Binti: The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  And then the water began to ripple as Okwu swam up and rose before me. I smiled, tears stinging my eyes. Its dome was a deep blue in the sunshine. And it was covered with clusterwink snails. I stepped back as more domes emerged around it. More Meduse. A woman screamed from the group of people and there was the sound of scuffling feet as people fled.

  I waded back to the land, joining Mwinyi. “How did you know?” he asked. He sounded more than nervous, but he didn’t step away as the Meduse emerged from the water.

  “Because I know Okwu,” I said, turning to Okwu. In Meduse, I asked it, “Are you alright?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you answer me?”

  “I didn’t want you to come.”

  “I thought you were dead!” I said.

  “It’s better than you being dead, Binti.”

  “W—… what happened? Why is … The Root! They burned it! And there were dead soldiers. Many! What happened?” I was shaking and crying now.

  Okwu blew out gas and both Mwinyi and I started coughing.

  “When you left, I stayed in my tent,” he said in Otjihimba. “Your family was kind to me, except for your sisters, who like to yell. Your family had a meeting that evening, so many were there. The Khoush came in the night when your father took me out in the desert to meet with your elders in private. The elders wanted to speak with me. And as we talked, from where we were we saw the Khoush ship fly in and blow up my tent.”

  “What?” I whispered.

  “The elders told me to stay with them in the dark, as your father ran back, shouting at the Khoush to stop. He told all your people to run inside for safety. There were Khoush on the ground at this point. One of the Khoush argued with your father. I could hear it; the man called himself General Staff Kuw and he had no hair or okuoko on his head. He didn’t think I was in the tent and he wanted to know where I was. Your father refused to tell him and the general accused him of sympathizing with the enemy and having a daughter who’d even mated with a Meduse—”

  “Mated?” I exclaimed. The Meduse hovering around Okwu all thrummed their domes.

  “Yes, the Khoush are a stupid people,” Okwu said. “Your father said they were the enemy because they’d just blown up part of his property. This angered General Kuw. That’s when he ordered his soldiers to firebomb the Root. I think they expected everyone to run out. They didn’t expect your father to run inside as it was burning. But that’s what he did and no one came out.”

  “The Himba do not run away, we run within,” I said, quietly. “They went inside, even as it was burning.” I clucked my tongue, as my hands began to shake and my mind tried to cloud. “The Khoush like to joke that we are a suicidal people.”

  “As the elders watched the Root burn in the night, I left them … who just stood there staring at the fire that was so huge, it showed light far into the desert,” Okwu continued. “As the Khoush, in a stupid rage, went on to firebomb more homes in Osemba. They weren’t even looking for me. I activated my armor, crept up to those standing near the house, and killed as many of them as I could. I wanted to kill that General Kuw, but he had already fled onto a ship. Coward.

  “For you, for your family, they all deserved to die. When I could kill no more, I covered the air and escaped as they coughed. There were too many who were coming from their ship. One does not fight a war it cannot win. I hid in the lake and waited for the others. Now when the time comes, we will fight the war we will win.”

  “They burned everything!” I heard Kapika yell from behind me. He pushed his wife away as she tried to hold him back. Several of the people had come back to listen too. “The Khoush came and burned everything! Out of spite! Because of you people!”

  There were about ten Meduse and the only one who was not blue floated up so quickly that I thought it would barrel over me. It was so clear that I could see the white of its stinger as the sun shined right through it. The Meduse chief.

  “See what they did to Okwu? You see why we kill them?” the chief rumbled. “We have come. They don’t know we are here. We will meet them when they are not ready.”

  I stepped back and looked at them all. “You need to make peace,” I said.

  “No,” the chief said. “We are here. We will make war. You should want war.”

  I felt my okuoko twitch as it dawned on me. I looked beyond the Meduse, at the lake. I moaned. I turned to Mwinyi, then to the Himba standing around us. “Chief Kapika,” I said, stepping over to him. I put my chin to my chest as I took his hands. I felt him twitch, wanting to pull away from me. My otjize had washed off. I stood before him, before everyone, naked, so I was not offended by his discomfort. “Please,” I said. “I know I come to you as a barbarian. Please, put that aside for now, and focus on the fact that I am a Himba daughter, regardless of how I look and where I have been…”

  “And what pollutes you,” he added.

