Crown of Thunder

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  Aliya was right. The arashi that attacked the village was sent here.

  I had imagined Kos as a ruined city, but to hear my fears spoken out loud crushes my heart all over again.

  “Taj,” he says, smiling so much now that he’s showing his teeth. “Taj, Taj, Taj.” He raises his hand. I lean in close, and he moves to touch my face. He probably thought he’d never get the chance to see me again after I escaped from Kos. Maybe he’s just trying to confirm to himself that I am indeed real, that I’m not a dream. That whatever his mission was, he accomplished it.

  I lean back and look at him. I can’t bear to see how sickly he looks now. No more muscle, just skin and bone at this point. Like he’s been deflated. “If it’s a sin killing you, let me call it forth.”

  He chuckles. More like a gasp than anything else. “Any sin you could call from me would kill me with the effort. Do not bother, brother. It is enough to know that you are still alive.” He rests his hand back on his stomach. Tolu looks at me out of the corner of his eye and smirks. “The trouble people have gone to in order to keep you alive . . .”

  There’s no need to remind me.

  “But remember this: Right hand or left, we are all of the same body.” He coughs, and blood appears on his mouth. He weakly raises a hand to wipe it, but before he can get to it, I tear off a piece of my tattered shirt and dab at his lips. “That is supposed to be Bo’s job.”

  “He always was the caretaker,” I say, managing a small smile.

  “But we knew you cared. Even when you would pretend not to, you were fooling no one.” Tears pool in his eyes. “We knew it was you who planned everyone’s Daga Day. We knew it was you who made it so that Omar could witness his sister’s Jeweling ceremony.” A tear leaks down the side of his face. “We saw how you mourned Ifeoma when she Crossed during the Fall of Kos. And we heard stories of the army of renegade aki you raised in the forest to help defeat Izu.”

  I shake my head. “That was Aliya’s doing. I . . .” Even as I try to shrug off responsibility, I can’t.

  “Arzu is here,” he whispers.

  “What? How do you know?”

  “A message. Sent back to the rebels. We have friends . . . among the refugees. We have all been at work. It’s not over, Taj.” He speaks like he no longer hears me. “It’s not over. You must come back. And you must forgive her for what she has done. Forgive her. And come back. It’s not over.”

  Questions swirl in my mind around Arzu, around what it is Tolu says she has done. Whether it has anything to do with the scar on her neck. But I know he doesn’t have much time left. I want to tell him that it is over. That Karima has won. I want to tell him that all I want is peace for myself, even if that means a life on the run. Even if it means being a wanderer, moving from new land to new land. Even if it means never laying my head on the same patch of sand or grass or stone to rest. I’ve already left everything I’ve ever loved behind. All I want is peace, but instead I tell him, “No, Tolu. It’s not over.” I hold his hand and thread my fingers through his. “You did well. You reached me. We will save Kos. All of us. Together.” I’m lying to him; the sin grows in me. “There are aki here. An army of them.” My voice is down to a whisper. Tolu’s eyes slowly close. “And they fight like nothing I’ve ever seen before. I saw one of them kill four inisisa in less than the time it takes to bake good jollof. And with them at our side and Aliya and the others waiting for us back in the city, we will . . .” I trail off. His hand has gone limp in mine. “Tolu?”

  I know he’s gone, but I shake him anyway. Gently. “Tolu?” Then again, “Tolu?”

  My lips quiver. My hands shake. I try to sniff back the sobs, but they come anyway, and I bury my face in his blanket.

  * * *

  • • •

  I don’t know how long I spend weeping into Tolu’s blankets, but eventually nurses arrive, wrap up his body in many-colored blankets, and carry him away.

  They vanish through the tent’s flap. It is several long minutes before I can find the strength to rise to my feet. When I stand, something on the bed catches my eye. Where Tolu’s hand had been, there’s now a stone. It might have glowed blue on a necklace around his throat or green in an anklet. He might have worn it in his ear. But here he must have kept it sewn somewhere in his clothes. Now it’s a dull, ashen piece of crystal. I scoop it up and hold it so tightly in my fist that I can feel blood seeping through my fingers.

