Zahrah the Windseeker

by Nnedi Okorafor

  At first I was scared and flew faster, trying to outdistance them. But they were expert fliers and kept up easily. After a while, when several more joined me, squawking gleefully to each other, I realized that they were either playing with me or trying to teach me. This was how I tested and practiced my speed.

  On the second day, it rained. It was my first Greeny Jungle thunderstorm. It had sprinkled a few times before but not enough to slow me down. This was an all-out tree-shaking thunderstorm. I hovered high in the sky, watching as the enormous thunderhead rolled toward me. Its beauty was striking. The cloud was a deep undulating gray with purple lightning bouncing within its bowels. All around me I saw the birds that populated the skies descending to take cover. I quickly followed suit.

  As I descended, I scanned the treetops. I knew what to look for. A root tree. Its yellow square-shaped leaves hung from long, thick stems. These grew from the tree's center like a giant golden fountain. Underneath was a series of chunky, tangled roots. It was the perfect place to seek shelter during a thunderstorm. I easily spotted one below.

  By the time the storm came, I was comfortably nestled underneath some roots. They overlapped, and I wasn't surprised when I stayed completely dry. Placing my satchel with the elgort egg next to me, I brought out my glow lily. I ate a mango while watching the storm through the tunnel of roots before me. It was vicious, with rain, some hail, and winds strong enough to blow down several trees nearby.

  I heard them fall but I was safe. An iroko tree, the tallest kind in the jungle, could tumble onto these roots, but they would remain undamaged. To take my mind off the storm, I took out my digi-book. My hands were damp, and the digi-book slipped out of my hand and banged against a stone on the ground. I picked it up, and more out of habit than hope I tried the elgort entry yet again.

  The error message popped up again, but then the screen went black and up came the entry, this time in its entirety. I laughed loudly. "Oh now it decides to work."

  I turned it off and laughed.

  The storm was violent and swift. It passed within twenty minutes, and soon after, I was on my way again.

  I landed past the jungle's border, where the trees were more spaced, where the town of Kirki began. When my feet touched the hard, even ground, I just stood there. Behind me stretched the Forbidden Greeny Jungle, a place that I no longer considered forbidden.

  I had traveled well into its insides. I still had the scar on my upper arm from the whip scorpion. It would probably remain slightly blue until the poison left my body. There were healing scrapes from where the Carnigourd's vine had wrapped itself around my ankle. I had itchy scrapes and scratches from when I had escaped the elgort. And, of course, there was the throbbing bruise from where the baby elgort had grabbed and gnawed on my arm. Rubbing cool mud on my wounds lessened the itching and encouraged healing. I was very much alive and, even more extraordinary, I had an elgort egg!

  A car passed by and I laughed to myself as I began walking. Then I pulled out my compass.

  "Well, you're almost home, where you belong," the compass said, sounding delighted. I smiled. The best way to please a compass was to go in the direction of the place you'd programmed it to call "home." I pressed a button on the side and it announced, "It's one-twelve a.m., Saturday night."

  "And what a beautiful night it is," I said, turning off the compass and putting it in my pocket. I looked down at my tattered clothes. My hair and body needed a good washing, but at least I didn't have any birds nesting in my hair. And if it weren't for the time spent in the Greeny Gorilla village, I'd have been much filthier. Would I even be alive if I hadn't stayed there for those few days? I wondered. I put the thought out of my head. It didn't matter. I was sure that I smelled strongly of sweat, mud, and leaves; the jungle. But I didn't care. I hadn't reached the end of my journey yet. Dari's time in a coma would reach a month in about a day or so.

  I stood for a moment, wondering where to go and how to travel. My home was only a twenty-minute walk away, the hospital about an hour. But I could fly to the hospital. However, someone might see me. In Kirki, large glow-lily clusters grew alongside the road and people moved about during the night. And I didn't know how people would react to something so unfamiliar to their eyes.

  I turned east, toward home.

