people see you inna this shirt plenty times already.”

“Well, is you have the eye for these things, Annie,” replied Ione. “Tell me what you think.”

“A new blouse. I go make you something pretty in lace.” She fastened the cuffs of the blouse.

“I would be honoured to wear your creation, Compère.” Ione looked down at Tan-Tan.

“I know you been asking your daddy to take you to the fight yard from since, and he never pay you no mind. Well he not here now. I going take you. Go and get dressed, doux-doux.”

The fight yard! The place where challengers trained to fight in the Jour Ouvert morning duels on the first day of the Carnival parade. On Jour Ouvert morning, besides the street dancing, anybody who had a quarrel with someone could call their enemy out to fight. “Young Mistress,” said the eshu in her ear, “you understand the word ‘archaic’?”

“No, what it mean?”

“Old. Very old. When people does fight in a Jour Ouvert duel, them does fight in the old ways, with machète and bull pissle and stick and thing. All to remind them of their history, of times back on Earth. Them does even fight with hand and foot.”

Nursie bustled Tan-Tan back to her room, chatting the whole time about the training at the fight yard:

“Tan-Tan, if you see it! When me was young me did train to be a fighter, you know? Well, a dancer. Stick fight dance. The yard big so like a sugar cane field, but pack down flat all over; just dirt, no pavement. The chicle fetches does sweep the yard flat every morning. And the practice! Lord, it sweet for so! It have three kinds: stick fight, bare hand and machète. Your own labour, you understand? Body and mind working together to defeat an enemy, like old-time days. Woi, Nanny. A laying on of hands. Don’t mind people who tell you labour nasty. Some kinds is a blessing for true, a sacrament.” Nursie’s eyes got big-big, and she was waving her hands round in the air, trying to describe how the fighters-them looked.

“Stick fight pretty to watch, you see? When the fighters and them does practice, and the stick fight marshall call out the steps, it come in just like a dance. Man and woman, everybody know they place, and even though you might think say them will lash each other by mistake, them does scarcely do it, you know?”

“Bare hand is the type I really like; is that I used to play when I was young. Capoeira.”

Click in Tan-Tan’s ear. “When you come back, young Mistress, I go tell you about capoeira.”

Nursie said, “You know is fight you fighting when you could feel your opponent muscles sweaty beneath you hand. Mama, that is fight! It take skill! The bare hand marshall we got now does only train with two-three people at once, and she don’t make fun to make example of them. One time, I see she haul one big, hard-back man over she shoulder, and drop him boops! on the ground like a sack of cornmeal, just because she catch he giving a kidney blow. She don’t make joke, oui?”

“Machète fight different, though; it ain’t a clean type of fighting. When them practice, the marshall make everybody wear the leather armour and use the wood blades. Even so, I see people get bruise-up bad in machète practice. I don’t like to watch the machète duels so much. One crazy motherass so-and-so only have to fetch you one chop for you to end up dead. Oh—excuse my language, doux-doux.”

Tan-Tan couldn’t wait to see the fight yard with her own two eyes. She made haste to get dressed; she even laced up her aoutchicongs by herself, instead of begging Nursie to do it for her. By the time she reached the front yard, Ione was already waiting for her in a pedicab.

“Hurry up, nuh, Tan-Tan?” Ione pulled her into the cab. She made sure Tan-Tan was settled, then tapped her foot on the floor of the cab for the runner to move off.

Ione’s eyes were bright. She sat straight and tall in the cab, waved at passers-by on the long avenue, cut her eyes at the ones who scowled at the mayor’s cheating wife. Ione just smiled: Granny Nanny’s ears and eyes everywhere kept people’s actions to one another respectful. Ione was running her mouth off steady like water from a tap: “I so love to watch the practice. The fellers does look too nice, oui, with the sweat shining on their muscles, and them tiny dhoti them does wear like loincloth.”

“Compère Ione,” came the runner’s deep voice. He glanced back at them over his shoulder. “Me bring one message for you. You will hear it?”

“You? A message for me? From who?”

“The Obi-Bé.” The witch woman. “She say must tell you to go where it have plenty people today, not to stay in your house and grieve for your man.”

Ione smiled, a pleased look on her face. “And ain’t is that I doing?”

“She say the shells tell she a former love making plans to change your life.”

“Koo ya! Look at that now. I know say Quashee been practising in the fight yard since before Jonkanoo Time. I bet you he getting ready to call that blasted Antonio out to duel. It woulda serve Antonio right if Quahsee kill he dead! I spend too many nights crying over that man and he worthless ways!” Ione’s eyes were bright and shiny. Excitement or fear, Tan-Tan couldn’t tell.

They were passing through the heart of Cockpit Town now. Tan-Tan took in the Carnival sights. The runner took them up Main Street, past the town square, where the big calypso tent was erecting itself with the aid of tiny, agile chicle fetches. Calypsonians had been touring all the cities and towns on Toussaint. They went from one calypso tent to the next, singing their best new kaisos, competing for the title of Road March Monarch. There was a billboard in front of the tent. Its message: “Woi, Mama; Is a Calypso Fight; Piquant for So Tomorrow Nite!” Behind the words flashed vids of the reigning Road March Monarchs, Mama Choonks and Ras’ Cudjoe-I. Piquant was a competition of skill and wit. The singers had to make up insults for one another in song, right there on the stage.

“Mummy, Mama Choonks going to sing ‘Workee in the Parlour’ tomorrow night?”

“Stop it, Tan-Tan; where you hear such rudeness? You musn’t mind wicked people with nothing better to do than fast themself in other people business.”

Tan-Tan didn’t understand. More big people story. But she’d heard people in the house softly singing the chorus to “Workee”:

Tan-Tan didn’t understand all the words, but she liked the tune. Nursie had told her that “tallawah” meant somebody tough, somebody who could take hard knocks. Then she’d laughed a nasty laugh.

Little bit down the road they passed the masquerade camp. From inside came one set of hammering and drilling and cussword flying like breeze.

“You hear that?” Ione said. “Them building everything by hand, oui? The old-time way.” She shook her head in admiration.

“Who, Mummy?”

“Fimbar and Philomise. They making the costumes for Carnival Day. Send-off parade here in Cockpit County Jour Ouvert afternoon, then them have a mag-lev train to carry everybody to Liguanea Town for the big jump-up; all the bands from every parish in the county competing.

“One big mako secret what theme them two men come up with for the float this year, oui? Even though everybody who jumping-up in the parade done pay for their costumes already.” Ione smiled. “Is so them does always do it. People fenneh for know what they going to be wearing; no way to tell.”

“Their eshus wouldn’t tell them?”

“Nah. Fimbar and Philomise have special dispensation to lock out data from the spider web till they done.”

The runner shouted: “You see them five hard-face men and women guarding all the entrances? Just for show, oui; the camp eshu give better security.”

The only clue to the parade theme was a big banner across the front of the building with the words “Wail for Marley.”

“Man,” the runner chuckled, “Fimbar and Philomise been life partners and business partners since God was a boy, oui? Two people, one mind.”

Tan-Tan stared at the camp until they had passed it. The banner flapped in the breeze, slapping the side of the building.

Finally the pedicab was at the fight yard all the way at the opposite edge of the town. While Ione was paying the cabbie, Tan-Tan jumped down and ran to the big wrought iron gates.

It had an old man guarding the entrance, standing in between the two stone pillars on either side of the gates. His face was nothing but wrinkles. He had a red kerchief tied and knotted on his old bald head. He was wearing a dirty white singlet. A dhoti flapped loose round his skinny matches stick legs-them. He was holding a long wood staff, but his wrinkly brown arms were meager so till you couldn’t be sure what was staff and what was arms. He looked to Tan-Tan like a stick insect. She didn’t get to see too many people too old for telo rejuve.

“Good afternoon, young lady,” he said to Tan-Tan in his shaky old-man voice. “Don’t you is the mayor little girl?”

“Yes, mister.”

“And is what I could do for you this fine day?” The old man smiled down at her. His teeth looked white and perfect and new.

“Me and Mummy come to watch the practice, mister.”

“Good afternoon, Bogle,” Ione said. “You keeping well?”

“Yes, ma’am; thank you, ma’am. The hot sun does make the old bones feel young, oui? Like I could dance the stick fight again.” Bogle opened the gates so mother and daughter could pass inside. “Mind allyou stay on the yellow walkways, all right?”

Baps! A man landed on his back on the ground just in front of Tan-Tan and Ione. Berimbau music jangled to a halt. Before they could move out of the way, a woman strode up. She looked at Ione, who stepped back, pulling Tan-Tan along with her.

