The Deep

by Rivers Solomon

  The headache threatening at her temples was sharp and prickly. She didn’t know what to do with the decreases in pressure. Her body felt wrong, like it was flying apart. There was nothing in these depths to hold her together, to squeeze her into place. As the light colored the water into a strange shade of dark, greenish blue, she closed her eyes, unused to the burn of sunshine.

  This was familiar. She’d been here years and years ago. Words came to mind… hunting… hunting with Amaba. Or perhaps this place was from the History. She had a sense of the rememberings still, though already the details had faded. Whenever she tried to concentrate on anything specific, it slipped through her mind like sand through her webbed fingers. She could feel it still, but she didn’t know it.

  She couldn’t say for sure where she’d seen the sunshine before, or this particular shade of blue. Random, meaningless images were all her mind dredged up. Where she’d once carried multitudes, there was sparsity.

  Yetu was not so shallow yet that she felt out of danger. Light was only just beginning to penetrate. Some wajinru lived at these depths and would search for her here. She needed to go closer to the surface yet if she wanted to escape her people entirely.

  Yetu pumped her body upward in a spiral, unthinkingly, too out of her mind to determine how far she was going. She guessed it had already been miles.

  Light burned her eyes as she rose. Her pupils shrank to dots, but it was still too much. She couldn’t focus on navigation with the headache that had spread from her temples to the top of her head all the way down to the base of her neck. Her sense of north, south, east, and west were gone. The currents were a maze. Unfamiliar animals moved in ways she didn’t recognize.

  Schools of fish flitted past her, turning her around. Which way was up again?

  She followed the light, went toward its blinding whiteness. It was so warm. She’d never been this lost before, never been so unable to orient herself.

  But Yetu didn’t need to orient. She just needed to go. That was what mattered most. The goal was to be away from where she was now. The particulars of where she ended up were inconsequential.

  She went up, up, and up until there was no up left, her head cracking through the sea’s surface, oxygen from the air—the air!—blitzing her lungs. It made her remember fire and bombs, images of thrashing water tumbling through her mind, but then she couldn’t remember where the fire and bombs came from. A few seconds later, Yetu couldn’t remember what fire and bombs were.

  Yetu was still. She let herself float. She’d left the wajinru. That, she could not forget. She’d done the one thing the first historian wanted no wajinru to do. By leaving, Yetu was forcing them to endure the full weight of their History. She’d left them alone. Had abandoned them. They were not one people anymore. Yetu was apart. She squeezed her eyes shut against the light and reminded herself that they’d be okay. Amaba was the strongest wajinru Yetu had ever known. Her will did not bend. Not even the rememberings could ruin her.

  Yetu trembled in the water, the physical ache of her desertion catching up to her. After everything, she still might die. She wasn’t sure her body, debilitated from a year of neglect, could take what she’d done to it.

  The light overhead was dimmer now. It still hurt to look at it with squinting eyes, but it wasn’t as bad as she had imagined. The air was cold against Yetu’s face. Sounds up here were different. She couldn’t feel them properly. She turned around. Pink-orange haze crowned the sky.

  Waves carried her up and down and toward the waning light. She bobbed, and she liked the rhythm of the subtle movement. She was, for the first time in many years, weightless.

  Breaking through to the surface was not as new a feeling as she had expected it to be. Yetu had lived it all before through the rememberings, and though her mind struggled to focus on any particular image or memory, it was familiar. This was how her people must have felt after the Remembrance. The raw pain of the memories was gone, but the truth of it still remained in the wajinru, helping them to carry on.

  That was how it had been before, at least. Now, her people were still remembering. It would take them some time to untangle themselves from it.

  Yetu focused on making sense of her surroundings. There was nothing solid that she could see. No land. No boats. No birds. Just water and sky.

