Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements

by Walidah Imarisha

  Cy let out an impatient sigh. She knew Holt had many interests in the north, none of which had anything to do with the peace, prosperity, and security of the Archipelago.

  Cy let her focus shift inward, letting the scene before her blur, blending from one image to another. New voices sounded and others went silent. Her body relaxed, her heart slowed. Her eyes took on a glassy, unfocused look, their pupils dilated to large dark pools. Such was the demeanor and practice of a Memorial shifting from the present to the channels of Long Memory.

  A past memory overlaid the present—ghost images superimposed on flesh. Cy felt the weight of the memory, knew it hailed from before her birth. Older memories felt heavier, the pressure behind her eyes increasing the further she reached back. In the beginning Cy felt like she was being crushed from the inside out by any memory before her time. But after years of training, in her final year of apprenticeship, she barely noticed the weight of this memory.

  The phantom voices of a long gone council rose and fell: “The settlement must take place. We can no longer allow the Northernlings to continue wandering across all the lands with their herds.”

  “Yes, they claim all the lands their stock grazes on. They use too much given their size. That land is profitable and can be used for the benefit of all.”

  The gold coins clinked together. Cy knew these were the voices of the merchants. They said they wanted the settlement project for the good of the Northernlings. The memory had the sharp taste of falsehood. The land of the north was rich and good for growing grain and raising herds of livestock. Many of the wealthier merchant houses saw the settlement project as a means to gain access to production of goods in the north.

  A green-cloaked figure finally stepped forward to speak. “The Northernlings are not of one people but of many, many identities,” he said in a voice soft but firm. “The Northernlings of the mountains are not the same as those who roam the plains. They are the oldest people of this land, having been here before the boats of the Archipelago landed many of our ancestors on these shores. They are a proud and diverse people. We must seek a Memorial from the north to confer with before taking action.”

  Cy felt the figure’s presence through the memory and knew it instantly. She had spent countless hours with this presence guiding her through the streams of memory—it was a much younger Hammon.

  Cy would have known it was Hammon even if she had not felt his presence. In lessons at the Central Library, he had made reference to this memory often, a pivotal turning point in their history.

  Ultimately, in what was one of the most divisive actions in the Archipelago’s history, a northern Memorial was not sought, and the settlement project was enacted. Many were uneasy with the move to act without a blessing from the Central Library. It also precipitated the decline in the stability of the north, bringing on more violence and poverty. Ever since the settlement project, the north had been mired in conflict, with no small role played by the various armies of the governing provincial houses. One house would arm one faction while another would arm another. The factions then fought each other and the provincial armies, and the north saw the rise of petty rulers fighting for what limited power they could hold.

  Jumping at a sharp jab to the ribs, Cy was yanked back to the present, back into the council chambers.

  “Get back here!” Ban hissed in her ear.

  Cy’s pupils contracted and her face flushed as her heart sped up. Back in the present, Cy glanced around the gallery. A group of men sitting nearby looked at them with barely concealed contempt, while a cluster of women gave Cy and Ban uneasy glances. Looking down at the floor of the council, she sensed that there were far more speaking in support of Holt than in opposition. Cy stood sorrowfully, and left the gallery with Ban.

  The air hung heavy from a recent rainstorm, the kind that frequented the coast. The humidity made the air fragrant with flowers and earth. Beneath a fig tree in the Central Library gardens Ban paced nervously, while Cy lay on the grass trying to stay cool.

  Cy wore her thick dark hair long, as was the custom in the north for both men and women. She liked to lie on the grass, hair fanned out around her like a cape, the cool of the earth on her neck and scalp. In the heat and humidity of the Capital, Ban could never understand why Cy wouldn’t just cut it all off. For her part, Cy couldn’t understand how Ban could stand to be barefoot all the time. Coming from the Riverlands, Ban had grown up on boats and docks where most everyone went shoeless.

  Ban flopped down at the base of the tree and began to eat one of the ripe figs.