  I paused, restraining my Meduse prideful anger. I let myself tree and called up a current. As the numbers flew around me, through me, I felt calmer, clearer, and more confident, though the anger still boiled beneath, trying to push thoughts of my dead family to the forefront of my mind. I continued to hold his hands, my head respectfully bowed. “Yes, what pollutes me. But I am still a master harmonizer,” I said in a steady voice, loudly enough for the others to hear. “I am more than and better than what I was when I left here. I want to call an urgent meeting of the Council Elders.” I looked up into his eyes. “It is urgent and a matter of peace in these lands. Please. We can’t have more die.” I hesitated and then pushed on. “C—… call an Okuruwo.”

  An Okuruwo was only called when the lifeblood of the Himba people was in grave danger. It was only called by elders, because it was to call on the soul of the Himba to heal itself and that took a power only the old could wield. Usually. The healing power of the Himba is carried within the elders, even the word Okuruwo is usually only spoken by older Himba. Thus, the word felt hot coming out of my mouth. I cleared my throat as we stared at each other. His irises were a deep brown, the whites of his eyes yellowed by the sun. “Have you not looked around?” he asked in his soft voice. “Your childish selfish actions led to all this strife. We don’t leave our lands for a reason, Binti. Now you speak beyond your years. What makes you think you can call an Okuruwo?”

  I didn’t miss a beat. “Because there are Meduse ships in the lake and if we don’t do something immediately, we’ll be the grass crushed beneath the feet of two fighting elephants.”

  * * *

  The Council Elders use the same method of communication that Himba women use to spread the word about the date of the pilgrimage: a large leaf is cut from a palm tree and passed from member to member. The Himba people are the creators and makers of astrolabes, devices of communication. However, the Himba people have been communicating important meeting announcements in this old, old way for centuries and we will continue to do so.

  So I watched a young girl climb a palm tree, use a large machete to cut a large leaf, climb down, and hand it to Chief Kapika. Okwu, Mwinyi, and I stood there silent as he took it and went into his home and came out with a jar of his wife’s otjize. He held the jar out to me.

  “You’re calling the Okuruwo, so you draw the circle.”

  “Why don’t Himba males put otjize on their skins?” Okwu asked, floating up beside me.

  From behind me, Mwinyi chuckled. I took the leaf and the jar, ignoring Okwu’s question.

  “What reason does a man have to be beautiful?” Chief Kapika asked as he watched me spread the leaf on the dry dirt.

  “Beauty does not need a reason,” Okwu responded.

  I opened the jar. The otjize was so fragrant that for a moment, I swooned. It had been so long since I’d smelled Earth-made otjize. The zinariya squeezed and expanded my world as images of home tried to flood my brain—town’s square, the lake, the schoolhouse … his wife must have collected the clay from near there. My otjize no longer even smells like this, I thought.
r />   “You will never understand us,” Chief Kapika said dismissively to Okwu.

  I drew the circle with otjize and handed him the leaf. He looked at the circle and then at me. “Make sure the Meduse stay in the water,” he said. “We will meet and try to make this better.” He looked at Okwu, but spoke to me. “Their tribesman is alive, there is no reason for war. They have destroyed enough.”

  “That is not for you to decide,” Okwu said. “Unprovoked aggressive action is reason for war.”

  “The Khoush killed my family,” I added flatly. “For we, Himba, that should be an act of war, shouldn’t it?”

  “I’m sorry, Binti,” Chief Kapika said, touching my shoulder. “But if you chose to mingle with the Meduse and if your family chose to welcome one into its home, even built a home for it, why should the rest of us—”

  “Because we are Himba!” I shouted, clenching my fists. “Osemba is my home!”

  He waved his hand. “Save it for the Okuruwo,” he said. “I won’t speak for the council.” He rolled the palm leaf up and began to walk away. He stopped and turned back to me. “When you come, please apply otjize. Use what I gave you, if you have none. You look like a savage.” He gave Mwinyi a foul look.

