SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

"We find fragments of new books every year, and we recover computer files—sometimes even from other worlds. Everything that comes to us, we add to our texts…"

"But we don’t study cases?"

"Of course we do. We have the cases that the Union doctors treated, and even some of those from the Commonwealth and the Accord."

"New cases. Cases to recreate what was in their books rather than looking for them in holes in the ground." He trailed off, suddenly deflated. "Then Mapalo is in the care of Babalu, not Eyinle?"

"She must be. Where we have not the knowledge to follow the god of health, then only the god of sickness can help."

"Where we refuse to find the knowledge, you mean."

"Be careful, musambilila," the professor said, his voice calm but with an edge of iron. "I know your anger. Many students have it. But if you don’t grow beyond it, then you will never be a nganga. You didn’t come this far, sacrifice this much, to be an umulaye."

"No," Mutende said. "I will think about your words."

"See that you do."

That night, Mutende didn’t go home. His feet took him to the port district instead, and into a shebeen only blocks from the landing fields. He wanted to be among those who knew the ichiyawafu, those to whom it was a highway rather than a fearful mystery, and he wanted to grieve with those who had passed through the land of the dead and lived.

The shebeen was a free traders' bar: that was confirmed by the patrons' florid clothing, and also by the tapestries that hung between the tables so that merchants and sailors could keep their secrets. The hangings were in blue and white, the colors of Yemoja of the Waters and Stars, with scenes from foreign worlds or abstract patterns that recalled ichiyawafu-dreams.

He bought a cup of imbote and sat at one of the long tables outside the curtains, sipping the honey-beer in the candlelight and listening to the others' stories. A few looked at him sharply—a man with no ship-clan had no place here—but one of them was a Hornbill and he was quiet in the shadows, so they let him stay.

"Kaweme," one of them said when he spoke at last. "Yes, I remember him. He always wanted to find something—the world the orishas came from, the lost colonies of the Second Migration, the jewel of an awantu-king a million years dead. He was going to find the universe and bring it home to sell…you say his woman has the fever?"

"Yes. That’s what he did bring home."

"I should see her. Kaweme was in my ship-clan, and we owe her something. A funeral, if nothing else."

"The pirates got him, didn’t they?" asked another trader, leaning in.

"That was when he went looking for the lost colony. They’d found it first."

"No, it happened on Muya, where the pirates were paying tribute to the governor…"

Others around the table joined in with their stories until it was almost a wake for Kaweme. But it wasn’t one for Mapalo, and after a few attempts to steer the conversation in that direction, Mutende realized that the sailors didn’t know her. Ship-clans and ship-marriages were what mattered to them; their lives in port, and their husbands and wives there, were separate. Mapalo was as much a stranger to them as Kaweme was to Mutende.

He finished his fourth imbote and sank into a sodden despair; he had come to the wrong place for this particular grief. But he bought his neighbor a shake-shake beer and let the sailor buy him the next one, and watched the candles flicker and listened to stories.

There was noise by the bar and Mutende saw that a group of young men had come in; a second later, he saw that they were basambilila. The medical school had rooms near here, he remembered—a clinic, purchasing offices, a center for study of off-world diseases—and the students must have just come from class. They were high-born, too: if that wasn’t clear from their clothing, it was made plain when they ordered liquors from distant worlds. If everyone at the long table emptied their pockets, they wouldn’t have enough to buy even one of the cups the students held.

Mutende never remembered standing up. He stood at the table for a long moment, his eyes fixed on the students, oblivious to the looks of concern the sailors were giving him.

"You!" he said. "High-born fools! Are you tired yet of being dogs at the ancestors' feet?"

A musambilila turned to look at him, surprise and anger written on his face. "Who are you calling a dog, ifilolo?" he said.

"You scavenge for the Union’s books but you don’t care about the diseases that come on the ships every year. You learn the lessons your professors memorized but you don’t want to learn the ones your patients teach you. Did I call you a dog? Dogs would know better than to do what you do."

One of the students seemed about to answer, but it wasn’t debate that Mutende or most of the high-born ones wanted. "An umulaye would spit on you," said one of them, and he answered, "An umulaye is worth ten of you bush-pigs." The next part of the discussion wasn’t with words.

Maybe Mutende charged first; maybe one of the basambilila did. His fist found someone’s face, and he fought with hands and feet and knees, ignoring the blows that rained on him, wanting only to hurt or even kill. Blood ran into his eyes, forcing them closed; he lashed out unseeing, not caring about the pain he suffered as long as he could inflict some in return.

From somewhere, he heard the rasp of a knife being drawn. He couldn’t see where it was. Others did, though, and the shebeen-owner’s men stepped in: fights were one thing but blades were another, and no one wanted the attention of the bakulama. A dozen hands pulled the combatants apart, and two of them threw Mutende out the door.

It had begun to rain outside, and as the cool water washed over his face, Mutende realized how badly he had been beaten. He would have to find a nganga to put him back together—no, an umulaye. This was what they did well, and after he’d defended their honor, it would hardly be fair of one to refuse.

The predawn light was emerging in the east when Mutende made it home. He planned to collapse in his bed and find a doctor in a few hours, but when he passed Mapalo’s apartment, he could hear conversation inside and the cinnamon-pepper smell of a blue-leaf tisane filled the hallway. Evidently her umulaye came early.

"I’ll go to the ichiyawafu soon," she was saying. "They say it’s everyplace at once, so Kaweme will be there even though he died on another world."

"Don’t speak like that," said another woman’s voice. "Drink your tea."

Mutende hesitated, but he knocked on the door.

"Come in…oh, you’ve been in a fight!"

"I’ll live, mbuya."

"Lelato should look at you. Have you met her?"

He hadn’t, and his eyes were drawn to the umulaye’s appearance. She wasn’t from the north country: no, she affected the dress of a free trader, with loose silk trousers and jacket in black and red geometric patterns and tight curls cropped close around her scalp. He wondered why, and then saw the tattoo of a ship-clan, weathered with age and just a shade darker brown than her face.

"I was a ship’s doctor for twenty years," she said—she must have seen him looking. "Most of the traders like awamulaye better than inganga, and I had a year’s training in surgery on Chama. They take women in the medical schools there."

"Did you know Mapalo’s husband?"

"He was in my ship-clan. He made me promise to see her if anything happened to him. When I came back to the city and learned she had the fever, I came to her."

There was a mystery here, Mutende thought. He’d expected a peasant healer from Kabwe province, full of remedies against witchcraft and half an infwiti herself, but here was a woman who’d traveled among the stars, and who might have seen medical books that even the bakalamba hadn’t read.