Who had shot at the Meduse chief to start it all? I will never know. What I did know was that I’d seen the face of the Khoush king when the Meduse chief was shot and it was a face of astonishment and despair. He didn’t know; he hadn’t wanted this. The rest was reaction. And in their reaction, they all forgot about me. They forgot I was standing there, between their sides as they shot at each other.
Red fire balls and blue searing waves of light flew past me, filling the air. The smell of smoke, incineration, the very air around me began to burn. Rakumi, who was standing where my brother’s garden had been, fell as her head was blown clean off. The sound of fireballs zipping past my ears. I coughed and stumbled. Then I felt something punch me in the chest, then my left leg, and then I don’t know. I don’t know. I screamed. I was flying. The pain bloomed all around me, within me. Now I was moaning, rolling in the dry dirt.
Okwu was on me and everything became blue and muffled. Binti, I heard it say to me. Hold on. Okwu pressed us both to the ground as the world around us exploded. I felt Okwu shudder as something smashed near it and burst into flames. Then it was as if the fight itself began to rise. I saw it happening and at first thought I was falling. But no, it was the ships of the Khoush and Meduse. They were taking the fight to the skies and probably into space.
Just as quickly as it began, it was over. At least, on Himba soil. Not over, elsewhere. I could hear the battle raging high above and something huge crashed to the ground nearby. I could not tell, for Okwu was still holding me inside its body. As Okwu lifted off me, I felt myself fading. I could actually hear my blood draining into the desert sand beneath me. My back stung in a distant way. My chest was wet and cool, open. My legs, whether they were just torn up or actually torn off, were gone.
Limply, I raised my arm and let it drop to my nose. I sniffed the otjize on it and it smelled like home. I heard Mwinyi calling me as he fell to his knees beside me. He was shaking and shaking, his eyes wild. His beautiful bushy hair covered with dust and sand. But I was smelling home. I closed my eyes.
Death is always news.
CHAPTER 6
Girl
Mwinyi was screaming.
He looked down at her again and kept screaming and screaming and screaming. Her chest was smashed and burned open, bone, sinew, and flesh, red, yellow, and white. Her legs were each a mangle of meat. Her left arm had been blown off. Only her right arm, face, and tentacles were untouched.
Mwinyi had been at what was left of the Root when it all fell apart. He’d turned and seen the Meduse chief and Khoush king both looking at Binti with awe and respect. He’d heard Binti laughing. He’d been proud. He’d seen the leaders walking away. Then he’d turned to what he’d come to see and it had all happened behind his back. By the time he reached her, she was gone.
Okwu floated on Binti’s other side, its tentacles touching her torn-up arm and pulling back, touching and pulling back. It could feel the battle happening above, but it stayed with Binti, allowing the others to know that the one who’d become family through war had been killed. They fought harder and angrier because Okwu stayed, because Okwu felt.
Mwinyi looked up, his mouth in an open wail. He was so numb that the sight of the raffia monster running wildly toward him did not startle him. It roared, shoved Mwinyi aside with long sticklike hands, and threw off its head of wooden faces. Mwinyi fell to the side and then stared back at the creature. Not creature, Night Masquerade. The Night Masquerade was mourning Binti.
* * *
Dele had forgotten all protocol. Last year he’d been initiated into the secret society through which the Night Masquerade spoke. He’d joined just after Binti had left. Learning the chants from the elder men, taking in the smoke from the burned branch of an Undying tree, and seeing the friends of the Seven had all helped him forget about Binti. Then he’d been tapped for grooming as the next Himba chief. He’d been so proud and felt strong, though he hated the scratchy beard he’d had to grow. Throughout, however, no matter how hard he’d worked to forget her, he’d sorely missed Binti.
Days ago, during a meditation with the elders, the elders had all agreed that Binti should see the Night Masquerade. Chief Kapika had been the one in costume standing outside her window. Dele had hated this; Binti was a girl and she’d abandoned her own destiny. And the elders hadn’t even bothered telling him Chief Kapika had decided to show Binti the Night Masquerade again yesterday.