  Chapter 26

  Home

  I didn't have to see my parents to know that they had gone through a rough time. I was their daughter and I had run away and been gone for over three weeks. Not even my parents had believed that there was much hope. How could they? No child had ever done such a thing and come out alive. And I'd read that most of the highly trained adults who had emerged were crazy, half dead, or deeply affected by their travels. The unexpectedness of my actions must have stung my parents as deeply as my being gone.

  I stood in front of the house staring at the door. I felt guilty even as I clutched my satchel with the elgort egg in it to my chest. In being selfless, I'd been selfish.

  I reached up and touched the thick wooden door. The door with the round mirrors decorating the top and bottom of it. The door that my mother had painted red five years ago because she thought it would look like a flower next to the green plants that grew on the outer part of the house. The door that another version of me had run in and out of so many times.

  I was no longer the Zahrah who was afraid of the world around her, who kept her head down, afraid of confrontation. I could almost see my old self coming out the door, my chin to my chest, ashamed of what I was, all too concerned with my clothes being civilized and making my hair less noticeable. The old me would never be out this late, I thought.

  I raised a shaking hand to the door, closing it in a loose fist, and knocked. I shivered, feeling flutters in my belly. I had no idea what I'd say to my parents. I waited for an answer. They were probably asleep. I knocked again, this time much harder. The light turned on and I almost passed out with nervousness.

  "Yes?" I heard my father say. He didn't open the door. I knew he must have been looking through the peephole. I was just tall enough for him to see the top of my head. "Do you know what time it..."

  There was a long pause. Then the door flew open.

  "Zahrah?" my father said quietly. Then he shouted, "Ha Ha!"

  "Papa!!!!"

  I ran into my father's arms, and for minutes we stayed that way, my face nestled in his shoulder, my body shuddering as I cried. Then my mother came out, bleary-eyed and confused. When she saw me, she gasped, clapping her hands over her mouth.

  "Oh I knew it! I just knew it!!" she shouted as I ran into her arms. We must have woken up the neighborhood with our cries and laughs of shock and joy. And our eyes grew puffy with tears, our noses ran, our throats grew sore, and our arms ached. We didn't want to let each other go.

  My mother immediately called the hospital to inform them of what we were bringing.

  "Oh my goodness," exclaimed the nurse who answered the phone.

  Everyone in the hospital knew of Dari's rare condition.

  "Come right over!" the nurse said.

  Then after the nurse alerted the doctor, he ran to his other hospital friends and spread the news. Soon the bush radio was at work, twisting and growing its vines of gossip all over Kirki. In the night, the news quickly spread to other nurses' and doctors' husbands, wives, family, and friends and finally the local and national newspapers.

  "No time to explain," my mother said to Dari's mother after she'd called the hospital. "Just go to the hospital. Zahrah's come home!"

  But we didn't leave right away. As my mother put down the phone, I asked my parents to sit down.

  "I ... I need to tell you..." I sighed and laughed nervously.

  "Zahrah, what...?"

  "No, Papa, I will say it. Give me a moment," I said. I took a deep breath and then looked them both in the eye. I grabbed one of my dadalocks. "Mama, Papa, I was born ... I got home so ... if it weren't for..." I blinked. "I can fly. I ... yeah, I can fly."

  It took severa
l moments for my words to sink into my parents, and they just looked at me perplexed.

  "Fly as in..." Then my father pretended as if he were a bird flapping its wings.

  "Well, I don't have wings, as you can see, but ... here, I'll show you. "

  As I flew about the living room, my parents' perplexed looks became slack-jawed looks of shock. Then my mother laughed, mashing her hair to her head.

  "Great Joukoujou, o," my father whispered. "What sort of juju is this?"

  "It's not juju, Papa. It's just who I am."

  After that had sunk in, I went on to tell them a very abbreviated version of my travels. In between my telling, came their yelling:

  "How could you leave like that?! Were you crazy?"

  "Do you know how your actions have turned this town upside down?"

  "How could a tortoise that huge have two heads?!"

  "You made the front page in the newspapers and you were a breaking story on the net!"

  "You could have been killed!"

