Instead she wrote, Why did you come?
He wrote, I wanted a voice.
What are you fighting for? she wrote.
He wrote, Everything. We will have to fight everything, if we are to have any power.
After a moment she wrote, My mother was the shaman, not me. I have no real magic.
On the floor of the amphitheatre, Adam Maleficio was saying, “Unity is more important now than ever, when magic users are taking a unique and visible position in a changing world. Let us not forget this is a place we made. This is a place of magic. This is a place for magic. And without unity, we weaken.”
James wrote, As long as you can fight.
Maleficio was still going, enjoying the podium and trying to drown out the translators for good measure. “This is a place for those who know true magic to meet with respect and understanding, to come together with a single vision, and, conjunctis viribus, we shall succeed in all we try to do on this sacred ground.”
“With united powers,” Stephens translated.
“May this be a milestone of a new era,” Maleficio finished.
He crushed the pages in his hands and threw his arms wide; the paper turned into six doves and flew away.
The day was boiling hot and fruitless, and during the Magic-Assisted Environment Preservation referendum Anna decided she would leave. There was no reason for her to pretend she had a voice in a council full of wand-wavers.
Then one of the delegates from Japan stood up to address the assembly.
She was wrapped in a fox stole so long that half a dozen fox heads knocked against one another as she stood. Under the stole her suit was the grey of rotting ice; the grey of the narwhal.
Anna sat up in her chair.
“While I can’t speak for all natural magicians,” the woman said, her voice carrying over the hum of translation, “I know my own magic has already been compromised by the problem that you ask us to solve. Without a natural world for us to call upon, we are powerless.”
Maleficio called, “Don’t pretend you’re powerless, foxwitch!”
Her stole rippled as the six fox heads lifted and hissed at the crowd.
“No magic, no speaking out of turn,” called the Congress Director. “Delegate Hana, thank you, you may sit down—no magic, ladies and gentlemen, please!”
The woman sat, amid a chorus of derisive laughter from the spellcasters.
James said, “If they had to call their spells from the grass, they wouldn’t be laughing.”
“If they had to call their spells from the grass,” Anna said, “we’d still have grass.”
The first thing Annakpok had done as shaman was build a bier for her mother’s body and sing as it burned down to ashes.
It was still cold enough that Annakpok walked out onto the sea, scattering the ashes around the holes in the ice where her mother had hunted—a gift to the seals, in return for what they had given.
(It was an empty gesture; there were no more seals.)
There would be a feeling of light, her mother had told her. Annakpok would take a breath and know her purpose as shaman, and her power would move through her blood.
The closest Annakpok had come to feeling like a shaman was when she was twelve, and a government agent came to get her mother’s blood sample and register Sitiyok as a natural magician.
The deep-winter sun had already set, and without her mother Annakpok was alone in Umiujaq. Besides the moon on the empty ice, there was no light at all.
The wind stole the ashes from the bowl as she walked; when Annakpok reached land again, she was empty-handed.
That was the last thing Annakpok had done as shaman.
Anna put herself in the Japanese woman’s way as everyone filed out of the theatre at sunset. The woman didn’t look surprised to see her.
(“Kimiko Hana,” Stephens told her. “Tsukimono-suji. They hold power over magic fox familiars. It’s inherited.”
“Is that spellcasting or natural magic?”
Stephens shrugged.)
Anna watched the fox heads watching her. “Do you kill them to get their power?”
The fox heads shrank back and hissed; Kimiko rested her hand on the stole to quiet them.
“No,” she said, when they were still again. Her voice was carefully neutral. “It’s to remember them after they leave our family. Their children are close to us.” She looked askance at Anna. “Do you . . . have a familiar?”
Anna wondered if a dead narwhal counted. “No,” she said, and then, recklessly, “I don’t even have magic.”
Kimiko raised an eyebrow, kept walking.
Anna followed her down the stairs and across the amphitheatre, waiting for a reciprocation that never came.
