Binti: The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  Seconds passed and I leaned back, my own okuoko writhing on my head. I could feel the vibration of Okwu’s body and then a hardness against my arm. Its stinger. White and sharp. And a thought came to me heavy with relief. If Okwu was protecting me, then it was not killing Khoush. I felt Okwu shudder and I was expelled. I tumbled onto the sand and without looking at myself, I knew most of my otjize had been sucked off. The night air felt cool on my bare flesh.

  I looked back at Okwu and saw that several of its okuoko were hanging by a thread or shot off, its blue color looking lighter in the firelight. Maybe pink. Red? I wondered. Then I was sure. Okwu was spattered with blood. My blood? I thought, but I didn’t look at myself because Okwu lowered to the ground. I’d never seen a Meduse touch the ground. “Okwu!” I exclaimed, scrambling to it on my knees. Okwu now lay to the side, like a deflated balloon. I gently touched its dome, tears squeezing from my eyes, barely able to breathe. Okwu’s dome felt tough like the bladders of water that women carried to and from the lake. Cool beneath my touch. “What’s the matter?” I shouted. “What’s the matter?”

  “They shot it,” Mwinyi was saying as he came and knelt beside me.

  “Why didn’t you use your shield?” I asked.

  “You’d … have … died if I did,” it said, its voice deeper and rougher than ever. It made my head hurt.

  Mwinyi placed a hand on Okwu’s dome as he stared intensely at it. Okwu’s flesh twitched at his touch, but then calmed. I looked behind us and gasped. There had to be at least a hundred Khoush soldiers; men and women standing stiffly in tight desert pants and tops, the women in black and the men in white. Two Khoush men and one Khoush woman, all also in army gear, stood speaking with Chief Kapika, Titi, and Dele, the others standing eagerly behind them.

  “It is in pain,” Mwinyi said. “It won’t speak to me.”

  I couldn’t think. Mama, Papa, my siblings, family dead. Zinariya crippling me. The Night Masquerade’s ominous appearance. War was here. I could barely take in enough breath to keep from passing out. My heart felt as if it would burst through my chest. Heru’s chest burst open and his blood on my face was warm. I wanted to throw myself over Okwu and scream and wail. Submit. I looked at Okwu, then back at the Khoush and the elders, then back at Okwu. I frowned, reaching into my pocket and touching the gold ball. My hand brushed against my jar of otjize. I was about to let myself tree for clarity. Then to myself, I said, “No.”

  Mwinyi looked at me questioningly.

  I grabbed the jar of otjize in my pocket. Okwu’s insides were slathered with a lot of it already. “Mwinyi, put this where Okwu’s been injured,” I said. I paused and then added, “Use all of it.”

  I stood up.

  As I walked toward them all, they could have shot me. They’d just tried. I was too angry to care. The Khoush soldiers stood like statues as I approached. In rows, before their sky whales, the darkness of the desert extending behind them, the stars above. My sandals dug into the sand. My red skirt lapped at my legs and my red top was wet with sweat. No otjize. I was naked.

  “Binti,” one of the Khoush men said.

  “I don’t know who you are,” I said, standing beside Dele. He was staring at me like I was a creature from outer space. All of them were.

  “Qalb Leader Iyad,” he said. “And these are my co-leaders, Qalb Leader Durrah.” The tall woman with the thin braid hanging to her knees nodded at me. “And Qalb Leader Yabani.” The intense-looking man with an equally long black braid inhaled noisily, flaring his nostrils at me as if he’d smelled something foul. All of them had light brown skin, darkened from its typical Khoush tone by the sun.

  “We’ve told them of your suggestion,” Chief Kapika quickly said. “That you offer to convince the Meduse to attend a meeting to make peace.” He gave me a slight nod and I felt a rush of relief, despite all that had just happened. The Himba Council would be there too.

  “We will take the idea to General Kuw and he will take it to the king of Khoushland,” Iyad said, looking down his nose at me. “But the Meduse massacred a ship full of our most gifted minds, unarmed students and professors. And all that was left was … you. Can you really convince those savages to come and have a rational discussion?”

  I don’t know when I started shaking, but when I spoke, my voice was vibrating like an Undying tree during a thunderstorm. “You just tried to kill me,” I blurted.

  Yabani laughed.

  “That was an accident,” Iyad said. “We thought you were a Meduse.”

  I felt Dele try to take my arm. “Breathe,” he said into my ear.

  I yanked my arm away. I could feel my okuoko writhing wildly now. Without otjize what must I have looked like? “You shot my friend,” I growled. “It’s the third time you people have tried to kill it since we arrived here! You agreed to the pact through Oomza Uni knowing you were lying right through your teeth.”