  When I leave the tent, I wander in a daze. The fires have all been put out. But everywhere, groups of people are carrying bodies. Some of the bundles are smaller than others. One woman walks past me solemnly, a bundle held closely to her chest. Tear streaks mark her cheeks. But she wears the same expression on her face as so many others. A coldness, as though their faces are carved out of stone. Why don’t they cry? Why don’t they let themselves cry?

  I search for familiar faces—Zaki, Arzu, Aliya, anyone—but stop when I hear hushed tones.

  On a crate in an alley sits Juba with her face in her hands, her shoulders heaving with sorrow. Arzu kneels before her. I’m witnessing something I shouldn’t be seeing. Something intimate and precious and secret passing between them. I feel like a spy.

  “I have failed my people,” Juba sobs. “We have always moved. Always migrated. But I saw the river.” She looks into Arzu’s face. “I saw the river. I saw the water. I saw a home for us. And it had been so long since the last storm. And . . .”

  Arzu puts her hand to Juba’s face and shushes her.

  “Arzu, what have I done?”

  “Ayaba,” Arzu says in a voice so low I almost don’t hear it, “you do not control the arashi. You cannot govern the weather.”

  That hits me so hard and so suddenly in my chest that I nearly fall back. Juba can’t control the arashi. But, apparently, Karima can. And she sent this one after me. The reason for all this fire, all this death, is me.

  Juba’s posture straightens. Something in her face hardens. “Leave me,” she whispers.

  “Juba . . .” It comes out of Arzu as a whimper.

  “Leave me, sicario.” Juba rises from the wooden crate. “Go make yourself useful.” She has that coldness in her face now, the stoic look of her people. “They will need many hands to bury our dead. I must serve my people.”

  Arzu grows so still it is as though she has turned into stone. I can’t see the tears that pool in her eyes, but I can see the way her shoulders shake as Juba turns to leave.

  I hurry away before either of them notices me.

  * * *

  • • •

  I’ve come out of my grief-haze enough to feel the desire to be helpful. Villagers, those carrying bodies and those carrying tools, all head to the rim of the village where the arashi attacked. Arzu walks beside me but says nothing. Her face is expressionless. We are both just part of the crowd heading to the mass graveyard. Someone hands us thick wooden trowels for digging.

  When we get to the rim, I see many already at work. Some dig graves while others smooth out the clothes on the dead. Inyo darken the sky above us and the air around us. Their howls rise, then subside, then rise again. Through it all, people work.

  Arzu and I head in the same direction. She finds her way to a tall, wide-shouldered man having trouble with his trowel. He falls to one knee, trying to hold himself up with his staff. Zaki. Arzu rushes to his side and kneels next to him. Shadows swirl around his black robe.

  “Rest,” she tells him. “I will dig while you gather your strength.”

  I find an empty plot nearby and get down on my knees and begin digging. I know I shouldn’t be listening, but I can’t help myself. Will he reveal who he is?

  “I don’t know what you did,” Arzu says, like she’s trying to make conversation, “but I thank you. For your part in saving the village.”

  Zaki coughs. I hear the blood in it. “Just a little forbidden magic is all that
was.”

  Arzu digs. “You are from Kos. Your accent.”

  Zaki picks his trowel off the ground and resumes digging, and the two of them are so close together they look like they know each other. But they are just two people joined in intimate labor. Sharing tragedy. After Baptisms in the dahia, Kosians would look at one another as though they knew one another. Absolute strangers would help or comfort one another, would pick through the rubble of the homes of people they’d never met before. They shared a tragedy. They were bound by it.

  “Yes,” Zaki says after a long pause. “I once lived in Kos.” He stares at the ground and smiles. “I was a Mage, in fact. A lawmaker. What we call kanselo.” In between his words is the sound of wood scooping up dirt. “But I loved to study. I secretly hoped to gain a place in the Ulo Amamihe. The Great House of Ideas. Unfotunately, what I loved to study was dangerous. Dangerous enough to have me cast out of Kos, never to return.” He looks up at her. “And you? I hear Kos in your voice too.”

