When Mami whipped us with her song, Daddy and I went dancing. We did Omozgo two-step, and the broom jumpers of the people he had traded with farther up the northeastern coast, and the jerk-motion hat tricks he had learned right here as a Laarin smuggler’s boy. Daddy might be a sailor, but he was at home on steady ground. He tried to ask Mami to dance when she sat silently on the border wall, but his tongue was as clumsy as his feet were fluent. He stuttered his way through: “Would you do me—the honor?—of da—”
Mami took pity on him and held her long fingers against his full lips. “Of course not, but I am honored by your asking.”
Daddy liked to claim he lost his speech around Mami because he could never forget he was talking to a “princess” of the kingdom below water. Right around the time he died, I realized that her status had never intimidated him. It was his guilt. He wielded his water wife as though she were the talking tortoise of the tale: to get better work, a better house, better wine. But he always knew Yemaya would have her due.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
A year after those blessed days, when the Tanger blockade had set the full force of its cannons and steel against us, my divine grandmother made her displeasure known. It started with heavy rains, far too late in the season. Then the rain stopped, and the fish stocks of the bay plummeted. Even the seaweed beds died of a mysterious disease that left them inedible, stinking of eggs. I would go with the neighborhood girls to collect larvae beds of water flies from the shallows and bake them into cakes. Daddy was dismissive: “Poor-man’s food,” he said, and went out again to pray at Olokun’s rites. He came back with millet cake and red beans from the offering and we ate in secret, before anyone could see our prosperity. He told us that Olokun wouldn’t let these light-skinned foreigners track their bloody boot prints across the Egun Peninsula. The great kingdom of Ofu would stop them. But the Tanger with their steel and cannon and deity of gunpoint benevolence ran across the southern plains as though they were in a feast day footrace. They stopped at the southern mouth of the Egun River. They squatted down in the mud and watched. Daddy prayed and offered to Olokun. But he returned from his fishing night after night with a net full of empty crab shells and old fishhooks. Everyone’s catch was bad, but his could have glowed from the bad mojo. All of Laarin kept clear of us, as though Yemaya’s punishment would touch them if they lingered.
One day, the fishermen returned to harbor even more long-faced than usual. An armada had been spotted just on the horizon: Tanger steel ships, cannons bristling like teeth from the hulls. The mandible of the Tanger. With the land army encamped a few days’ ride south in Ofu, we were now trapped in their jaws. It would be easy work for the armada.
The whole city gathered for our war rites, which had not been invoked in nearly a century. We sang to Yemaya, sacrificed our best livestock, and threw garlands of white flowers into the water. For a week, Laarin begged our own Yemaya for her help, but the sea kept her counsel, quiet and sterile as a puddle. Mami stayed home, her lips pursed, her back to the sea.
“Mami,” I asked her, fear so hot on my skin that it made me brave, “why is Mami Wata so angry with us? Why won’t she defend us?”
She gave me a cool stare. I swallowed back the terror I always felt at these moments when her alien remoteness took her too far for me to follow.
When she finally spoke, it was in smugglers’ pidgin. “You don’t take from Yemaya,” she said, “if you’d still like to sleep.” The phrase was common among Laarin smugglers. I had heard it whispered in reference to my father. But I had refused to understand until that moment.
“But how could he have taken you? Didn’t you come to him?”
Her eyes came back to me and crinkled at the edges, as though she really were human. “I did. And he made sure I had to stay. He never gave me the chance to choose.”
Daddy had started drinking again. He never did handle responsibility well, and guilt is the heaviest kind. He hoarded bootleg palm liquor instead.
I knew what she meant, though I had struggled to avoid thinking of it most of my life. I had known since the day they fought and she threatened him with the locksmith: the charmed iron key and the strongbox that he checked every night but never opened. He was terrified of her leaving him. So he made sure that she never could.
I said to my mother in the language just the two of us shared, “You’ve slept next to him insensible for a thousand nights. Why not take the key from his neck?”