  “What will we do, Cy?”

  Cy turned her head to look at her friend. “Prepare for the worst, I suppose. What else can we do?”

  • • •

  “She is a Coull and a Memorial,” said the paunchy, balding man standing in the middle of Holt’s chambers. “Her family were all Memorials, killed in some tribal dispute years back. She was at the hearing today, with another Memorial. She even had the audacity to use the Memory while you were speaking.”

  Holt only grunted. He did not turn to look at the four others in his chamber. He stared at the window, not out at the rolling seas but rather at his reflection. He wanted to see himself in this moment of victory.

  “Yes,” continued the speaker. “She is powerful, though—apprenticed to Hammon the elder.”

  Holt interrupted, breaking his gaze at his own reflection. “I do not care about the old man. But the girl I would like removed.” He moved to sit in an armchair. “When we take the libraries, make sure you get the girl. Gather what men you need. Use plain blades, no house markings, and no uniforms. Take the libraries, starting with Central. Quickly. The momentum must be sustained. We can’t allow anything to go wrong, not when we are so close to victory.”

  The men around Holt nodded acknowledgment and departed. The man who had spoken, Timmon, remained. Timmon had known Holt for years, watching and helping him build to this momentous achievement. Timmon could sense there was something more on Holt’s mind.

  Holt poured two glasses of wine. “You know the legend of the binding, Timmon?”

  “Of course. Doesn’t every child learn of it in school? It is the story of how the Long Memory was bound to a line of people charged with seeing our memories safeguarded.”

  “Yes, the great story of the binding,” Holt spoke mockingly as he took a seat beside the closest person he had to a friend.

  “Do you know, Timmon, in some circles it is said it was the Coullish who first told the story of the binding? I have been to the north many times and have heard the story of the binding told very differently than how we learned it in school. In the far north it is said that powerful story makers feared the loss of history, and they used the letters of the making found only on the scrolls in the caves of the Coull Mountains to write a story. A story that would bind memory to a line of people. The Memorials.”

  Holt paused to sip his wine, and silence ensued. Timmon was unsure if he should speak, and he was about to when Holt finally continued.

  “In Coull and other obscure parts of the north, it is also said that these story makers wrote a story of unbinding.”

  “A story of the unbinding?” Timmon started. “I confess, I have no knowledge of such a thing.”

  “I am not surprised. I believe it is even little known among the Northernlings themselves. And among the Memorials it is an esoteric study.”

  “But would not the unbinding of memory be a means of reaching our end? To stamp out the Long Memory?” Timmon sat forward, looking at Holt.

  Holt shook his head. “No, I think not. To unbind memory would be to free it. The Memorials are meddlesome, but they do serve a useful purpose in containing memory. Now the people remember only what they need to in order to go about their lives. To unbind memory would mean to restore full memory to all the people. It would mark our end. What we need only do is control memory through containing the Memorials.”

  “This Coullish Memorial, you think she—” Timm
on lifted his eyebrows.

  “If the legend is true, I believe the story of the unbinding might be held somewhere within her endless memory. She comes from a strong line of Memorials and from the very lands of the binding. Indeed, had a Memorial been sought prior to the enacting of the Settlement Act, it would have very likely been her mother.”

  “You have known of her for some time, then,” said Timmon.

  “Oh yes. She may not know it. But we have history between us, she and I.”

  • • •

  Preparing for the worst does not make it hurt any less. Two days after the vote, they came to the library in the middle of the night. The smell of smoke woke Cy first. Within minutes, hands seized her in the dark and dragged her from bed. They thrust a burlap sack over her head, bound her hands behind her back. She heard shouting and the clanging of metal—the clash of swords.

  It was hard to breathe under the sack. Her capturers half shoved, half dragged her. She stumbled and became entangled with the legs of one of the intruders. Both fell hard. A boot kicked her in the gut.

  “Get up! Get up, damn you!”

