by Fiona Zedde
A piercing cry froze her next movement. In that split second, she cursed herself for freezing up at some strange sound but realized a movement later that the queen had done the same and was looking over her shoulder toward the palace. It was an alarm. Nyandoro sensed it in the sudden fear and resolution on the queen’s face, her abrupt dismissal of Nyandoro as a threat. She turned from Nyandoro and ran toward the palace.
She felt a pull toward the queen, a stretching of time and a disorientation and then they were, impossibly, in the courtyard of the palace and the queen was staggering where she stood as if she had been pulled by a sudden and strong breeze. She had used her power to get them back from the beach. It was using this power, Nyandoro realized, that made her weak, not using her physical body. Anesa slipped from a nearby corridor, her eyes wide with fear.
“The watchers on the mountain see men approaching.”
The queen took a moment to catch her breath. “Do we know who they are?”
“They wear the familiar markings of the men who left Nyandoro eight days ago.”
Eight days?
The queen nodded as if she had been expecting the news. “Send three guards. Have them go to the men and ask what they want.”
“Iya, you know what they want. You saw it in your dream.”
This was her daughter? Nyandoro narrowed her eyes at Anesa, trying to find traces of the queen in her face. But she found a delicate sweetness in Anesa that was absent from the queen’s beautiful but unyielding face.
“This may not be the moment I dreamt,” the queen said.
But even Nyandoro sensed the lie. The queen knew what the men had come for. Did they want to take her back? Her hands turned into fists. They wouldn’t get her alive again.
The previously peaceful palace was now a blur of motion and worry percolated like a bad smell in the air. Nyandoro could taste its bitter tang with each breath. After sparing another desperate look at her mother, Anesa ran back where she came from.
“What’s happening?” Nyandoro demanded. “What are those men here for?”
The queen turned away, or at least tried to, but Nyandoro grabbed her hand. “Tell me!”
Under her hand, she felt the power in the woman, a flicker of electricity under her skin, lightning sparking up into her arm, painful and hot. But Nyandoro did not let go. “Tell me,” she insisted again.
The queen snarled. “You want to know what they want?” Her teeth were a ferocious white against her skin. She grabbed Nyandoro’s other hand in a vice grip.
A tingling buzzed through Nyandoro’s hands, running up her arms and into her chest. Images flooded her mind.
Men at the farthest entrance to their oddly placed valley, hills on both sides, the mouth of their valley leading out to the sea. Running in controlled formation and carrying spears. Hundreds of men. Then another image, more like a thought or an order. A wish. The palace burning, white under dark smoke and yellow flames. Men pushing women into the ground and burrowing furiously between their thighs. Dead warrior women everywhere and, in the back of the palace near the beach, in relief against the burning house, a rising pile of valuables—gold and jewelry, goats and cows, women tied together with rope to be taken away in slavery, the queen dead and a man standing at the center of it all with his hands raised to the heavens while lightning pulsed overhead in the sky.
The queen pulled her hand away and the visions dropped from Nyandoro’s mind. She gasped, eyes blinking frantically as fear bathed her body in stink. Even though it was all in her head, she could still smell the charred bodies from the vision, feel the smoke from the palace burning into her eyes.
Nyandoro couldn’t catch her breath. “Can they do that?”
“They think they can,” the queen said. “Whenever we have a transition between queens, there is always a risk. Our power is at its lowest, and some try to take advantage. The outside world thinks we have great wealth here. Jewels and power that ordinary men can use. Every three hundred seasons they forget that even at our weakest, we are still strong. They must be made to remember again.” Something dangerous flashed in her eyes, but it quickly flickered out. She didn’t have enough strength for even a threat.
She reached out a hand to Nyandoro. “Become the new Rain Queen and stop them.”
That couldn’t be the only solution. “No. I can’t.” Nyandoro shook her head and stepped away, physically separating herself from the queen and her problems. Their fight was not hers.
The queen’s expression shuttered and became hard. “Then stay out of our way.”
She rushed from the room in a sweep of blue cloth. Nyandoro stood frozen in the chaos, panic racing down her spine while women raced through the hallways, some carrying weapons, others cradling children.
A pair of warriors, armored in thick animal skins and carrying blades at their blue-sashed waists, bumped into Nyandoro’s shoulder as they ran past. Her heart drummed between her ribs. The blood rushed through her, a swift and dizzying flood. She didn’t want to go back with the men. This time, they wouldn’t worry about keeping her whole, or even alive. They would use her like the women in the vision, then they would sell her to anyone who had enough cowrie to pay. The quim of the would-be Rain Queen to the highest bidder. Fear gripped her belly.
She couldn’t stay here.
She couldn’t allow herself to be taken by those men again.
She wouldn’t let them rape and torture her.
She had no choice but to fight. For herself.
A deep breath of resolve and Nyandoro turned to follow the queen. She’d only taken a few steps before Anesa appeared at her side. The young girl’s face was frightened, her large eyes on the verge of spilling over with tears. She fell into step with Nyandoro, easily keeping up with her near run against the stream of women rushing the other way.
