EIGHT
Hell’s Gate, Kenya
AISHA ROSE LAY at the base of her muhutu tree, dazed, a lump rising painfully on the back of her head, a trickle of blood tracing down her cheek. Above, the sun glinted through the leaves, and a colony of weaverbirds went about its business. Aisha Rose watched a black-and-yellow male using strips of grass to construct its globular nest, which hung like an ornament on the end of a slender branch. A brownish female perched nearby, watching the nest’s progress with bright black eyes.
“What I like best about weavers,” Mama had said once, in the clear tone she used to state facts, “is that the males have to do all the work building the nest.”
Her eyes had gleamed. This was how she smiled, with just the slightest upward curve of the lips, but . . . eyes that shone. “And you know what the female does if none of the nests meet with her approval?”
Aisha Rose, hearing Mama’s voice loud inside her head, winced. Her vision blurred, turning the birds above her into dancing patterns of yellow and black.
“What, Mama?” she asked.
“They destroy every nest and make the males start over from scratch.”
Aisha Rose was thinking about this when she felt something drip onto her bare right leg, just below the knee. Something that started out warm but quickly cooled against her skin.
That was a new sensation for her, in a world, a life, with few unfamiliar experiences. And that was how, instead of thinking about weaverbirds, she raised her head to see what had caused it, and found herself staring into the pale eyes of the drooling hyena that was considering whether to start feeding on her.
Its bared teeth revealed long yellowish canines and a thick pink tongue. It breathed out, and she smelled its breath, the reek of rotting meat, as the rank exhalation wafted across her face. The hyena made a moaning sound in its throat, the sound echoed by another, a little farther off, then a third.
She’d seen hyenas before, of course, out on the grasslands below Mount Longonot and in the zebra-rich plains that fringed Hell’s Gate. But none had ever come here, to the canyons she and Mama called home eight months a year. Aisha Rose had always thought that its narrow, red-rock walls and secret caves made it a protected spot, safe from the biggest predators.
Or safe enough, at least. That was one of the reasons that she and Mama migrated here every year from their other home in the compound in Naro Moru, where Aisha Rose had been born. Why they followed the game into the Great Rift Valley and sought out the protection of these twisting passages. For safety as well as food.
Well. So much for that. You were a fool to think you were ever safe on the real earth.
Shifting her weight just a fraction, Aisha Rose saw the hyena, the alpha, tilt its head. Its gray pupils dilated as it took in the new information: This potential meal wasn’t recently dead, like one of the lion or cheetah kills it frequently commandeered. This piece of meat was still alive.
Not that that mattered much. Alive, dead, hyenas took their food as they found it. If it needed killing first, they killed it.
“The locals always knew the truth,” Mama had said, the first time they’d seen a hyena, at a distance, on the shore of Lake Naivasha. “But we Europeans, in our racist way, judged everyone—and everything—by appearances. We saw lions as noble and brave simply because of how they looked, so golden and wreathed in a royal ruff. Hyenas, on the other hand, were sniveling, subservient, untrustworthy. Native.”
Mama had watched the hyena loping along. “Look at how it walks!” she’d said. “We called them crippled. Sneaky. Weak.”
Then she’d smiled. “But here they are, the cripples, doing a whole lot better than we are.”
Aisha Rose could see the other two now, the alpha’s pack, closer, moving sideways toward her with that familiar hyena hobble. Yes, they did walk like their legs hurt.
“Don’t believe it!” Mama had said. “Hyenas are sneaky, but they’re also smart, opportunistic, and . . . strong. So strong. They can kill a lion in direct combat, and do. Back on the dreamed earth, the native people considered them among the most dangerous animals in Africa. We were easy prey.”
Aisha Rose could have reached out and touched the alpha, it was so close to her. She knew that the only reason she was still alive, the only reason it hadn’t yet attacked, was because she was unfamiliar. Because it didn’t recognize her smell.
“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” Mama had said. “Once, so recently, there was barely a creature on earth—from one-celled organisms on up—that didn’t know our smell, our sounds, our presence, almost as well as we did. You never saw that world, the dreamed earth, but we were everywhere. Everywhere. And now we’re the outsiders, the aliens.”
Aliens. Alien prey. Given the life span of hyenas and most other animals, it was likely that this alpha female had never encountered a human before. That was true of most wild animals although maybe there were still elephants alive that remembered the world as it had once been, the world that Aisha Rose herself had never known. Elephants and tortoises and parrots and other long-lived creatures that still possessed fading memories of the dreamed earth.
If any wild creature did remember that time, Mama had told Aisha Rose, it was with fear and disgust. “Just as I remember it,” she’d added. “As a world of nightmares. I’m so glad to have lived to see this one. The real earth.”
Aisha Rose had stayed silent. Even now, Mama didn’t know about the stain. The spreading stain. She didn’t need to know.
The alpha female opened its mouth wider and bent toward Aisha Rose, another string of warm saliva falling on her thigh.
Yet the hyena’s gesture was strangely indecisive. Like a bow. It seemed almost . . . respectful. Polite.
Please pardon me while I kill you.