“Get up!” the woman said to the man on the ground. “Get up, you lazy so-and-so!” Her voice was two rockstones cracking together. “Tomorrow when you fighting for real, you can’t lay down so every time you get throw. Get up, I say!”

“Must be the bare hand marshall, she,” Ione said to Tan-Tan in a low voice.

The marshall’s chest was a bull chest. Her bare arms and legs-them were thick like poui tree trunk. She hauled the man to his feet. “Every Carnival them send me one set of allyou soft-hand people, say you learning how for fight. Well, go back and fight then, nuh!” With a hard slap to the man’s shoulder she sent him stumbling back into the ring. The man who’d thrown him all that way looked determined and cocky. The berimbau player began his tune again. The two men faced off, grappled, began to tumble around the ring of the roda.

“Lord have mercy,” Ione said. “What make anybody want to labour so?”

Tan-Tan could barely hear her for all the yelling and shouting, the scraping of the berimbau, the sounds of sticks crashing together. Over to the right they could see the stick fight ring. It had about twelve men and women standing in two short lines, facing one another. They each had one short stick and one long one. The stick fight marshall was shouting out the measures: “Lemme see you do the Scarlet Ibis!” The stick fighters turned and jumped, swinging their sticks high in air and hitting them against their opponents’ sticks. It was more performance than fight, and Tan-Tan could see the pattern of the dance. It looked like birds flying for true.

“All right! Now the Dip and Fall Back!” One line crouched down low and ran behind the other. The people in the standing line leapt up high, crashing one another’s sticks together at the apex of the jump. The marshall sang out, “Canboulay-Oh!” and the dance turned into a free-for-all. Fighters jabbed at one another with their long sticks and used the short ones to fend off blows. One set of comess and confusion!

“Mummy, they going to get hurt!”

“No, child; you ain’t have no sense? Long time ago, the stick fight was real, but is just a pappyshow now.”

It ain’t look like no pappyshow to Tan-Tan; it looked like serious business.

Ione pointed to the middle of the fight yard. “Look the machète practice there so. That is what we come to see.” She hustled Tan-Tan over to the barrier. “Peel your eye, girl. Me will look too. Tell me if you see your Uncle Quashee.”

True to old-time tradition, the machète fighters-them were wearing full antique leather armour and face plate and thing, so it wasn’t easy to see who was who. They were sparring in twos, slicing at each other with wood machètes. The marshall went from one pair to the next, moving an arm or a leg, stopping people sometimes to demonstrate a move.

Suddenly, one fighter tripped a next one to the ground and kicked the machète out of the fallen one’s hand.

“Bloodcloth!” the downed one cursed, cradling the kicked hand. His voice was muffled by the face plate.

“Hold on; hold on!” the marshall yelled. The sparring stopped.

“Quashee, man, I tired tell you about cheating! Kicking not allowed; tripping not allowed! If you can’t fight fair, get your ass out of my blasted yard, you hear?”

The cheater swiped off his helmet and face plate and dashed them to the ground. It was Quashee for true. It had dust in his hair. His face was covered in sweat and mud. Ione was only waving her handkerchief, trying to catch his eye, but he wasn’t paying her no mind. He was too busy arguing with the marshall.

“Don’t vex, Boss,” Quashee say. “Is forget I did forget. I know you tell me before, but this thing ain’t no joke, you hear? We only playing fight today, but if Antonio decide to challenge me, tomorrow I go be catching my nen-nen.”

“Man, what you frighten for?” The man on the ground had picked himself up and entered into the argument. “You ain’t even self know if Antonio going to challenge you. Today is he last chance to lay challenge. Is five months gone, and you ain’t hear from he. I bet you he don’t show up.”

A real machète flew through the air and jooked into the leather helmet lying at the mens’ feet, nearly slicing the helmet in half. Quashee cried out and jumped back.

“Well, Master Don, you lose your bet. I here.” One of the other fighters in the ring was unbuckling his face plate. Tan-Tan knew that voice. It was her daddy. He had been practising beside Quashee all along, disguised by his helmet.

A woman in the crowd of spectators sang out joyfully, “Oh, God! Look story now!”

The marshall scolded: “Antonio, what the ass you doing making masque in my machète ring? Is Potoo supposed to be he in here, not you! And what you mean by throwing bare steel at one of my students like that?”

Antonio frowned, but the marshall continued his harangue: “You is mayor of Cockpit County, yes, but in this machète yard, even the mayor don’t break my rules.”

When Antonio replied, he did so in a respectful voice: “Sorry, Marshall; my head get too hot when I see that cheating son of a bitch who disgrace my wife and insult my hospitality!” (Quashee moved behind the marshall’s back.) “I can’t let it pass; I come to announce my intentions to challenge Quashee to a fair fight on Jour Ouvert morning!”

Outside the barrier, the spectators began to whisper to one another. Tan-Tan heard: “Lord, how Antonio think he could win a machète fight when Quashee been practising for five months now?”

Obviously the same thing was on the marshall’s mind; he kissed his teeth, shook his head and said, “Allyou know I could cancel a challenge if I think one fighter have a unfair advantage, right? Antonio, you don’t have no practice fighting with machète.”

Antonio laughed. “No? What make you think so? You remember Warren, Marshall? The man you replace as machète master when he retire from the yard last year? Well, Warren is my good, good friend and he been giving me private lessons since before Jonkanoo Time.”

Oh, yes: scandal break again in Cockpit County! The crowd was ssu-ssu ing so till the marshall had to shout for silence. It ain’t have nothing for him to do but shrug and ask Quashee and Antonio if they understood the rules of the challenge: “The two of you going to fight with machète, leather armour your only protection; a fair fight, until one of you surrender or can’t fight no more. And Quashee, listen good; the rules say you can’t refuse a Jour Ouvert challenge if you healthy. So: you accept the challenge, or you refuse?”

Sweat was beading Quashee’s forehead like when you put salt on a slice of z’avocat pear.

“I accept, Marshall.”

Antonio just nodded.

Tan-Tan couldn’t stand to keep silent any more. “Daddy! Daddy! I over here!”

Antonio turned at the sound of her voice. He strode over to Tan-Tan and Ione. Tan-Tan felt suddenly shy. Was he still vex with her?

But Antonio bust one big grin and patted Tan-Tan on her head. “Well, doux-doux, long time I ain’t see you. You miss me?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Tan-Tan whispered. Yes, she had been missing him too bad.

“Don’t mind, Tan-Tan; as soon as I teach that young boy name Quashee a lesson, I go come back home to live with you. You would like that?” He was speaking to Tan-Tan, but is Ione the tamarind-brown beauty he was looking at.

Mummy frowned. She didn’t say anything. She would make Daddy vex again! Desperately, Tan-Tan asked, “We go be together again, Daddy?”

“Yes, doux-doux. Soon.” To Ione he said, “You looking after my child good, woman? I too angry with you already; you wouldn’t want me to vex even more.” His smile had an edge to it now.

Ione’s look changed from I-don’t-business-with-you to I-best-take-care. She pressed her lips together and made a little step back. “Yes, Antonio, I taking care of she. You don’t see how good she looking?” Then a pleading look: “You going to come back to we, doux-doux?” she wheedled. “I sorry too bad for what I do.”

Daddy’s face softened. Mummy smiled like she’d just won a game of jacks. She reached out a hand to Daddy. He took it and squeezed it gently. Then harder, until his heavy leather gloves creaked. Don’t that must hurt? Tan-Tan looked to her mother, but Ione just stood there with her mouth set in a smile. She hissed a little through her teeth. A tear was worming its way down her cheek. See, she really was sorry for hugging up with Quashee!

Still tightly holding her hand, Antonio smiled tenderly at his wife. “Yes, darling, I go come back, after I deal with that young boy there. He pee ain’t even start to make froth yet, but still he casting he eye ’pon my woman like he is big man.”

He raised Ione’s hand to his lips and kissed it. He released her. He left them and went to where Quashee and the marshall were standing. Ione rubbed her hand. She looked as though she were going to cry for real, but instead she shook her head and gave a little laugh.

“What a thing eh, Tan-Tan?” she said in a high, shaky voice. “To have two men fighting over me! Ain’t? I think your daddy really love me, sweetheart. I must try to be a good wife to he after this. Is me make him vex, and is me must fix it. Come let we go home, child; I have to dress to puss-foot tomorrow morning, oui!”

On the way home in the pedicab, all Ione’s talk was about how Quashee is a nice man, young and tireless; but on the other hand, how Antonio is a mature man who know he own mind, and too besides, you see how fit and strong Antonio looking nowadays? She ain’t really know which one to wish would win, after them both have them good points.