  I shot a glance at Mwinyi, who glared at Chief Kapika but held his tongue. When Chief Kapika was out of hearing range, Mwinyi said, “And that’s why we will not come to fight for the Himba.”

  I bit my lip. “He only knows the little we know here,” I said. “Forgive him for that.”

  Mwinyi only looked away, moving his hands smoothly as he turned his back to me. I didn’t ask who he was speaking to.

  “Are all your people so afraid?” Okwu asked.

  I glared at it.

  “I think we should leave here,” Mwinyi said, turning back to me. “The conflict between the Meduse and the Khoush is old. It’s a large part of why the Enyi Zinariya have stayed away from these lands. Binti, it’s not your fault. This was all going to start again, sooner or later. You did what you could on that ship, but even you had to have known it was temporary.”

  But was it, I wondered. Things had been peaceful all my life and well before that. The pact had held. And in that time, the Himba had flourished. My father was able to build up his shop. Many of us traveled regularly to Khoush cities to sell our astrolabes. Even all that had happened on the Third Fish and with the stinger on Oomza Uni would have remained planets away if I had not been there. No, I had disturbed all of that when I decided to do what we Himba never do.

  “I have to try and make it better,” I said. “I can’t just leave here.” My family, I thought. Almost all of my loved ones had burned alive and were now charred remains in the Root, the home in which we’d all grown up—my mother, father, siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, family friends. I shuddered, reaching into my pocket and touching the golden ball of my edan. It felt warm and I grasped it. The feeling of its grooved surface was instantly soothing, the feel of the numbers running through my mind as I lightly treed such a relief that my legs felt weak.

  I sighed and walked over to a market bench and sat down. “Where is Rakumi?” I flatly asked.

  Mwinyi pointed up the road toward the Root. I nodded. “Are you alright?” He sat beside me.

  “No,” I said. “I will never be alright again.”

  Okwu glided over to us. “Shall I go with you?” it asked.

  I thought about it for a moment. I nodded. “Yes,” I said. “For now, though, go back to the chief and the other Meduse and keep them from showing themselves.”

  “Have the Khoush returned here?” Mwinyi asked.

  “They will, “Okwu said and it sounded almost hungry at the prospect. “They are still searching for me. Soon they will realize that I have been hiding in plain sight.” Its dome vibrated. Laughter. “You should hope this meeting is successful. Otherwise, tomorrow, there will be war.”

  Mwinyi looked at me. “When will…”

  “O … O…” I paused. The word was still hard for me to speak. “Okuruwo are always held at sunset,” I said. “‘When the fire and the sky are in agreement.’”

  * * *

  Mwinyi and I stayed in the empty souq for much of the day, then Mwinyi went back to the Root to get Rakumi; I didn’t want to go with. Okwu had returned to the lake, where it quickly disappeared into the water. Once, while in there, it had reached out to me through my okuoko and asked, Are you alright?

  “I am here,” I responded.

  Mwinyi returned with Rakumi, who must have eaten her fill of what was left of my brother’s garden. The camel sat down beside my unrolled mat and went to sleep. The remaining Himba in the area who hid in their homes kept their distance. Once in a while, I could see people walking in small groups up or down the road. People looked our way but quickly moved on.

  I spent those few hours resting on my mat, my golden ball levitating before me as I treed. I left the other pieces in my pocket. Somehow, they no longer felt like part of the edan anymore. They were like bits of shed skin. I wondered if the golden ball was still poison to Okwu, or if it was just the outer silver-looking pieces. The golden ball had the same tang of the pieces when I touched it to my tongue. “It’s not really a good time to ask Okwu,” I whispered to myself, and I watched the golden ball rotate before me. The current I sent around it was like an electrical atmosphere around a small planet.