  Arms jerked Cy to her feet, and she struggled to stay alert, clinging to reality. It was no use. Feeling nauseated, she threw up and lost consciousness.

  Over what seemed like days Cy flitted in and out of consciousness. She had been on a ship, that she knew. She had felt the rolling of the sea, the dampness and saltiness of sea travel. There had been bodies, many bodies, tightly packed in the hold below the ship’s deck. She remembered groans mixing with the creaking of the wooden hull. No one had cried out, though. Cy herself had kept silent as a tomb.

  But now there was nothing. No bodies, no sounds. Cy felt cold, sore. She lay face down on a smooth stone floor. Lifting her head, Cy could see a wooden cot. With a heave, she lifted herself onto all fours and crawled toward the cot. Lights popped behind her eyes.

  Now she raked her hands through her hair, felt the knots and dried vomit. Cy’s stomach clenched; she felt disgusting on top of broken. Cy slumped onto the cot and her face landed in something wet. It was a bowl of turnip stew beside a piece of flat bread and a small cup of water on a tray.

  Cy cursed. Half the soup had spilled but the water cup was still full. She resisted the urge to down the water and the soup in a few gulps. Instead she sat and slowly sipped about a third of each, then waited to let it settle before downing another third.

  The meals came twice a day, pushed through a slot in the cell door. Beyond their hands Cy saw nothing of her captors. After several days, she felt some strength and clarity return. She began to save a small amount of water from each meal until she had a full cup. Tearing a scrap from her tunic she dipped the cloth in the water, using it to clean her wounds and wash the filth from her body as best she could.

  Cy scrubbed her toes and thought of Ban. She and Ban loved to go to the seawall in the Capital harbor to soak their feet in the cool water. Ban had grown up on boats. Her father owned a fleet of barges used to ship inland crops and other goods to the Capital. Cy hoped Ban had escaped the raid on the library and fled to her family’s home in the Riverlands. She could easily have found passage, smuggled upriver on one of her father’s ships if she had made it to the harbor.

  “If Ban had been on the ship with me, I imagine she would have called out to me,” Cy thought. She smiled a little at this, thinking about how her friend, continuously chattering, could not have kept her mouth shut, not even if threatened with death.

  The days were monotonous. Cy spent her time watching her bruises turn from deep purple to yellow until the day she finally felt strong enough to dive into the streams of the Long Memory so she could understand where she was being held. Images layered upon one another to form a sort of moving diorama of the fortresses’s history. Some were sharp and clear, some faded and blurred. All around her the memories of people imprinted in time. It was a cacophony of yells, sobs, and scraping of shackles. So many people had suffered here. Died here. It almost overwhelmed Cy. She swayed where she stood. With great effort, Cy cleared many of the memories, allowing those remaining to come into sharper focus. They confirmed Cy’s hunch about where she was being held. The eastern edge of the central Archipelago was dotted with dozens of small stone islands turned defensive outposts and then abandoned. Some of the forts had dreadful histories, places where refugees or slaves would be held without recourse, until they withered to dust.

  Cy spent hours swimming through the channels of memory, for as long as she could stand. Some of these memories were so old that they pressed down on her, making it difficult to breathe. It took time, but she allowed the images to layer and fade until she could clearly distinguish one memory from another. In this clarity Cy could almost walk through the memories as she paced her cell. She listened to a mother sing a lullaby to her child, both fresh from a slaver’s ship. Cy sat in on a whispered conversation between ten former slaves turned captives. They huddled in the cell planning escape.

  “The guards will have to open the door if they cannot open the slot for our food. We can be on either side of the door, ready.”

  Cy stood and let the memory fade. The practice made her feel sad and drained. It was the exploration of the past, not merely the facts of history but the stories of the past, that made the Memorials so important. A Memorial did not simply know that this fortress had been used to cage refugees, a Memorial smelled the death in the air, heard the sound of screams, sensed hope draining from bodies like spilled blood. With Memorials remembering the pain and devastation, their role was to ensure that things like these prison forts would never be used again. But here was Cy sitting in this cell, drowning in the pain of the past mixed with her own.

