Our Hearts. Chapter Seventeen. Bone of the Earth

The forest parted before the hood of the battered Mitsubishi reluctantly and heavily, like thick green water closing with a grim rustle behind the stern of a boat.

The village of Bata Kolé met them with silence—a scorched, tense silence. Parched by the sun, choked with stifling fear, and frozen with the anticipation of disaster. Several rows of mud huts made of unbaked brick and rusty corrugated iron stretched along the broken red rut, like knocked-out teeth in a lower jaw. Between them lay trampled, cracked alleyways, overturned wooden mortars, and abandoned maize fields upon which the dust unhurriedly settled. No children, no chickens, not even flies over the dung. Only the distant, barely audible cry of an infant drifting from somewhere behind a clay fence, and the persistent smell of overburnt palm oil, wood smoke, and stagnant water.

Ilunga hit the brakes at the very last yard on the outskirts. This house was wider and sturdier than the rest—with high gates and a solid cinder block fence.

Behind the fence, in the gray-brown shade of a sprawling mango tree, boiled a quiet, monotonous life. At the gate stood a young woman with a one-year-old child on her hip—she silently and motionlessly followed the Jeep with her eyes. In the yard, two old women in faded dresses rhythmically pounded dry cassava with wooden pestles in massive stone mortars. The hollow, dense thuds—thwack… thwack…—echoed over the blistering earth, akin to the pulse of an ancient, tired beast. A little further off, over a fire of damp logs, a huge cast-iron cauldron resting on three boulders let out bluish smoke. It wafted a spicy, hearty steam—some kind of stewed meat, roasted palm nuts, and a sharp note of wild onion.

Ilunga killed the engine.

“Wait here,” he tossed back, and stepped out of the cab.

Leo and Imani remained in the open bed of the pickup. Imani sat with her knees pulled to her chest, her palms resting motionless on her worn jeans. To the residents of Bata Kolé, she remained a pariah—the one who had betrayed her family’s blood for the sake of whites. And Leo physically felt this thick alienation, taut as a string. The copper bracelet on his wrist radiated a quiet, steady warmth, pulsating in time with his new, solitary heart. Inside his ribcage, there was no longer a chaotic flutter—the renewed sinus node pumped blood evenly and thickly, and in this rhythm he caught a strange echo: the copper on his wrist pulsed with a barely perceptible, tickling spasm, as if reacting to an invisible vein buried deep beneath the shaman’s hut.

Ilunga walked up to the gate and spoke quietly to the woman. She nodded and darted into the gloom of the yard.

A couple of minutes later, the hefty carved door of the mud hut creaked, and Kapya Mulenga stepped onto the threshold.

The old shaman seemed carved from ebony or dry, cracked clay. Parched, parchment-like skin stretched taut over his cheekbones, a short bristly crop of white hair, and a sunken chest adorned with a bundle of bird claws and small bones on a dark cord. His pupils—cloudy, covered by the thick milky veil of cataracts—seemed to look not at people, but somewhere through time and space. In his right hand, he gripped a carved wooden cane with a bone knob; his fingers traced the ridges on the polished wood as if they were counting the years.

He did not descend the steps. He stopped on the threshold, placing a palm on the doorjamb—the gesture of an owner, marking the boundary between his own and the foreign.

“Young Mboko,” the sorcerer rasped. His voice was restrained, with a quiet, hollow vibration that sent a chill over the skin. He called Ilunga by the ancient surname of his ancestors, instantly drawing the boundaries of the conversation. “Why have you brought them?”

Ilunga stood before the gate with a straight back, arms lowered by his sides. In his posture, for the first time, a deep, almost religious respect could be read—for the old man and for that unseen, ancient power he embodied.

“The earth is burning, Kapya,” the partisan began in Lingala. “The white mercenaries behind the fence have unleashed a contagion from the adit. The whole village is in danger. We need your help.”

Mulenga slowly raised a hand with withered fingers, halting his speech.

“Your words are heavy, Ilunga,” the old man said quietly but firmly. “But such words are not cast into the dust before a single man.”

The shaman turned his wrinkled face toward the yard and tossed out a single, guttural word. One of the women by the cauldron immediately set aside her pestle, briskly walked out of the yard, and disappeared into the labyrinth of village streets.

“We will wait for the elders,” Mulenga rasped, and retreated into the shadow of the house.

They waited under the scorching tropical sun for about twenty minutes. Finally, five old men gathered in the yard—two of those who had blocked the Jeep’s path during the escape, and three new ones. All of them wore white canvas shirts yellowed by time, with sun-dried faces and hands roughened by years of labor to the state of cracked kiln clay. They sat silently on wooden benches and overturned crates beneath the broad crown of the mango tree. Mulenga sat in the center, in a chair woven from vines, motionless and stern as an idol.

The women stepped back to the edge of the yard, continuing to busy themselves soundlessly by the cast-iron cauldron, occasionally glancing at the gathered men.