“It burns my skin. It has a charm.”
“Why not ask me to do it?”
“Would I ask my own daughter to betray her own father? Have I been such a poor mother to you?”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “Go back! Go back now! Can’t you see she’s killing us? If he’s too weak, then do it yourself.” We were sitting at the shore. She twisted herself to look at the water, as though it repelled her but drew her just the same.
“I will return there eventually. I am Yemaya’s daughter. But not yet. He needs me, Nena. He will die without me.”
I knew my father, knew how he looked at her, how he drank when she went to the water, how his gaze followed her like a moth follows the moon whenever she was in his sight. I knew Mami only told the truth.
I felt it again, as though I were losing myself, drowning in the storm that raged between them, as though I were not their daughter but a bit of seaweed, a tossed spar splintered from a wrecked ship. I filled my lungs with air and dug my nails into the soft skin of my wrist. “If you don’t go, we might all die.”
My mother, she did not even answer me. The waves heard me, though. They said, “Come, daughter, come. Make it right, if they will not.”
Mami grimaced and hurled a stone into the shallows with the force of a boulder.
The armada held off for a week, but when none of the prophesied waves and storms arrived, they made their cautious way forward. Laarin’s reputation could protect it for a while, but reputation would never match Tanger’s ambitions. Only a show of force would turn them back. And our force, our most reliable ally, Yemaya of the kingdom below, had abandoned us.
Daddy did not pass a moment sober. He kept to the new house, and not the taverns, where the sailors and fishermen and smugglers waited in icy silence for him to order his wine and depart. They knew. We all knew. This was Laarin, after all, and we had always been Yemaya’s. He began to vomit, and there was no one but me to clean it. So I did; I had practice. I was my father’s daughter and I loved him, as much as Mami loved him, as much as he loved the both of us.
“I wish we were dancing again, like last year,” I said.
His eyes rolled bloodshot past me, steadied, and came back. “Your mother would never dance.”
“You never gave her a chance.”
“I asked!”
I heard my mother’s voice in my head as though it were my own. A calm certainty steadied my racing pulse and cooled my disgust. “You cannot ask for that which you have already compelled.”
He closed his eyes. I left him there. It was not a long walk to the ocean. It never is, in Laarin City. We are Yemaya’s, first and forever. But I walked out along the mangrove coast and then slipped myself into the muddy water. I felt Yemaya around me, buoying me up, lighting my path with a swirling tail of phosphorescence. I was her granddaughter, but now, for the first time, I entered her domain alone. As I swam, the water and the moon and the clouds came together in a solitary baptism. I was fifteen, that night I became a woman. The moon had moved a thumb in the sky by the time I reached that tiny mangrove island that marked the limit of the bay. I climbed their thickly tangled roots and sat with my back against a trunk. A crocodile peeled its eyelid back and we exchanged a long look before it slid into the water and away from me. I laughed softly. I was so afraid. From here I could barely make out the breakwater and the masts of the nearest ships of the Tanger armada. They would be here within a day.
The air was as still and thick as soup, faintly but unmistakably spiced by the sulfur of foreign gunpowder. We would not survive. Ofu might stave off the Tanger battalion on their southern border, but not if Laarin was overrun in the north.
“Yemaya!” I called, though not precisely that, because in her language her name is the sound of water itself, a rushing accretion of force that rips through the vocal cords and plummets like an arrow into the ocean.
She appeared to me in a blink, in the heart of the mangrove. I fell back into the water, all terror and wonder.
“He will pay for what he took!” Her voice through the mangrove crackled like burning tinder and ripped at my ears.
“But we will all die in the morning, when those ships come.”
“He will pay!”
I dipped my head below water; the pain was too much. “And if I promise myself in his stead?” I said. My words wrapped themselves around the thousand legs of the mangrove island. They held them tight.