  Arzu touches her neck, as though she has just now remembered what happened to her. “It’s in the past.” She bunches her scarf up around her throat, and the scar is gone. “We must move forward.” I inch my way closer to them to hear better. They dig in silence for a quarter of an hour before Arzu speaks again. “I escaped. I left by choice. I was part of a rebellion. I don’t know how long since you’ve last been to Kos, but now a queen rules who cares nothing for her subjects. I was part of a group who wanted to save the city. Our city.” She looks at the grave she’s been digging the whole time. “But I was captured and made her servant. Again. This time, my task was to choose captured rebels for public executions.” Her hand shakes. “I wanted to fight back. I would rather have died than do this thing. I even tried once to . . . to end it. A rope around my neck, but I couldn’t go through with it. My friends, they told me it was best for the rebellion if I went along. If I let Karima believe she could trust me. I was to be their agent in the Palace. I was forced to select many of my friends for death.” She grips her shaking wrist with her free hand, holds it close to her chest.

  Zaki tosses his trowel to the ground and hugs his daughter. He silently strokes her hair.

  A few moments later, she pushes away and starts digging again. More violently than before. “I escaped,” she says, her words punctuated by her trowel turning the soil. “Mages who were part of our rebellion made me a special palm wine. It simulated death. I was to appear as though I had murdered myself out of guilt. It did not take much to imagine such a fate. The aki who were tasked with burying me brought me outside the city Wall, and that is where I woke up. I did not know if I could trust them, but they let me go.” She digs and tosses dirt over her shoulder. “I left and, later, waited for others. I did not know if I could face them. After what I’d done.”

  You must forgive her for what she has done, Tolu had said before dying. Tears sting my eyes without warning. I blink them away, but more come. When I look up, all I see around me is death. I feel so lost.

  I need to be far from here. As far from here as possible. I drop my trowel and walk away from the camp. I don’t know how I carry myself there, but when I stop walking, Zaki’s house stares at me from the top of its hill. A place of peace and quiet. Where no one will see me. Where no one will try to tell me what to do. Where no one will remind me of who or what I abandoned.

  When I open the door and see Aliya lying on a table, eyes closed, wet cloth on her forehead, I want to laugh at the absurdity of it all. Of all the people I could run to who wouldn’t speak to me of Kos . . .

  But something has willed me here. So I decide to stop fighting it. And I take a seat next to my sick friend. And I take her hand in mine.

  It’s the warmest thing I’ve touched all day.

  CHAPTER 23

  ALIYA LIES ON a pallet placed on two desks moved together. She’s been given a white robe, lighter than the heavy dust-colored robes she’s taken to wearing here. I move slowly. I don’t even want to disturb the air around her in case it does something to harm her.

  Zaki must have brought her here after he defended the village. Before he joined the others in burying their dead.

  Aliya is not sweating as much as she was just before the arashi attack, and her breathing has slowed. It sounds normal again, though I’m not a nurse or Healer, so I have no way of knowing. And, really, at this point I’m too scared to go and ask for one. If I leave and Aliya wakes up and doesn’t know where she is or what happened, who’s going to explain it to her? So, I stick around and try to remember how the nurses moved when they were working on a patient. I get up and put my fingers to the skin under Aliya’s jaw and take her pulse. Then I put my ear to her mouth, and I listen for her breath. It’s almost like when I woke up after nearly drowning in the river and Aliya was sucking the water from my lungs and breathing breath back into me. I know I look foolish, but it feels good to be doing something.

  “If there’s anything I can do to help,” I say to her, stupidly, because she probably can’t hear me, “just, you know, say so or, well, you can’t say anything, so I guess just knock on the wooden desk or something.”

  I think of how drained she looks when she comes out of these episodes. It has happened a few times now, and every time, it gets worse. It takes her longer to come back to normal. She always seems to leave a piece of herself behind. Somehow, Tolu’s stone has found its way into my hands, and I fiddle with it, turn it over in my hands, watch it glint in the candlelight.