Tan-Tan was frighten too bad, oui.

“Mummy,” she asked. “Daddy go dead?”

Ione sighed. “Tan-Tan, you does worry too much about stupidness. The machète marshall ain’t go let Quashee kill we mayor, doux-doux. The rules say you ain’t supposed to kill in a Jour Ouvert challenge. For you to win, your opponent have to be hurt too bad to keep fighting, or he have to beg you to stop. Okay? So what you think I should wear tomorrow? I have to look nice for the fight!”

Ione and Antonio had always had a stormy relationship. “Love so sweet it hot,” people said. They quarrelled often. It added spice to the subsequent making up. It was their favourite game. But over the years the sweetness had soured. To keep it juicy they’d had to raise the stakes on the fights. Now they each had too much to lose. Neither would give ground. People used to think that Ione was the one suffering, oui? Cockpit County knew about Antonio and the way he lied about his womanizing. The old people who had seen everything in their lives happen two and three and four times would just shake their heads and mutter, “He going to run aground, just like a Garvey ship.”

People thought say was only wicked Antonio horning Ione, for Ione had been too sly to make anybody know her business.

But the game had gotten stale on her. Once Antonio had become mayor he was soon too busy with the work to pay their games much mind. Some days Ione felt say she could have paraded naked through Antonio’s office with three of her lovers and he wouldn’t notice. Singing with the Jubilante Mummers distracted her busy intellect a little. Being on the committee that organized the annual Mercy Table helped too, but she missed Antonio. She found herself longing for the young people days when the two of them would meet after a day of farming and hold hands and walk and talk in the setting sun and make plans for their life together till the frogs in the wisdom weed bushes were wooing krek-ek! in the dark.

Ione decided to try a new way to catch Antonio’s attention again. She got pregnant. So that is the piece of comess that Tan-Tan had been born into. Two people who loved each other fiercely but had forgotten how to do it without some quarrel between them. Ione and Antonio thought say is baby they were making oui, but they were really only creating one more thing to quarrel over.

It had sweet Antonio can’t done to know he was going to be a father. And it was a good thing he liked the idea, for from the first birth pangs hit Ione, it was as though she realised she didn’t have the taste for hard labour, oui. As soon as she pushed the baby out of her, Ione took one look at it and shouted at Antonio to activate the wet-nurse, purchased to help Ione with the breastfeeding. The midwife Babsie took the baby, held it out for Ione to give it one dry kiss on the tiny cheek, and that was that for mother-love.

Antonio followed Babsie as she went into the next room and parked the baby in the carry pouch of the wet-nurse. The nurse’s calming blue chicle gel body hummed reassuringly. “Is all right,” he said to Babsie. “I go stay with she little bit.”

With trembling hands, he made sure his new daughter was snug and comfortable in the carry pouch. She stopped crying. He guided her mouth to the teat of the wet-nurse. The tiny lips locked on and began to suck.

Antonio sat for two hours straight by the baby’s side. He marvelled to watch the new little thing eat, sleep. Watched her wake crying at the feel of the soiled bedding wadded round her. The wet-nurse had come with instructions. He played the ones for changing the swaddling and followed them meticulously, afraid at every turn that he would hurt the child. He fed her again. Then he sat and stared at her for another long hour.

“I still getting pain,” a voice from the next room said.

“But no more contractions?”

Antonio climbed slowly out of his reverie into awareness. Ione was next door in the lying-in room, talking to the doctor. Is how long he had left her alone?

He jumped to his feet. He picked up the baby and hurried into the next room. His wife’s skin was grey with fatigue, her eyelids-them drooping. Is two hands she was using to hold the glass of water to swallow the pills the doctor was giving her.

Doctor Kong turned and smile at him. “Congratulations, Daddy.”

Antonio looked to Ione, but the cut-eye of contempt he got in return was enough to slice skin, oui. She reached out her two arms to claim her property. Antonio put the baby into them. But Ione grasped her too roughly. The pickney woke up and started to cry.

“No,” Antonio said. “Hold she so.”

“Back off from me. You make any pickney?”

And it was Ione who held her child as Doctor Kong syringed the nanomite solution that would form her earbug into the baby’s ear. From then on, what used to be sweet hotness between Ione and Antonio turned to nuclear war, yes.

Ione would look in on Tan-Tan once a day and pat the tiny shoulder, just a little bit too hard. She would always startle Tan-Tan awake, and the baby would start to cry. Quick-quick, Ione would set the wet nurse on “rock.” “Ssh, baby, ssh. You musn’t cry. Don’t make so much noise, or the Midnight Robber will come and take you away.”

In years to come, the little girl Tan-Tan would ask the eshu to show her images of the Midnight Robber. Fascinated and frightened at the same time, she would view image after image of the Midnight Robber with his black cape, death-cross X of bandoliers slashed across his chest, his hat with its hatband of skulls. The Midnight Robber, the downpressor, the stealer-away of small children who make too much mischief. The man with the golden wooing tongue. She would show him. She would be scarier than him. She would be Robber Queen.

All Ione knew was that she was no good at being a baby-mother. She told her husband, “Hear nuh? You have one pickney now, so don’t expect me to be stretching out my figure trying to make no more for you.”

Antonio pushed out his lip when she said that, and his brow got dark as thunder clouds, but he didn’t say nothing, nothing at all. After that, no sweet words for Ione any more.

Is all right though. Ione had better fish to fry, oui? Mayor Antonio was always bringing sweetie and dolly for his little girl Tan-Tan, but he never had anything sweet no more for his hot-blooded, lonely wife. Ione pitched her cap for a youth named Evan, a tall, sweet-talking swaggerboy. Who coulda blame her? Such a nice boy, so polite, so attentive. Such long, strong legs. She hoped for Antonio to see the glances between them and counter with a passion of his own. The game was on again.

Well, doux-doux, Ione was a woman who got bored easily. Couple months down the road, Evan made his eyes rest too long on a pretty young man he met while playing dominoes. And is not like he and Ione coulda had any fidelity pact, but Ione didn’t want to be one of two people vying for Evan’s loyalty. Next day, Ione abandoned Evan for Franklyn and his green, bitter-melon eyes.

About a half-year later, Ione’s favourite parasol flew away from her in the garden, and Franklyn laughed to see her running after it. Just for that little piece of mako, Franklyn gave way to Jairam. Jairam was a dougla boy, Indian and Euro blood from Shipmate Shiva that had settled two continents away. Jairam’s mammy was descended from the longtime ago East Indians, the ones who had crossed the Kalpani, the Black Water on Earth to go and work their fingers to the bone as indentured labour in the Caribbean. Jairam was a pretty, pretty man with curly black hair and sweet, pouty lips. All the same though, he could never get a joke. Ione soon tired of his long, serious face, so Jairam lost his place to Quashee. By coincidence, it was about the same time that Antonio threw over a certain Shanti for a pretty piece of sweetness name Aïsha.

Now, Quashee was to hang around a little longer. He was the first one of this string of lovers to really sweet Ione: his skin was smooth, black and hot; just so cocoa-tea will warm your body on a cool morning. He managed to keep Ione entertained for a few years well. By then, Tan-Tan was seven, and she was so used to seeing Quashee round the place, she was calling him “uncle.” Nice arrangement for Ione, oui. Hard-working husband and a harder lover.

Things couldn’t go on so for good. Cockpit County is a small place, and you know how them back-a-wall, smalltown people stay. Eventually, Antonio came to find out about his wife and Quashee. Jealous Jairam whispered some badmouth something in his ear one day.

At first, Antonio didn’t believe, but all day long he kept seeing Quashee in his mind’s eye. That good-for-nothing grin. The long, lanky way he would lope after the ball on the soccer field that would have people sighing and fanning themselves for how pretty he was. If Ione was horning him in their own house Granny Nanny would have the images in her data banks, but no-one could override Nanny’s privacy protection. Nanny only chose to reveal information that she judged would infringe on public safety.

Like plenty people in Cockpit County, Quashee had a way to pass by the house in the evenings to pay his respects to Mayor Antonio and wife, Ione. Antonio had always felt say Quashee was really paying respects to their good red rum, but now he was wondering. Quashee and Ione? For true?

And that is how the story start.

“Is a argot of she operating language, seen?” Maka’s voice was muffled through the filter he wore over nose and mouth. He inspected the beaker on the stove, frowned at it.

“Nannysong? How you mean, ‘argot’? All this time me think say it is her operating language.” Antonio longed to take his own filter off, but Maka said the fumes could be harmful. He stayed close to the door, ready to run outside if it looked like the experiment was getting away from Maka. He touched the nearby wall of Maka’s house, still bemused at there being no eshu, at the way that runners chose to live inside dead material.