However, last night during the Okuruwo meeting, Dele had had a change of heart about Binti. He’d listened to her speak, watched her closely, and realized she was the Binti he’d known all his life and she was amazing. The elders were the elders for a reason. Even in their own bias, they’d still been able to see and admit to each other what he couldn’t up to now . . . but the elders were deeply flawed, too. Hours ago, he’d joined them in a second meeting, this time in the quiet of the desert a mile from Osemba. Dele had thought they were just gathering to go to the Root as a group. When the elders had all agreed to forgo brokering a truce and to sacrifice Binti instead, Dele couldn’t believe it.
And so, he’d stolen the Night Masquerade costume. The moment he put it on, he knew what he was to do. And because when a man wears a spiritual costume, he is not himself, Dele found it easy to go to the Root. And there he placed himself where she would see him, hoping she would be encouraged.
And Binti had succeeded. He’d seen it even from where he stood on the road. She’d channeled deep culture! He’d felt the power of it shivering through the ground, into his feet, halfway up his legs like electricity, like current. Like almost all the other kids in Osemba, he didn’t know how to call up current. He’d only watched Binti do it over the years, glad the practice wasn’t his calling. Now, he was watching her do what only a handful had ever done in Himba history. And she used it to convince the leaders of the Khoush and Meduse people to finally stop fighting. She had truly been Osemba’s master harmonizer.
Dele stared down at her face now. So beautiful, though the otjize on her face was partially rubbed off, her strange tentacles spread over the sand. Limp. It came from deep within his soul, the keening. He threw his head back and opened his mouth wide, tears dribbling from the sides of his eyes. The horror of it squeezed at his heart. He threw aside the leather gloves that made his hands long and sticklike and tore at the Night Masquerade costume, pulling at the raffia, tearing at the blue-and-red cloth.
* * *
Mwinyi stood up and walked away, his blue garments darkened with Binti’s blood and his eyes toward the sky. The fighting had moved toward Khoushland and that was best for them.
“Okwu,” he called, hoarsely.
“Yes,” the Meduse said, floating over to him.
Behind them, the only Himba Council member to show up continued to scream and scream, his voice rolling across the now empty desert.
“I think we should take her into space,” Mwinyi told Okwu. “That’s where she belongs. Not here.”
“How?” Okwu asked. “The launch port is that way, where the fighting is happening. I don’t think . . .”
“Not from the launch port,” Mwinyi said, shaking his head.
“A Meduse ship?” Okwu suggested. “They will understand. We set our dead free in space too.”
“No,” he said firmly. “I have a better plan.” He paused, shutting his eyes as despair tried to take him again. “I . . . I know exactly where to take her, too. Will you come?”
“Yes,” it said.
“They would never have listened to us,” Dele sobbed from behind them. He was holding Binti’s only remaining hand.
“Is that why you left her to die?” Mwinyi snapped.
“I didn’t,” Dele said. “I tried. I didn’t agree with the rest of them. But I am just an apprentice; I wasn’t even supposed to be speaking. But I did. ‘We don’t abandon our own,’ I said. They said she was no longer one of us and then I was told to be quiet
. And none . . . none of them believed they could really evoke deep culture. They didn’t believe in . . . they had no hope. The chief said the Khoush would never listen to the Himba because they don’t respect us.” He squeezed his eyes shut at this as if in physical pain.
“But they respected Binti,” Mwinyi said. “The Khoush and Meduse. Then they forgot about her.”
Dele looked at Binti and started to sob again.
“Come,” Mwinyi snapped. “If you want to do something that would have pleased her, come. Okwu, come.”
Mwinyi walked to the wooden foundation of the Root without looking to see if they were following. With each step he took, he saw more. It was breathtaking, never had he experienced anything like this before. He could see where they were, through his feet. All it had taken was for the one he had come to love so much in a matter of days to get torn apart by two irrational peoples.