A solitary sea cow with skin as white as a pearl swam out from their protective shadow. Her face was my mother’s, her face was my mother’s. She kissed my forehead and swam away.
I barely made it back to shore before the storm did. I found Mami sitting alone in our old straw-thatch hut, Daddy’s iron chest at her feet. The rain lashed the mud walls like the drumming fingers of an angry god.
“We have to get to higher ground,” I said.
“Your father will come for this.” Her voice was shorn and clipped again, that remembered spear of disquiet from a childhood I hadn’t understood. She did not look at me. Of course she didn’t. But it mattered less, now.
“Let’s go, Mami,” I said. “Leave the damn box.”
“I loved him, Nena. You can’t imagine how much . . .” Lightning hit the sea with two fists. Her head jerked up. Her eyes were wild, the whites had disappeared. They’d gone black as pebbles. Like those of the sea cow who had claimed me by the mangrove. “What did you give her, Nena?”
“The only thing I had.”
We ran from that place with just the clothes on our backs. We ran with hundreds of others whose homes were too close to the shore, who knew as well as my mother did that Yemaya had, at last, sent us her storm and that her aid would not be without price. We passed Daddy, shocked halfway sober. He was running in the wrong direction. I begged him to come away with us, but he ignored me like he always had when she filled his vision.
“I’ll get it back,” he told Mami. “Don’t you leave me now.”
Mami’s eyes still hadn’t gotten their irises back. I wondered if Daddy even noticed. “Stay with us,” she said. Just that, but it was a plea as fervent as the rain that stung our cheeks.
He shook his head. “Take care of your mother,” he told me absently. Dismissed, like that runty fish left over from the catch, like a child gasping and forgotten.
He started running back down the road. That spiky thing inside me snapped and flowered. I sprinted to catch up, grabbed his wrist, and hauled him around. He had a wild look, lips pulled back from his teeth, chest heaving. I wondered if he would hit me. But I raised my own hand, pulled a thread of lightning from the rioting sky, and told him, simply, “Try.”
He froze, staring at the crackling light sparking against my fingertips and palm. I could kill him right there if I wanted. The joy at being powerful, being more, being seen at last was so intense that I felt the spark of Yemaya’s flame leap from my outstretched fingers to his wet curls. I pulled it back, the acrid stink of scorched hair thick in my nostrils. Daddy stammered my name.
“Just leave it,” I told him.
“Your mother—she won’t—you don’t understand, I have to—”
“Let her go, then!” I yelled. “Stay for me!”
I might as well have asked him to stay for the seaweed, to stay for the sand. He stared at me, confused, searching. For a moment, I hoped—but his gaze grew distant again. He hugged me, though my hand still glowed with lightning and my whole body buzzed with friction. Then he was gone, running down the road as the floodwaters came up.
That was the last time I saw him alive.
* * *
◆ ◆ ◆
The storm sank every ship of the Tanger armada right at the breakwater. Lined them up like hens in a market stall. And our divers have been making good use of whatever we can scavenge for the last three years.
After Daddy drowned, I took the key from the tangled hide cord that had strangled him to death in the confusion of the flooding. Together, Mami and I opened the chest.
There was a shift inside, so small and plain. It did not fit her anymore. We burned it with Daddy’s things.
“The rules of the sea,” Mami said that night, when we shared a pint of palm wine in his memory, “are harsh, but fair. When you go to her, you must remember that. They are not like we are here.”
“We were beautiful here.”
“Yes.”
She still lives in that tall house with its thick windows where you can’t hear the whispering of the sea. I’ve made my way all up and down this mangrove coast, into Ofu and the Highat territories and beyond, smuggling goods past the Tanger armies that are still trying to choke us to death. She will not return to Yemaya, who killed her love. She cannot, I think, forgive herself for loving him. One day I will have to go to Yemaya in her stead. But not yet. Not until my grandmother calls me.
And when I go down to that place, no matter how much the rules of the sea differ from the rules of the land, I will bring my fire with me, and the air in my lungs, and though I may not be free, I will be seen.