“Why won’t you take the queen’s power?” Anesa asked, breathless and sad. “We waited so long for you to come to us. We allowed you to have a life. Is this how you will allow all of our waiting to end?” She jerked her arm toward the upheaval around them. “Those men will not be merciful with us.”
Apparently, she hadn’t believed her mother’s words about not knowing what the men wanted either. Not that she had to be an oracle to know what a group of armed men bearing down on a houseful of women wanted. The specifics were unclear, but the broader picture was not. They would all die, be tortured for sport, or end up enslaved.
“This has nothing to do with me. You brought me here. You caused this. Your fight with those animals has nothing to do with me.”
“But those animals are the ones that killed your family. Don’t you want to take revenge on them?” Anesa was very much her mother’s child.
Revenge? No, this was suicide. Nyandoro started to tell the girl as much, but Anesa dragged her to a stop, pulled her from the path of the women rushing past. Her hands gripped the front of Nyandoro’s dress.
“Don’t make us lose everything,” she said, her voice breathless with desperation. “You can stop all this.”
The panic in her face, the way her body trembled like a bird caught in a windstorm, almost broke Nyandoro’s resolve. But she steeled her spine. There was only one person she would fight for now, and that was herself.
She needed to find a spear, a tapanga. And she needed to leave this place. Nyandoro untangled Anesa fingers from the front her dress. “Where are your weapons?”
A look of triumph and gladness transformed the girl’s face, then she frowned. “You cannot fight them when your body vulnerable like this. You need my iya’s power.”
Nyandoro thought briefly of lying, telling the girl what she wanted to hear so she’d show her the weapons room. But it seemed too cruel. “I’m sorry, but your iya will die queen of this place.”
“Please! No.” Anesa grabbed her arm.
But Nyandoro didn’t have time for any of this. These women had destroyed everything she had. She wasn’t going to reward them by giving them what they wanted. But she would
take what she needed from them. A quickly drawn breath and she slammed her elbow into Anise’s head.
With a sharp cry, the girl collapsed. Nyandoro cradled her light form, leaned her against a nearby wall and out of sight behind a large potted palm. Then she turned and ran with the other women. She pushed through the confusion of female bodies, women running to the safer parts of the palace, deeper rooms with no windows and trapdoors to prevent invaders from finding them. Nyandoro remembered her vision and how the palace had burned. The women didn’t stand a chance. But she didn’t want to pity them. Nyandoro ran faster, pushing her way through the sharp stink of fear clogging the hallways, and focused on the direction where the armed warrior women came from. Where they came from, she was sure to find weapons.
Her instincts were right. In the weapons room at the end of a twisting hallway, she grabbed a long blade from its place beside dozens of others on the wall. Feeling eyes on her, she twisted around with the blade in hand. A passing group of women peered into the room at her then, ignoring Nyandoro, moved on as if there was nothing to see. They looked like guards, these women who wore short blue tunics and carried long tapangas and short daggers strapped to their waists. One of the women even carried an axe.
How far away were the invaders? The women acted as if they would appear at their doorstep at any moment. Nyandoro grabbed a belt and bucked it around her waist, slid a tapanga and a short dagger into the loops designed to carry them. Then she left the palace.
Even in the growing darkness, it was easy to find the path she and the queen had taken down to the sea. She walked quickly away from the palace. It wasn’t her responsibility. It wasn’t. She could do nothing for these women short of giving away what was left of her life. Those assurances didn’t stop the guilt from following her down to the sand and to the small flotilla of boats she’d seen when she and the queen had had their “talk.”
The boat she wanted was one of half a dozen tethered to the shore. It floated placidly in the blue-green water between larger boats, small enough to carry her alone to anyplace she wanted. The vessel’s very presence on the shore, quiet and unbothered, screamed in sharp contrast to the chaos Nyandoro had left behind at the palace. Her guilt screamed even louder.
It’s not your problem.
It’s not your problem.
Chanting the words under her breath, she ran toward the small boat, her sandaled feet sinking into the sand with each step. The sound of the sea whispered at her, tugging at her the closer she drew to the dark wooden boat with a foreign word scrawled across its side.
Liberdade.
Nyandoro tugged at the rope holding the boat prisoner to the land, her fingers fumbling with the rough twine, slipping over and over again, unable to disconnect the line.
“Fuck!”
She yanked at the rope and it cut into her skin, burning with each frustrated tug. The wet sand squelched between her toes and gently pulled her farther toward the water. She should go. She wanted to go. Duni and a peaceful life waited for her on the other side of this journey. But still, Nyandoro didn’t do what would’ve been the simplest thing: cut the boat’s tether with the blade at her waist. Instead, her hands stopped moving on the rope. She cursed again.
The sea was dark, and growing darker. Stars peered down from the sky and the moon was fat and white, giving off the perfect amount of light to sail by. A sharp scream cut through the trees. Nyandoro gripped the edge of the boat and dropped her head in defeat. She turned and ran back up the path.
In the valley, the palace was already on fire.
A small blaze raging under the lower window of one of the palace rooms, the invaders’ first attempts to smoke out the women. The queen’s women fought the invaders in the courtyard, on the rise of the hill. But it wasn’t enough. They needed help.
