“Maybe. If we move quickly.”
But what will we find? I thought. I shivered and went to relieve myself a distance away from our camp. As I walked back, I called up a current and let myself tree while I looked up at the night sky. There were stars now. The clouds had dissipated. I would see things clearly when I returned home.
I reached into my pocket and brought out the golden ball with the fingerprint-like designs on it. Running a current around its surface, I watched as the ball lifted from my palm and rotated before me like a tiny planet. Then I retracted the current and let the ball drop into my hand. When I put it back in my pocket, I ran my fingertips over the triangular metal pieces sitting at the bottom.
I reached into my other pocket and brought out my astrolabe. Holding it to my face, I stopped walking. I stared at the elegant device. What I realized made me sick to my stomach and my legs grow weak. After all the changes I’d been through in the last year, becoming part Meduse, making otjize on a different planet, but especially with the activation of the zinariya, my astrolabe didn’t seem like the most advanced technology anymore. Astrolabes were the only object that also carried the full record of your entire life on it—you, your family, and all forecasts of your future. The chip in it had to be transferred if the astrolabe broke, which they rarely ever did if they were made by my father or me. My family’s fortune and identity were based on the importance of astrolabes to the world and beyond and the superiority of the ones we made. Even peoples at Oomza Uni used astrolabes. However, I’d barely even glanced at mine since I’d been taken into the desert.
Now I touched it to turn it on and my heart sank even lower. It wouldn’t turn on. I called up a current and used it to “inspire” my astrolabe. I’d built this astrolabe myself, special specific part by special specific part. I’d made it to last. But because I knew every inch of it, I knew that now it was pointless trying to turn it on, reset it, shake it, smash it against my leg. My astrolabe was dead. I whimpered as it crossed my mind that maybe even the chip inside it was now unreadable. This would mean that I’d just lost my entire identity. I put the astrolabe in my pocket and took five deep breaths, the tears in my eyes drying more with each breath. Mwinyi finished packing the tent on Rakumi’s back.
“I’m ready when you are,” I told Mwinyi.
* * *
Rakumi walked at a steady strong pace, her onward wavelike movement seeming to say, “Forward, forward, forward.” The motion was uncomfortable at first, but I grew used to it. Mwinyi sat right behind me and I leaned against him and this is how we stayed for several hours.
“Binti?” Mwinyi asked, breaking the silence.
“Yes?”
“We’re close.”
“I know. The land looks the same but it’s somehow familiar.”
“I have something to tell you,” he said. “From your grandmother.”
My astrolabe was broken and in order for my world to stay as it was, I had taken Mwinyi’s advice and not tried to use the zinariya at all since going to sleep. I hadn’t bothered trying to reach Okwu through my okuoko, either. In this way, the last several hours of disconnection had been the most peaceful hours I’d experienced in quite some time. My heart began to pound and suddenly it felt difficult to breathe, and an image of Heru’s chest bursting flashed through my mind.
Mwinyi climbed off Rakumi and I did the same. We stood there facing each other.
“What . . . did she say?” I whispered.
He hesitated for several moments and I wanted to hug him for those moments. “Three days after we left your home, you stopped hearing from your partner Okwu.”
I frowned at the word “partner.” “Yes. I’d just learned I could reach it through a sort of . . . connection we had. I said I was okay, Okwu said it was okay, then that third day, nothing.” I turned to Mwinyi and he looked at me as if he wanted to put some distance between us. “Why?” I asked.
“I know more of what happened now,” he said. He looked at his feet. “The Ariya told me everything a day ago.”
I frowned deeply at him.
Mwinyi looked me in the eye now. “I thought it better to tell you now than a few hours ago.”
We stared at each other. Rakumi’s reins clicked and dragged on the sand as she looked curiously at us.
“That wasn’t your choice to make,” I finally said, but the words didn’t come out in an angry growl, they came out choked. I pressed the tips of my right fingers to my forehead. “I’d rather know ev—”
“They came for Okwu.”