A HAGIOGRAPHY OF STARLIGHT
By Somaiya Daud
Betimes I wonder, if I had not been so secure in my own power, if I had thought beyond my own abilities and my own desires, whether I would have seen it. If I had listened more and learned to worry, if I would have marked the slow decay, the discord in song, the apocalyptic tune that led my world to the point of no return. But such is the power of hindsight.
I was born in the city of Baal, or so I assume, for I have no memory of the people who bore me and abandoned me in its alleys. Baal was an ancient city with buildings that had stood thousands of years. The song of their age ricocheted against the newer boulevards and pleasure gardens, and rose up in the great sandstorms that assailed the city from time to time. It was the capital of the Baal Empire and therefore its center, just as it was the center of my world.
My world was filled with song, and in Baal’s cradle I learned the difference between the flower song of the gardens and the songs of flowers that grew freely and without human control. It was in Baal I learned the wood song of newer buildings and the stone songs of the ancient. And it was in Baal that I began to understand what people meant when they said kazerach and to whom it was they referred. For it was from the kazerach twining its way around and through our world that all song flowed. It was from the kazerach that we were given life, and it was on the back of his spirit that we flourished.
As a child, shameless and without guile, I sang, and in song, I caught glimpses of him and his glory. Never anything I could hold on to, never a song note I could replicate, but always I came away from such song certain that I had glimpsed a little more of his majesty, of his beauty. And it was in such song when I was eight, as the morning sun rose, that the priestesses of the kazerach—the kazervaaj—made note of me and took me in off the street.
Until then, mine had been a miserable existence, filled with hunger and cold and fear. A girl with no family and no pack of orphans to watch her back was seldom safe in a city like ours. Joy and safety were seldom and fleeting. But the morning the kazervaaj discovered me, I felt joy rise in me as a tidal wave. As the sun touched my face I felt the flush of divinity, like a rising tide of pure light churning inside me, pushing at the edges of my soul. The world was louder and quieter all at once—song rising over the c
lamor. The air warmed, my breath stalled. It filled me up until it couldn’t, until I could feel it pressing against the barriers of my skin, and then it robbed me of it all at once.
And in my retrieval I finally learned the kazerach’s name: Bayyur.
The House of Bayyur was unlike anything I’d ever known. The kazerach of Baal had many aspects, but key was his love of love. He gave and took life, burned and warmed, starved and nourished. Bayyur sought to illuminate the beautiful in the ugly, and he reveled in pleasure. And the longer I lived in the Baal monastery, the more intimately I learned these things. I had been denied them when I lived scurrying from alley to alley, but now I knew them all in abundance. It took longer for me to understand what it was the kazervaaj wanted from me—that my voice was a prized and holy thing, that it rendered my flesh and the sight of my face sacrosanct.
In the monastic structure of the kazerach there were three orders: the kazervaaj, the hagaad, and the saagkazaar. The kazervaaj were priestesses. Almost all members of the temple were kazervaaj. The hagaad were the warrior order, and resided primarily in the Temple of the Great Mother Serpent. They left only when a saagkazaar was found.
Saagkazaar was an old word with no equivalent in the Baal tongue, but it meant “the state of being prior to bridehood.” Those who left that state were either dead or turned kazerkai—the bride of the serpent.
There were no kazerkai in Baal. There had been none for over a thousand years. The learning of the dance that turned one from saagkazaar to kazerkai had been outlawed, for a bride of the kazerach held untold power over the fates of men. Her word was that of an oracle, and her allegiances determined the results of battles.
I was not named saagkazaar, for the kazervaaj knew they trod dangerous ground even bringing me into the monastery. You could not leash song and dance—you might make the singer and dancer afraid, or you might choose their death. What is one soul in the face of empire? I did not understand this when I was young—I understood only that I was lucky and that I was blessed and that they trained me in what I loved best: song and dance.
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