  The sound of her door being thrown open ripped Cy back from the Long Memory. Then three guards were upon her, wrestling a burlap sack over her head and shackles on her wrists. In the moment before the sack went over her head Cy saw her guards’ faces. Young, so young, she thought, and a little uncertain. Cy’s heart pounded.

  The guards marched Cy out of her cell, up several short flights of stairs. Trying to contain racing thoughts of being thrown off a cliff into the sea, Cy struggled, but her guards just dragged her with more force. Cy began to panic. She was going to start screaming, she thought.

  A door scraped open and fresh air brushed over Cy. In an instant someone yanked the sack off Cy’s head and shoved her forward. Hands still shackled, she landed hard, face down. Without a word, the guards uncuffed her and left, sealing a door behind them.

  It took several minutes for Cy to gain her vision. She was in a tiny courtyard of sorts, completely surrounded by high stone walls. Gravel, grass, and some flowering bushes. Most welcome was the brilliant blue sky. Cy rolled onto her back, staring up at it.

  After some time, the scraping of a door jarred her peace. Cy sat up quickly and looked around. Across the courtyard, a mere ten feet or so away, a slender man seemingly unfolded himself through a small wooden door. As he straightened, Cy saw that he carried a canvas bag and wore a broad woven hat. She moved to stand, and the man jumped at the sound of her body on gravel. He dropped the bag with a clatter, and an assortment of gardening tools spilled out. Taking a square of cloth from his back pocket, the man wiped his brow, cleared his throat, and bent down to collect his tools.

  Cy watched cautiously. “Hello?”

  The man finished picking up his tools with the air of a person focused on ignoring something obvious. He took up some clippers, setting to work on a hedge.

  “Hello,” Cy said again.

  The man’s clippers worked faster.

  “My name is Cy. Are you the gardener here?”

  The man stopped and wiped his brow again. “Yes, and they cannot be bothered to tell me when there will be someone here and when there will not be someone here, it seems. So please stay over there while I work.” A slight accent flavored his soft voice, almost covered by the nervous tremor.

  “Of course,” she said, “I would not harm you. Ple
ase, do your work.”

  The man worked meticulously and seemed to enjoy the challenge of making everything symmetrical. After a while, he packed up his tools and went to the door.

  As he stepped through, he looked back at Cy. “My name is Makati.”

  And so it began that every other day Cy would be removed from her cell, taken to this little courtyard and left for about an hour.

  It was with no predictability that Makati worked in the courtyard. At first he would only acknowledge Cy with a nod. But over time and after many promptings, Makati began to respond. Mostly he would only answer questions about the garden. He told Cy the names of all its plants. Eventually he told Cy about the gardens in other parts of the fortress. Cy learned from Makati that there were about one hundred other prisoners. Makati said new prisoners arrived every now and then on ships, usually no more than two to three at a time.

  One afternoon Cy sat in the shade of the wall and studied Makati as he worked. His deep red-brown skin was much darker than her own. It marked him as someone from the Outer Isles. He worked barefoot, dressed in plain linen pants and a soft woven shirt.

  After a time, Makati asked, “You are a Memorial?”

  Cy nodded yes and stretched her legs out in front of her.

  “Is that special?”

  “I don’t know. Some people certainly think so.”

  “It wasn’t until I reached the west that I heard of Memorials,” Makati said, continuing to weed. “Where I am from, on the Island of All in the Outer Isles, we do not have Memorials. We used to have what we called Holders. Those raised to be keepers of the stories that made us. But they passed from existence some time ago.”

  Cy, curiosity peaked, asked, “How is it that the Holders stopped being?”

  “Oh, it was many years ago now. Long before my day of birth. It is an old story.” Makati sat back on his heels.