  "Let me see that egg."

  "You lived with ... gorillas?! Talking gorillas?"

  "Dari needed you around him even if he was in a coma!

  "What you did was thoughtless!"

  "Whip scorpion?! Let me see the scar."

  "Poison?!"

  "Oh my goodness, I don't want to hear any more about these elgorts!"

  "Are you serious? These gorillas bathed in oil?"

  "You could have been killed!"

  "Those really exist!?"

  "You can fly!!"

  Then it was my turn to be shocked when they told me all that had happened while I was gone. By the evening of the day I'd gone missing, the hunt for me was on. But it didn't get very far. Everyone knew that once a person entered the Forbidden Greeny Jungle, he or she was not coming out.

  My father headed the terrified search team that ventured a mile in, but they were quickly forced to turn back after a pack of bush dogs attacked them! One man was bitten on the leg and later suffered an infection, and several others were pretty scratched up and frightened. On top of all this, I was front-page news the morning after. The headline read, "Wise Dada Girl Makes Tragic Unwise Decision."

  The search involved the whole town, hundreds of people tentatively combing the outskirts of the jungle, hoping that I was scared and had not gone in, knowing they were being uselessly optimistic. After the dog attacks, Papa Grip gave strict orders that no one should enter the jungle.

  "At this point, all we can do is hope," he said sadly, looking into the red eyes of my father and mother as he spoke at the emergency meeting he called a week after I went missing. "Unfortunately, to go in there would mean more people missing." Papa Grip is going to be do amazed when he finds out that I'm back, I thought.

  Before we left, I took my first hot water shower since leaving home. The water stung my wounds as it washed off the healing mud. I soaped and rinsed my long hair many times, savoring the water. I sighed, my eyes closed. I wrung out my hair and stepped out of the shower.

  I looked at myself in the mirror, my dark brown skin, my dada hair, my scraped face, arms, and legs, the scar from the whip scorpion on my arm. I looked into my own eyes and smiled when I saw the new glint in them. Then I floated up to the ceiling of the bathroom, did a somersault, and floated down. Wait until Dari seed me do that, I thought as I rubbed rose oil into my wet hair.

  On the way to the hospital, I answered more of my parents' questions about my adventures.

  "Amazing," my father said as he drove.

  "My grandmother used to talk about people who could fly. She said that my great-grandmother could do it," my mother said. "As a matter of fact, when you were born, your father and I discussed the possibility that you might be able to do it."

  "We decided to just watch and listen to you closely," my father said.

  "But we didn't really believe it was possible," my mother said. She shook her head with a smirk. "Your grandmother would find this so wonderful."

  I frowned at this. If I had only gone to my parents in the first place and talked to them about my ability ... no, I thought. That was not a good way to think. What was done was done. All I could do now was learn from my actions.

  My mother had brought a bottle of antiseptic and a cotton ball, and she cleaned my healing scorpion wound.

  "I thought she was just telling stories," my mother said. "I always viewed flying people as symbols of freedom that storytellers liked to use. To fly means you are able to go wherever you want, really. Or maybe to fly, to travel, makes you wise. Like one born dada. But they weren't just stories, even if they sounded like they were. It's real!"

  I laughed at my mother's babbling and watched the street glow lilies that lined the road whoosh by.

  "So you first met this other Windseeker in the Dark Market?" my father asked again.

  "Yes."

  "That was why you were there that day," my mother said with a nod. "Now I understand."

  "You should have come to us, Zahrah," my father said solemnly. He rubbed his forehead.

  "I know," I said with a sigh. I knew this with all my heart.

  "Well, everything happens for a reason," my mother said softly. "Let's just hope there's no reason for anything like this to ever happen again. "

  And let's hope the antidote works, I thought. Seven minutes later, as we walked into the hospital, I was chewing on my lip. I couldn't wait to see Dari. He needed me and I had been away for too long. He certainly must have been aware of my not being there. Maybe he's even angry, I thought.

  "Dari is stable," my father said. "There's a nurse who exercises his legs and arms. He's ... he's OK."

