Nnedi Okorafor - Binti - The Complete Trilogy

“That is not for you to decide,” Okwu said. “Unprovoked aggressive action is reason for war.”

“The Khoush killed my family,” I added flatly. “For we, Himba, that should be an act of war, shouldn’t it?”

“I’m sorry, Binti,” Chief Kapika said, touching my shoulder. “But if you chose to mingle with the Meduse and if your family chose to welcome one into its home, even built a home for it, why should the rest of us—”

“Because we are Himba!” I shouted, clenching my fists. “Osemba is my home!”

He waved his hand. “Save it for the Okuruwo, ” he said. “I won’t speak for the council.” He rolled the palm leaf up and began to walk away. He stopped and turned back to me. “When you come, please apply otjize . Use what I gave you, if you have none. You look like a savage.” He gave Mwinyi a foul look.

I shot a glance at Mwinyi, who glared at Chief Kapika but held his tongue. When Chief Kapika was out of hearing range, Mwinyi said, “And that’s why we will not come to fight for the Himba.”

I bit my lip. “He only knows the little we know here,” I said. “Forgive him for that.”

Mwinyi only looked away, moving his hands smoothly as he turned his back to me. I didn’t ask who he was speaking to.

“Are all your people so afraid?” Okwu asked.

I glared at it.

“I think we should leave here,” Mwinyi said, turning back to me. “The conflict between the Meduse and the Khoush is old. It’s a large part of why the Enyi Zinariya have stayed away from these lands. Binti, it’s not your fault. This was all going to start again, sooner or later. You did what you could on that ship, but even you had to have known it was temporary.”

But was it, I wondered. Things had been peaceful all my life and well before that. The pact had held. And in that time, the Himba had flourished. My father was able to build up his shop. Many of us traveled regularly to Khoush cities to sell our astrolabes. Even all that had happened on the Third Fish and with the stinger on Oomza Uni would have remained planets away if I had not been there. No, I had disturbed all of that when I decided to do what we Himba never do.

“I have to try and make it better,” I said. “I can’t just leave here.” My family, I thought. Almost all of my loved ones had burned alive and were now charred remains in the Root, the home in which we’d all grown up—my mother, father, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, family friends. I shuddered, reaching into my pocket and touching the golden ball of my edan . It felt warm and I grasped it. The feeling of its grooved surface was instantly soothing, the feel of the numbers running through my mind as I lightly treed such a relief that my legs felt weak.

I sighed and walked over to a market bench and sat down. “Where is Rakumi?” I flatly asked.

Mwinyi pointed up the road toward the Root. I nodded. “Are you alright?” He sat beside me.

“No,” I said. “I will never be alright again.”

Okwu glided over to us. “Shall I go with you?” it asked.

I thought about it for a moment. I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “For now, though, go back to the chief and the other Meduse and keep them from showing themselves.”

“Have the Khoush returned here?” Mwinyi asked.

“They will, “Okwu said and it sounded almost hungry at the prospect. “They are still searching for me. Soon they will realize that I have been hiding in plain sight.” Its dome vibrated. Laughter. “You should hope this meeting is successful. Otherwise, tomorrow, there will be war.”

Mwinyi looked at me. “When will…”

“ O… O…” I paused. The word was still hard for me to speak. “ Okuruwo are always held at sunset,” I said. “‘When the fire and the sky are in agreement.’”

Mwinyi and I stayed in the empty souq for much of the day, then Mwinyi went back to the Root to get Rakumi; I didn’t want to go with. Okwu had returned to the lake, where it quickly disappeared into the water. Once, while in there, it had reached out to me through my okuoko and asked, Are you alright?

“I am here,” I responded.

Mwinyi returned with Rakumi, who must have eaten her fill of what was left of my brother’s garden. The camel sat down beside my unrolled mat and went to sleep. The remaining Himba in the area who hid in their homes kept their distance. Once in a while, I could see people walking in small groups up or down the road. People looked our way but quickly moved on.

I spent those few hours resting on my mat, my golden ball levitating before me as I treed. I left the other pieces in my pocket. Somehow, they no longer felt like part of the edan anymore. They were like bits of shed skin. I wondered if the golden ball was still poison to Okwu, or if it was just the outer silver-looking pieces. The golden ball had the same tang of the pieces when I touched it to my tongue. “It’s not really a good time to ask Okwu,” I whispered to myself, and I watched the golden ball rotate before me. The current I sent around it was like an electrical atmosphere around a small planet.

Mwinyi sat beside me, watching for a bit, and other times getting up and walking along the edge of the lake. At one point, he stopped and stood with his back to the lake and looked toward the sky. He stayed like this for nearly an hour. I watched him, while deep inside a flow of mathematics, the golden grooved ball slowly rotating before me, my mind clear, sharp, calm, and distant. Mwinyi’s face was peaceful, his lips seemed to be saying something, his hands to his sides, his light blue garments fluttered in the wind, and he stood on the discarded shells of the clusterwink snails who lived in the lake.

I wondered what he was doing. A harmonizer knows when a fellow harmonizer is harmonizing. Who was he speaking to? Maybe the Seven. Eventually, he roused himself, then moved his hands for several minutes. He came back to me and sat on his mat. “Was it a good conversation?” I asked him.

He chuckled, rolled his eyes, and said, “You wouldn’t believe it.”

I went back to working with the golden ball. If he didn’t want to tell me, I was fine with that. Maybe he’d been speaking with my grandmother, or the Ariya, or maybe his parents or brothers. It wasn’t always my business.

At sunset, I breathed a sigh of relief. The Khoush military hadn’t returned. This meant there was still a chance that an Okuruwo would help the Himba organize, and maybe I could get us to serve as mediator between the Khoush and Meduse and prevent all-out war. If war intensified between the Khoush and Meduse, if more Meduse came and more Khoush from farther lands came, the fighting would spread and even bleed into other peoples’ business. All because of me. On the Third Fish, I had accidently found myself in the middle of something. This time I was that middle.

We packed up and Mwinyi and I ate a large meal of leftover roasted desert hare, dried dates, and ground roots. I stepped behind one of the booths and used most of the remaining otjize I had to cover myself with a thick layer, rolling my okuoko with so much of it that one would not be able to tell that they weren’t hair but okuoko, tentacles.

I sent a message to Okwu that it was time to go and it emerged from the water less than a minute later. There was an odd moment when Okwu glided up to Mwinyi and they both stayed like that for about thirty seconds. Something passed between them, I was sure. Though Mwinyi had no edan or okuoko, he was still a harmonizer; where I used mathematics, he used some other form of access to speak with various peoples.