“Yes,” said Yetu, her voice growing weak and stuttery. “But like you, only with someone special in a particular sort of way.” A stranger to these sorts of conversations, she treaded cautiously. It would be too easy to let herself get submerged, to be raptured by the beautiful closeness and say nothing at all, or worse, something foolish.
Oori said nothing, her eyes looking to the sea. She rarely looked Yetu directly in the face. At first, Yetu thought to be offended. Was she really so ugly? So distasteful to the gaze? Yetu often didn’t look people directly in the face, and certainly not the eyes, but for Oori it seemed an aversion. Whenever Oori did catch Yetu’s gaze, she flitted her eyes away then hardened her face.
Yetu understood now that it was a loneliness. Oori had lost everyone, everything. She couldn’t look at another’s face and think of anything but the screams of the last remaining specimens of her people.
“And do you find me special in a particular sort of way?” Oori asked, erupting the silence.
Yetu shivered at the note of tenderness in her voice, her throat and mouth uncomfortably dry. She tried to answer, but couldn’t speak, instead swallowing a lungful of ocean air, thick with moisture and the scent of salt.
Oori’s eyes were still affixed to the sea’s horizon, but Yetu caught the faintest flutter of movement as she went to turn toward Yetu then changed her mind, thinking better of it. “I do,” answered Yetu finally.
Though she could only see Oori in profile, Yetu saw her cheeks twitch and then plump. She was smiling, and that made Yetu’s heart speed up and the pit of her stomach become hot. “And do you find me pleasing to look at?” asked Oori. Just as Yetu’s did, Oori’s heartbeat quickened with each passing second, causing the water to throb against Yetu’s skin.
“Yes. I do,” said Yetu, her confidence growing. It felt so good to speak plainly, to know that the answers she gave would be accepted.
“I want you to know that I feel similarly about you,” said Oori. Yetu trembled as she tried to steady the flow of water coming in and out of her scales. “But I don’t think I can do this.” She stood up then pushed herself up out of the rocks, her naked body fully visible. A consuming desire to be closer to her, to step out of the water even if it killed her, overtook Yetu. She knew not where it came from.
Oori wrapped herself in thick white cloth. “I am going, Yetu.”
Yetu nodded, hoping she hadn’t revealed too much and frightened Oori away. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she said. Despite her resolve to never alter herself for another again, she found herself worrying that she’d said something wrong, something that had made Oori want to go so suddenly. Yetu had asked too many invasive questions, and her answers to Oori’s questions had been too frank.
“I won’t be back tomorrow,” Oori said.
Yetu nodded again, this time less enthusiastically. Oori sometimes went on lengthy boating trips. Maybe it was time to leave the tidal pool. She could follow her. Everything felt so strained still. Her body protested most movement. She’d gotten used to a constant physical gnawing.
“How long will you be gone for, then?” asked Yetu.
“Uncertain. With this storm, I need to take a pilgrimage back to my homeland before it gets worse. I need to protect some of the fixtures, tend to the grave sites, lest they all vanish and the place I’m from become truly dead. I should’ve gone days ago. Weeks. But I didn’t. I wanted to stay. I wanted to stay for you.”
Yetu pressed her tail fin into the gushing sand below to disrupt her breathing. Her chest tightened, and she attempted to keep her body still. “What is a homeland?” Yetu asked, translating it to home-sea in her head but unable to make any sense of that.
Oori’s face fell, and Yetu searched for all the reasons that might be. Was it a word she was supposed to remember but had forgotten? Had Yetu’s question been insensitive in some way? Yetu retraced the conversational steps, the moment Oori’s face changed from gently hopeful to a mixture of anger and sadness. She had been expecting Yetu to ask something else. What?
“A homeland is just a place,” said Oori, her voice quiet and unsteady. She’d never sounded so defeated. “It’s a place that means something because of its history. I know you have a complicated relationship with the past. I do too. But if I don’t protect what is left of it there, I will have no homeland. It will just be another place,” Oori explained.
Yetu tried to bob her head up and down to nod, but the movement was rigid and forced. “You are leaving me, then?” said Yetu, teeth out, though she hadn’t meant them to be. Yetu could only understand a few words Oori had said, too lost in shocked grief to make sense of much more. “Just like that, you are going?” That was the pertinent information. Yetu would be alone again, like she’d been in the deep.
There was Suka. There were other two-legs and surface dwellers. But they did not compare. With Oori, she always wanted more, desperate for time together, for conversation, for closeness. The depth of want seemed endless.
Yetu batted her front fins against the water and made a hard splash, almost soaking Oori’s cloth coverings. “Stay. You must stay. Please,” she begged, hating herself for it. She’d left the wajinru, seeking out freedom, yet here she was, tethered to another, bending herself toward her. She could not make herself feel nothing for this two-legs, and that was not freedom.
“Come with me,” said Oori.
Yetu sunk herself deeper into the sand. She wanted to bury herself alive in it. “I can’t. I’m stuck here.”
“You and I both know that’s not true,” Oori said. “Your health is not perfect, but you’ll survive, I’ll make sure of it. We can protect each other. What is keeping you from the sea? What kind of deep-sea creature prefers a shallow death pit to the infinite ocean?”
