Scarlet Odyssey

by C. T. Rwizi

  Chickens cluck in the coop built next to the hut. A stooped figure leaning on a crooked staff is waiting outside, watching Kelafelo’s approach through eyes that long ago clouded over with cataracts.

  Standing there draped in a kaross of hide, with a face as weathered as a crag and a thick mane of dreadlocks as white as chalk, she seems carved from stone, like some permanent feature of the landscape, as if she were present when the river was gouged into the land and the mountains raised from it. The people of Namato often whispered that the Anchorite has been an old woman for centuries; she certainly looks like it might be true.

  A centipede with metallic legs and an iridescent carapace squirms out of the folds of her hides and perches on her left shoulder, swaying its long chrome-like antennae to the tune of the wind. The Anchorite appears oblivious to its presence, even as it brushes its antennae against her leathery face. Kelafelo might have thought the creature one of her waking nightmares had she not seen it once before, perched on that same shoulder. It is said the centipede is where the Anchorite keeps the spirits she collects, which she uses to cast her darkest spells.

  She speaks first, in a croaking voice that seems to come from afar. “Have you come here to die, young one?”

  Kelafelo hasn’t thought about what she will say to the old woman, yet the words come out on their own. “Teach me,” she says. “Teach me so I may find vengeance for what has been done to me.”

  The Anchorite regards her with those unseeing eyes of hers. The centipede on her shoulder rears up and tastes the air with its antennae. “I owe you nothing,” she says at last.

  Kelafelo is undeterred. “You will die one day. Are you content to let all the knowledge you’ve gathered die with you?”

  The Anchorite’s lips twist into a spiteful smile. “I was here before you were born, dear girl, and I will be here long after you die. You know nothing of the knowledge I possess.”

  “Nor does anyone else, and that will remain true unless you teach me. Pass your knowledge on to someone who will treasure it.”

  “I care not for your vengeance.”

  “And yet I will be all the more eager to learn because of it.”

  The Anchorite watches her again. “You are wounded. You may be dead by this time tomorrow.”

  “I will survive.”

  “What was done to your village was inevitable,” the Anchorite says. “A new warlord has risen in these parts. He commands many. You will die if you go against him.”

  “Then so be it. Vengeance is all I have left in this world. I will have it, or I will die in its pursuit.”

  Some say the Anchorite can read minds. If she reads Kelafelo’s mind right now, she will likely see nothing but a quiet storm.

  “If I take you in,” she says with a warning seeping into her voice, “there will be a price to pay, and I always collect my debts.”

  “What is it you want?”

  “You will know it when the time comes for you to pay.”

  Kelafelo doesn’t need to think about it. Her daughter is rotting in a shroud of grass while her killers roam the savannas. “I accept your terms,” she says, and thus begins her induction into the mystic arts.

  9: Musalodi

  Khaya-Siningwe—Yerezi Plains

  Life goes on in Khaya-Siningwe. The clanspeople fall back to their usual routines, trying to salvage a modicum of normality from the broken pieces of their lives. Almost convincing if Salo doesn’t look too closely at the ghosts haunting their eyes, the strained smiles, the absent stares. As for Salo himself, the days wear on in a dreary haze, like a cloud of soot has fallen around him and leached all the color from the world.

  Word spreads about how Monti died, and people start giving him the same looks they used to give him right after his failure at the Queen’s Kraal two comets ago. Only this time they aren’t laughing, because what he did isn’t worthy of simple derision; it’s worthy of abhorrence. He let a little boy die.

  Even VaSiningwe starts looking at him differently. The specter of disappointment has always lurked behind his eyes where Salo is concerned, though Ama knows the man has done his best not to show too much favoritism among his sons. Now, however, resignation sits openly in his heavy gaze, like he’s given up hope that Salo will ever amount to anything worthy of the copper on his left ear.

  “A hard lesson learned, dear nephew,” Aba D says to him during dinner in the chief’s compound.