Finally she asked, “What sort of magic have you got?”
“It serves me better not to explain,” Kimiko said. Her dark eyes flashed red. “If you don’t have power, pretend otherwise. If you do, pretend otherwise.”
She stroked the foxes’ heads; under her hand, they sighed.
“What is your power?” Kimiko asked.
Anna said, “I’m great with funerals.”
A woman outside the hotel was selling amulets from a card table.
“Magicked by the sorcerers from the Congress,” she called, holding out a stamped clay bead on a string. “Talismans and charms! Witch-blessed! Shaman-approved!”
Anna didn’t know what the symbols meant, but she could tell they were empty of power. The seller had dusted them all in cinnamon; the smell choked the air.
As Anna passed, the woman thrust it at her brightly. “Need a little magic, miss?”
Yes, Anna thought, and kept walking.
Anna dreamed of the narwhal, stark and pale against the black rocks. When she walked across the ice to meet it (she was so far away, she should not have wandered), she slipped. She remembered the ice was rotten, and was afraid. She stood where she was, too frightened to move another step and risk falling through the ice and into the water.
On the beach, the narwhal had turned to face her. Its mouth gaped open, revealing Sitiyok inside, standing and waving, gesturing to the shore.
Annakpok could not move, she was so frightened—even when the ice she was standing on sank under her, she stayed where she was. She looked down at the water lapping at her knees—so cold she couldn’t feel herself drowning, so deep that the bottom could not be seen.
The ice gave way under her, and she tilted her face upwards, fighting for her last breath. The sun above her gleamed fox-red.
As the water swallowed her, she opened her hands and felt something slip from them; she had been holding tight to something she could not see.
There is always more than we can see, her mother said.
Her mother was unafraid.
Her mother was waving.
“You look horrible,” Stephens said as they took their seats. “Didn’t you sleep? The papers will think you’re a refugee.”
“And that’s why they recruited you into the Diplomatic Corps,” Anna said.
The environmental referendum ended with spellcasters insisting that they could not possibly be to blame for a weakening of natural magic they did not even use.
“We make a study of the art,” said Maleficio. “Our magic is the result of scholarship. If anything, we begin at a disadvantage, because natural magic rarely chooses us. We are powerless, though we may pretend otherwise.”
Anna looked up. The tips of her fingers itched as if she were stroking fur.
Maleficio threw his arms wide. “Natural magicians have the authority of the ages—they have inherited magic!”
“We have to register like livestock!” someone from the Kenyan delegation called.
Maleficio ignored him. “We spellcasters have to read and practice, and must make the best we can of lesser circumstances, to create what power we can.”
The spellcasters nodded sadly. Anna and James exchanged a look.
Kimiko said, “Then in your infinite scholar
ship and wisdom, suggest a solution that will enable natural magicians to find enough magic for ourselves without robbing powerless, impoverished spellcasters of all their hard work.”
“No magic!” cried the Congress Director, as a dark rumble spread through the Amphitheatre.
The air crackled, and heat rose from the dozens of angry sorcerers. Adam Maleficio seemed angriest of all, his arm trembling, the air rippling around him.
For a moment, his blue eyes glinted fox-red.
There is always more than we can see.
In the pause between debates, Anna slid into place behind Maleficio. Across the amphitheatre she could see James and Stephens frowning at her. She ignored them and leaned in. This close, Maleficio smelled of sulfur.
“Tsukimono-suji,” she whispered.
He startled, stiffened. “Who are you?” he asked without looking.
“I’m natural magic. And so are you, foxwitch.”
“I’m a sorcerer,” he hissed. Around them, people were caught up in arguments over who was responsible for making natural magic possible for those who practiced it; no one heard him. “I studied at Stonehenge. I spellcast.”
“You have a fox at home,” she said. “The rest is party tricks.”
She felt, rather than saw him flinch. “What do you want?”
