by Alyssa Cole
Shanti pulled away, resting her forehead against his chin for a second.
“Good night.” She stepped back and closed the door.
Sanyu stared at the patterns carved into the wooden door for a long time, trying to wrap his mind around what had just happened. That hadn’t been their first kiss, had been chaste compared to what they’d done before, but his head was spinning. In his hand, the piece of paper she’d passed him was crushed in his fist.
He thought about knocking on the door and pulling her back into his arms, but she’d made it clear that it was a night for politics, not passion. If he did that, he’d only be using her as a distraction and Shanti was much more than that.
“Everything all right, Your Highness?”
When he glanced sharply to his right, Kenyatta stood ramrod straight. Her lips were pressed together as if to prevent a smile.
“Yes,” he said, turning toward her and heading for the exit.
“I should hope so, Your Highness,” Kenyatta said, and though her voice was level as ever, he understood that she was teasing him. If he were his father, he would have roared at her for her insubordination.
He chuckled and kept walking.
Sanyu didn’t look at the paper Shanti had handed him until hours later, when he lay wide-awake in his bed, trying not to relive the humiliation of the day over and over.
“How can women and other marginalized groups feel like full citizens when we have no voice in this kingdom?”
Written beneath the question he hadn’t answered, in a slightly messier version of the same cursive, was a quote:
If a troop of lions gather to make the rules of the land, they will agree that eating antelopes and aardvarks is in the best interest of everyone. If a group of lions, antelopes, and aardvarks gather to make the rules of the land, the final decision will look very different, don’t you think?
—Queen Ramatla of Thesolo
Sanyu stared at the quote for a moment, then pulled up his search engine to see where it had come from. The result was a video of Thesolo’s queen giving a speech on good governance. After he’d watched it, another video of her, her husband, and her son in conversation about the role of the monarchy in modern Africa began to play. Two hours later, he fell asleep with the videos still autoplaying, and dreamt of being deposed by an aardvark.
Chapter 9
When Shanti hurried into Liberation Books an hour after Sanyu left her room that night, the mood was tense. The chess players hunched over their pieces, eyes darting, and the general sense of merriment was more subdued, even though the volume level of the café was louder.
While she’d been soothing her husband, something else entirely had been brewing outside of the palace walls.
As she passed one table, she heard a man begin singing as a woman drummed the tabletop with her palms. “Sanyu II! Even crueler than his father! Sanyu II! Our new and useless king! E-ne-mies, of Njaza! Our king, he does your work for you!”
Everyone at the table laughed and clapped afterward, and the muscles around Shanti’s eyes tightened as she tried to hold on to her cheerful expression.
As Shanti passed the bar, Amy gave her a nod of welcome, then scanned the café like she was keeping an eye out for any brewing fights. Shanti wasn’t the only one sensing the strange energy.
She found Jendy, Salli, and Nneka sitting around a small table in a recessed corner.
“Are you okay?” Shanti asked, rushing over to them. “Did they hurt you? How about Marie? I was so worried when I got the texts earlier today!”
Sanyu had told her they were fine, but he wasn’t always told what took place in the palace.
“We’re fine,” Jendy said, voice filled with pride. “They asked questions that we didn’t answer, and then we were released. I told one of the guards that he was a sandal licker who disappointed the ancestors.”
Shanti laughed despite the seriousness of the situation.
Jendy made a face of contrition. “Sorry we didn’t invite you—it was a spur-of-the-moment thing.”
Shanti pushed aside the uncomfortable sensation of someone feeling bad they hadn’t brought her along to protest her own husband.
“I couldn’t have come anyway. Was it scary?” she asked.
“Yes. But it was also amazing,” Jendy said. “All of those people who usually ignore me had to look. Had to listen.”
Shanti remembered her satisfaction after getting Musoke to acknowledge her at the last council meeting. There was a sweet victory in forcing yourself into the line of sight of those who would rather erase you.
“Another round on the house,” Marie said cheerfully as she walked up to the table with a tray of drinks. Her NJAZA RISE UP! shirt was ripped at the sleeve, but she seemed to wear it with pride.
Shanti plucked at the shirt as Marie handed over a glass of wine to Nneka. “How did this happen? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. Like our great king, the guards are nothing but bluster, and the royal advisors who watched were too disdainful to see us as a real threat.”
It felt like treason now, to hear Sanyu spoken of this way and not defend him, but Marie and the others had every right to be angry. The fact that Sanyu might one day be a great king meant nothing to their current situation, and acknowledging that wasn’t betrayal—it was accountability. Wasn’t it?
“This is in part because of you,” Marie said as she settled into a seat.
“Me?” Shanti asked.
“Yes. You’ve brought us so many wonderful ideas, and shared information about what various activists were doing in other parts of the world,” Marie said. “One of the videos you sent us said modeling public confrontation can be effective in populations where people don’t have a strong cultural history of protest. Today our goal was to show the people of this country that asking for what we need directly is possible.”
“Oh,” Shanti said, proud of her friends, but wondering what it meant that a queen was complicit in the heckling of her king.