  Every night the compound’s dry earth is swept clean of the day’s bustle, the lone musuku tree in the center is draped with fresh glowvines and transformed into a towering centerpiece, and three different families from within or without the kraal are invited to come dine with the chief and his family. They all sit in groups on stools or mats and eat communally from large earthenware platters.

  “The world isn’t going to coddle you,” Aba D goes on. “If you don’t man up, it’ll slit your throat and grind your bones to dust. You have to be strong, son, always. Never, ever show weakness, or your life will be nothing but a long string of miseries.”

  Aba Akuri, sitting next to him, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving bits of sorghum porridge trapped in his thick beard. “Perhaps now is not the time to speak of such things, dear husband.”

  “If not now, when?” Aba D says. “There is never a good time for harsh truths.”

  “You can be so stubborn sometimes,” Aba Akuri remarks, shaking his head.

  Salo hasn’t touched any of the roasted meats and vegetables arrayed in front of him. Instead, he’s been idly twisting the new leather band on his right wrist—a recently acquired habit. Now he feels the sting of shame wash over him.

  Aba D is right, though, and he certainly knows all there is to know about never showing weakness. Unyielding strength and pure and absolute perfection on the battlefield were the prices he had to pay in order to marry the man he loved without suffering the stigma that often comes with such unions. Anything less, even the slightest slip of the foot or a moment of hesitation, and the stigma would have never left.

  An impossible standard to live up to, Salo would say, one he knows he could never achieve in a thousand years. In fact, sometimes he feels like he gathers stigma just by breathing. A walking, living scandal. A blot to be washed clean.

  Weak. Useless.

  Monti’s wristband was too small for him, so he had to sew longer straps onto it to make it fit. Ama Lira is plucking her lyre with calloused fingers beneath the musuku tree to the beat of bowl-shaped drums. The music drifting from the ensemble muffles Aba D’s words, so Salo and Aba Akuri are the only ones who hear them. But they sting so intensely the man might as well have shouted them to the whole kraal.

  Salo wipes his eyes behind his spectacles and says nothing. And then he stops taking his dinners in the chief’s compound altogether.

  Life gets no easier, though. The number of crimson loincloths walking around more than doubles in one day when the chief calls almost half the clan’s rangers from all over Khaya-Siningwe to come garrison the kraal.

  Worse, Niko doesn’t forget Salo’s promise to train with him and his posse of young Ajaha in the circular glade by the lake, so Salo has to spend whole mornings in the company of people who openly despise everything he is and tolerate him only because their idol tells them to.

  More than four times the usual number of aspirants are coming to train with Niko and his crew these days, though this shouldn’t be surprising given the legendary status Siningwe Ajaha have recently acquired. Tales of their bravery during the attack have spread across the Plains like a virus, infecting virtually every young man in the tribe with the zeal to prove himself worthy to don the red.

  After Salo suffers yet another humiliating defeat to one of these zealous young men in a stick fight, Niko pulls him to the side with a betrayed look on his face. “You promised you’d try,” he says.

  “I am trying,” Salo protests, rubbing the painful welts on his arms.

  “You’re better than this, and you kn
ow it. And you’ve gone through the training before. You should be walking all over them!”

  Salo’s hackles rise at the criticism. “We can’t all be as good as you, all right?”

  “No,” Niko says with a level stare, “but you can. You have your aba’s blood in your veins, and your uncle is the greatest warrior this clan has ever seen. Your heart’s just not in it.”

  It doesn’t work like that, Salo wants to say, but he holds his tongue. He looks around the forest glade, at the aspirants and rangers sparring for dominance, sticks rattling as they strike each other, faces grimacing, muscles straining. “This isn’t me, Niko. I’m trying, but . . . I don’t know if I can ever belong here.”

  Niko’s eyes spark with something hot, and he turns around to shout across the glade. “Mujioseri! That log you and your brother are sitting on. Throw it at me with everything you’ve got.”

  Jio and Sibu have been presiding over a stick fight between two young aspirants in white loincloths. Now they trade identical looks and lift their eyebrows at Niko. “Are you asking to die, mzi?” Jio says.