  Soaking up the strange nothingness of life without the History, she drifted off to sleep. She awoke at random intervals, stoked to consciousness by the searing pain all over. When she tried to convince herself that she should go hunting for meat, she passed out again from fatigue and pain. This carried on for three days, her mind and body both at the brink.

  Any attempts at wakefulness were quickly met with protest by her sore limbs. There was an ache, a throbbing, a pull, a tension in every part of her. She let herself be moved about the sea. Storms shook her, tossed her body like a piece of driftwood here and there. They lifted her, then thrust her back down.

  Though pain racked over every inch of her, this was a deep, restful sleep. There were no nightmares. Rememberings didn’t haunt her. She was just Yetu. She wasn’t quite sure who that was, but she didn’t mind the unknowing because it came with such calm, such a freedom from the pain.

  When she finally awoke properly, it was onshore. And she wasn’t alone.

  * * *

  The two-legs spoke a short distance away using a language Yetu couldn’t name, but that she knew. She may have forgotten the specifics of her own life and of the rememberings she’d once carried, but in the same way she still knew how to speak wajinru, she knew many other languages too.

  The surface dwellers were talking about her, asking what she was, wondering among themselves if they’d ever seen such a thing. One said that it didn’t matter and argued that Yetu looked more or less like food, and that they should eat her.

  Yetu groaned as she squinted her eyes open cautiously. The light was so unbearable, and pathetically, she felt homesick already, coveting the deep sea, its blanket of cold and dark.

  One of the two-legs in the distance noted that Yetu was moving, breathing. She’d washed into a small pool bordered by massive rocks, the top half of her body in air, the bottom in a mix of gushy sand that her torso seemed to sink into. The water was extremely shallow, but the tide brushed over her, back and forth, allowing her to breathe through her gills.

  Strangely, she was breathing with her mouth and nose, too, sucking in air from her surroundings with the two narrow slits in her face and her wide mouth. She didn’t know she could do that. It was a new, uncomfortable feeling, and her lungs felt unsatisfied.

  Her body had never hurt this much before. The waves must have battered her against the rocks before tossing her into this hole. All her cartilage was damaged.

  One of the two-legs started to approach, and Yetu tried to move back into the water, but she was so stiff, so spent, and she certainly couldn’t clear the large boulders separating her from the larger sea. She settled for a scream, opening her mouth wide, showing rows of sharp, long teeth, narrow and overlapping.

  Her eyes and nose disappeared as her mouth expanded, her face replaced with a black, endless pit guarded by fangs. The two-legs jumped back, then stepped away farther and farther with cautious steps, hands held out in front of them.

  She didn’t quiet herself until they were a safe distance away, her teeth at the ready. She roared, the ensuing sound so different on land than it was in the water. She was pleased to find it sounded even more terrifying. She didn’t want them to think they could hurt her just because she was in a vulnerable state. She would not let them forget she could tear them apart if she wanted to.

  She swallowed air through her nose and chest, working out the mechanisms to suck it in so her chest didn’t constantly feel empty. This made the surface dwellers stand back even farther. She must’ve looked hungry, like she was biting the air. As her breathing became more fluid, her body stilled and she could take in the sight of her audience more thoroughly.

  There w
ere four in total, and they looked similar enough that she guessed they were of the same people, perhaps even the same family. They were a range of sizes, and likely, ages, one small, coming only up to the hips of the others, one lanky and wobbly and uncertain on scrawny feet. They had dark brown skin and long, dark brown hair that was wild, scraggly, and long, matted into pieces that looked like long chunks of coral.

  Yetu’s memory stirred as she regarded them. At first, only a fuzzy gray outline emerged, then flashes of images from the History flicked through her mind without context. She saw the bodies of two-legs drowning, but not just in the water, on land, too. Water erupted from the sea and flowed onto the surface. A war. The ocean war? The wave war? Yetu concentrated deeply, straining to remember. Fractured details returned, but only briefly. The memories were caught in a quick current, hurriedly swishing away from her.

