Binti: The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  Mwinyi climbed back on Rakumi. Minutes later, I got up and did the same. And for the next hour, we were quiet again. Tears fell from my eyes as I stared at the open desert ahead. I had to drink more water than usual because of it. The number five flew around me like a swarm of gnats at sunset. And behind me loomed the tunnel, I knew. Every so often, I felt Mwinyi shift about as he moved his hands this way and that, speaking to whomever he was speaking to. I didn’t care; I wasn’t interested in talking to those who were behind us.

  * * *

  “What’s that?” we both said at the same time. Mwinyi was looking at the stones, I was looking at the smoke.

  “Stop!” I screamed. “Oh stop! Rakumi, stop!” When the camel kept walking, I started climbing down. Mwinyi grunted deep in his throat and Rakumi stopped just as my sandaled feet reached the sand. I landed hard and bent low, then I started running. We were still miles away. As I ran, I heard my anklets clicking and I was reminded of the sound of my sisters and mother moving about the Root and of Himba women dancing during Moon Fest.

  I stopped among the stones and fell to my knees as I stared. The Root. No, not just the Root, the part of Osemba closest to it too. Burning, crumbling, attacked. Even from here, I could smell the smoke. Billowing up from burning or burned homes and buildings. I could not see exactly what, but I knew Osemba enough to know where things were.

  “As we were coming, I was dying,” I whispered, my hands pressed to my mouth, my eyes wide and dry as the hot breeze blew. They hadn’t just destroyed the Root. They’d taken much of Osemba, too?

  I felt Mwinyi’s hand on my shoulder as he knelt beside me. I inhaled and exhaled, focusing on each breath, just as my therapist had taught me. I calmed some. “When I first left here,” I said quietly, wringing my hands, “I left on a ship called Third Fish. It was … she was alive.”

  “Bigger than a whale?” he asked.

  “What?”

  Mwinyi only shook his head. “Not important. Tell me about your Third Fish.”

  “Miri 12s,” I said, trying to focus on the image of the Third Fish in my mind, instead of what I saw ahead. “They are probably the finest technology, finest creature, this planet has ever produced. What else can leave Earth with nothing but itself and travel through space? But it all happened in Third Fish. Everyone was killed by the Meduse. I nearly died in there. When I came back here, I happened to get Third Fish again for the journey. I stepped onboard Third Fish and I felt such a … comfort. I wish I were on her now, her peacefulness swallows everything bad.”

  We were at the place where I’d found my edan; the group of gray stones jutting out from the ground like flattened old teeth. This was where I had practiced treeing and prepared for my Oomza Uni interviews. The stones were large enough to sit on and arranged in a wide semicircle that opened west, facing my hometown. Mere feet away, beside one of the stones, was the spot where I’d dug up my edan.

  I looked at this place and suddenly I saw that the ground around it shimmered as if sprinkled with flecks of gold. Mwinyi seemed to see it too. I wasn’t ready to stand up, so I crawled there, grinding sand into my red skirt, feeling it enter the bottoms of my sandals as it stripped away the otjize on my knuckles. I didn’t care about any of it. I sat down at the spot where I’d been, where I’d dug up the edan, back when my life had been simple, and looked at the speckled ground. Mwinyi came and stood over me.

  “The shimmer isn’t physically there,” he said. “The zinariya is showing it to us.”

  I touched the sand where the sparkles were, rubbing it between my fingers. No matter how hard I tried, and no matter how real the gold flecks in the sand looked, I could not touch them.

  “It was there,” he added, kneeling down beside me. “A long time ago.” And as if his words cued it to happen, the world expanded again, but this time, I didn’t feel as if it would repel me into space. Instead, it was as if the sand around us was disappearing, all of it shifting away, and as it shifted, I … we, both Mwinyi and I, lowered. Mwinyi grabbed my arm and I knew that he too was seeing it happen. We both looked around as the stones seemed to grow taller and wider and then their bases became shiny thick very solid gold, as did the ground beneath us. A large imperfect circle about the size of the Root emerged, the semicircle of gold-based stones in the center. I ran a hand over the smooth surface that shined so brightly in the sun we both had to squint and shade our eyes. It was warm.