Maka smiled. Laugh lines ran deep grooves beside his mouth, making his leonine features even more arresting. With one foot he hooked a stool closer to his worktable. Looked at it approvingly. “Is my cousin make this, you know? Work the wood with she own two hands. First one she make that ain’t give nobody splinters.”

Labour. Back-break. Antonio grimaced at the memory of the calluses on Beata’s palms. “Me nah understand oonuh, but your way is your choice. Tell me about this creole then, nuh?”

Maka sat on his cousin’s stool. In their terrarium on the worktable, mice scurried around. “When Nanny get create, she come in like a newborn adult; all the intelligence there, but no knowledge. You follow me?”

“Hmm.”

“She had was to learn, she had was to come to consciousness. Them days there, the programmers and them had write she protocols in Eleggua, seen—the code them invent to write programmes to create artificial intelligence?”

“Yes, me know.” Old-time story. Antonio sipped at the rum he’d brought to share with the Obi-Bé’s son. He savoured its sweet burning at the back of his throat. Maka raised his own glass to him, threw back a swallow.

The liquid on the burner was bubbling. Maka consulted the notes on the table beside him, written on stained, wrinkled sheets of the headblind paper that Antonio found so wondrous. Code that Nanny couldn’t automatically read!

Maka turned down the heat, added another substance to the mix. “Well,” he continued, “something start to go wrong. It get to where the programmers would ask Nanny a question, and she would spew back mako blocks of pure gibberish. Them think say the quantum brain get corrupt. Them prepare to wipe it and start over.”

“Them kill Granny Nanny?” The thought was obscene.

“Nearly. But she save she own self. Is Marryshow she break through to first. You know he was a calypsonian, yes? Just trying a thing, he run the Nanny messages through a sound filter; tonal instead of text-based, understand? The day them was set to wipe she memory, Nanny start to sing to Marryshow. She brain didn’t spoil, it just get too complex for Eleggua to translate the concepts she was understanding no more; after Nanny was seeing things in all dimensions—how a simple four-dimensional programming code would continue to do she? So she had develop she own language.”

“Nannysong.”

“Nah. If you was to transpose nannycode to the tonal, humans couldn’t perceive more than one-tenth of the notes, seen? Them does happen at frequencies we can’t even map. Nanny create a version we could access with we own senses. Nannysong is only a hundred and twenty-seven tones, and she does only sing basic phrases to we; numbers and simple stock sentences and so.”

“Like the proverbs she used to sing to we in crêche.”

“Seen. Same way so.” Maka read in his notes again, took the beaker off the burner.

“So is what I hear allyou runners doing? When you turn off Nanny?”

“Not turn we turning she off. Not possible. We just know more nannysong than the rest of oonuh, we more fluent, seen? If you sing the right songs, so long as Nanny don’t see no harm to life nor limb, she will lock out all but she overruling protocols for a little space.”

“Rasscloth,” Antonio breathed in amazement.

Maka laughed. “Nice thing to know, eh? And we learning little more nannysong every day. We could ask she to do things nobody else could even think of.”

“And how come allyou runners know all this?”

“Is who you think we descend from? We was programmer clan.” Maka pulled the filter off his face, used a dropper to suck up some of the paste from the beaker.

“What, it ready?” asked Antonio. His heart started a pan jam beat. He stepped closer to the worktable. Took his own filter off.

“Me think so. If me understand the old knowledge right. If me follow the instructions right. Making casareep juice for pepperpot stew is one thing, but me ain’t know about this woorari. Me tell you straight, Compère, this herb science I teaching myself is a ancient skill for true.” He stuck a hand into the terrarium, pulled out a kicking mouse. He dropped it into the deep pan of a nearby scale, weighed it. Consulted his notes. Picked the mouse up again. Forced its muzzle open. Squeezed a measured drop of the woorari onto its tongue. The mouse struggled and worked its mouth, foam forming on its snout. Maka put it down on the table. It ran a short distance, then flopped to the ground and lay still. Maka inspected it. “Good. Still breathing.” He looked at Antonio and smiled.

Come Jour Ouvert morning, Tan-Tan was afraid to even self get out of bed. She had asked her mother the rules of the fight over and over till Ione got fed up and refused to repeat them any more. Tan-Tan knew the rules in her own head by now. As she opened her eyes she started to recite them like a mantra. Daddy would be all right.

“Young Mistress,” said eshu softly. “Ione say is time to get up now. She say to clean your teeth and take a shower, then put on your best frock, the white one with the sailor collar.”

Tan-Tan got out of bed. She went outside through the bedroom doors that led to the back verandah. The morning was looking dreary, oui. Papa Sun was hiding his face behind one big mako cloud. Rainflies flitted everywhere, dancing on their wings in anticipation of a wetting. Tan-Tan went to her bathroom, washed herself and brushed her teeth. She reached into her closet for the white dress with the blue-piped collar, but her hand touched her Robber Queen outfit instead. She put it on. It covered up some of her scared feelings.

Nursie bustled into the room, carrying combs, ribbons and fragrant coconut oil for Tan-Tan’s hair. “No, child. Put on the white dress, you ain’t hear what your mother say?”

“I wearing this.”

“Tan-Tan…”

“Mistress say is okay,” chimed the eshu out loud. It confused Tan-Tan. She hadn’t had any message from her mother.

Nursie sighed with exasperation. “Let me just get some red ribbons then. These blue ones not going to match.”

Nursie oiled and parted Tan-Tan’s hair, wove it into plaits, then rubbed some of the coconut oil into her elbows and knees so they wouldn’t be ashy. “My pretty little girl.” She kissed the top of Tan-Tan’s head and took her to have breakfast with Ione.

Tan-Tan’s mother was sitting at the table, staring off into the distance. “Oh, you prefer to wear that instead, doux-doux?” she said absent-mindedly. “All right.”

Nursie narrowed her eyes. “Compère, eshu tell me that you give permission for Tan-Tan to wear this.”

It was a second before Ione replied. “Eh? No, but is all right.” With a sigh she got to her feet and pulled out a chair for Tan-Tan. “Just ask Ben if he will please do a synapse wash on the eshu, nuh? It must be past time.” She stood and patted Tan-Tan’s shoulder, a little too hard. She smiled nervously, muttered at the air, “Eshu, we ready to eat.”

Mummy was wearing a beautiful white dress that left her shoulders bare. It had puffy sleeves and a deep flounce from knee to ankle. Tan-Tan thought Ione was the most beautiful woman in the whole world.

A chicle fetch slid into the room, loaded with covered trays. Ione took them and put them on the table. Bammy bread and saltfish with cabbage and thyme. “Oh, what a creation! Eshu, thank Cookie for we, please.”

But Ione only nibbled at breakfast. She kept asking Tan-Tan if she looked okay, kept checking her hand mirror all the time.

Outside, the threatened passing shower broke. Drops pounded like fists at the windows and thunder shouted at lightning.

As soon as the meal was over, Ione had the eshu make a full-sized mirror on the nearest wall. She put a colourdot from her purse onto one lip, then pressed both lips together. Her lips flushed with her favourite oxblood burgundy.

The eshu said out loud, “The limousine waiting, Mistress.”

“Oh God,” Ione whispered. “Time to go.” She hugged Tan-Tan to her, a little too hard. “Don’t fret eh, doux-doux? One way or another, it go work out all right.” Silently Tan-Tan repeated the rules of the duel to herself. They bustled out into the front yard.

The shower was over. Tiny so like babies’ fingernails, transparent rainfly wings were everywhere, held pasted in place by drops of water. Outside twinkled. Flightless as ants now, the rainflies were crawling off to wherever they went after a downpour. The sun had come out, was burning down full. Registering the way Tan-Tan’s pupils contracted against the glare, the nanomites swimming in the vitreous humour of her eyes polarised, dimming the light for her.

Plang-palang! Plang-palang! Cockpit County was in the full throes of Jour Ouvert morning revelry. People beat out their own dancing rhythms with bottle and spoon, tin-pan and stick. What a racket! Bodies danced everywhere: bodies smeared with mud; men’s bodies in women’s underwear; women wearing men’s shirt-jacs and boxers; naked bodies. They pressed against the car, pressed against one another, ground and wound their hips in the ecstatic license of Carnival. Someone grinned into the limo at Tan-Tan and Mummy. The woman had temporarily cell-sculpted her skin to be Afro on one side, Euro on the other. The Euro side was already sunburnt. She licked the length of the window with her tongue, which had been pierced with a star-shaped platinum nugget. The metal scraped against the window glass.