  “Just do it already.”

  “If you insist.” Jio stands up and pushes his unsuspecting brother off the log, causing a few laughs when Sibu yelps and falls onto his back. The log must weigh more than five men, but Jio slips his hands beneath it and lifts it up like it’s a sack of feathers. Insects squirm in the recess of wet earth where it lay. He smirks as the aspirants gawk at him, wallowing in their admiration like a reptile basking in the suns. Then the log flies across the glade and toward Niko like it’s been ripped upward by a vicious gale.

  Salo sees everything clearly: the way Niko flexes his knees and braces his sandaled feet on the ground, the way strength coils in every muscle of his body, the way his chest glistens with sweat as he thrusts his fist forward. A thunderous crack booms as fist connects with wood, and everyone watches, amazed, as the log splinters into a thousand pieces like it was detonated from within.

  Niko slowly walks back to Salo, a fierce blaze burning in eyes that usually hold nothing but kindness. “Do you hate being weak, my friend?”

  “You know I do,” Salo says in a low whisper, feeling the sting of tears.

  “Well, guess what.” Niko spreads his arms as if to take in the glade. “This is a path to strength. With this you can fight back. With this you’ll never have to watch someone you love die in front of you again.”

  Salo wipes his eyes and nods. “All right. I’ll try harder.”

  “It’s all I’m asking,” Niko says in a softer voice. “Now go back in there and fight like a leopard.”

  When the training session ends, Salo wanders to the bonehouse to see if he can’t steal something from their stores to quench the fire in his limbs, as well as maybe something to soothe his heavily battered ego.

  The bonehouse is actually a circular cluster of five drystone buildings surrounding a well-groomed garden whose focal point is an ancient witchwood tree. Salo finds Nimara brewing tonics in the alchemical workroom attached to the largest building, which has a wraparound timbered porch and recently renewed thatching. She’s set her spider talisman on her table and commanded it to display a cascade of semitransparent charts and figures that drift and flicker, feeding her information only she can understand.

  She’s been busier than usual since the attack. Over a dozen people still require intensive medical care, and while she has several women who help her around the bonehouse, Nimara has the tendency to micromanage everything under her purview. She’s barely been seen outside in almost a quarter moon.

  Salo quietly wanders into the spacious workroom and sits down on a stool by the west-facing windows. A faint whiff of beeswax floor polish hangs in the air. The place is never anything less than scrupulously spotless, everything arranged in parallel lines, from the glass vials in the cabinets to the journals and sheaves of stacked paper resting on the mahogany work tops, not a lick of dust in sight.

  Nimara doesn’t take her attention off the alchemical reactor in front of her, a brass apparatus of chuffing pipes and moving cogs, powered by the mind stone from a tronic eland cow. A smoky liquid churns in the glass sphere at the center of the reactor. Salo watches her carefully insert pegs of red steel into slots around the sphere—he knows that each of those pegs has a unique enchantment of alchemical Earth craft. She uses her talisman to keep track of how they influence the smoky liquid over time.

  “Are the kraal’s harvesters in good shape?” she says after inserting the last peg and wiping her hands with a cloth. “The New Year’s harvest starts soon. We should address any problems quickly so we get started on time.”

  A wave of discontentment rises up from Salo’s chest. “You’ll have to ask the queen to send an Asazi to help you out with that. I won’t be working machines for much longer.”

  Nimara sighs and returns to tinkering with the little levers on her machine. “She can’t force anyone to come, Salo. You know that.”

  “I’m a man, all right? The son of a chief.” He waves a hand around the workshop. “I’m not supposed to know how any of this works. I’m not supposed to want to know. I should be a ranger, punching logs with my fists and subduing wild stallions.”

  “You know what I’m wondering right now?” Nimara says, folding her arms and giving him a hard gaze through a window of information. “I’m wondering when you’re going to quit feeling sorry for yourself and finally do what we both know you should have done a long time ago.”