  The drownings had been a part of the Tidal Wars—that was the name—a conflict between wajinru and two-legs. Yetu rummaged her mind for more images, more precise explanations, but it was all too disconnected to put together. She pressed and pressed, anxious to know what had happened, but all that was left of the rememberings were traces and impressions, and even those seemed to be fading from her. Though the curious quiet and lightness of her mind pleased her, she did not relish forgetting. She felt unmoored.

  “What if it needs our help?” said the youngest one among them.

  Yetu studied what remained of her scant memory to identify the language they spoke, but even though she understood it with ease, she didn’t know where it came from, what region of surface dwellers it belonged to. This, very much like the breathing through her mouth and nose, surprised her. How much of two-leggedness was in her? She didn’t know what came from instinct and what came from the History and echoes of rememberings.

  Though Yetu knew that at least distantly the two-legs were kin, the similarities were not as prominent as their differences. Yetu was black and scaled. She lived in the water and she looked it. They looked so… fleshy. Yetu only had skin like theirs over her belly, and a smaller portion on her face, over her eyes, nose, and mouth.

  “Leave it. Let’s go,” said another one of the two-legs.

  They left, and she was alone again. Yetu still couldn’t move. Sunlight faded, thank goodness. She welcomed the dark and the rising tide, which soon left her gloriously submerged.

  Strangely, despite the physical pain her body was in, she felt better than she had in ages. The ache of her muscles, bones, and cartilage was nothing compared to the pain she was used to carrying, of the History and what they’d been through. There was no doubt that despite the disorientation of life without the rememberings, Yetu felt tranquility, too.

  Not far off from sleep, she wondered if she’d still be here in the morning, or if she’d wash up on a different, nearby shore. How miraculous it was to go where she pleased. No past, and no future, either. Before leaving the History, she’d had little chance to discover who plain old Yetu was. The wajinru inside her from the past had pulled her backward, and the wajinru around her had pulled her outward toward their various ends. The combating forces had stretched her so far this way and that way that she had lost her shape. If she had a will of her own, she was too deflated to actually exercise it. Now, though, reduced to a skeleton, she could build herself back up however she wanted.

  Prior to this Remembrance, the other wajinru must’ve felt this way all the time. Unburdened, they could do as they pleased and follow their whims wherever they took them. Now, trapped in the mud womb, they had to endure the limitations Yetu had had since she was fourteen.

  As Yetu drifted in the tidal pool toward sleep, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had cursed them. After all, when she held the rememberings, only one wajinru suffered. In the aftermath of her leaving, all of them did. All but Yetu. That wasn’t right, but neither was the alternative. She didn’t deserve to die, did she?

  The wajinru weren’t faring well, Yetu had no doubt of that, but eventually, hunger and fatigue would draw them out of the trance. They’d carry the rememberings, but they’d be able to resume hunting and live the rest of their lives.

  Yetu watched the ocean. Waves collided with the surface at regular intervals, water spraying. Overhead, clouds gathered. The seas were not particularly rough nor the sky particularly gray, but a heavy rain was on the horizon.

  It meant nothing. Storms came and went for any number of reasons. It wasn’t a sign anything was amiss, that the wajinru were worrying the water. Still, Yetu kept guard over the water, eyes steady on the sea as she succumbed to sleep. Everything would be all right now that she was free.

  * * *

  Yetu next awoke to the smell of dead fish. A pile of fifteen of them lay next to her on the beach, their tails tied together with a piece of browned, twined seaweed.

  She recognized it for the gift it was and devoured it. She slept again.

  The next day, there was more. Still hungry from having eaten so poorly over the last year, she devoured it too. There were blacktails among the bounty, one of her amaba’s favorites. She was about to call out to invite her to join the meal before she remembered that Amaba was not here. Yetu chewed the fish slowly, hesitant to take another bite. While she feasted on gifts from a stranger, Amaba and the other wajinru were trapped in rememberings. They would recover in time, Yetu had to believe that, but without her guidance, they were surely stumbling and scared.