The limo crept along, slow as a chinny worm. A mako jumbie strode through the crowd, picking his way on his tall stilts. His tattered motley had been made into pants that clothed the stilts all the way to the ground. His chest was bare and he’d tied a long, pointy beak onto his face.

A Robber King stepped into the road in front of them, brandishing pistols almost as long as he was tall. He blew a shrieking whistle that brought to a halt the comess and carrying-on all around him. A circle of space cleared for him. People called out to him cheerfully and drew closer to see what he would do. The limousine braked, tried to go round the man. He stepped into their path again. Ione sighed. “Let he give he speech,” she told the car.

Tan-Tan could have lain comfortably under the expanse of the Robber’s hat. It had small white skulls bobbing all round its brim. The skulls’ lower jaws yammered, but it was too loud in the street to hear if they were saying anything. The Robber’s black and red outfit was the essence of Robber King style: bandoliers, holsters, chaps, alligator skin boots with enormous spurs. For a second, Tan-Tan felt the old fear: had he come to take her away for being bad?

The Robber gestured with his guns, spat his whistle from his mouth and broke into the nonsensible rant he had written especially for this day. “Arrest thou compunctively, embroilèd despoilers. Dip and fall back, and hear my sultry cry.” He turned his head towards the car as he spoke, and it was as though he were sitting right beside them. He must have been wearing a pointmike. Tan-Tan leaned forward to get every word of his speech. Maybe she could pick up some new ones for hers.

“My seraphic dam was a very queen of Egypt; mine pater its monarchical magnate, and I, a son of the sun, a coddled cocotte in my child’s robes of ermine and cloth-of-gold. Who would curdle my kingly boy’s joy, who mash me down and steal me away like jacks from a ball?”

And so it went: the classic tale, much embroidered over the centuries, mirrored the autobiography of Olaudah Equiano, an African noble’s son stolen into slavery on seventeenth-century Earth. The Robber Kings’ stream-of-consciousness speeches always told of escaping the horrors of slavery and making their way into brigandry as a way of surviving in the new and terrible white devils’ land in which they’d found themselves.

…and then,” the Robber went on, “I wrestle the warptenned flying ship from the ensorcelled dungmaster, the master plan blaster in his silver-fendered stratocaster with wings of phoenix flame, and I…”

Ione opened the window, stuck her hand out. “Here,” she called to the Robber. “Take this, and make we move on.” She held out money in her hand.

He was supposed to stop when offered payment, but he wouldn’t reach for it. “Avaunt!” he shouted. “Get thee behind me, horny horning whore of Babylon!” Someone in the crowd giggled. “Thine gelt shall not tempt me, too wise am I to be clasped by your thighs.”

“Take it,” Ione growled. “Is fight yard we going, you hear me?”

Fight yard. Fight yard… was whispered through the crowd. “Robber man,” someone yelled, “take she blasted money and let she get through. She going to see she husband duel.”

Ione threw the coin. The Robber leapt, swept off his hat, bent on one knee to catch the coin between his teeth and came up smiling. Tan-Tan clapped her hands and whistled to salute him. “Shut up, pickney,” Ione snapped. Tan-Tan pouted and slouched back against the seat.

The Robber stepped back to let them through, bowed and flourished his hat as they passed. The ring-bang ruction and the dancing started up round them again.

They reached the fight yard to find Quashee standing in the machète circle already, looking stiff and serious in his leather armour gleaming with jumbie oil, and holding his helmet under his arm. Ione made to wave to him, but pulled her hand back before the gesture was finished. She sucked in her bottom lip and hurried with Tan-Tan to a seat. Some people glared at her, some smiled. An old, white-haired woman with a cane made the kiss-teeth sound of disgust and leaned over to whisper with her companions, another old woman and an old man.

The fight yard had been rearranged to accommodate the only activity it would feature today: the duelling circle. The circle dominated the whole yard. It had rows of benches erected all round. Spectators sat on one side, everybody dressed to puss-foot, everybody excited. The duelling parties sat in two separate boxes on the other. A team of medics sat beside the fighters in one box, a stretcher propped up nearby. Higglers moved through the crowd of watchers, shouting, “Roast peanut? Topi-tambo? Chataigne? Who going buy my fresh roast peanut?”

Tan-Tan craned her neck, trying to see the fighters better. “Mummy, is where Daddy there?” Tan-Tan asked.

“I don’t know, darling. I don’t see he. Mama Nanny, tell me that after all this fret I fret, the blasted man not going to just forfeit.”

The fighters were all dressed differently, according to their fighting style: some armoured like Quashee; some in leotards; some in dhotis with bare chests or bubby-bands. They all looked jittery.

Daddy finally came striding out from the change rooms. Ben the gardener was running in front as squire, carrying Antonio’s helmet and machète.

Quashee ain’t have a squire.

The crowd went silent. Daddy walked into that ring tall and proud. You could tell he wasn’t ’fraid nobody. Tan-Tan’s heart was thumping like drums.

She had never seen Daddy look so fine as this day. His leather armour was all in black with silver joints for the elbow and knee. His matching black leather helmet had a silver mouth guard. His machète was sharp so till it caught the little bit of sunshine that had graced the day and flung the light into Tan-Tan’s eyes, sharp like a razor cut.

Tan-Tan could see the fear-sweat already on Quashee’s brow.

Quashee and Antonio stood opposite each other. The machète marshall examined both their armour, ran a black box over their bodies. “Mummy, what he doing?”

A woman beside them answered. “He checking to make sure them ain’t using electronic fields to protect themself.”

“Granny Nanny,” the marshall chanted in nannysong to the air, “let the record show: the combattants dress fair to fight fair.” His enhanced voice echoed. He put a hand on either man’s forearm and switched to patwa. “Gentlemen, I want you to inform the crowd who issue this machète challenge this Jour Ouvert morning.”

“Is me, Marshall. Antonio, mayor of Cockpit County, against Quashee, the man who take away me wife honour from me.”

Somebody muttered, “Eh-eh. Like her honour is yours to have or lose.”

Mummy shot a quick glare at the man, her lips set hard together. He returned her gaze sheepishly, shrugged. Mummy looked back at the ring.

The marshall boomed, “Quashee, you accept the challenge?”

“Yes, Marshall.” His voice trembled a little.

The marshall nodded and looked up at the stands. “People, listen good, for though Granny Nanny hearing we, you is the human eyes of the law this morning. This fight must go according to these rules:”

Tan-Tan whispered the rules along with the marshall.

“Them could only use bare machète, no other weapon or device.

“Them could wear leather armour for protection.

“If the fight going fair, nobody must interfere.

“The thing must continue until one of them beg mercy or can’t fight no more.

“The winner shouldn’t kill, but should show mercy.

“Them is the rules. Allyou go be witness?”

“Yes, Marshall,” the crowd yelled back. As the marshall turned and walked to safety at the edge of the ring, Tan-Tan could hear the excited voices of people all around her:

“Quashee, man, is Quashee go win! Put a ten rupees on Quashee there for me.”

“You know so! He been practising! He sure to beat out Antonio. Look my five rupees.”

“Nah, man. Is fool allyou fool. Antonio have more life experience. I bet you the dog have some tricks in he. I putting down twenty on Antonio, oui?”

From the edge of the ring the marshall called to the two fighters: “All right; allyou ready?”

They nodded. Quashee put on his helmet. Even from where she was sitting Tan-Tan could see how his trembling hands fumbled with the chin buckle. Ben made to put on Antonio’s helmet, but Antonio stopped him cool-cool. He swaggered over to Mummy and Tan-Tan. Ione giggled like a sob. She put her hand to her mouth.

“Doux-doux,” Antonio called out to his wife, “give me your favour, nuh? Your lace handkerchief to tie back me hair from out me eyes?”

Ione put her hand on her bosom. Her lips wavered into a smile. She reached into her bodice with two fingers, slow, the way molasses does run down the side of the bowl. She drew out a pretty lace kerchief from her blouse, dabbed it against the moisture gathered between her breasts, and then flung it to Antonio. He caught the little piece of lace and held it up to his face, inhaling the perfume of Ione’s skin. “Oh God,” a man whispered from the crowd. “Look how he love she, even though she did horn he.”

“Never mind that at all,” somebody replied. “Ain’t you would give anything to be that kerchief, and rest where it does rest?”