What kind of creature, indeed? One who had abandoned the History and the people to whom it belonged. One afraid. One who could neither bear the weight of the rememberings nor the weight of feeling her people suffer through the churning water.
Yetu shook her head. “You’re the one who’s leaving.”
“No, Yetu. You’re the one who’s not coming with.”
* * *
Oori had been gone for a day, and the rain had not ceased. Yetu kept her ears open for any sign of where Oori’s homeland was, but no one knew. All anyone said about the matter was that the place Oori was from wasn’t really a homeland anymore because a homeland needed a people. Without a people, it was just a patch of earth.
That was part of why Oori was going back. This place had meant so much to her, she could not let it become nothing, all traces of it wiped out by storm, a storm Yetu had caused by leaving the wajinru to brood in the rememberings.
Why had she been so stubborn with Oori? Now Oori was on the ocean as the waters grew more and more unsteady. Yetu imagined the brine rising up and filling Oori’s throat, imagined the waves upending her craft. She’d let her fear of going back into the ocean stop her from doing what she’d needed to do to keep Oori safe. But Oori wasn’t the only one who would suffer. The winds were heavy enough that the trees on the beach shook violently. Branches flew from some of the taller ones onto the sand. The ferocity and the tumult of the sea had increased more than tenfold since Oori had left. Yetu should’ve known this was coming, how bad it was going to get.
Suka had come to visit her to see how she was doing. Yetu had yelled at them to go inland and to take as many people as they could with them. They weren’t new to storms, but they’d likely not seen anything like what was coming. An echo of a remembering reverberated through Yetu. The same images she’d seen when she first came here washed over her afresh. Drowning two-legs. War between the wajinru and the surface dwellers. In such a battle, the two-legs would surely lose, for what being on this earth could compete with the might of the ocean? Suka and their family might die, and it would be Yetu’s fault. She’d have to live with that for the rest of her days. Her bid to save herself, to save her life, would have the unintended consequence of killing others
.
Oori would die too. Eventually, so would the wajinru; for if they had not found their way out of the trance of remembering by now, it didn’t seem likely to happen. They were so lost in it, they were taking their grief out on the whole world.
Then there would just be Yetu, all alone. There would be quiet. The waters would settle. The winds would slow. The rememberings would perish with the wajinru. The wajinru would have the same fate as Oori’s people. Much of the world would.
Storm waters filled the tidal pool, dark and murky, blotting out Yetu’s view of the teeming life inside. The future, too, was dark, if there was a future at all. The hurt that coursed through Yetu as she imagined a futureless world rivaled the pain of the rememberings. Could it really be that there was a version of the world where everything would be eradicated? Gone? She imagined how it felt when the History left her, the freedom of it, but if freedom only brought loneliness, emptiness, what was the point?
Nothingness was a fate worse than pain. How long would it take for Yetu to become ravenous for something to fill the hole the way other wajinru did? She doubted she could last even a year. She was already aching to see Oori, but also her amaba.
At least with pain there was life, a chance at change and redemption. The rememberings might still kill her, but the wajinru would go on, and so, too, would the rest of the world. The turbulent waves were a chaos of her own making, and it was time to face them.
8
HOW LONG HAS IT BEEN “tonight”? Lost in the endless madness of the Remembrance, we all starve, unable to nurture our bodies. Our bodies wane but our minds swell with pains too large to contain. Such imbalances cannot last.
Foolish Zoti, to think there is ever a way to guard against harm, to protect prosperity. Everything ends. How she would cry to know what became of her legacy.
We wajinru live Zoti’s ignorant lie for centuries, convinced our castles in the deep can shield us. The ocean is more than our home or birthplace. It is our heaven, too. For we were knit together by the powers of its life force. When we die, it is where we remain. Therefore we nurture it as it has nurtured us. We bring life to it as it brought life to us.
This is our covenant, maintained for years, until we are Basha.
In the old days, when we discovered a ship that threw our ancestors into the sea like refuse, we sunk it. Now we will sink the world.
* * *
There is chatter about dead children.
“Is there anything about this in the History?” Omju asks. “Something that can tell us how to proceed?”
Someone else asks, “Basha?”
“Historian Basha! Honored one!”
We hear them call us, our name ringing out through the water, but we are too entranced in a remembering to respond, one made by the third historian. The History troubled her so deeply that she did not believe it. She thought it was a trick of the ancestors, a test she had to pass. The third historian wondered if a woman called Zoti really had seen bodies cast overboard into the sea, left to drown.
When she went upward to see if it was true, she was snagged by a hook and lifted onto a boat deck. She tried to heave in oxygen through her mouth and nose, but she didn’t know how. Suffocating, she half passed out. The two-legs (they were real!) tried to grab and handle her, but she was more awake than they thought, and she bit every one of their throats until they died. She flopped and crawled to the boat edge, using her front fins to pull herself forward. With one powerful but painful thwack of her tail fin, she was back into the sea, having cleared the short wall.
She did not see the supposed surface dwellers who abandoned bodies of their own kind like an emptied-out clamshell, but she had no trouble believing the two-legs were capable of it after seeing them in the flesh.