Ilunga stood before the council. Leo and Imani kept silent slightly behind him. On this land, the floor belonged to those who had put down roots into it hundreds of years ago.

The partisan spoke. His voice was even, devoid of emotion—like a commander reporting before a battle. He did not resort to complex medical terminology. He translated Leo’s conclusions into the language of the jungle and the ancestors: he told of the black, rotting blood that dissolved a person from the inside out in ten minutes, of the deaths of the hunter Kasongo, the white biologist Maurice, and the miner Benga. He explained that the blight was breaking out of the old adit on the territory of the Southbridge camp, and that the white doctor wanted to bring down fire from the sky upon this adit. But to summon this fire, the doctor needed proof—that very stone that made the ground “glow at night” and caused people’s bones to wither and teeth to fall out.

“Elders,” Ilunga concluded, “you know these hills better than anyone. You know where the ancestors forbade digging earthen pits. But we need this stone.”

He fell silent and crouched on his haunches.

The old men remained silent. They exchanged glances—unhurriedly, weightlessly, the way people exchange glances when they are accustomed to speaking not so much with words as with looks and pauses.

Finally, one of them, with whitish, faded eyebrows and deep nasolabial folds, nodded toward Leo:

“Let the white man speak.”

Leo stepped forward. Standing before five old men in a Congolese village was not like presenting to an Academic Council at Harvard, nor was it like giving a report to an instructor at the Langley “Farm”. Here lay a different scale of truth, where a single gesture weighed more heavily than a dozen scientific monographs.

“The contagion that the mercenaries found is not just a fever,” Leo began, calmly weighing each word, pausing while Ilunga translated into Lingala. “It is more terrible than any curse. It is smarter. The virus learns, adapts to a person to find its next victim. If it breaks out beyond the camp’s perimeter, it will leave no one alive. It will destroy not just your village. Cities, capitals, the whole world will perish.”

The elders looked at him with motionless, dark eyes, but the air around them thickened.

“But there is a way to stop it,” Leo continued. “American ships from the ocean will deliver a precision missile strike. The strike will come from the sky, early in the morning, at dawn. The adit will be buried under hundreds of tons of rock, and a thermal charge will burn the virus to ash. Neither your village nor the main Kato-Tombe mine will be affected.”

He paused, letting the thoughts settle in their minds:

“To minimize casualties among ordinary Congolese workers and PMC staff, I propose organizing a diversion. When I learn the exact date and time of the strike, Ilunga’s men will attack the main mine. The mercenaries are hounds, reacting to any threat to their loot. The bulk of the garrison will abandon the camp and rush to defend the mine. And when the missiles fall on the adit, only a few will remain in the camp.”

“Mboko, are you sure he will succeed?” asked one of the old men, looking intently at the partisan.

Ilunga nodded silently.

The elders leaned their heads toward one another. Their quiet, staccato whispering in Lingala rustled like dry grass in a gust of wind—guttural syllables, frequent pauses, arguments, and, finally, agreement.

Mulenga sat motionless all the while. His cane lay across his knees. He did not participate in the council—he was listening to the profound essence of what was unfolding.

After several long minutes, the old man with the whitish eyebrows raised his hand. Silence returned to the yard.

“We will help you find the stone, white man,” the elder took the floor, and his voice sounded like the crunch of pebbles beneath a thick-soled boot. “Mulenga will show you the way to the old tailings.”

He shifted a hostile gaze, filled with ancient rejection, to Imani, and then back to Leo:

“But the earth has a price. When everything is over and the fire falls from the heavens, you both will leave our lands. Forever. You will not return to this village, nor to these hills. The curse lives within you both. You carry it in your blood. Leave Katanga, or the jungle itself will devour you.”

Imani shuddered barely perceptibly. Leo noticed how her fingers touched the copper bracelet—the only thing she would have left from this land. Her fingers clenched into fists, her knuckles turning white, but she silently bowed her head.

Leo met the elders’ gaze openly:

“Alright, we will leave.”

Mulenga rose from the wicker chair. His movement was unhurried, commanding, as if an ancient tree trunk were straightening out. He took his cane and, step by step, walked past the elders to the gate. At the gate, he stopped and tossed a few short words to one of the women.

“I need a pickaxe,” he said. “And a headlamp.”

A minute later, she brought out from the depths of the yard a heavy, rusted miner’s pickaxe with a hewn wooden handle, and a military headlamp with a cracked lens on a powerful battery.

Mulenga gripped the pickaxe handle with his bony fingers with the familiar confidence of a man who had held the tool a thousand times. He walked unhurriedly over to the pickup, pulled the door open himself, and sank heavily into the front passenger seat next to the driver’s side.

The old man laid the pickaxe behind the seat. He clamped the cane between his legs. The headlamp he left on the dashboard.