I sighed. “Khoush soldiers,” I said. “We know that. They fought and my family fled into the Root, into the cellar. Right?”
“Yes.”
It felt as if there were hot embers in my chest. “Okwu . . . Did they . . .” I didn’t want to say it. “Tell me, Mwinyi!”
A pained look crossed his eyes and that made everything he said next more devastating. “Things . . . things didn’t happen exactly as I thought.” He took a deep breath and surprised me by stepping closer. “The Khoush did come for Okwu. They’d always planned to come for it. The Meduse-Khoush War . . .”
“I understand,” I snapped. “Go on.”
Mwinyi nodded and continued. “Your father said they blew up its tent, but Okwu wasn’t in it. Okwu wasn’t there. The Khoush soldiers demanded that your family tell them where it was. Your family refused. They threatened to kill your father.”
I pressed my hands to my mouth. “They killed my—”
“No, no,” he said, taking my wrists. “But your family would not give up Okwu.”
I looked into Mwinyi’s eyes and said, “If they burned Okwu’s tent, that’s deep, deep disrespect to Himba land . . . Land is sacred to us. We would never, ever cooperate after something like that.”
Mwinyi nodded. “This angered the soldiers and they used their weapons to set the Root on fire,” Mwinyi said. “And . . .”
I was suddenly faint. “The Himba don’t go out, we go in,” I said, breathlessly. “My family ran into the Root . . . and the Khoush set it on fire, didn’t they? What I saw was true!”
Mwinyi kept talking as I paced in circles, my hands grasping my okuoko. “Your father believes Okwu killed many of them,” Mwinyi said. “Even as the Root was burning with all of them inside, he could hear it. Khoush screaming, over and over. The only Meduse there was Okwu, so it had to be Okwu doing it. And it most likely sent a distress call to other Meduse. But eventually, the noise stopped. All this, your father communicated to your grandmother.”
“As the Root was burning around him, around everyone?” I shouted at him.
Mwinyi paused, seeming to question whether or not to say more. “At some point,” he continued, “he stopped communicating with her through the zinariya. So Binti, I . . . I don’t know what we’re going to find when we get there.”
“The Ariya knew all this before we left?”
“Yes.”
“Yet she told us half-truths and didn’t try to stop me from leaving.”
“No.”
“She would not have succeeded,” I muttered. I felt numb. Dead. Mwinyi may not have known what we’d find there, but I did. Charred bones. My family was dead. My family was dead. My family was dead . . . five five five five five five five five five five five. I climbed high into the tree and when I turned to Mwinyi, the motion felt slow, and I could have been looking at him from outer space. “If you think I’m such a mess, why did you come with me?”
His eyebrows rose. “I’m the only one who could get you here safely on my own.”
We stared into each other’s eyes and I knew he wasn’t telling me all of it. I waited. And waited. When it was clear he wasn’t going to speak, I blurted, “If Okwu called on its people, it’s the Khoush-Meduse War all over again.”
He looked away. “Maybe.”
“What if no one is left?”
/>
“I don’t—”
“You know you don’t have to say it to say it to me,” I said. “And, Mwinyi, I came back with a Meduse, the Khoush nearly killed both of us the minute we stepped off the ship, why would they leave it at that?” I stepped over to Rakumi, my legs feeling like someone else’s legs. The number five was in everything and I was glad. I patted Rakumi’s neck. “And why would Okwu not fight back? It wanted a reason to use the weapons it made at Oomza Uni, the same place the Khoush brought the chief’s stinger. Okwu hadn’t forgotten anything. And the Khoush have always been jealous of the Himba; why not find a reason to burn down Osemba’s oldest home?” I shut my eyes, whispering, “Z = z^2 + c.” When my heart rate had decreased, I said, “All because I came home.”
“Binti,” Mwinyi said. “It wasn’t your homecoming, it was a matter of time.”
I was listening to his every word, from deep in the tree, but in my heart, I burned.
“Ouch!” Mwinyi hissed. I felt the electric shock all over my body, but mainly in one of my okuoko. Rakumi bucked and groaned loudly, turning an eye toward us to see what was going on. “Why does your hair do that?”