“Force a vote,” she said. “In our favor.”
He sniffed. “Forget it. I’m not about to switch sides. Besides, the others won’t care if I’m foxblood. I put in the work on spellcasting.”
“Oh sure,” she said. “It’s heartwarming. We’ll wrap up with that story, then,” and she moved as if to rise.
He flailed one arm behind him. “Stop, stop, come back, you horror. What am I putting to a vote?”
In a surprise turnaround, Adam Maleficio made an eloquent case for the responsibility of the magical community to support its own.
“Natural magic was the earliest magic,” he said. “It deserves our respect, our support, and our devotion. I, for one, will be voting to create a coalition that will work to discover a magic strong enough to shield the natural from the ravages it has suffered, and shame, shame, on those who do not join me!”
The spellcasters drew wands, and voted (barely) yes.
As Anna walked the ring of the amphitheatre back to her seat, she passed the Japanese table. Kimiko caught her eye and beckoned her over.
“What did you do to him? You must have more power than you thought.”
Anna smiled. “I had no power,” she said. “I just pretended otherwise.”
One of the fox heads looked up and grinned.
When she got back to her seat, the note paper was waiting for her. James was looking straight ahead; he didn’t even acknowledge she had come back.
Under I have no real magic, James had drawn a question mark.
She folded the paper carefully, rested both hands on it like a talisman.
At home, she waited for dark to go down to the water.
A hundred yards out, in the dim moonlight, she could still see that the narwhal was gone.
She ran.
As she lurched over the rocks, she saw it was not really gone; it hadn’t sprung to life again and swum out to sea (as she had half-hoped).
It was devoured.
The narwhal was eaten clean down to the bones (impossible for birds to manage in three days), and the bones themselves were intact, despite the wind (impossible, impossible). The ribs rose sharply white against the green-black sky, the skin curling like parchment against the black ground as if the wind itself had pulled it gently from the flesh.
Annakpok looked in the sand for tracks. No animal tracks (she expected none), but she was surprised that only her own footprints came out this far.
She walked slowly, tracing the edge of the laid-out hide with her feet as she went, trying to still her pounding heart. She had to listen; she needed to see.
There was no flesh left on the bones at all; she would have suspected that she had been trapped in time, at the summit for a hundred years, except that the bones had not yet begun to dry. They were pearl-white still, the ribs like joyful hands, the tailbones pointing mournfully to the sea.
Anna knelt and plucked the smallest tailbone from the hide. It was the length of her palm, and hollow. She slid it over one finger.
She made rings out of ten vertebrae. They warmed against her skin; when she curled her hands they shifted against one another like she wore gloves of bone.
The ice under her feet was slippery, rotten, but she stepped where the moon reflected thickest. The bones in her hands thrummed as she breathed.
She walked across the sheet ice, out and on, past the light from shore, past her mother’s old hunting grounds, to the edge of the ice-veiled sea. There she stopped, and trembled. The ice rocked gently under her feet, and she knew if she slipped here the sea would swallow her.
It might swallow her in any case. (She thought of her mother inside the mouth of the narwhal, beckoning her home.) It was great magic, what she was attempting. It was beyond her power.
She would be the sacrifice.
Around her the world was flat and black; the wind slid mournfully against her face.
Annakpok held out her open hands before she could be afraid. If she was a shaman, the sea would bring them back to her as narwhals. She had only to wait, and be worthy.
(What are you fighting for?
Everything.)
The bones fell into the water, ten white sparks that disappeared into a black so deep that the bottom could not be seen.
When she turned for the shore, the narwhal’s bones looked like a doorway, like an open hand waving her home.
Nnedi Okorafor is the author of the novels Zahrah the Windseeker, The Shadow Speaker, and Who Fears Death. Her book for children, Long Juju Man, won the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa. She is also the winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature and the Carl Brandon Society’s Parallax Award, and has been a finalist for the NAACP Image Award, Andre Norton Award, and the Essence Magazine Literary Award. Forthcoming books include Akata Witch and Iridessa the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog. Her short fiction has appeared in Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, and in anthologies such as Eclipse Three, Seeds of Change, So Long Been Dreaming, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones.