  Salo flinches. He expected balm for his wounds, not salt. “I’m training with the rangers, aren’t I? I’ll face the uroko again and earn my steel.”

  “Not at all what I meant.”

  “Then what do you want from me?”

  Nimara places her palms on the table. “I’m talking about that thing you’re letting rot inside your talisman.”

  “Shhh!” Salo gets up and closes in, stopping on the other side of Nimara’s worktable. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! If anyone finds out . . . by Ama, you can’t tell anyone, Nimara. Promise me you won’t.”

  She stares at him, a challenge in her eyes. “This is exactly what I mean. You have the means to do something—you’ve had the means for a while now—but you keep choosing to do nothing.”

  “I can’t do anything!”

  “Yes, you can!”

  The liquid in the sphere suddenly turns blue. With a defeated sigh Nimara grabs a rack of empty vials, places them beneath the sphere, turns a valve, and begins to fill one of the vials with the liquid. “You know the problem with you, Salo? It’s never that you can’t. Oh, no. It’s that you won’t even try.” She plops a cork stopper onto the vial and proffers it to him. “This’ll help you recover from all the running around you’re doing.”

  Salo hesitates, then reaches forward to accept the vial, but she retracts her hand at the last moment. “Have you thought about what difference you could make if you were just brave enough to come out with your secret? What difference you could have made when the witch attacked if you never hid it in the first place? We’re defenseless without a mystic, Salo.”

  “You will be our mystic!” he says.

  “I’m eighteen,” she says. “Statistically, I still have several more years before I achieve an Axiom good enough to live with for the rest of my life. What do we do until then?”

  “I can’t, all right? I just can’t.”

  She leans forward, her gaze unwavering. “Salo, that witch could return at any time, and she’d still find us defenseless. But we don’t have to be! Stop caring about what people think for one second, and you’ll know I’m right.”

  Salo groans, feeling exposed, like he’s being attacked. “The queen would never allow it,” he says weakly. “It’s sacrilege. She’d sooner have me exiled.”

  “You don’t actually know that, do you?”

  “Nimara . . .” He looks down at the floor.

  “Your fear is depriving this clan of something it desperately needs. Plain and si
mple.” She finally hands him the vial and starts filling another one. “I have fifteen patients to take care of, and these tonics aren’t going to make themselves, so.”

  Taking that as his cue to leave, he thanks her for the tonic and flees the bonehouse. But her words stay with him in his waking hours like painful scalds on his skin and come out in his nightmares through Monti’s lifeless lips, accusing him, asking if he knows.

  Do you, Bra Salo? Do you know what difference you could have made that day if only you weren’t such a coward?

  The queen comes to address the clanspeople on the first Onesday after the attack.

  The Ajaha welcome her with their lively stick dance, kicking up dust to the powerful beat of barrel-size drums, but the mood is far from festive as the woman rises from a wicker chair to deliver her message.

  Her presence seems to thicken the air. Backs are stiffer than usual, brows are creased, and not a single wailing baby can be heard anywhere. In all Salo’s years attending clan meetings, he has never once witnessed such a thing.

  But this is hardly surprising, considering the vision standing before them.

  Salo reckons that if the malaika of dusk came down from the heavens, if she traded the stars and nebulae draping her body for glass beads, copper bangles, and cascading bronze skirts, if she set aside her corona of twilight for a towering crown of copper feathers—if she did these things and her splendor became flesh and she walked the earth as mortals do, she would probably look something like Queen Irediti of the Yerezi Plains.

  The queen is a six-ringed mystic—the most powerful sorcerer in the Plains—and cuts a tremendous figure of sharp, imperious beauty so worthy of her station you would never mistake her for anything other than what she is. Her bright umber eyes are oppressive pools of knowledge you would do well to avoid. The copper crown adorning her head doesn’t just glint in the encroaching dusk like mundane metal; it sparkles, it coruscates, it scintillates, like something forged in the heart of a star.

  Is it any wonder, then, that the clanspeople, who are unaccustomed to such potent blends of beauty and power, should quail when confronted with one such as she?