He stopped at the place where he’d kicked off his sandals. They lay there like the ripped-off wings of a sand beetle. Okwu hovered on one side of him and Dele stood on the other as they looked down at the charred remains of the Root. Mwinyi breathed a sigh of relief. With his feet he could see much. The zinariya had shown him relatives who had this ability in the past. It was called “deep grounding” and it always kicked in when one “walked far enough.”
He held his hands up for a moment, preparing to send word through the zinariya, but then he noticed that already coming in all around him were messages from the Ariya, Binti’s grandmother, his parents, his brothers, several of his friends, people. The Enyi Zinariya knew what had happened somehow. He had not sent word himself. How did they know already?
“Just stand beside me,” Mwinyi said to Okwu and Dele. How could he explain? So he did not. The storm had awakened it and though the storm had passed, he could still feel it vibrating through his exposed feet. The Root’s foundation had been made on the dead root of an Undying tree. At least, they’d thought it had been dead. The inside of one of the roots had been hollowed out and made into the house’s cellar.
Like Binti, Mwinyi was also a master harmonizer. And his ability was communication in a different way; he could speak to those who were alive. So just as he’d been able to speak with Okwu in a way that allowed him to locate where it had been hurt and where it was best to slather the otjize, he’d been able to speak to the living Undying tree that was the Root’s foundation.
Dele looked back at Binti’s body, lying there alone, and then at her friend, the desert savage named Mwinyi. His bushy hair was a strange red brown, freed like a dust storm and full of dust like . . . a dust storm. His skin was dark like Binti’s, but where he’d never seen Binti’s skin tone as a marker of being uncivilized, everything about Mwinyi said savage. And so when Mwinyi bent down and placed his hands on the dense charred wood and the ground began to shudder, Dele shouted, “Stop it! What are you doing?” because whatever it was had to be wrong.
Okwu watched Mwinyi closely. The human reminded it so much of Binti. Harmonizers are the same, Okwu thought. And from a distance, it felt many others of its kind agree with it. It stayed there and waited.
CHAPTER 7
The Root
A tree with strong roots laughs at storms.
Mwinyi could not remember who said this but he’d heard it often as a child. Never did he imagine the proverb was so literally true. The ground was shuddering as he held his hand to the foundation and repeated over and over, “Let go, please. Let go, let go. Please.”
The moment he heard the sound of cracking, he said, “Dele, go!”
“What? Where?” Dele asked. “What is . . . what is happening? What are you doing?”
“Go where the cellar is,” Mwinyi said. “You know this house better than I.”
“I see it,” Okwu said, floating onto the charred foundation.
Mwinyi and Dele followed it. Mwinyi gasped, ran to the spot, and stared. He shut his eyes, as Dele knelt down beside him. Mwinyi could hear the plant’s voice in his head now and it was so broad that his head pounded and his vision blurred. It spoke no words he could understand, but there was relief and a sigh. Mwinyi waited as he heard more cracking and then the sound of Dele grunting and pulling and kicking.
Mwinyi held his breath, his eyes closed as he waited a little longer. He saw them with his feet. Then he heard other voices and he sank to the ground, his head in his hands. Binti should have lived to see this. How ecstatic she would have been to know that every single one of her family members was alive and well.
* * *
Dele had lain on his belly, reached down, and one by one pulled them out. Mother, father, sisters, brothers, nieces, nephews, cousins, and even a few family friends. They ran about, jumped and sang and danced with joy. They didn’t care that their skin and hair were nearly free of otjize. They kneeled and prayed to the Seven. Sobbing and hugging. Binti’s father was the only one who could speak through his joy. He explained to Mwinyi about how they’d all fled into the large cellar and when the Root had been attacked and set aflame, something had made it react as one of the family. It enclosed and protected. And inside the Root, there had not only been supplies that they could eat, but pods of water that grew from the walls of the cellar.