  Dari's parents were already there waiting for us. Dari's mother's Afro was smashed to one side, and her dark brown lip polish was only on the lower lip. Dari's father still had sleep crusts in the sides of his eyes, and his shirt was inside out. Both of them were breathing hard and had wild, desperate looks on their faces. They stared at me as if I were from another world. I didn't mind because I felt like I was.

  Visiting time for patients had ended hours earlier, but this was a special occasion.

  "Is this her?" the doctor said, running up to me. I remembered this doctor from the time I had been there weeks earlier. "Ohyes, it is! Unbelievable!"

  Before I knew it, three other doctors surrounded me. They reminded me of a flock of birds with their chatter and movement. I hoped they wouldn't get caught in my hair. I quickly handed them the elgort egg, and their interest immediately shifted from me to the egg. Then they were gone.

  "We'll be back shortly. We must mix the solution to inject into the patient," one of the doctors said over his shoulder.

  "My goodness, look at it," I heard one of the other doctors say. "If it works, we'll have more than enough to store for other patients and to study!"

  "Wow," my father said with a chuckle. "They sure were anxious. But it's the first elgort egg they've ever handled, and they're scientists, so I understand."

  I still thought their behavior strange.

  That done, I focused on seeing Dari. We quickly walked to his room, and my eyes immediately went to him. His parents stood aside, each patting my shoulder as I passed.

  A large, bulbous plant grew from the wall above Dari's head. Several of its stems were attached to Dari's arms and forehead. The plant bloomed blue flowers near the top, and the part of its pod closest to Dari pulsated to the rhythm of his breathing. Air softly blew out of a small flower to a steady rhythm, making a whistling sound each time.

  Dari was as he had been when I left: asleep and un-smiling. He lay in his bed in blue pajamas, his rough hair shaven close as it always was. His soft lips were slightly parted, his long legs hidden under tan covers. I desperately wanted to see his big brown eyes. I wanted to cry, but instead I sat on the bed and rested my head on his chest. He wore the leaf-shaped luck charm around his neck. I closed my eyes and listened to his heartbeat. I don't know how long I stayed like that. I must have fallen asleep.<
br />
  I heard someone enter the room and when I opened my eyes, my muscles were stiff.

  "Zahrah," I heard my mother say near my ear. Both sets of parents had left the room to let me be with my friend. Now they were back. "Zahrah, the doctor is here."

  I quickly shook myself into complete wakefulness and stood straight, looking around. The lights in the hospital room had been turned up, and three doctors were standing in green doctors' coats and holding clipboards.

  "OK," one of the doctors said breathlessly. She held a large blue inocula fly between her fingers. It buzzed impatiently. "This is it."

  She stepped forward and I stepped back. The doctor looked at me.

  "Can I talk to you after this?" she asked.

  I nodded.

  "Let's do this then," the doctor said. "Zahrah, open the window screen, please."

  My legs felt rubbery as I walked over and opened it. Then I went and stood with the parents. The two other doctors stood by, observing. I had no idea what to expect. The doctor wiped a place on Dan's arm with a cotton swab that was wet with a white liquid. Then she turned to all of us and said, "I'm going to let this inocula fly go. It has already engorged its stinger with elgort egg serum. It'll go right for the spot I just swabbed with the sugar paste. Then the fly will inject the elgort egg serum into his arm. The serum might take a few minutes to circulate into his bloodstream."

  We all nodded. I just wanted her to get on with it. It was the moment of truth. Would it work? Was it too late? Was the antidote in the book a he? And what if there was an earthquake and the shaking room confused the inocula fly into stinging someone else? Get on with it, lady, I thought.

  The doctor opened her fingers and the inocula fly flew off. It zoomed about the room for a moment and then smelled the sugar paste that the doctor had swabbed on Dan's arm. It buzzed and dived, embedding its sharp, thin stinger into Dari's arm and injecting the serum. When it was finished, it pulled out its stinger and flew out the window. Then I closed the screen.