Antonio smiled at Ione and tied back his long black hair with the kerchief. Only then would he let Ben put on the helmet. Tan-Tan clutched at the Robber Queen cape Daddy had given her. She closed her eyes and said silently, The winner can’t kill. He must show mercy. The winner can’t kill…

Daddy and Quashee shook hands. Ben jogged to safety beside the marshall. Daddy and Quashee drew their machètes. They started to circle each other.

And the fight start! Quashee made the first feint. Antonio danced out of the way easy-easy. He swung his machète through the air. Quashee stumbled out of the way just in time. Somebody in the stands muttered, “Quashee too craven, oui.”

Antonio came back for another jab, but Quashee lunged beneath it. Antonio cried out as Quashee’s machète grazed across his thigh.

“Daddy!” screamed Tan-Tan, jumping to her feet.

Ione pulled her firmly into her lap and held her still. “Quiet, pickney. Don’t distract your daddy.” Tan-Tan bit her lips against the sobs that threatened to break through.

A sharp line of red blood was oozing through the slice in Antonio’s black armour. He ran a hand through it, then shook his head like a bull snorting in anger. He leapt vigorously at Quashee, slicing and slicing through the air. Quashee didn’t let a single thrust through. He jumped, he dodged; he used his machète to block all the chops Antonio was throwing for him. He was good, and young, and fast. Tan-Tan held Mummy’s hand tight-tight. Ione curled her arms round Tan-Tan, never taking her eyes off the ring. She mumbled, “Chop he, doux-doux; mash he down!”

Antonio got inside Quashee’s block. He chopped off a piece of Quashee’s forearm guard clean. But the cut barely grazed the skin. Antonio dropped to the ground and swept the blade of his machète at Quashee’s ankles-them. Quashee jumped up over the blade but got tangled in midair in his own two feet. He crashed down. Antonio was on top of him one time; he pinned Quashee and put his machète right up under Quashee’s chin guard, where his neck was exposed. Quashee wailed, “Ai! Mercy!” He dropped his machète and froze, his palms spread rigid in front of him. A trickle of blood was running down his neck. Antonio had nicked him.

“You want me to stop?” Antonio roared into his face.

“Yes, yes! I done, I done!”

“All right, little boy, Mama man; I go stop.” The scorn in Antonio’s voice was how you would speak to some stray dog you kick in the street. He slapped Quashee on his ear with the flat of the machète. Quashee howled again.

“Ey!” shouted the marshall in his enhanced voice. “Enough of that!”

Antonio stood up. Ben rushed over and unbuckled Antonio’s helmet to reveal his triumphant, sweaty grin. “Oh,” said Ione softly. She loosened her hold on Tan-Tan a little.

The marshall hurried over to the two fighters, face black as a passing shower.

“Antonio, you know the rules. Once Quashee ask you to stop, you had no right to box he like that!”

“Man, don’t give me no umbrage today. I win the fight fair, and I taking my wife and my child and going home.”

Somebody in the stands shouted out, “Bloodfire! What wrong with Quashee?”

Quashee hadn’t gotten up, was lying limp as do-do in the dirt.

Ione sniggered. “All that just for a little pin prick? Quashee!” She yelled, “You could stop making mako now! Fight done!”

Quashee started to make a horrible choking noise. Alarm jumped plain onto the marshall’s face. He lifted Quashee’s helmet, then shouted for the doctors. The team jogged to Quashee’s side, carrying a stretcher between them. They assessed the information they were getting from his earbug and began to minister to him. The marshall got the listening look of someone getting a message from an eshu. He scowled at Antonio, who looked confused and angry.

“You coward dog you!” The marshall motioned to the sheriffs. “Arrest he.”

All the way home in the sheriffs’ car, sitting with Antonio between the two guards, Ione was only beating her breast and carrying on, holding on to Antonio like she would never let go. Antonio reached out from time to time to pat Tan-Tan’s head where she sat crying in the front seat. “Maka get it wrong,” he fumed. “The poison was only supposed to slow he down, not make he sick so.”

The streets were a little clearer. Everybody would be following Fimbar and Philomise’s band “Wail for Marley” as it made its first lap through the Cockpit County parade route. Then it would be time to see the band off to Liguanea Town for the competition. Nanny’s guidance was for the sheriffs to take Ione and Tan-Tan home, then drive Antonio to the shift tower in Liguanea and confine him there. Whether Quashee lived or died, things weren’t going to go good with Antonio.

“That blasted Quashee. He constitution too damn weak, yes?”

Tan-Tan was so frightened she couldn’t think. They were going to lock Daddy away! She kept reaching out her hand to touch Antonio’s sleeve, but he wasn’t paying her plenty mind, only stroking Ione’s hair and saying, “Don’t cry, doux-doux, don’t cry.”

They reached the mayor house. “Compère,” said one of the sheriffs, “you have one hour to pack up your necessaries for the jail.”

“Pack? Why?”

“You just pack up what you need, oui? Provincial Mocambo not going to waste resources on you, you must bring your own. And make haste, yes? Sooner we get you there, sooner we get to jump-up this Carnival.”

“Nanny save we! Antonio!” Ione moaned in grief, taking Antonio’s face between her hands and kissing it all over.

“Doux-doux…” Antonio picked her up and took her inside, Ione holding on to him and sobbing for dear life. Tan-Tan tried to follow them inside the bedroom, but they closed the door in her face.

“Daddy! Mummy!” She threw herself to the floor and cried like her heart would break. She was still weeping when she felt the touch on her shoulder. She looked up through bleary eyes. Nursie and the sheriffs. Nursie shook her head sadly. “I hope your parents find enough drama to suit them this time.” She pounded at the door; no answer. She sucked her teeth in disgust. “Them two have one solution for every problem, oui?” One of the sheriffs sniggered. Nursie silenced him with one look. She picked Tan-Tan up and rocked her. Tan-Tan threw her arms round Nursie’s neck and blubbered.

“Oh, doux-doux darling, don’t fret so, nuh? Nursie go take care of you. Come lie down.”

“No! I want Mummy! I want Daddy!”

“They go come and see you soon, darling. Come now.”

She put Tan-Tan to bed, but when the fetch brought in the cocoa-tea, Tan-Tan remembered how it had made her sleep the last time. She only took couple-three little sips. She pretended to be drowsy. Slowly she closed her eyes and made like she was asleep.

Nursie stayed. Tan-Tan was frantic. Nursie had to go away! Finally Nursie sighed and left the room. When Tan-Tan couldn’t hear her steps retreating any more, she swung herself carefully out of bed and began to put her shoes on; a quiet pair, not the barking alligator shoes. Then quickly, just in case eshu decided to check with Nursie or Granny Nanny, Tan-Tan ran out through the porch door and round to where the sheriff’s car was parked. Her earbug clicked as she moved out of the house’s detection field. The trunk was open. Tan-Tan stood on tiptoes to look inside.

“You is Tan-Tan.”

Tan-Tan jumped. The voice was deep and sad as a potoo-owl’s cry. She peeked out from behind the car. The man who stood there had the massive chest and tree branch arms of a runner. His forehead sloped back to his peaked hairline, giving him the appearance of royalty. His brow was creased like ugli fruit skin, his mouth turned down in a forlorn bow. He looked like everybody in the world had decided to stop talking to him. “You is Tan-Tan, ain’t?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

“I name Maka.” He whistled a tune. Her earbug crackled into static, then faded away. “Your daddy in trouble,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I sorry too bad for it.”

Why was he sorry? He wasn’t Quashee.

“I could help he. You want that?”

“Oh, yes please, Compère.”

“Then you have to help me.” He held out a small playback machine wrapped in what looked like datastock.

Tan-Tan reached for it. As she took it from him, she felt the callus on his fingers. “What I must do?”

“Find a way to give he that when nobody ain’t looking. And mind you don’t talk about it out loud, not you and not your daddy. You must keep quiet, quiet about it like a mus-mus, like a mouse. Seen?”

“Seen.”

“Put it in your pocket.”

She did, and when she looked up, the man’s eyes were brimming over. “I pray it going to work. Is two nannytunes we just now invent, nobody ain’t have opportunity to test them out yet. But this might be he only chance to live out he life on he own terms, so try not to make a mistake, pickney. Me and your daddy was friend. Tell he I going to be following he presently.” He turned and jogged away, leg muscles flexing with each step.

Tan-Tan peeked inside her pocket. The package was safe.

There was a big cloth bag full of Daddy’s clothes and some folded-up blankets beside it. People were coming, she could hear Nursie talking to somebody. She clambered into the trunk and tucked herself into a dark corner of it, pulling the folded blankets over herself as neatly as she could.

Somebody plopped some heavy things down round her, probably more bags for Daddy. One landed on her foot. Quietly she squirmed the foot out from under it.

