Nnedi Okorafor - Binti - The Complete Trilogy

One girl ran around one of them, stopped, and brought up her hands. She motioned wildly and then kept running. She wove around two women haggling over a yam, squeezed between the group of men listening to the local imam preach, and ran right up to the tall golden figure waiting for her. She smiled and held up an orange whose peel had been cut away. “You bite into it,” she said. “Like this.”

I awoke with the taste of oranges in my mouth. When I opened my eyes, I was facing the desert and I could see the dream that wasn’t a dream retreating from me into the distance, like something sneaking away.

“Why bother hiding?” I muttered. “Why don’t you just ask if you want to tell me stories? I am a student. I will listen.”

I sat up and looked around. The dogs were gone. The sun was about an hour from rising and Mwinyi was already preparing Rakumi for the journey. I sat up and watched him for a moment as he grunted and patted the camel’s back before strapping the saddle onto her. There was a strange moment when Rakumi turned and looked right at Mwinyi and he gazed right into her eyes. Then the camel touched her soft lips to his forehead and turned forward and Mwinyi finished putting the saddle on.

I reached for my jar of otjize and held it before my eyes. So little left. I applied some to my face and a thin layer to my arms and lower parts of my legs, rubbing some into my anklets. If my family saw me like this, they’d be mortified. At least during more normal times. I climbed out of the tent and stretched my back. I was stiff, but okay, having slept about four solid hours.

“Good morning,” I said.

He turned around and nodded. “Not yet, but soon.”

“Can we make it there by the end of the day?” I asked.

“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…”