I frowned, staring ahead. “It’s not hair.”
“What?”
“When I was on the ship, the Meduse, they did this to me.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry . . . I didn’t . . . can I ask you . . . why . . . why did you let them—”
“I didn’t let them!” I shouted. My eyes were hot with tears. I needed to get home. “But it was done. I couldn’t turn back.” The world had started exploding again. If I looked behind me, I knew I’d see the tunnel that was often there, the one that led to the alien mind of my other people. I wanted to scream. I was too many things and my family was charred bones in the ruins of my home . . . five five five five five five five. I sat down right there in the sand beside Rakumi’s front leg. I climbed higher up the tree and stayed there.
Mwinyi climbed back on Rakumi. Minutes later, I got up and did the same. And for the next hour, we were quiet again. Tears fell from my eyes as I stared at the open desert ahead. I had to drink more water than usual because of it. The number five flew around me like a swarm of gnats at sunset. And behind me loomed the tunnel, I knew. Every so often, I felt Mwinyi shift about as he moved his hands this way and that, speaking to whomever he was speaking to. I didn’t care; I wasn’t interested in talking to those who were behind us.
* * *
“What’s that?” we both said at the same time. Mwinyi was looking at the stones, I was looking at the smoke.
“Stop!” I screamed. “Oh stop! Rakumi, stop!” When the camel kept walking, I started climbing down. Mwinyi grunted deep in his throat and Rakumi stopped just as my sandaled feet reached the sand. I landed hard and bent low, then I started running. We were still miles away. As I ran, I heard my anklets clicking and I was reminded of the sound of my sisters and mother moving about the Root and of Himba women dancing during Moon Fest.
I stopped among the stones and fell to my knees as I stared. The Root. No, not just the Root, the part of Osemba closest to it too. Burning, crumbling, attacked. Even from here, I could smell the smoke. Billowing up from burning or burned homes and buildings. I could not see exactly what, but I knew Osemba enough to know where things were.
“As we were coming, I was dying,” I whispered, my hands pressed to my mouth, my eyes wide and dry as the hot breeze blew. They hadn’t just destroyed the Root. They’d taken much of Osemba, too?
I felt Mwinyi’s hand on my shoulder as he knelt beside me. I inhaled and exhaled, focusing on each breath, just as my therapist had taught me. I calmed some. “When I first left here,” I said quietly, wringing my hands, “I left on a ship called Third Fish. It was . . . she was alive.”
“Bigger than a whale?” he asked.
“What?”
Mwinyi only shook his head. “Not important. Tell me about your Third Fish.”
“Miri 12s,” I said, trying to focus on the image of the Third Fish in my mind, instead of what I saw ahead. “They are probably the finest technology, finest creature, this planet has ever produced. What else can leave Earth with nothing but itself and travel through space? But it all happened in Third Fish. Everyone was killed by the Meduse. I nearly died in there. When I came back here, I happened to get Third Fish again for the journey. I stepped onboard Third Fish and I felt such a . . . comfort. I wish I were on her now, her peacefulness swallows everything bad.”
We were at the place where I’d found my edan; the group of gray stones jutting out from the ground like flattened old teeth. This was where I had practiced treeing and prepared for my Oomza Uni interviews. The stones were large enough to sit on and arranged in a wide semicircle that opened west, facing my hometown. Mere feet away, beside one of the stones, was the spot where I’d dug up my edan.
I looked at this place and suddenly I saw that the ground around it shimmered as if sprinkled with flecks of gold. Mwinyi seemed to see it too. I wasn’t ready to stand up, so I crawled there, grinding sand into my red skirt, feeling it enter the bottoms of my sandals as it stripped away the otjize on my knuckles. I didn’t care about any of it. I sat down at the spot where I’d been, where I’d dug up the edan, back when my life had been simple, and looked at the speckled ground. Mwinyi came and stood over me.
“The shimmer isn’t physically there,” he said. “The zinariya is showing it to us.”