“The Root is true Himba,” Binti’s father said.
Then he asked, “Where is Binti?”
* * *
The sun shone bright now and the war happening over Khoushland and in space just outside of the Earth’s atmosphere felt more and more distant. It was not the Himba’s war, and so for the time being, they were not concerned. News spread fast about Binti and her family’s survival through word of mouth. And now that they were out of the protective cellar, they could reach people with their astrolabes, too. Soon a large crowd had gathered at the Root, yes, now it was the Root, again. They brought joyous jars of otjize and baskets of food. Home or no home, the Root had been burned, but its foundation was alive and well and strong, as were those who’d lived in it.
Most feared Okwu, but Binti’s father stayed at its side well into the day, forcing people to look at and speak to it when they came to wish Binti’s father their condolences. Binti’s mother stayed with Binti at the place where Binti had fallen. She’d placed a red blanket of mourning over Binti’s body, as she hummed to herself and rocked back and forth to keep from tearing her hair out.
Over and over, Mwinyi told Binti’s family and those who came about what Binti had tried to do and what she died for. Mwinyi watched their faces; all of them looked upon him as if he were a wild man who had something they wanted—especially Binti’s older siblings. Still, Mwinyi told of Binti’s bravery and the betrayal of the council and answered their questions because they needed to know.
When the Himba Council arrived at the Root, Mwinyi walked away, heading to Binti’s mother. Okwu joined him.
“I don’t want to hear any of what they have to say,” Mwinyi said.
“We should leave,” Okwu said.
“Soon. First, let’s talk to her.” Mwinyi pointed at Binti’s mother. She was cradling Binti’s head in her lap and humming. The tips of her long otjize-rolled locks dragged on the ground, collecting sand. Even covered with old otjize, the bright sun couldn’t have been good for her skin. Sweat rolled down her face, dropping into an otjize-red damp spot in the sand beneath her.
“Mma Binti,” Mwinyi said, sitting before her. When he glanced at Binti’s face, every muscle in his body tensed up. When he spoke, his voice quivered. “I’m sorry.”
“She didn’t know,” her mother said. “She didn’t know her family was alive. She must have felt . . . homeless.”
Mwinyi glanced at Okwu, who floated over. “She loved you all,” it said. “She fought for you.”
Binti’s mother looked at Okwu, then nodded. “My husband . . . he was too afraid to see me do it. He thought I was delirious with panic.” She frowned and then continued. “When everything
was burning above, I was the one who woke the Root,” she said. She held up her hand and gracefully made a waving motion. “Everything I see fits together, even all this. I see both sides of the equation, the path that leads to the death of my brightest daughter.” She closed her eyes and when a minute passed and she still had not opened them, Mwinyi was about to get up. Her eyes suddenly flew open and she was looking intensely at Mwinyi.
“Are . . . are you alright, Mma Binti?”
“No,” she whispered. After a pause, she said, “You have eyes like hers.”
“I’m a harmonizer,” he said.
She nodded, vaguely, looking down at Binti. “You know, those equations that Binti and her father work to create current, I can see just by opening my eyes. Binti got some of this, but she has trained it toward current. I have no training, I just see it. At the door, the center of the cellar, then the wall, that was where the spot was. While everyone cowered in the center, moving from the walls where the heat and smoke were coming through, I went to the place directly across from the door. Across the diameter. I could see the line. Do you know plants can do math? They measure what they need to survive and thrive. The Root has survived long.
“The Root had a spot. I could wake it, if I gave from my own life force. We all have current running through us, that’s why we are alive.” She held up her right hand. The palm was an angry red and covered with crusty blisters. Mwinyi gasped, reaching for her, but she pulled her hand away. “That’s how the Root knew to protect its people.” She pressed her hand to her chest. “But once it closed, it would not open. You saved us too, Mwinyi.”
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