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

"It will help ward off the imfwiti within your body," Lelato answered. Mutende waited for his landlady to rebuke the street-doctor for saying such an absurd thing, but she nodded instead, and he remembered a north-country story she’d told him once. The peasants in her province told of witches who could make themselves any size, and who might lodge themselves in a victim’s heart and use her very blood to make their magic. There were stories like that among the awantu as well—awantu who, it was rumored, had once been human—and she’d no doubt heard them from Kaweme. She nodded again, satisfied.

"But if it goes wrong, it might also attack that which gives life," Mutende warned—always one more warning.

"If it takes my life, it will do no more than the fever."

"Then sit back, mbuya." Mutende held Mapalo’s arm while the umulaye held the needle. It was full of sterile fluid with the sliver inside, and when Lelato pushed it in, the machine went with it. The tool Mutende had remade was in Mapalo’s veins, to make medicine from her very blood.

He had class that day in the room that had once been refrigerator and storage-closet: another session with the Book of Maladies, another lesson in diagnosis and remedy. He half-expected that the mukalamba would call him out in front of the class and expel him for fighting or sacrilege, but that didn’t happen. Lesson followed lesson—biology, surgery, study of the body systems, hours in the clinics assisting the inganga with their work—and if anyone thought that Mutende’s conduct was unbecoming a musambilila, they didn’t say.

On the fourth day, he noticed that his landlady’s condition had begun to improve. Her lesions were clearing and she breathed easier, and she could sit and then stand without discomfort. On the ninth day, he heard her singing Kabwe-country songs while she fixed a drain, and that night, she sat outside with two of the market-women and shared an earthen pitcher of imbote.

In his hours at the clinics and the luwuko-rooms, he took notes, comparing Mapalo’s improvement to that of others who responded to treatment for ichiyawafu-fever. It seemed, day by day, that the sickness was leaving her body. On the eighteenth day, he and Lelato took her to the Mwata’s Gardens for the first time since she was a child, and almost every evening now, she dragged a chair out to the street and talked and sang.

On the thirty-second day, she died.

It was a fever—not the ichiyawafu-fever, but the Orange Sickness that had been brought to Chambishi Port from the far western islands. Mapalo fell ill from it in the morning, and she seemed to have no resistance: it burned through her, growing worse by the hour, and all his remedies and Lelato’s only slowed it down.

"It doesn’t do this to other people," he said as he and the umulaye kept watch at Mapalo’s bedside. She had passed from delirium into sleep; her breathing was shallow and her appearance deceptively peaceful. "It doesn’t go this fast. In the Book of Maladies …there’s time for the body to fight, for medicines to work."

Lelato was silent for a long time, and Mutende wondered if she’d heard. "I took samples of her urine and stool," she said finally. "I wanted to know which cells our nanomachines were cleaning from her body. And the cells she was passing—they’re the ones that make her immune. That’s where the infection was, and when the sick cells were cleaned, they left her with nothing to fight new fevers. I thought her body would make new ones, and maybe in time it would have, but…" She seemed on the verge of tears, and it took her four tries before she could say another word. "There’s so much we don’t know."

Neither she nor Mutende said another word that night: they watched Mapalo in silence, and three hours later, death claimed her. Lelato rose from her chair and Mutende heard a door open and close: soon after, the death-drums started beating.

The nyinachimbela came at dawn, the old woman who was queen of the women’s burial society. She and Lelato and three of the market-women washed Mapalo’s body, put strings of beads around her waist and neck and arms, folded her so that her hands were on her shoulders and her knees against her chest, and shrouded her in white imbafuta-cloth. Mutende did none of this: preparing a woman to be buried was women’s work. But he was one of those who carried her to the burial ground, and he joined the awenamilenda, the men’s burial society, in digging the grave and laying her down with her face to the east. And he was one of those who knelt, his hands in the cool earth, and pushed the dirt back into the grave to cover her.

That evening, after everyone had bathed in the lagoon, there was the wake: the ritual of singing and drinking and dancing. The market-women of Mapalo’s street were there; her tenants and neighbors came as well, and an elder of the Hornbill clan. And there was one other: when Mutende dipped his cup into the keg of shake-shake beer, he looked up to see his mukalamba.

"Do you see now," said the professor, "how foolish it is to seek new knowledge without a foundation?"

"You watched," Mutende said.

"We watched, as we watched others before you. Your uganga failed."

Mutende, suddenly combative, looked the teacher in the eye. "She lived longer than she would have done without our uganga, and she had a better death."

"But still it failed." The mukalamba held Mutende’s gaze with his own until, slowly, the younger man agreed.

"Learning needs a foundation," he conceded. "But trying and failing is the only way to build one." He realized suddenly what he’d wanted to say the month before when the professor had warned him against trying to surpass the ancestors. "We can’t wait until we know everything the Union knew before we learn more. We must build our own foundation even if it’s a different one from what they had."

The mukambala held his gaze steady again. "Even after your patient died, you say this?"

"How many patients have died because we didn’t dare?"

The teacher clapped once, but it was only an acknowledgment, not an affirmation. "If that is your decision, you must make it as an umulaye, because you will never be a nganga."

He was silent, and Mutende realized he was being allowed a final chance. But if the mukalamba was expecting a recantation or a plea, one did not come.

"My choice is made," Mutende said.

He took his cup and wandered past one of the upstairs families singing a funeral song—wulukoshi wakawalila mwana, the eagle has carried off my child. Lelato was there, listening, and he told her.

"You want an umulaye’s fostering, at your age?" she asked.

"I’ve had a fostering already. I am what I am—a sworn mechanic and a forsworn musambilila."

"I told you that awamulaye are jealous of our cures—what makes you think I’d want to share with you?"

"You already have. And if we’re jealous of what we know, we’ll never build the foundation."

"Yes," she said. They were silent, listening to the funeral chants and watching the dancing begin. "You know that Mapalo left her house to you and me…"

"No, I didn’t know," he said, surprised.

"We cared for her, and her children have gone to the ship-clans. The Hornbills will have a claim, but we can pay them some of the rents."

He thought about it for a moment. "And she thought that if she showed us favor, the neighbors wouldn’t think that we were the imfwiti who killed her?"

"Some of them may suspect that anyway. That’s one thing you need to get used to if you follow the umulaye’s path—a street-doctor who fails can be taken for a witch. But I was thinking that if you don’t want her rooms, we can turn them into a school."

"A school for awamulaye?" The idea was startling, but it took only a second to seem natural. "Her rooms are small…"