“So is what he use to poison the man?” asked one of the sheriffs.

“Me nah know. Nanny say woorari, curare; something so. I wonder is where he get it?”

“Cho, me ain’t business. He coming or what?” said one of the sheriffs.

“Yes, look he here.”

In a few seconds Tan-Tan heard more sets of footsteps, her mother’s sobs, then Daddy’s gruff voice saying, “Where Tan-Tan?”

“I put she to sleep in she room, Compère,” said Nursie. “She was too distressed. She could come and see you later.”

“Seen. Then I ready. Make we go.” The trunk was slammed shut, leaving Tan-Tan in total darkness. The autocar dipped with the weight of people getting into it. Mummy’s sobs got louder. Daddy’s voice said, “Is all right, sweetness. I go come back to you soon. Look after Tan-Tan.”

The car moved off. Tan-Tan felt it turn out of the driveway then pick up speed. She rolled around helplessly whenever the car turned a corner. She hung on to the luggage, but it only slid round with her. She was starting to feel dizzy. She bumped her head. She was locked in—how would they ever find her? Suppose they didn’t take Daddy’s bags out right away? “Daddy!” she shouted, but no-one heard her over the noise of the autocar. “Eshu,” she whispered. No answer. The car lurched around another corner. She tumbled. The car picked up speed. “Eshu!” There was static like before, then a pop. Eshu clicked on reassuringly in her ear.

“What happen, young Mistress?”

“I frighten.”

“Checking… Nanny say you in the trunk of the car, child. That not good. Hold on, young Mistress, help coming soon.”

The autocar stopped moving. She heard the sound of running footsteps then saw light as the trunk was thrown open. Tan-Tan fought her way free of the blanket she was tangled in. A voice said, “Granny farts! The pickney mad or what?”

One of the sheriffs was there, and her father. They reached in and lifted her out of the trunk. Cars were zipping by. They were on the highway, parked over to the side. Daddy pulled her into his arms, hugged her hard. He was shaking. Tan-Tan hugged back. “Oh, my child, my child,” Antonio said. “Own-way just like your mother. How you convince eshu to let you do this thing, eh?”

“He never know about it, Daddy.”

“Back inside the car,” said the sheriff. He sounded angry.

They started on their way again. Should she show him the package the man had given her? She reached into her pocket and touched it, then remembered: she couldn’t do it while people were looking on.

The sheriffs sent word to Ione to come and collect Tan-Tan from the shift tower. “We ain’t go be able to bring she back for you. Our day contract done long time, and we hear the jump-up sweet down in the city.” Then they accessed the road marches that were playing in Liguanea. Songs blared out from the car’s console. The two men sang and beat air steel pan along with the tunes, ignoring Tan-Tan and her daddy.

Antonio paid them no mind, just hugged Tan-Tan and rocked her. He didn’t look good. His skin was grey with fright, and his body only trembling, trembling. “What if Quashee up and dead on me?” he whispered into Tan-Tan’s hair. “When I get my hands on that Maka…!”

They entered the city limits, seat of the Provincial Mocambo. The outskirts were deserted, every man-jack in Liguanea centre was jumping-up with the bands. The long, wide avenues lined with gris-gris palms were quiet. Dog- and mongoose-sized fetches were going peacefully about their business, searching out and devouring trash. No need to dodge people and traffic today. The larger fetches made Tan-Tan think of her minder. The big peeny-wallie street bulbs bobbed and hovered above the city, their egg shapes clustering and glowing where there was most shade, flickering off whenever the sun caught them.

The car took them past low, graceful buildings, past a wooded park with a statue of Nanny of the Maroons and one of Zumbi. They pulled up in front of the tallest building in sight. It was ugly, thick and arrogantly high. “Your hotel, Compère,” one of the sheriffs joked.

Daddy’s skin was clammy. He looked ill. “What allyou go do with me?”

“So many people you must be send here already and you don’t know what happen inside?”

“I never been inside, just by four-eye.”

“Come. Get your things.”

They all got out of the car. One sheriff hailed a chicle fetch, told it to be a porter. The fetch flipped parallel to the ground, indented its surface to hold Antonio’s luggage. They loaded it up then approached the building, which greeted them when they reached inside its detection field. “Your i.d. and business verified,” the building told them. “This Antonio Habib that you bring me must be confined here until official notice. All the holding cells free. Them start third door on the right. Please to tell me, Masters, the pickney coming in too?”

The two looked at each other uncomfortably for a second. “Yes, until she mother reach. Expect Ione Brasil, Cockpit County, mother to Tan-Tan, who is this pickney here so. Tan-Tan will have to stay in the holding cell with she father.”

“Seen, Masters. Nanny judge she go be safe there till she mother reach. Ione Brasil could enter once today and leave once.” The doors swung open for them.

Cement and bars; the whole inside of the place was only cement and bars, oui? Tan-Tan took Daddy’s hand. He held on tight. There was a long, empty corridor with big metal doors flanking each side. Some of the doors had signs on them. Tan-Tan didn’t understand all the words: TO DEPORTEES’ HOLDING CELLS; LIMITED ACCESS AREA; COURTROOM A; COURTROOM B; LOWER COURT (FOR THOSE WITHOUT COUNSEL).

The third door on the right was open. The sheriffs took them inside. The cell was bare, felt almost dead. The sheriffs took Daddy on a quick tour of its empty rooms: bedsitting room with its food dispenser; bathroom. “We going now,” they said.

The building assented. It let them out of the cell and then locked the door. The men left, fetch following them.

Daddy sat on the bed, shoved his face into his hands. “What to do, girl; what to do?” He looked so frightened, it made Tan-Tan frightened too. She went and stood by him, patted his knee. He looked up at her and gave her a shaky smile. “Come. Come and sit by me.”

She clambered onto the bed. He put an arm round her shoulders, hugged her tightly. “What a thing, eh? What a thing. I was only fighting for my dignity and now the blasted man might up and dead on me. And then what, eh?”

He rocked them both, looked off bleakly into the distance. The building’s eshu spoke from the air. “Antonio Habib,” it said, “Quashee Cumberbatch just pass away.”

“Nanny have mercy.”

“Uncle Quashee, Daddy?”

Antonio whimpered. “What going to happen to me now?”

“Nanny don’t find no extenuating circumstances, Master. Is up to the Provincial Mocambo. Life imprisonment or exile.”

“Daddy? What going to happen?”

“Me nah know! Me nah know! Mama Nanny, you going to lock me away for true?”

“You a danger, Master,” said the building eshu. “Is so the law go.”

Antonio’s face crumpled, horrifyingly, into tears. Her daddy wasn’t supposed to cry. He wasn’t supposed to be frightened. What could scare him? Terrified, Tan-Tan clung to him and started to wail too. Antonio rocked and rocked, clinging to her so hard she could feel his fingertips bruising her arm. She didn’t care.

Something was hurting her chest where it was pressed against Daddy’s body. The package the man had given her. She pulled it out of her pocket. Never in her born days had she seen datastock like that. It was dirty, and stayed crumpled. She pulled off the box, uncrumpled it, tried to flatten it against her thigh.

“A-what that, pickney?”

They weren’t supposed to talk about it in words. She put a finger to her lips so Daddy would know to stay quiet. Then she handed the box and the datastock to him. His eyes opened big when he saw the writing on the paper. He read it. His tears dried. He sniffed snot back into his nose, swallowed. “Bumbo cloth! You mean that will work for real? I did swear say was only drunkenness talking when Maka tell me that thing.”

“What, Daddy?”

He didn’t reply, just looked right through her as though his mind were somewhere else. “Freedom…” he whispered. Then he grabbed her, hugged her tight. “I have to do it, girl.”

“Do what, Daddy?”

“You ever hear people say the only way out is through?”

“No.” She didn’t understand.

Antonio stood, a dithery energy animating his body. “Freedom is the thing, eh? Is freedom me don’t want to lose.” Something lit his face, like relief, like hope. He stood up, squared his shoulders. He activated the box. Tan-Tan heard a burst of too-fast nannysong; a soft, high-pitched whine in her ears, then a fading static. The cell door swung open. “Koo ya! It work! Fooling a house eshu is one thing, but the shift tower? Bless you, Maka.” He reached for Tan-Tan’s hand. “Come. Time for we to do we business.”

They headed briskly down the corridor. “Daddy, where we going?”

“To freedom, child. We going where nobody could tell we what to do. Maka say he will come after, and what the two of we could do in that world, with all we know! You want to come with me, right?”

“Yes, Daddy.” She didn’t understand, but she wasn’t going to make him leave her again. “Mummy could come with we too?”