“Njaza’s protest culture died by royal decree fifty years ago, supposedly a temporary measure to keep us safe after the turmoil of the civil war,” Salli added. “Funnily enough, temporary measures that help the ruling class often become permanent.”
“We were successful today, though,” Jendy said, raising her glass. “At the market tonight, the streets are full of debate about what the king is doing for us, and why some of us are said to be equal when paying taxes but don’t get to determine how the tax money is used. People sang my remix of ‘Sanyu II Is Our Future,’ and I’ve heard there’s even a version on the student radio station. And over there”—she pointed the glass toward the bookstore bar—“people no longer feel a need to whisper their complaints.”
Shanti tried to return Jendy’s smile and just managed it.
“Maybe we should use the momentum,” Nneka said, twirling a braid around one finger. “Maybe we should just bring everything crashing down. BOOM!”
“Or break out the guillotines!” Jendy said brightly.
What is it with her and guillotines? Shanti wondered.
Shanti breathed slowly as she tried to figure out how to defuse this talk of insurrection. She’d feared this, as months had passed and her husband seemed to ignore the discontent of his citizens, but her goal was to prevent it, not stoke the flames.
“In all likelihood, he didn’t know how bad things were before,” she said calmly. “This is the first time he’s been confronted directly and I’m sure it was a shock to him. Like you just said, the protest culture here died fifty years ago. He’s thirty-two and was raised in the shadow of an all-powerful king. And, he’s still grieving. The magnitude of the changes that need to be made may not have sunk in yet.”
Just give me a bit more time, she thought desperately. In addition to wanting to avoid Njaza tipping into civil war, she refused to have her legacy be that she achieved her dream of being queen only for her kingdom to fall. She wanted to help for altruistic reasons, but s
he was also in possession of an ego that had considered “become a queen” a normal and attainable goal. Just as she wouldn’t let Njaza fall victim to its own refusal to change, she wasn’t going to let the guillotine blades be dropped on her watch either.
“I know those that live in the palace are above our concerns, but how could he not know?” Jendy asked. “One of his names is Sanyu the All Knowing, is it not?”
“No. All-knowing is a title given to those touched by Amageez,” Marie said. “I understand they don’t teach religion in school as they should, but you should know that, girl.”
Jendy suddenly found great interest in the bottom of her cup.
“I think we should give him a few weeks,” Marie said. “Our friend is right. The pyramids weren’t built in a day, and the stubbornness of the Njazan king and his advisors won’t be changed in a day either. I know we are tired, but all of you are young. You have no memories of what it was like before peace stabilized the lands—I was once young, too, and I remember the fighting, the despair.
“Before we do anything rash, we must make sure that we aren’t sentencing our people to that despair, and we must discuss with others so that we are a united front. The last thing we need is several factions trying to seize power instead of a united people who are in general agreement about pushing the government to change.”
Shanti looked at Marie with surprise, then remembered that almost all older Njazans had been involved in the wars for independence in some way. She thought that maybe all of them had placed their trust in Sanyu I, even as the country grew more and more isolated, because they never wanted to experience war again.
“There are people who hope Njazans will fight one another,” Shanti said gravely, thinking about her own research. “The corporations and other countries who hope to set up puppet governments, or bribe officials. We’ve seen it happen elsewhere, and we know that despite how others talked about Njaza in the past, there is a respect for what they achieved. The kingdom’s downfall would be symbolically devastating.”
Which was why she needed her husband to do better, and fast.
“Right,” Nneka said. “It’s bad enough we have a Thesoloian in the palace. They look down on us when they did nothing to stop the Liechtienbourgers, then marry one of their own to our king? I’ve heard that they even helped the magistrates during the occupation because they saw our freedom as a threat.”
Shanti tried not to glare. She couldn’t jump into an impassioned defense of her country without raising questions.
“Who did you hear that from?” Marie asked, her tone lashing. “If you believe everything you hear about those who are our natural allies, you do the job of our enemies for them. At least make them work to divide us, eh?”
Salli nodded. “And if you’re eager to marry the king, you’ll have your chance soon. It’s almost been four months, surely they’re looking for a new queen by now.”
Shanti sipped her drink, the thick nectar sitting in her mouth until she was able to swallow against the truth of Salli’s words.
“Can you imagine?” Nneka crowed. “I mean, I wouldn’t mind getting spanked by that iron gauntlet if only for a few months.”
Nneka and Jendy laughed. Shanti huffed.
Jendy made a sound of annoyance.
“I’d hoped the queen would bring Ingoka’s fire to us, to smite Omakuumi and his cult of strength and Amageez and his logic that makes no sense,” she said as she stacked papers. “It’s such silliness! As if to be fierce and intelligent, one must be born male.”
“Or as if you should crush your true self to retain Omakuumi’s blessing or Amageez’s,” Salli said. “I sometimes still feel guilty, but my husband and wife remind me that I am their blessing, and that all of this stuff they say to make us feel bad about ourselves isn’t the true way of Njaza.”
Nneka squeezed Salli’s shoulder. “You’re our blessing, too.”
Salli batted playfully at Nneka’s hand. “Am I? I’m going to remind you of that next time you try to make me do the newsletter layout.”