Our next tale is about wizardry in modern-day Africa. Africa is a less common setting for fantasy stories, but there are some notable works out there for readers who are interested in the continent. Among the best known are the adventure tales of H. Rider Haggard, including She and King Solomon’s Mines (starring the character Alan Quatermain, who also appeared in Alan Moore’s graphic novel series League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Charles Saunders has written a series of sword and sorcery tales starring African characters, beginning with the collection Imaro. Octavia E. Butler’s Wild Seed begins in ancient Africa and follows the lives of two immortals as they attempt to come to terms with their unusual abilities. Alan Dean Foster’s Carnivores of Light and Darkness follows an African tribesman who sets out on a quest to rescue a princess and who faces off against all manner of magical obstacles. And Lion’s Blood by Steven Barnes is an alternate history in which Africa is the most powerful continent on earth.
In addition to her interest in Africa, another of Nnedi Okorafor’s passions is strange creatures. Her work is full of wild and colorful animals, such as the very unusual birds in this next story.
The Go-Slow
Nnedi Okorafor
It was Nigerian style gridlock. The worst kind of traffic. It was a carnival of vehicles from cars to supersize trucks, nose to ass for miles, oozing, spewing, dribbling exhaust into the weighted heat under the hot penetrating African sun. Only the okada were on the move. The motorbikes snaked clumsily between cars and trucks, with their one, two, even three passengers hanging on for dear life. The okada dodged opportunistic hawkers and occasionally scraped the fenders of a vehicles. They always kept right on going.
The go-slow was especially
sluggish today and Nkem was smoldering with irritation. All he’d meant to do was drive from one part of Owerri to another, a matter of miles. Instead, for the last two hours, he’d been stuck behind a smoke-belching truck and beside a rusty van full of choir members from some fanatical church. He’d turned off his car an hour and half ago, despite the heat. If he didn’t die from inhaling the truck’s noxious fumes, he was going to go mad from the women’s high-pitched singing. Just then, the women started yet another verse of “Washed in the Blood of Christ.”
“God Dammit,” Nkem shouted, slamming his hands down on the steering wheel in frustration. Several of the women stopped singing to glare at him. He considered giving them the finger or cursing at them with such fury that they’d either think he had Tourette’s syndrome or been possessed by some ungodly spirit, but then he imagined how appalled his mother would be with him. She was always in his head at the wrong times. “The goddamn church can kiss my ass, man,” he muttered. “Psychos, all of them. The crippling force of this country.”
But he said nothing to the women and he kept all his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel. He gnashed his teeth. It was amazing how slowly time moved in certain situations, especially ones of deep annoyance. Go-slows were like getting stuck in time warps. He shielded his eyes, looked into the sky and spotted a large eagle soaring by. Leisurely, free, ruler of the sky.
“Goddamn bird,” he muttered.
He’d been on his way to a good fuck. He deserved it; he’d finished shooting his latest film, No Boundaries, yesterday. He owed himself the distraction and he wasn’t going to get it from his wife. Besides, what he wanted was a destructive distraction. He’d met the girl, Agnes, at a club four months ago. Of course, she’d been ecstatic to get a phone call from Nigeria’s sexiest actor. She was ready and waiting for him at a hotel twenty minutes away.
Nkem smacked the steering wheel again and pulled at his budding dreadlocks. Why had he taken this way? At this time of day? The go-slow was always bad here. There was no rhyme or reason. It wasn’t the beginning or end of the work day. There were no especially large potholes. If it was an accident then there must have been an accident here at the same time every day. There were simply a lot of vehicles that came through here at this time. And I knew this, he thought. His blood pressure rose from just thinking about it.
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