  Mwinyi grasped my arm more tightly and said, “Don’t move. It’s alright.” If he had not done this, I’d have fled for my life, and my confused perspective of what was now and what was decades ago was so skewed, I probably would have run right into one of the stones.

  These People had limbs, two arms and two legs, each over twenty feet long and thin like the trunks of palm trees. Their bodies were smooth and long. And they looked made of solid gold. They walked with a slow grace that suggested fluidity. Gold was malleable when it was warm, and they were solar, their form of life might have been energy akin to the currents I could call using mathematics.

  They were coming toward the gold plane. They were not slow, but their motions were watery. Had they always been shaped like this, I did not know, for this clearly had been after they’d been around human beings for those few years. The first stepped in the center while the others waited on the sand. It stood up straight and raised its hands above its head. Then its arms then legs fused. I could hear it, soft slurping, ripples running over its flesh as it flattened and smoothed itself out into what looked like a five-foot-high, ten-foot-wide wedge.

  The rocks around us began to vibrate and phoom, off the golden wedge shot into the sky, so fast that it was gone in seconds. There was no sonic boom, no smoke, not even a gust of air, like with the Third Fish. But high in the sky, I could see a wink of gold, then nothing. The next one stepped onto the platform and did the same.

  “These are the Zinariya, the aliens who gave us the zinariya technology,” Mwinyi said, awed. “We loved them so much we named our tribe after them. I’ve never seen them before. Not like this! I’ve never thought to ask.”

  “And this was the launch port,” I said, as we watched the second one shoot into the sky. When the third one stepped onto the platform, it stopped and turned to us. Mwinyi’s hand clenched my arm tighter and we pressed closer to each other. It leaned down and brought forth an arm whose end became a hand with long, long fingers. In its hand was what might have been the golden center of my edan, except its surface was smooth, not fingerprint ridged. As Mwinyi and I watched, silver slivers rose from the golden ground, flipped up, and fitted around it, clicking and clacking, until it became the object that I had known until recently. It dumped the edan to the ground but instead of falling, it hovered before us. Then the world around us shifted, the sand rose, and the Zinariya people disappeared and we were back where we had been.

  “Do you know what that meant?” Mwinyi asked.

  I shook my head and was about to say more when a ship zoomed in from the north toward my village. I could see its sleek yellow design. It seemed to land nearby. A Khoush ship in Osemba. Unheard of. I started walking home.

  Chapter 3

  When Elephants Fight

  The Root was still burning.

  It was made of stone and concrete; how was it on fire? The bioluminescent plants that covered it had burned to ash. The solar panels on the roof had wilted like plants, some of them were probably puddles of synthetic steel in the debris. Six generations of my family had lived here. The Root was the oldest house in my village, maybe the oldest in the city. This was where we had family and community gatherings because the living room was so spacious that it could fit a hundred people.

  Powerful Khoush weapons had been shot into it, exploding and then burning so hot that they could even combust and melt stone. All the floors of the Root had collapsed, burned, and smoldered into a heap. Chunks of concrete and rubble blown out when the house exploded were littered around the heap. What remained looked like a giant mound of st
ill smoking blackened char.

  “Mama!” I called, walking toward it as I looked around wildly. I coughed as smoke wafted in my direction. “Papa!” I stopped yards away, everything around me was silent but the sound of embers crackling and softly popping. I looked away. Then, slowly, I turned to face what was left of my home. Because of me, I thought. And I could feel my okuoko begin to writhe on my head and against my back. My Meduse anger sharpened everything. The Khoush had always seen my people as expendable, tools to use, toy with, and discard, useful animals until we weren’t useful anymore. During war, we were just in the way.

  “When elephants fight, the grass suffers.” The green words appearing before me seemed so out of place and the words so profound that I was snapped from my dark thoughts. Mwinyi had sent them to me through the zinariya.