But polite or not, the result would be the same. Its first bite would pierce her skin and rupture her blood vessels and crush her bones. A hyena’s first bite was usually the only one it needed.
But, finally, Aisha Rose’s mind was clear. And even as she and the alpha had been staring at each other, even as she’d been thinking about Mama’s words, her eyes had been taking in the surroundings. And her right hand had been creeping toward a stone she’d seen from the corner of her eye. A roundish stone, smooth, brown and yellow.
A little too large, a little too heavy, for a hunt, but perfect for her current purpose.
Inside her head, Mama was quiet. This was Aisha Rose’s task alone.
With a speed and strength that surprised both the alpha and herself, she grasped the stone, reared up—getting her legs away from those dripping jaws—swung her arm, and bashed the stone against the hyena’s brow, just a little above its eyes.
All the while letting loose with the loudest shout she could muster.
The blow didn’t kill the beast. Aisha Rose hadn’t thought it would. Hyenas’ skulls were thick, and she wasn’t that strong.
She didn’t want to kill it, anyway, not unless it gave her no choice. Aisha Rose didn’t kill. Or at least she didn’t kill indiscriminately.
The hyena’s mouth closed with a click of teeth. It sat back on its misshapen haunches and, for an instant, its eyes went out of focus. Then they cleared, and Aisha Rose saw its body tense. At the same time, yowling, the other two came dancing in toward her.
Coming for her, but still sideways, with their heads partly averted even as they showed their teeth. Not the steady, headlong lope—somehow eating up the ground in their humpbacked way—they used when they moved in for the kill.
She’d hurt the alpha female, she could see that. But more importantly, she’d startled them, all of them. Even scared them. What was this seemingly dormant creature that suddenly sprang up and attacked? And what else was it capable of?
Aisha Rose knew the answer to that question: not much else. But it didn’t matter. She had the advantage now. Before the dominant hyena could
decide between attack and retreat, she made the decision for it. With another bellow—this one so loud that Aisha Rose knew her throat would hurt for days—she leaped at it, swinging the stone again.
This time it collided with the alpha’s midsection, making a loud, hollow thump. The hyena staggered back two steps, and what came out of its mouth now was no terrifying howl or laugh, but an unmistakable whimper.
That was enough. She wasn’t worth it. Game was plentiful in that season, and she’d seen at once that all three had the bulging bellies of the recently fed.
They’d approached her because normally that would have made no difference. Hyenas would eat until they could barely move, and sometimes kill even if they had no appetite at all.
But to have a nearly full stomach and confront an unfamiliar prey that fought back? No, thank you.
“Humans are the only creatures that kill because their feelings are hurt,” Mama had said.
Aisha Rose watched the hyenas depart, glancing over their sloping shoulders as they left to make sure she wasn’t in pursuit. Surprising herself again, she gave a hoarse laugh at their cowed expressions. Hearing the sound, the three hyenas hurried their stride until they reached the mouth of the little side canyon that Aisha Rose and Mama had made their home this year. Then, with one last backward glance, they passed out of sight.
Still smiling, Aisha Rose tossed the stone aside and stretched her arms out in front of her. She knew these hyenas would never return, and if something else came hunting for her? Well, with Mama’s help, she would deal with it, too.
Then she reached back with her right hand and touched the lump on the back of her head, wincing. The hair around it was matted with drying blood, but the wound itself had nearly stopped bleeding, and she could feel a scab beginning to crust over it.
The pain took her mind away from her encounter with the hyenas, and in that instant she remembered what had happened to her. What had left her so vulnerable that, if she hadn’t awoken when she did, she might have died in agony instead, or in unconsciousness, without ever realizing she’d been alive at all.
Or at least she remembered some of it. And, just like that, the joy drained out of her, and she felt cold.
No. Not cold. Afraid.
Afraid in a way she could never be, even facing hyenas or anything else the real earth could threaten her with.
Except this.
* * *
THIS WAS WHAT had happened:
As she often was during the heat of the day, she’d been up in her tree, in her perch above the weaverbird colony. Sitting with her back against the massive trunk and her legs dangling over the wooden sleeping platform nestled between the trunk and one of the tree’s sturdiest branches.
Not that there weren’t any threats up here—she’d seen her share of snakes and scorpions—but she was doubtless safer in the tree than even in the rockiest, most inaccessible corner of the caves and canyons.
So . . . she’d been sitting safely on her perch, watching the world go by (as Mama put it), when . . .
When she’d seen the picture of a lion. But not one of her lions . . . something slighter, sleeker even than a young lioness. Something else. Something she thought she remembered from a book she’d looked at long ago, one of the picture books Mama had brought with her from the dreamed earth. Back when they had books.
A lion that lived on the other side of the world.
But . . . no. This wasn’t a memory from some long-vanished book, but an image in her mind. Something that had come from far away.
And she knew at once where it had come from, and who was seeing it.
One of the others. The hundreds—or even thousands, she could not tell—of others out there who were like her. The ones she saw as lights inside her head, shifting constellations, galaxies wheeling and blurring. Never still, never fixed in place, but always changing shape and number as new ones arrived and others departed.