This truth, that two-legs were cruel and unusual, was the most important lesson of the History, and the third historian vowed to protect her people from them.
“Basha!”
We awake from the remembering as they call our name, head aching and body overly alert, overly sensitive.
“We need your great knowledge, Basha,” said Omju.
We don’t care for Omju at all, who always comes to us with his silly questions, but is also always so certain of his way. He presents himself as knowledgeable, as the keeper of traditions. He is the closest person wajinru have to a leader or queen. His made-up council agrees with whatever he wants.
We do not answer his questions. We barely acknowledge that he is speaking to us at all. Mostly we do this because it makes him reconsider his self-importance. Smiling, we turn and swim toward—something.
Restless energy builds up in us, wanting to explode. Our amaba used to call this spoiling for a fight. And it’s true, we always were, always still are. We don’t know what to do with quietness, with peace. Life in the deep has never suited us.
Amaba says we came out gnawing and biting. Chewed our own cord away. But it never filled us. We never wanted milk. Only meat.
We didn’t get along with others, finding their conversations slow and inane. Our mind moved so quickly while the world passed by slowly.
When we found out we’d be taking on the History, we were glad. For once, there was something that could keep up with our racing thoughts. When the previous historian transferred the rememberings to us, we sparked alive with the feel of the past rushing into us, making sure no part of us was ever empty again.
Where the History saddened others, we felt only a glorious, burning anger. We liked the challenge of it. It suited us. Anger was our favorite emotion. We were at home in it. It gave us purpose.
As we swim into the dark city, we attune ourselves to the chatterings of others. They want to know what could’ve caused such a thing, the deaths of a small group of wajinru children. We feel fears and anxieties rustle against our skin. Their confusion skims our scales. What mighty beast could bring down three wajinru children so deep in the ocean? We are the apex predators of the entire sea.
Clueless wajinru gossip as they wander the waters. They would know the answer to this question if they lived beyond the bubble of wajinru cities, if they listened to the things we had to say more than just when it was convenient. We cannot understand a people that would willingly choose to cut itself off from its history, no matter what pain it entails. Pain is energy. It lights us. This is the most basic premise of our life. Hunger makes us eat. Tiredness causes us to sleep. Pain makes us avenge.
We are not wajinru if being wajinru means distancing ourselves from pain. We embrace pain, seek it out.
We make a path through the water, people splitting their parties to accommodate us. They fear us. This reaction doesn’t bother us. We aren’t to be trifled with. It is good that they recognize this.
After several strokes, we see a muted orange light. It’s Ephras holding a bioluminescent cretuk, and we swim toward him. An explosion had burned Ephras badly enough that he has difficulty feeling around anymore. What happened to him was the same thing that had happened to the children, though he’d been spared death. Still, he needs the aid of the light to properly see without being able to sense words and objects against his skin.
“You came,” says Ephras.
“Of course.”
Ephras gestures for us to follow him, then begins swimming toward his den a mile outside the city. He has to move slowly and carefully, unable to navigate without the aid of the light.
“I thought perhaps the council might be holding you up, keeping you away,” says Ephras.
“The council has no hold over me,” we say.
“You should pretend to tolerate them more. You don’t want them as enemies,” says Ephras, but it isn’t really advice, more a general observation.
“If they ever decide to make themselves into a problem, I’ll address it at that time. Until then, I won’t worry about it,” we say, happy to follow Ephras wherever he leads us. He is the only living thing in the world for whom that statement is true.
The water grows quieter and stil
ler as we move toward the outskirts of the city. We don’t like the silence, the emptiness. Except now, when it is with him.
“You don’t worry about anything,” says Ephras, “save that you secretly worry about everything.” He shakes his head then twists his body into a sequence of elaborate spirals. We watch him intently, thrilled by the wild beauty of it. There are others not far from us; otherwise we would swim more closely to him so that our bodies were touching, grazing against each other as we pulsed forward in the water.
Generally, historians are not to take lovers. It is seen as a distraction from the sacred task of protecting the History. We have no interest in laws or customs. The wajinru are in no position to tell us what to do. They’d do well not to ask anything of us and be grateful for what we occasionally choose to give them.
When we arrive at Ephras’s den, we embrace him, our bodies curling together. No one else can pull tenderness from us like this, make us weak with longing. It is a weakness we cherish.
Before him, it was only anger that could bring us to a tremble. Ephras showed us there are other ways to live on the brink.
We mate until we are spent.
“So,” Ephras says.
“Don’t.”
“You need to tell them who’s behind this,” says Ephras.
“They won’t listen,” we argue.
“Make them listen. The council has explicitly come to you for help. I would say they’re ready to hear what you have to say.”
It’s an illusion of open dialogue. They want an easy answer. A quick trick to fix the problem of the recent attacks upon us. They want me to tell them it’s some barely known underwater creature, and if we just do this, we can beat it.
But these explosions, these strange hot-fire beasts who take us by surprise, they reek of the two-legs. Two-legs don’t live in the deep and therefore can’t be fought in the deep, not with the weapons they obviously have.
The Deep Page 10