  My eye went to the base of the house where the embers were glowing.

  “It wasn’t just called the Root because it was a family place,” I said. “Most of the house’s foundation was actually built on the old root of an Undying tree.” My mother had told me this when I was about five years old. I’d been sure she was just joking until the next thunderstorm when I realized the house wasn’t groaning because of the wind. “The cellar was—” I couldn’t say it. I knew what we’d find in the cellar.

  Mwinyi left me and walked around the house.

  As I stood there, I felt it more than I heard it and every part of me reacted. My okuoko writhed, one of them actually slapping the side of my face as if to say, “Look!” The zinariya contracted and expanded my world and I heard distant voices commenting from a distant place, just softly enough for me not to understand. I automatically called the simple equation that always focused my mind, a2 + b2 = c2. Then over and over, I spoke the number that relaxed me, “Five, five, five, five, five, five, five.” I let my mind follow the zipping dancing fives and with each triangular motion, I steadied. When I looked toward the road leading to the Root, I was thankfully calm enough to simply observe what stood there like the spirit it was.

  The Night Masquerade. Again. This time during the day! And now I was seeing it from much closer than I had the first time when I stood in my bedroom a few days ago, before my bedroom had been burned to ash. It looked taller, standing about my father’s height. Its raffia body cracked and snapped as it stretched an arm to point its long finger at me, fingers of gnarled sticks. The wooden mask’s mouth was full of yellow teeth.

  Only men were supposed to see the Night Masquerade and it was believed its appearance signified the approach of a big change; whether it brought change with its presence or change came afterward was never clear. The Night Masquerade was the personification of revolution. Its presence marked heroism. To also see it during the day was doubly unheard of. My family was dead; what more change could I endure? What was heroic about this happening? If this was a revolution, it was an awful one.

  It spoke in Otjihimba and its voice was like the sound of a vibrating Undying tree during a thunderstorm. “Death is always news,” it said, the acrid smoke billowing from its head thickening.

  I felt the world swim around me as the weight of my family’s death and my own terror tried to pull me down. Around it, everything seemed to vibrate. My eyes watered, and I kept blinking and blinking away the blurriness. The Night Masquerade slowly stepped toward me and I nearly screamed. Instead, I coughed as I inhaled a great whiff of its smoke.

  “A bird who has flown off the earth and then returns to land is still on the land,” it said. “Remove your shoes and listen.”

  Phoom! The smoke from its head was copious now and when it finally cleared, the Night Masquerade was gone.

  “Oh, thank the Seven,” I whispered. But its presence stayed with me and its words echoed in my mind. I looked down at my dusty sandals. I’d bought them on Oomza Uni in the local market. They were made from the secretions of a friendly spider that lived in swamps. When fresh, the webbing could be molded into anything. When it dried, it kept that shape for a thousand years, the seller told me.

  I was considering taking them off when Mwinyi called, “Binti. Come here.”

  He and Rakumi were on the other side of the house and as I jogged there, I felt faint. My family was in the cellar. Dead. Had they burned? Suffocated first? “We cannot get out,” my father had said. I stopped and realized that beside me were the charred remains of the sandstorm analyzer my brother had built and placed on the roof. The steel box with its optical particle counters looked like the discarded head of a primitive robot. He’d been so proud of that instrument and so had my mother.

  As I ran around the side of the house, I stopped again. My mouth fell open. Then I shut it because I could taste the stench through my mouth just as much as I could smell it through my nose. There were bodies all over and vultures stood and were pecking at some of them. Khoush soldiers. Men and women. With their chests burst open. I twitched and I was back on the ship in the middle of space. The smell of blood and now decay. How is that possible? I thought, because my stunned senses were telling me I was alone on the Third Fish again and the Meduse had just performed moojh-ha ki-bira. It had just happened.

  Happened.

  No warning.

  So many.

  I saw stars. Red and blue and silver. Bursting before my eyes. My mouth was full of decay, as it hung open, trying to pull in air. Now I couldn’t breathe. None around me were breathing. I stumbled, gasping, and one of the vultures lazily spread its wings and hopped away.

