Nnedi Okorafor - Binti - The Complete Trilogy

Mwinyi looked at me questioningly.

I grabbed the jar of otjize in my pocket. Okwu’s insides were slathered with a lot of it already. “Mwinyi, put this where Okwu’s been injured,” I said. I paused and then added, “Use all of it.”

I stood up.

As I walked toward them all, they could have shot me. They’d just tried. I was too angry to care. The Khoush soldiers stood like statues as I approached. In rows, before their sky whales, the darkness of the desert extending behind them, the stars above. My sandals dug into the sand. My red skirt lapped at my legs and my red top was wet with sweat. No otjize . I was naked.

“Binti,” one of the Khoush men said.

“I don’t know who you are,” I said, standing beside Dele. He was staring at me like I was a creature from outer space. All of them were.

“Qalb Leader Iyad,” he said. “And these are my co-leaders, Qalb Leader Durrah.” The tall woman with the thin braid hanging to her knees nodded at me. “And Qalb Leader Yabani.” The intense-looking man with an equally long black braid inhaled noisily, flaring his nostrils at me as if he’d smelled something foul. All of them had light brown skin, darkened from its typical Khoush tone by the sun.

“We’ve told them of your suggestion,” Chief Kapika quickly said. “That you offer to convince the Meduse to attend a meeting to make peace.” He gave me a slight nod and I felt a rush of relief, despite all that had just happened. The Himba Council would be there too.

“We will take the idea to General Kuw and he will take it to the king of Khoushland,” Iyad said, looking down his nose at me. “But the Meduse massacred a ship full of our most gifted minds, unarmed students and professors. And all that was left was… you. Can you really convince those savages to come and have a rational discussion?”

I don’t know when I started shaking, but when I spoke, my voice was vibrating like an Undying tree during a thunderstorm. “You just tried to kill me,” I blurted.

Yabani laughed.

“That was an accident,” Iyad said. “We thought you were a Meduse.”

I felt Dele take my arm. “Breathe,” he said into my ear.

I yanked my arm away. I could feel my okuoko writhing wildly now. Without otjize what must I have looked like? “You shot my friend,” I growled. “It’s the third time you people have tried to kill it since we arrived here! You agreed to the pact through Oomza Uni knowing you were lying right through your teeth.”

“I doubt one dead Meduse is a pact destroyer after they killed a ship full of our smartest and finest,” Iyad snapped. “They’re barely flesh, anyway.”

My vision blurred with fury. “Khoush scholars attacked the Meduse chief, took its stinger, and put it on display in a museum!” I stepped right up to Iyad’s face. I am not tall. Nor am I roped with muscle. I barely came to this man’s chin and I had to look up to meet his eyes, but he was scared. I saw it in his face. I smelled it wafting from his naked skin. He was terrified of me. I’d seen the Night Masquerade twice, I was Meduse, I was Enyi Zinariya, I was Himba, and I had no home.

“I am Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya of Osemba, master harmonizer,” I said. I let myself tree and though I felt calmer, my rage stayed and I was glad. I called up a current and held up my hands to show it connecting to my index fingers like soft lightning. I swirled my fingers and the current coiled into a ball hovering before Iyad’s eyes. “I do not want to see my homeland and people destroyed by a stale ancient irrational fight between people who have no real reason to hate each other. When the sun rises, come as you’ve agreed, to the Root that you reduced to char and ash, where my family lies dead. The Meduse will be there and you both will bury this idiocy once and for all.” With the help and power of us Himba, I thought, angrily. Because neither of you is reasonable enough to do it on your own.

I didn’t wait for his answer. I pulled in my current, turned, and walked back to Okwu and Mwinyi.

The Khoush left. I didn’t see them go, but I heard their sky whales take off and felt the dust they blew over us.

Okwu did not die. My otjize saved him. Both the otjize Mwinyi slathered on its wounds and the otjize Okwu had sucked off my skin and okuoko when it had enveloped me. Mwinyi, his fingers coated with what was left of my otjize, wouldn’t stop looking at me.

That night, we stayed in the Osemba House. Somehow, we’d been able to fit Okwu through the dome-shaped door that was wide but not nearly as wide as Okwu. The Meduse were huge but easily compressible, when they wanted to be. Iyad had been rude in his words, but correct, nonetheless. There really wasn’t much mass or weight to Meduse. Once inside, Okwu hovered weakly beside the well. It was quiet, glad to be near such pure water, its god. Mwinyi took a bucket of it out back and bathed with it. I can’t say that I didn’t have the urge to do the same, and this disturbed me.

The elders and Dele could not deal with me being otjize -free. Thus, after Titi and the other women brought us food and blankets and promised to check on our camel, they left us. They would meet us in the morning. Out back, the Sacred Fire burned, small now and fueled by the bark of an Undying tree, so it would not go out, as long as no sky whale wind turbines blew dust on it. Titi brought me a jar of otjize and now I sat on a blanket facing the back door and Sacred Fire, contemplating the large jar on the mat before my crossed legs.

Mwinyi sat beside me and picked up the jar. I let him open it and sniff the contents. “This one and the other I put on Okwu smells different from your own,” he said.

I smiled. “Mine was made from clay I dug up on Oomza Uni.”

He put the jar back down and turned to me. “Is it an insult if I said you look beautiful with it and without it?”

I met his eyes for only a moment and then looked away, my heart fluttering.

“I can see you more clearly now,” he said. “Now that I’ve seen you with it and without. The two make one.”

“You’re not supposed to ever see me without otjize, ” I said. “Only a Himba girl’s parents should ever see a Himba girl my age without her otjize . Not even a woman’s husband will—” I bit my lip and looked at the jar.

“I know,” Mwinyi laughed. “But remember, I’m not Himba. Me seeing you with and without it just means I see you. Nothing demeaning.” He touched the long matted braid that grew from the middle of his red-brown bushy hair. It was so long that it reached his knees. “See this? The Enyi Zinariya call it tsani, a ‘ladder’ for the spirits. You start growing it at the age of ten. So it’s been seven years. A woman isn’t supposed to touch it and not even my mother has.” He hesitated for a moment and then held it out to me.

I looked at it. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Why?”

“Do you know the desert dogs we met didn’t think you were from Earth?” he said. “I think, maybe, I think you’re part of something, Binti.” His confident smile was faltering now. This was anything but easy for him. I looked at the rope of red-brown hair. Then I reached out and took it in my hands. It felt like my hair, except it wasn’t made firm with otjize .

“There,” I said, putting it down. “Do you feel different?”

“No,” he said. “But I am.” He smirked and then laughed.

“What’s funny?” I asked.

He grinned bigger than I’d seen him grin since we’d left his home. “Honestly, I’m not even sure if you’re a human being anymore, so maybe you don’t really count.”