“Probably later, doux-doux. Hurry now.”

Antonio took them into Courtroom A. Inside it was row after row of uncomfortable-looking seats. They all faced a big chair with a desk. There were two other chairs on either side of the desk.

“That is where the judge does sit,” Antonio said, hustling them past a big chair. “When he pass sentence, the people to deport does go through here.”

Behind the judge’s seat was a door marked TO SHIFT TOWER. DEPORTEES AND DETENTION OFFICERS ONLY BEYOND THIS DOOR. They went through.

“Daddy, let we go home, nuh?”

“Can’t do, sweetness. Quashee dead. Me try to go home and them will pop me. Maka saving my ass, darling. Can’t get out, but I can get through.”

They were in a long, dark cement corridor. Their footsteps rang on the concrete floor like the dead-gong in Cockpit County.

“Daddy, what ‘deportee’ mean?”

“When people do bad things, we does send them away so they can’t hurt nobody else. Killers, rapists… people we don’t know what to do with, and like so.”

“And is which part New Half-Way Tree is?”

Antonio gave a small, tight laugh. “Where? You know what, doux-doux? It right here.” He explained about the dimensional shift, how there were more Toussaints than they could count, existing simultaneously, but each one a little bit different. “We going to a next Toussaint, one we can’t come back from again, nobody know how. It going to be hard to live, no comforts. But I think we can survive. Is a big chance I taking for you, doux-doux.”

All Tan-Tan heard was can’t come back. She imagined deportees walking down this same corridor, hearing their footsteps echoing in this world for the last time, and knowing they would never see home again.

They reached a room marked SHIFT TOWER. They went inside. The room was tall and narrow and the ceiling was so high that it disappeared in the shadows above. In the middle of the room was a tall-tall column with four doors all around it.

“That is how we going,” Antonio said. “That is the half-way tree. You see the four pods?” He pointed to the doors. “We go get inside that one there—just like peas in a pod, right?” He tickled her to make her laugh, but it didn’t work this time. “It will take we in, and point we at New Half-Way Tree, and fling we there like boulderstones from a slingshot.”

Tears started to run down Tan-Tan’s face; she had promised Daddy to be good, but she was scared.

“Don’t frighten, sweetheart; it going to be a nice ride.” His voice shook. He picked her up, took her over to one of the pods, stepped inside. “This is it, Tan-Tan. Pray that it going to work.” Daddy activated the box again. Came another burst of song.

The door to the pod slid soundlessly closed. It was bare inside; just one dim light in the ceiling. Antonio had barely set Tan-Tan down when a wave of nausea swept through her. “Daddy!”

Antonio sat down hard beside her. Tan-Tan felt like a big hand was pressing her down onto the floor of the pod, its fingers stirring up her insides. “My ears block up,” she complained.

“Hold your nose and blow hard,” Antonio said. His voice was trembly. Tan-Tan looked at him. His face was grey with fear. He looked like he wanted to vomit. Her daddy wasn’t supposed to ’fraid nothing.

The first shift wave hit them. For Tan-Tan it was as though her belly was turning inside out, like wearing all her insides on the outside. The air smelt wrong. She clutched Antonio’s hand. A curtain of fog was passing through the pod, rearranging sight, sound. Daddy’s hand felt wrong. Too many fingers, too many joints. Antonio coughed nervously. The wave passed through them and went. Daddy’s hand felt all right again. “We climbing into the Tree for true,” he said.

A next veil swept through them, slow like molasses. Tan-Tan felt as though her tailbone could elongate into a tail, long and bald like a manicou rat’s. Her cries of distress came out like hyena giggles. The tail-tip twitched. She could feel how unfamiliar muscles would move the unfamiliar limb. The thing standing beside her looked more like a man-sized mongoose than her father. He smelt like food, but food she wasn’t supposed to eat. Family. Tan-Tan sobbed and tried to wrap her tail tightly around herself.

But the veil was gone. She had only thought she was a big manicou. Antonio was a man again. He made a little noise in his throat, like a whimper. He skinned up his teeth at her in one big false grin. “That wasn’t so bad, eh, doux-doux?” His voice was high. “We going to a good place.” But under his breath he started to sing,

“That one is a old sailor song,” he mumbled, almost as though he wasn’t talking to Tan-Tan, but just to hear his own voice. “Itanami was a river rapids. People in ships would go through it like we going through dimension veils. Itanami break up plenty vessels, but them long ago people never see power like this half-way tree.”

They were trapped in a confining space, being taken away from home like the long time ago Africans. Tan-Tan’s nightmare had come to life. “Daddy,” she started to bawl, “I don’t like this. I want to stop. Let we get off, nuh?”

“I can’t do that, sweetheart. Now I activate it, I can’t control it from the inside, you understand? This is the half-way tree, this is exile! When you go through the shift, we is new people, not Marryshevites no more. We never going to belong in Toussaint again.”

Click came the eshu into Tan-Tan’s ear. Antonio got the listening look that let her know eshu was talking to him too. “Young Mistress, is what a-go on?” It was her eshu, the one from their house.

“Is all right, eshu,” Daddy lied before Tan-Tan could say anything. “She eat some pepper mango is all. It making she sick little bit.” He chuckled weakly. “She could never stand pepper, oui?”

Eshu was responding, but his voice was crackly. She couldn’t understand him. Antonio was shaking his head like a dog with fleas in its ear. “We losing the connection to the web,” he muttered. “Oh, God, like this is it, oui.”

Another veil. The light inside the pod turned pink. The air got hot. Very faintly both her eshu and the building eshu said together, “Hold on, young Mistress, shift aborting.”

“No!” shouted Antonio.

Tan-Tan felt a little pop! inside her ears. She felt dizzy. “Abort fail…” whispered eshu.

There was an itch at the back of her throat. Her ears popped painfully; once, twice. There was a ringing in them. Antonio moaned in fear. He took Tan-Tan in his arms and held her close. “Whatever happen, you is my little girl, you hear? My doux-doux darling, come in just like Ione when she was a sweet little thing. Don’t care where we go, you is always my little Ione.” Antonio buried his head against Tan-Tan’s shoulder, a heavy weight.

Another veil washed over them. It was hot, fire hot. The ringing in Tan-Tan’s ears was so loud, it was pain. She cried. The tears running down her face felt too cold, like ice water. They were leaving Marryshow’s paradise, shifting to a new world, her and her daddy.

Little by little, the ringing and itching went away. The pod door clicked open. Antonio picked Tan-Tan up and reached for the hatch, but his hand went right through it. The image of the pod faded away, leaving the two of them standing in the bush.

Tan-Tan looked at Antonio to see if he’d changed plenty now that he was no longer a Marryshevite. He was crouching down beside her. His face was the same, and his body, but in his eyes was a look like the fear in Quashee’s eyes when he had felt Antonio’s machète at he neck. Is so a man face does stay after he look at he own death, and he could never be the same again. Tan-Tan felt say she must have changed too.

Antonio stroked Tan-Tan’s cheek and looked deep into her eyes. “You is all that leave to me now. You dear to me like daughter, like sister, like wife self.”

Tan-Tan didn’t like the way Antonio was talking. She tried to act normal, to make everything be normal again: “Eh-eh! Where the pod gone, Daddy?”

But the crazy look wouldn’t leave her daddy’s eyes. “It was never here, Tan-Tan. It just push we here from Toussaint.”

Antonio ran his hands over his body. “Safe…” He looked around. “Ahm, let we take a look at we new home, all right?”

“This? This bush?” All around them it had some big knotted-up trees-them, with twisted-up roots digging into the ground like old men’s fingers. The air was too cold, and it had a funny smell, like old bones. The light coming through the trees was red, not yellow. Even the trees-them looked wrong; the bark was more purple than brown. Some beast was making noise in one of the trees over her head; a grunting noise like Quashee made when Antonio hit him yesterday. This wasn’t her home. This ugly place couldn’t be anybody’s home.

“Where we going to live, Daddy? What we going to eat? Where the people?”

“I ain’t know, doux-doux. We just going to have to fend for weself.” Antonio shrugged his shoulders.

No more Nursie with her ’nansi stories; no more Ione and her pretty dresses-them. No more eshu. Daddy gone stupidee, like he ain’t know the answer to nothing any more. She and Antonio didn’t look no different, but Tan-Tan could feel the change the shift tower had made inside her, feel her heart begin to harden against her daddy who couldn’t tell her where they were, who couldn’t make everything all right again. She felt she didn’t know him any more. He was right. Once you climb the half-way tree, everything change-up.