  Mwinyi sat beside me, watching for a bit, and other times getting up and walking along the edge of the lake. At one point, he stopped and stood with his back to the lake and looked toward the sky. He stayed like this for nearly an hour. I watched him, while deep inside a flow of mathematics, the golden grooved ball slowly rotating before me, my mind clear, sharp, calm, and distant. Mwinyi’s face was peaceful, his lips seemed to be saying something, his hands to his sides, his light blue garments fluttered in the wind, and he stood on the discarded shells of the clusterwink snails who lived in the lake.

  I wondered what he was doing. A harmonizer knows when a fellow harmonizer is harmonizing. Who was he speaking to? Maybe the Seven. Eventually, he roused himself, then moved his hands for several minutes. He came back to me and sat on his mat. “Was it a good conversation?” I asked him.

  He chuckled, rolled his eyes, and said, “You wouldn’t believe it.”

  I went back to working with the golden ball. If he didn’t want to tell me, I was fine with that. Maybe he’d been speaking with my grandmother, or the Ariya, or maybe his parents or brothers. It wasn’t always my business.

  * * *

  At sunset, I breathed a sigh of relief. The Khoush military hadn’t returned. This meant there was still a chance that an Okuruwo would help the Himba organize, and maybe I could get us to serve as mediator between the Khoush and Meduse and prevent all-out war. If war intensified between the Khoush and Meduse, if more Meduse came and more Khoush from farther lands came, the fighting would spread and even bleed into other peoples’ business. All because of me. On the Third Fish, I had accidently found myself in the middle of something. This time I was that middle.

  We packed up and Mwinyi and I ate a large meal of leftover roasted desert hare, dried dates, and ground roots. I stepped behind one of the booths and used most of the remaining otjize I had to cover myself with a thick layer, rolling my okuoko with so much of it that one would not be able to tell that they weren’t hair but okuoko, tentacles.

  I sent a message to Okwu that it was time to go and it emerged from the water less than a minute later. There was an odd moment when Okwu glided up to Mwinyi and they both stayed like that for about thirty seconds. Something passed between them, I was sure. Though Mwinyi had no edan or okuoko, he was still a harmonizer; where I used mathematics, he used some other form of access to speak with various peoples.

  As we left, heading further down the dirt road, I couldn’t shake the feeling that from all the sand brick homes and buildings that still stood (once we were a few minutes’ walk further from the Root, there was no further Khoush damage), people were
watching us. They all must have known about the Okuruwo by this time, the news traveling rapidly by astrolabe and word of mouth as the palm leaf was passed from council member home to council member home. And if I knew my people as well as I knew I did, they were hopeful for my success even as they raged at me.

  * * *

  The stone building where the council regularly met was on the other side of Osemba, about a two-mile walk. We went around the lake and then set onto the main dirt road. Here, people stared from doorways, windows, and even came out of their homes to look at me, the “one who’d abandoned her people,” or Okwu, a “violent Meduse,” or Mwinyi, a “savage desert person.”

  “Why let so many of those grow here?” Mwinyi asked as we passed a large group of trees with thick rubbery leaves and wide trunks covered in hard sharp thorns. He held up his hands and made several motions. A woman standing in the doorway of a large stone house we were passing gasped when she saw this, grabbed her staring toddler, pulled him inside, and slammed her door.

  “The Undying trees?” I said, glancing at the closed door. Mwinyi didn’t pay the woman any mind. “We couldn’t dig them up even if we wanted to, their roots go too deep. Plus, because of them, we found drinkable underground water sources for Osemba; because of them, we can live here. We built our water systems around them.”

  “I can see children accidentally impaling themselves on them while playing games in your street,” Mwinyi said. “Why are they called ‘undying’? Do spirits live in them?”

  “Spirits live in everything,” Okwu said.

  “Because they’re older than the Himba,” I said. “We respect them. When there are thunderstorms, it’s like they come to life. They vibrate. Fast enough to make a howling sound. You have to see it happen to know how incredible it is. And they make this salt that you can scrape from the leaves that’ll cure all kinds of sicknesses.”

  Mwinyi was moving his hands fast now and when he finished by making a pushing motion forward, I saw the air before him warp for a moment. My head ached and I turned to look ahead of us until it stopped.