I touched the sand where the sparkles were, rubbing it between my fingers. No matter how hard I tried, and no matter how real the gold flecks in the sand looked, I could not touch them.
“It was there,” he added, kneeling down beside me. “A long time ago.” And as if his words cued it to happen, the world expanded again, but this time, I didn’t feel as if it would repel me into space. Instead, it was as if the sand around us was disappearing, all of it shifting away, and as it shifted, I . . . we, both Mwinyi and I, lowered. Mwinyi grabbed my arm and I knew that he too was seeing it happen. We both looked around as the stones seemed to grow taller and wider and then their bases became shiny thick very solid gold, as did the ground beneath us. A large imperfect circle about the size of the Root emerged, the semicircle of gold-based stones in the center. I ran a hand over the smooth surface that shined so brightly in the sun we both had to squint and shade our eyes. It was warm.
Mwinyi grasped my arm more tightly and said, “Don’t move. It’s alright.” If he had not done this, I’d have fled for my life, and my confused perspective of what was now and what was decades ago was so skewed, I probably would have run right into one of the stones.
These People had limbs, two arms and two legs, each over twenty feet long and thin like the trunks of palm trees. Their bodies were smooth and long. And they looked made of solid gold. They walked with a slow grace that suggested fluidity. Gold was malleable when it was warm, and they were solar, their form of life might have been energy akin to the currents I could call using mathematics.
They were coming toward the gold plane. They were not slow, but their motions were watery. Had they always been shaped like this, I did not know, for this clearly had been after they’d been around human beings for those few years. The first stepped in the center while the others waited on the sand. It stood up straight and raised its hands above its head. Then its arms then legs fused. I could hear it, soft slurping, ripples running over its flesh as it flattened and smoothed itself out into what looked like a five-foot-high, ten-foot-wide wedge.
The rocks around us began to vibrate and phoom, off the golden wedge shot into the sky, so fast that it was gone in seconds. There was no sonic boom, no smoke, not even a gust of air, like with the Third Fish. But high in the sky, I could see a wink of gold, then nothing. The next one stepped onto the platform and did the same.
“These are the Zinariya, the aliens who gave us the zinariya technology,” Mwinyi said, awed. “We loved
them so much we named our tribe after them. I’ve never seen them before. Not like this! I’ve never thought to ask.”
“And this was the launch port,” I said, as we watched the second one shoot into the sky. When the third one stepped onto the platform, it stopped and turned to us. Mwinyi’s hand clenched my arm tighter and we pressed closer to each other. It leaned down and brought forth an arm whose end became a hand with long, long fingers. In its hand was what might have been the golden center of my edan, except its surface was smooth, not fingerprint ridged. As Mwinyi and I watched, silver slivers rose from the golden ground, flipped up, and fitted around it, clicking and clacking, until it became the object that I had known until recently. It dumped the edan to the ground but instead of falling, it hovered before us. Then the world around us shifted, the sand rose, and the Zinariya people disappeared and we were back where we had been.
“Do you know what that meant?” Mwinyi asked.
I shook my head and was about to say more when a ship zoomed in from the north toward my village. I could see its sleek yellow design. It seemed to land nearby. A Khoush ship in Osemba. Unheard of. I started walking home.
CHAPTER 3
When Elephants Fight
The Root was still burning.
It was made of stone and concrete; how was it on fire? The bioluminescent plants that covered it had burned to ash. The solar panels on the roof had wilted like plants, some of them were probably puddles of synthetic steel in the debris. Six generations of my family had lived here. The Root was the oldest house in my village, maybe the oldest in the city. This was where we had family and community gatherings because the living room was so spacious that it could fit a hundred people.
Powerful Khoush weapons had been shot into it, exploding and then burning so hot that they could even combust and melt stone. All the floors of the Root had collapsed, burned, and smoldered into a heap. Chunks of concrete and rubble blown out when the house exploded were littered around the heap. What remained looked like a giant mound of still smoking blackened char.
Binti, The Complete Trilogy: Binti ; Home ; The Night Masquerade Page 23