The two friends batted back and forth affectionately, while beside them Jendy pouted.
“I was so excited about having a new queen, since I don’t remember the last one—I was so young. This one has done nothing, and she’ll be gone soon.” Jendy sighed. “Very anticlimactic!”
Shanti sat stiffly, wishing she could shout the truth—she was doing all she could. But Jendy was right; in the end, it still amounted to nothing. Maybe she should have used tough love with Sanyu instead of comforting him. Maybe she should be pushing harder. Nothing she did would please everyone, but she couldn’t let this be her legacy—a wedding photo in a binder with “scanned old papers” written beneath it.
“You overestimate the power of a queen in Njaza, precisely because you’re too young to remember,” Marie said quietly. “The queen has as little power as us, and an even shorter amount of time to wield it.”
Shanti shook her head—she still had a few weeks left and she wouldn’t believe that she couldn’t change things. Her friends had been brave enough to publicly defy their king and demand change; Shanti had to step up her game.
“The queen has as much power as us, and we each have as much power as a queen,” Shanti said, settling in next to Salli to help staple the pamphlets that were handed out in schools and markets.
Salli handed her a stack with a smile. “Is that another of your quotes?”
“It’s the truth.”
They worked in silence for a while and then Shanti glanced at Marie, who seemed to know everything about Njaza. “Do you know what happens to the queen? After she’s dismissed?”
In her head, the old images of the women who had preceded her—save the first—flashed in an unbroken line, with her own face appearing at the end.
“Oh, I’ve heard all kinds of things,” Jendy said excitedly before Marie could answer. “She is sacrificed to Omakuumi—wrapped in banana leaves and boiled up, then served as a meal to make the king strong.”
“I heard she disintegrates,” Nneka cut in, voice full of drama like she was telling a scary story. “Yes! She turns to dust, her purpose in life having been completed. That, or the shame of her weakness eats her from the inside out. Either way, POOF! She’s gone.”
Fear made a quick dash up both Shanti’s arms as she worked, raising the fine hairs in its wake.
Marie laughed, shook her head. “No. I think in the past most of them left this country and went to a place where they could be happy and where they never had to think of their time as queen again.”
“I just don’t understand the point of this tradition,” Shanti said, venting in a way that she couldn’t at the palace. “On the surface, it looks progressive—a marriage that isn’t truly binding until the couple has had time to see how they work together. But in reality, they bring in woman after woman, trapping her in a powerless role, and for what? It’s impossible to build a marriage in just four months, let alone change a kingdom. She isn’t even allowed to serve as a figurehead. It couldn’t be more pointless if they tried.”
She slammed her mouth shut—surely, they’d wonder why she was so upset over a tradition that wasn’t hers.
Nneka sucked her teeth, an exquisitely long and exhausted sound that resonated with the anger inside of Shanti. “The council are a bunch of old men who don’t care about waste or common sense. They are the ones who decide what is logical and what is fair, and if they’re incorrect, then they decide that being incorrect is logical. They then lay their decisions at the feet of Amageez, who I’m sure is somewhere on the mount of the ancestors saying, ‘No, no! Leave me out of this, okay?’”
Marie’s glass scraped against the table as she placed it down. “Oh, my young friends. These decisions that seem wasteful to us always benefit someone. A queen without power who can be replaced at any time,” she said darkly, then shook her head. “Whatever the initial reason for it, it lets every woman in Njaza now know her place. If the most important woman i
n the land is little more than a temporary trinket—not even a trophy, which is shown off—then the seamstress and shop owner and the shepherdess shouldn’t expect any better. There’s an ugly brilliance to it, and the fact that it might not have been purposeful makes it worse.”
There was a heavy pause as the weight of Marie’s words settled over them. Shanti actually felt a bit ill—Marie had put a label onto the terrible feeling that permeated the palace and forced Shanti to sneak out to make change with her subjects since her words meant nothing in the kingdom’s heart. Ugly brilliance. Shanti had never considered herself naive, but even she hadn’t thought of the many ways her position reflected that of all Njazans not seen as important enough to listen to.
Eventually, Jendy chirped that she had a USB drive with some new TV shows on them. They watched a couple of episodes of a popular Nollywood sitcom on Marie’s laptop, their shared laughter clearing the unbearable cloud Shanti’s question and its answers had brought to rest over them.
IT WAS VERY late when Shanti got back to the palace—much later than she usually returned home. She’d known she shouldn’t stay for two episodes, but it had been hard to leave the comfort of people who, even if they didn’t know who she really was, welcomed her. It had been even harder to come back to the palace aware that those same people knew she’d done nothing at all in her role of queen since she arrived, and blamed her for it.
She was careful entering the secret passageway, but was still jumpy. She whirled when she heard something behind her, but there was nothing but darkness.
When she got to her room, she placed her wig and glasses back into the largest secret compartment in her desk, showered, and then crawled into bed, something else settling over her along with the blanket: worry.
Marie was fine for now, but would there be retaliation? And the people of Njaza were growing restless—she was sure Jendy and Nneka weren’t the only ones thinking of burning it all down or busting out the guillotines.