  I look up from the dulled gemstone in my hands. “Do you remember that time at Zoe’s when we first met? You had a bunch of dates on your table, and you kept rearranging them in rows, and I walked over and snatched one off your table and popped it in my mouth. And you said you were using it, and I think I said something like ‘If you were using it, you would eat it’ or something foolish like that.” I laugh at the memory, and I think I see a smile cross Aliya’s face too. But it’s probably just a trick of the light. “You held my hand and my arms, and you looked at the sin-spots on them, and for the first time, it was like someone wasn’t repulsed by them. They didn’t shock you or put you off or make you want to spit at me. You called them equations. You called them poems.” It feels good to talk like this—to remember how it used to be.

  “Back then, I was too proud to admit it or let you see it, but it’s something I go back to a lot in my head. That moment. You had this . . . this look of joy on your face, like you couldn’t believe it. And the idea that these ugly sin-spots could bring someone joy? That was . . . it’s still tough for me to believe it happened.” It occurs to me that the appropriate thing to do, if these were normal circumstances, would be to give Aliya a stone, a family jewel or something like a heart-stone. Something to show her what she means to me. But I have nothing on me. Of course. I’m about to get up to get her another blanket when I see her stir. She blinks her eyes open.

  “I remember that day,” she says at last. I feel tears prick the backs of my eyes at the sound of her voice. “That day at Zoe’s. It was supposed to be a break from my studies. I was to meet other students, but they never arrived.” She smiles.

  Heat rises in my cheeks. “You brought your study materials anyway.”

  She chuckles. “Oh, the dates. Yes, I was a dutiful student. It was how I was raised.” She flexes her fingers absently into fists, like she’s testing them for feeling. “I was so rude,” she says at last.

  “Rude?”

  She turns my way, slowly. “The way I grabbed your arm as soon as I saw your markings.”

  “Oh. My sin-spots.” I roll my sleeves back and look at them. A lion on my forearm, the tail of a dragon curling down one shoulder, snakes ringing my biceps, a griffin whose wings are wrapped around my wrist, and on it goes until only a little dark flesh shows through.

  “I was so entranced. I couldn’t believe it.” She swallows. “They were beautiful.”

  Now my entire body
warms. “I’m going to get you some water,” I say suddenly, because I need to start moving or else she’ll see how much I’m shaking or how heated my face feels.

  “Taj,” she murmurs, and grabs my wrist.

  “Yes?”

  For a long time, she’s silent. Then a hand falls onto my shoulder. I start and knock over the stool, turning to see Zaki standing over me. He no longer leans on his cane. Behind him, in the doorway, is Arzu. She steps tentatively over the threshold and into the living room, where our journeys have brought us. I hide Tolu’s stone in my belt.

  “Arzu,” Aliya whispers.

  “My friend.” Tears pool in Arzu’s eyes, and she rushes to Aliya’s side, pressing her forehead to Aliya’s. Something private is passing between the two of them. I remember how it was for us when we left Osimiri, and it was Arzu who was sick and Aliya who cared for her. And I imagine something important happened between them when they first decided to keep that secret, the truth of what Arzu had done in Kos. Forgive her, Tolu told me.

  I head out the front door to breathe fresh air and clear the fog in my head. So much has happened so quickly. My mind is a mess of images, all whirling about like a dozen dogs chasing their tails.

  Zaki closes the door behind him and joins me. We both look out onto the village. Juba’s tribe wades through the rubble and sand piles and burnt bits of houses. From up on this hill, I can’t hear a single sound they make.

  “Your friend is touched,” Zaki says finally.

  I grit my teeth. I have no patience for riddles or circle-talk right now. “What does that mean?”

  “It means that she, more evidently than the rest of us, is a vessel for the Unnamed. She sees the world in its truest form. The equations she speaks of, and the proofs she performs on her parchment—she is describing the world as the Unnamed sees it and has designed it. All of it. It is being written onto the very skin of her body.” Zaki waits for me to absorb that. Her equations. My sin-spots. Are they the same? “She is learning how to do things we have not been able to do for hundreds of years. Pretty soon, she will have discovered how to turn coal itself into diamonds.” Zaki turns to me. “She is learning the world in order to remake it.”