  Reminded of the heavy rain in the distance, a rain that would not touch the corner of the earth where she was settled, Yetu looked out to the ocean. When would the wajinru wake up from the trance of the Remembrance? They didn’t have that much time before they’d work themselves into the same kind of state Ayel had when the Remembrance had first started and she’d forgotten who she was. Without direction, they’d break open the walls of the mud womb, leaving themselves exposed, and the world in danger. Taken by rage and grief from the rememberings, and without the cognizance to hold themselves back, the wajinru all together could stir the ocean waters to a degree that would disrupt the natural weather cycles. The winds, the skies—they’d both be electrified into a whipping frenzy. The wajinru could make a storm as big as the one that prickled like a half memory in the back of Yetu’s mind, the one that drowned the land.

  It wouldn’t come to that. Yetu worried because that was what she always did, prone to fits of anxiousness and over-reactivity. She shook her head and took another bite of fish. She forced herself to swallow it after realizing she’d been chewing the same morsel for several minutes.

  The vastness of the ocean looked so different from above, so much less comprehensible. Its murky blue waters were a dark veil separating her from her people. Cut off from them, she had trouble making sense of who or what she was. Without them, she seemed nothing more than a strange fish, alone. Absent the rememberings, who was she but a woman cast away?

  Yetu squeezed her eyes shut against the light of sunrise. She had not been granted stillness like this since she was a child. Never had she had so much time to think. She wasn’t even sure she could do it.

  Another day passed, and the next morning, when she awoke to fish, she saw the person who’d left her the food just as they were walking away. Yetu whimpered to grab their attention, and the two-legs turned around, startling back a few feet as they took in the sight of her.

  “Hi, there, fishy fish,” they said. “Shh, now. Quiet. I’m Suka, and I’m not going to do anything to hurt you.” They were one of the original four who’d seen her the day she had first become beached.

  “It’s all right,” they said, holding out their hands to placate her. She recognized the same gesture as one her amaba did sometimes. Was such a thing passed down in DNA? Was it a part of the History she’d never noticed before? She went to flick through the rememberings in her head to find previous instances of it, but—she had no rememberings anymore, not like she used to. When she reached for the past, nothing was there. The emptiness inside her stretched far and w
ide in every direction like a cavern. It was lonely. She had thought herself unmoored when she was the historian, but this did not compare. She was a blip.

  “I promise, all right? I promise I’m not going to hurt you,” Suka said. “Not that I could if I tried. I know you can’t possibly understand me but— Everything’s all right. I promise.”

  She believed them, that they weren’t going to hurt her. After all, they’d given her all this food. But Suka didn’t seem like an authority to trust on whether everything was going to be all right or not. They didn’t know anything about her. They didn’t know what she’d swum from.

  “I understand you,” Yetu said, the words spitting up from her throat unexpectedly and in an odd configuration. She sounded croaky and rough; her voice so deep she wasn’t sure the two-legs would understand. She had never spoken this language before, and the words felt strange sliding against her esophagus and tongue. The words tickled faintly against her skin, but not in the same way they would were she in the water.

  Everything about life on land strained her senses. It was disorienting to use her eyes rather than her skin. She was like a newborn, cast away from its amaba and grasping outward for anything solid on which to hold.

  “My god, my god, my god,” Suka said. “You are— What are you?”

  Yetu breathed deeply in, but it just rattled her more, the oddness of getting oxygen through the air rather than the water.

  “Thank you for the fish,” she said. “I’m recovering from a difficult journey and unable to hunt for myself.”

  Suka looked at her in silence, their eyes wide and mouth agape, showing the tips of what looked like very useless, blunt teeth.

  “I am Yetu,” she said, hoping that might calm them.

  “You speak. You’re alive,” said Suka, trembling.

  “If you didn’t think I was alive before, why did you bring food to sustain me?” Yetu asked.