Leo and Imani climbed into the open truck bed. With a turn of the key, Ilunga started the diesel, and the pickup pulled away, kicking up clouds of red dust.

On the way out of Bata Kolé, the vehicle drove past the white canvas tents of the WHO field hospital.

Behind the yellow plastic cordon tape, at the entrance to the green zone, stood Remy Gaillard and Dzuzu Koma. Both wore white medical gowns with headlamps around their necks. The Frenchman smoked nervously, flicking ashes into the mud, and his sweat-drenched face seemed carved from gray wax. Dzuzu stood beside him, clutching a clipboard with documents to her chest.

Remy lifted his head and saw the passing pickup. A complex, bitter turmoil reflected on his exhausted face—a mixture of professional impotence, human anxiety, and the desolate realization that his colleague had crossed a line beyond which no epidemiological protocols applied anymore. Dzuzu quietly placed her hand on the Frenchman’s shoulder, and her attentive, narrowed eyes followed the vehicle with an unwavering, long gaze.

A sharp, nauseatingly acrid smell of chloramine and burnt plastic drifted to Leo—they were disposing of used hazmat suits in a blue barrel near the tents. This sterile, medical scent of the old world caused a fleeting, dry lump in his throat. They seemed like figures from someone else’s dream, stuck in the hopeless logic of instructions, while beneath Leo’s own shoulder blades, fresh, invisible scars, flushed with hot blood, were still burning.

He didn’t wave to them. Didn’t call out. He simply tried to commit their faces to memory—two people from his former, rigorous academic life, which had burned away without a trace in a radioactive delirium. The vehicle picked up speed, and the white canvas tents dissolved behind a bend.

The jungle swallowed them instantly. At first, the track wound through thorny underbrush, but soon the crowns of centuries-old ficus and khaya trees closed over the road in a solid dark-green vault, turning the path into a damp, breathing tunnel. The air thickened, suffused with the stagnant smells of humus, wet foliage, and overripe fruit.

Mulenga sat in the front seat absolutely motionless. His time-faded eyes stared straight through the windshield:

“There… Left at the fallen baobab… Across the dry creek.”

The pickup bounced over exposed roots, its undercarriage scraping against boulders. The trail grew drier and narrower, until the Jeep suddenly rolled out onto a wide, scorched clearing.

Before them, amidst patches of toxic-green moss, ruins revealed themselves. Here, time had devoured everything except stone and rust. Two orange, listing steel portals and the remnants of iron mine-cart rails jutted out of the red clay, plunging into the dark, caved-in maw of the rock. Scattered around lay the blackened remains of wooden supports, coated in a whitish layer of mold.

It was an old, abandoned mine—a blind sinkhole opened by the Americans eighty years ago.

Ilunga killed the engine. In the silence, only the ticking of the cooling metal muffler could be heard.

The uninvited guests felt a cold, cellar-like draft pull from the depths of the mine, and faintly mingled within it was a strange aroma, unnatural for this place—the smell of frankincense and blooming gardenia.

Mulenga opened his door and stepped barefoot onto the damp moss. He took the pickaxe from his knees, picked up the headlamp, and walked over to the truck bed, handing the items to Leo.

“See there,” the old man pointed with his carved cane through the dense thicket to the right, to where a gently sloping, absolutely bare hill of gray rocky earth rose. “About half a kilometer, maybe a little further. Where the earth smells of dry iron and mortal cold, you will find what you seek.”

Leo jumped down from the truck bed and took the dosimeter from the glove compartment—the device clicked softly, reacting to the background radiation. Leo hung it around his neck and then took the pickaxe—the old metal burned his palms with the chill of rust and foreign, forgotten labor. He placed the headlamp into his canvas bag, slinging it over his shoulder.

Imani immediately climbed out after him, her lips pressed into a tight, unyielding line:

“I’m going with you.”

But Mulenga abruptly thrust out his cane, blocking her path.

“No!” the sorcerer’s voice clanged like a steel bolt. “He must go there alone.”

The old man turned his impassive face, deeply etched with wrinkles, toward the dead hill:

“This place is cursed. Your great-grandfather knew. He who digs here loses his mind. Or his life. Let this curse meet him face to face. If the earth accepts him, he will return.”

Imani froze. Her hands, clenched into fists, trembled, but she did not take another step. In her dark, profound gaze reflected the sheer depth of fear, faith, and silent love that must not be spoken aloud before the ancient forest.

Leo stepped toward her. Briefly, firmly, in a single motion, he embraced her—pulled her close, breathed in the scent of her hair. Through the thin cotton fabric of her shirt, he felt the trembling, hot expanse of her skin, heard her heart beating in rapid, bird-like thuds… And let go.

“I will return,” he assured her.

Imani nodded. Once. And that was all.

Leo shifted his grip on the wooden handle of the pickaxe and stepped alone into the dense undergrowth, making his way toward the gray hill.

Chapter Eighteen. The Shrine →
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