Free Mount Pleasant by Patrice Nganang Page B

suddenly found himself in Njoya’s bedroom. The monarch was stretched out on the ground, one hand clutching his chest. His breathing was labored.
    â€œManga!” He was yelling, his eyes like milky ghosts.
    Two men were working away at his body. They were holding him, repeating incantations Nebu didn’t understand. Their frantic actions didn’t drown out Njoya’s confused words. “Samba!” Njoya shouted, his hands and feet spread out, his mouth open wide in the chaos of the room. “Ngosso!”
    Standing beside him, Mata looked lost and helpless—each frantic gesture canceling out the one that had come before. Nebu ran back to his room. Bertha wasn’t there. She must have joined the other servants who, alerted by the noise in the sultan’s room, were running around or forming groups of curious onlookers in the hallways. The image of the fallen sovereign filled Nebu’s mind with every imaginable horror. He suddenly took off backward and bumped into a man coming from the courtyard: it was Nji Moluh, Njoya’s son and successor.
    â€œWhat’s going on?” asked Nji Moluh, who was still pulling on his clothes as he ran.
    No one answered him, because no one knew.
    Njoya’s cavernous voice broke the silence.
    â€œManga! Samba!”
    â€œAlareni!” A voice in the darkness repeated this flattering title, chanting it like an incantation. “Alareni!”
    It was Nji Mama.
    Nebu kept walking backward. He knew the path out of Mount Pleasant well. He didn’t need to search for his way through the labyrinth. In the courtyard there was only the skeleton of the sultan’s pickup truck to answer the sky’s song. There were no children, no one at all. Even the heavens were empty. Soon the boy found himself outside the compound. He ran between the trees of a misty forest. He hurtled down Nsimeyong’s hill as if he had wings. He made his way along the rocky paths. Dogs barked. He cut a path through the brush. Voices cried after him, describing a destiny he didn’t recognize as his own. In his mind, the grimace on the face of the fallen sultan revealed the disaster he was fleeing: the face of his father as he fell. Nebu ran to escape those misty visions of the fall, to escape Sara, to escape Bertha.
    In the distance, a light let him know he had reached the church in Mvolyé. He was out of breath. He beat on the door with both hands.
    Silence was his only reply.
    He knocked again, and finally a feeble voice asked, “Who’s there?” A woman’s scared voice.
    Nebu banged on the door even louder.
    â€œWho is it?”
    A white man opened the door. He held a wavering lamp in his hands. His face, lengthened by a beard, identified him as a priest, even if he was wearing pajamas. His voice was familiar.
    â€œWho are you?”
    Yes, it was the priest. His outfit made him look strange. Seeing the child standing there, he responded in a fatherly way.
    â€œCome in, my son,” he said in Sara’s language.
    Nebu moved toward him, then stopped. The heads of two women appeared behind the man. Maybe the priest thought it was another dramatic case of a native child fleeing the clutches of paganism. Isn’t that how so many girls came to him—in the night, fleeing forced marriages, pursued by bloodthirsty spirits, ancestral traditions, and curses, by abusive uncles or violent husbands? The church was a refuge and Catholicism a heaven for these hopeless souls. No need even to attract them with candies; it was easy to convince them to become nuns, to offer their lives to God.
    This time, however, it was a boy. And this boy—although the bearded man didn’t know it—suddenly thought of Njoya, abandoned, covered in his own spit, his two favorites, who had no idea how to save him from death, by his side.
    â€œCome here and tell me what’s wrong,” the priest repeated.
    Instead of obeying the man of the cloth, Nebu