Nyandoro drew her tapanga with the sound of steel against leather and ran toward the men who swarmed like ants down from the mountain on both sides of the palace. The men numbered in the hundreds. Their feet drummed into the dirt and their necklaces made of animal teeth and bone looked wet in the dark, frightening symbols of what they could do to these women and girls once—if—they took the palace. Nyandoro ran faster, dimly aware of the wet grass under her feet, blood, not water. Like in her village.
Nyandoro slashed the throat of the first man she reached.
His gurgling scream drew the attention of men nearby, and her presence on the field of blood was no longer a secret.
With every man that came at her, she imagined the men who had taken her family, their gloating faces, and their chief. She slashed with the sharp blade, dancing between thrusting spears and slashing knives before they could touch her, pushing into the never-ending surge of men that rushed toward the palace.
These men were strong, well-rested and well-armed. But she didn’t stop. She kept slashing until her shoulder ached from the thud of her tapanga into flesh and bone, kicking the dead men from the end of her blade with her foot, moving silently through the chaos and using her size and agility to her advantage.
Flesh pounded flesh. Men and women screamed in pain. Blood splashed her hands, her face. In the madness of the fight, Nyandoro imagined the white walls of the palace splashed with red. She gasped when a punch landed on her face and split her lip, exploding the taste of blood in her mouth. The blow brought her firmly back into the fight, and she howled at the soldier who came at her throat with his blade. Nyandoro split his belly and darted away.
But there were so many of them.
The grunts and screams of men, of women, echoed through the valley. Both sides were losing. Nyandoro imagined the frightened faces of the children, the women hiding in those rooms vulnerable to fire and death. She slashed through the men, gasping. The breath whooshing from her mouth, her chest heaving, her arms stinging from minor cuts.
How would the queen win this? It looked impossible. It looked like she would get her chance to die after all. She was ready.
To her left, another woman went down under a spear, but she took her killer with her, ramming her blade up into an invader’s body and twisting just before the light leached out of her eyes. The men hadn’t made it into the palace, but it was only a matter of time. Panting, she ran toward the building, dodging men and bodies and spears, keeping low to the ground and constantly moving, her eyes already adjusted to the moonlit night.
She leapt over a rangy man, slashing through the meat of his neck before he could make it farther toward the palace. She ran up the steps. Then gasped at a punching pain at her back. She fell down to one knee, reached back to feel the steel lance buried in her back. Shelter. She needed to find shelter.
Nyandoro spun and hid behind a column, hissing from the pain when the spear jolted in her flesh. It burned. She twisted and reached back, wrenched the spear with a liquid squelch from between her shoulder blades. Agony. Her throat raw, she screamed and hurled the spear. It rammed into a man leaping toward her, slashing into his neck. But the move cost her and she slipped down the white steps and into the grass, leaving a bloody trail. Blood filled her gasping mouth, coppery and strong. Swaying only a little, she jumped to her feet.
Up ahead, a pair of men jumped over an unguarded terrace.
Isn’t that where—?
Nyandoro’s eyes narrowed when she saw Anesa, slashing and fierce, attack the men with a spear. Her movements were tight and graceful, admirable on a practice field, but not enough against men actually trying to kill her. Nyandoro grabbed a spear sticking from a dead invader’s chest and threw it as hard as she could. It caught one of the men in the throat and he fell on top of Anesa. She screamed.
Nyandoro dodged a slashing tapanga, ran, and sprang onto the bent back of a woman warrior, landing on the thick stone railing with her short knife gripped in her hand. But both men were already dead. Anesa looked both feral and frightened, her face stained with blood.
Nyandoro dragged her to her feet.
“Come with me!”
Their feet pounded again
st the stone floors as they ran into the palace, Nyandoro pushing the girl ahead of her, heading where her instincts told her the queen was. From deep in the palace, she felt a thrum of power, followed it through the corridors to a small room with a door hidden by a false wall.
Nyandoro shoved Anesa into the room, panting. And stared at what she saw. The queen sat on the floor surrounded by children and young women, girls who had yet to pass five seasons. She was singing softly to them. A child sat in the queen’s lap, bewildered eyes flickering around the room while she sucked her thumb. The child reminded Nyandoro of the baby girl her brother’s wife would’ve had. A child who never got the chance to be born. She staggered where she stood.
The room stank of fear and resignation, women clutched each other, crying, and children sobbed into their mothers’ breasts. Although a fight to the death raged outside their hidden door, it was just a matter of time before the invaders found them. Nyandoro stared at the child in the queen’s lap, her wide-eyed vulnerability, her innocence. She drew in a hitching breath when the inevitable realization settled in her. These women and their children had nothing to do with what happened to her family. They were victims too.
“I’ll do it.” Nyandoro fell to her knees at the queen’s feet. “I’ll accept the power.”
Anesa cried out, her voice jarring and loud over her mother’s singing. She stared at Nyandoro in shock before rushing to the queen’s side, gently pushing her way through the barrier of children to hang on to her mother’s arm. She looked terrified.
The queen huffed out a sound that was very much like relief.