Always there with her, inside her, an earth filled with people who’d shared Aisha Rose’s fate. And others, dimming, dwindling lights, who’d shared Mama’s.
And still others, the ones that grew stronger every year. The spreading stain.
But this one, the one who had witnessed the lion, this one was different from all the others. He—and Aisha Rose was sure it was a “he”—was the most powerful by far. The fiercest light.
And the only one she could see. No: see through. See through his eyes, sometimes, just for a moment, just as she could see through the majizis’ eyes.
Without knowing it, he gave her glimpses of the world he inhabited. A place of forests and streams and grasslands. Of snow, something she’d seen only from a distance, a white gleam atop the enormous mountain—Mount Kenya—that looked down upon her and Mama’s house in Naro Moru.
Forest and grasslands and snow and ruins that seemed to go on to the horizon. Ruins of a city gradually subsiding into itself as the years passed.
She’d glimpsed these things early on, when she was still learning about the lights, when she was still beginning to understand what they were and what she was.
But then she’d come to understand how strong he was. The strongest of all of them, besides her. But she was strong because she had Mama with her. From what she could see, he was entirely alone, and always had been—or, at least, had been for many years. Alone, and damaged, and terrifying because of it.
Terrifying to her because he didn’t understand his own power. Because he didn’t know what he could do to her, even to Aisha Rose, and how effortlessly.
She didn’t think he even knew she existed. But she’d known. She’d understood the threat. And so she’d built walls, erected barricades, to protect herself from him. And she’d hidden herself . . . until today, when she’d let the barricades slip and seen his lion.
And then, because she was lonely, because she forgot her fear, she’d created the image of a beautiful black-maned lion she’d seen a month earlier, out by the big lake. Naivasha. Standing there, every bit a picture like the ones in books. The King of the Beasts.
Sprawled on her platform to escape the heat of the day, she’d opened herself and placed the image of her lion where his had been. After all those years of hiding, it was such a simple act, a step she’d taken in what must have been a moment of madness.
His response had almost killed her. Three times. First with its own force, a massive, paralyzing blow to her head, an explosion inside her skull. Second because it had caused her to fall from her perch. And third, because the hyenas could easily have disposed of her before she ever awoke.
That was the breadth of his power: to kill her in an instant or to leave her vulnerable to the death that was always awaiting her—awaiting everyone—on the real earth.
But she hadn’t died. He hadn’t killed her. In her high-walled canyon, at the base of her tree, she was still alive.
But for how much longer, now that he knew she existed?
She shivered, but as much from the chill as from residual shock and fear. Drawing in a breath, she looked around. The sun had already dipped behind the western wall. The air had noticeably cooled. It would be full dusk inside the canyon within an hour, and dusk on the earth above little more than an hour later.
She was so late.
Without hesitating, she headed deeper into the canyon and half ran through its caves and narrow passageways. Twisting and turning as she went, toward the surface now, her momentum sometimes taking her halfway up the walls as she ran. A path so familiar that she knew from instinct where to place her feet.
Singing as she went because she always sang as she ran.
She made it in time. The sun was still high enough though the evening’s first rays were already staining the mountain’s spires a deeper red. Vultures soared around the cliffs, and swifts winged overhead in a whirling flock.
“You’re late,” Mama said. Mama, sit
ting in their spot, the place where they came every evening, so Aisha Rose could perform her recitation.
Their spot was a small, hidden plateau on the lip of the canyon that afforded a view of the giant lake below, the game-rich plains that spread outward from it and, beyond, the Great Rift Valley wall.
“I was beginning to wonder, Aisha Rose,” Mama said, “if you’d forgotten.”
Mama’s real voice had become so different from the one that Aisha Rose heard inside her head. The loud, declarative tone that Mama had once possessed, but that had been stolen from her, along with her strength and endurance, and, in truth, her life. Soon enough.
That loud Mama had become part of the dream. The real Mama’s voice was scratchy and weak, her sentences interrupted by the kind of breaths that whistled in her throat but barely seemed to reach her lungs. A voice to match the way she looked: gaunt, the skin so tight over her bones that you could almost see the skeleton beneath. Her hair, which had once been as thick as Aisha Rose’s own, now dull and ragged.
Mama was dying. She’d been dying since before Aisha Rose was born, and for the same reason everyone else like her died. Her fate was inevitable and irreversible.
Aisha Rose had known this from the start. It might have been the first thing she’d ever known, as she began to understand what the lights in her mind meant, and as she watched Mama’s light fade, day to day, year to year.
But her eyes, the same strange blue-violet as Aisha Rose’s own, were just as clear and sharp as they’d been when Aisha Rose was a little girl, fifteen and more years ago. And her manner, if not her voice, hadn’t changed either.
“I’m sorry, Mama—”
“Don’t waste any time.” Mama sat back in the wooden chair that Aisha Rose had made for her. “No lollygagging or daydreaming. Just begin.”
So Aisha Rose began. “My name is Aisha Rose Atkinson,” she said, her voice hoarse. “I was born nineteen years, one month, and twenty-six days ago, six months and three days after the end of the dreamed earth.”
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