  I blinked and I was back at the remains of the home where I’d been born. The violence was here now. I’d brought it by leaving home and coming back home. I was hyperventilating now. What did my therapist Saidia Nwanyi say I should do when I can’t breathe? I thought. I put my hands behind my head, though doing so made me feel more exposed to the gruesome sight before me. There had to be fifteen, maybe even twenty bodies strewn about like fallen trees. “Five, five, five, five, five,” I chanted as I let myself tree. Each time the number left my lips, I was able to take in more breath. And with each breath, I came back to myself. The moment I could move, I fled.

  When I reached the back of the house, I stepped onto a sheet of solid yellow glass. It cracked and shattered beneath my foot. I took another step and stopped, realizing this was the spot where Okwu’s tent had been. Mwinyi stood in the blackened center. Not far to the left was what remained of my brother’s garden, a charred skeleton of tomato bushes and ash. Rakumi sniffed the greener parts and began munching on a tomato bush.

  “Did you see—”

  “Yes,” he said, still looking at the cracking glass beneath him.

  “I think Okwu did that,” I said.

  “Maybe because the Khoush did this,” he stamped on the glass and his sandal went right through it, shards flying this way and that.

  I shut my eyes and took deep breaths, holding myself shallowly in the tree, numbers and equations cartwheeling and floating around me. “This explosion would have killed anything it hit,” I said. “Unless Okwu wasn’t in the tent.”

  “I don’t think they killed it,” Mwinyi said.

  “Why?”

  “Your family was hiding inside the Root when they set it on fire.” He paused to inspect my face. “They burned the Root because they couldn’t find you or … or Okwu.”

  The idea hit me so hard that when I turned and ran off, I didn’t care about the possibility of glass cutting my feet through my sandals.

  The road into town was dusty and my sandals kicked it up with every step. Even as I ran further and further from home, the air continued to smell of smoke. The Yennes’ house was still burning. The Mahangu building was blown to bits. The Omuzumbas’ house was still intact and I glimpsed someone on the balcony watching me run by. How many others were watching me run down the road? How many had fled the destruction?

  A Khoush ship had just flown by, which meant they were still in the area. I didn’t care. I passed the remains of the souq, where it looked as if the market’s women and men had left
everything behind in a rush. There were overturned tables and booth dividers and in some places crushed and rotten meat, vegetables, piles of grains, and crushed baskets. The smell of spices, snuff, and incense mixed with the stench of smoke here. I leapt over an overturned bench. Sweat was pouring down my face now, and my heart felt like it would smash through my chest.

  I stopped at the lake and stood there. Its water was so serene that it looked like the glass burned into the sand where Okwu’s tent used to be. “So calm in all this chaos,” I said, breathing hard. The sweat was getting into my eyes, so I wiped my hand down my face. My hand came away red orange with otjize. I heard someone behind me.

  “What … are … you doing?” Mwinyi asked, jogging up. He bent forward to catch his breath, putting his hands on his knees. “We don’t know if the Khoush are around here!”

  “I … saw the Night Masquerade again,” I said. “In broad daylight. We don’t know anything anymore.”

  “Back at the Root?” he asked. Even Enyi Zinariya people believed in the Night Masquerade.

  I nodded. There was movement to my right and I turned my head. Two men. Himba. I knew them. I knew most everyone in my village. The Council Elder Kapika and his second wife Neeka.

  “Binti?” Chief Kapika said, coming closer. Neeka followed. And as they came closer, I noticed more people peeking from behind market dividers and from within homes across the street.

  I hesitated, then turned to the water and walked into it. I felt all eyes on me as the lake water washed off the thin layer of otjize on my legs and sweat washed it from my face, neck, and arms. In front of all these people, Himba people. I went in up to my waist, then I opened my mouth and shouted, “Okwuuuuuuuuu!”

  My voice echoed across the water and then there was silence. I could hear people behind me whispering. Still, I waited.