  “I doubt one dead Meduse is a pact destroyer after they killed a ship full of our smartest and finest,” Iyad snapped. “They’re barely flesh, anyway.”

  My vision blurred with fury. “Khoush scholars attacked the Meduse chief, took its stinger, and put it on display in a museum!” I stepped right up to Iyad’s face. I am not tall. Nor am I roped with muscle. I barely came to this man’s chin and I had to look up to meet his eyes, but he was scared. I saw it in his face. I smelled it wafting from his naked skin. He was terrified of me. I’d seen the Night Masquerade twice, I was Meduse, I was Enyi Zinariya, I was Himba, and I had no home.

  “I am Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka Meduse Enyi Zinariya of Osemba, master harmonizer,” I said. I let myself tree and though I felt calmer, my rage stayed and I was glad. I called up a current and held up my hands to show it connecting to my index fingers like soft lightning. I swirled my fingers and the current coiled into a ball hovering before Iyad’s eyes. “I do not want to see my homeland and people destroyed by a stale ancient irrational fight between people who have no real reason to hate each other. When the sun rises, come as you’ve agreed, to the Root that you reduced to char and ash, where my family lies dead. The Meduse will be there and you both will bury this idiocy once and for all.” With the help and power of us Himba, I thought, angrily. Because neither of you is reasonable enough to do it on your own.

  I didn’t wait for his answer. I pulled in my current, turned, and walked back to Okwu and Mwinyi.

  * * *

  The Khoush left. I didn’t see them go, but I heard their sky whales take off and felt the dust they blew over us.

  Okwu did not die. My otjize saved him. Both the otjize Mwinyi slathered on its wounds and the otjize Okwu had sucked off my skin and okuoko when it had enveloped me. Mwinyi, his fingers coated with what was left of my otjize, wouldn’t stop looking at me.

  That night, we stayed in the Osemba House. Somehow, we’d been able to fit Okwu through the dome-shaped door that was wide but not nearly as wide as Okwu. The Meduse were huge but easily compressible, when they wanted to be. Iyad had been rude in his words, but correct, nonetheless. There really wasn’t much mass or weight to Meduse. Once inside, Okwu hovered weakly beside the well. It was quiet, glad to be near such pure water, its god. Mwinyi took a bucket of it out back and bathed with it. I can’t say that I didn’t have the urge to do the same, and this disturbed me.

  The elders and Dele could not deal with me being otjize-free. Thus, after Titi and the other women brought us food and blankets and promised to check on our camel, they left us. They would meet us in the morning. Out back, the Sacred Fire burned, small now and fueled by the bark of an Undying tree, so it would not go out, as long as no sky whale wind turbines blew dust on it. Titi brought me a jar of otjize and now I sat on a blanket facing the back door and Sacred Fire, contemplating the large jar on the mat before my crossed legs.

  Mwinyi sat beside me and picked up the jar. I let him open it and sniff the contents. “This one and the other I put on Okwu smells different from your own,” he said.

  I smiled. “Mine wa
s made from clay I dug up on Oomza Uni.”

  He put the jar back down and turned to me. “Is it an insult if I said you look beautiful with it and without it?”

  I met his eyes for only a moment and then looked away, my heart fluttering.

  “I can see you more clearly now,” he said. “Now that I’ve seen you with it and without. The two make one.”

  “You’re not supposed to ever see me without otjize,” I said. “Only a Himba girl’s parents should ever see a Himba girl my age without her otjize. Not even a woman’s husband will—” I bit my lip and looked at the jar.

  “I know,” Mwinyi laughed. “But remember, I’m not Himba. Me seeing you with and without it just means I see you. Nothing demeaning.” He touched the long matted braid that grew from the middle of his red-brown bushy hair. It was so long that it reached his knees. “See this? The Enyi Zinariya call it tsani, a ‘ladder’ for the spirits. You start growing it at the age of ten. So it’s been seven years. A woman isn’t supposed to touch it and not even my mother has.” He hesitated for a moment and then held it out to me.

  I looked at it. “Are you sure?” I asked. “Why?”

  “Do you know the desert dogs we met didn’t think you were from Earth?” he said. “I think, maybe, I think you’re part of something, Binti.” His confident smile was faltering now. This was anything but easy for him. I looked at the rope of red-brown hair. Then I reached out and took it in my hands. It felt like my hair, except it wasn’t made firm with otjize.

  “There,” I said, putting it down. “Do you feel different?”

  “No,” he said. “But I am.” He smirked and then laughed.

  “What’s funny?” I asked.

  He grinned bigger than I’d seen him grin since we’d left his home. “Honestly, I’m not even sure if you’re a human being anymore, so maybe you don’t really count.”

  I laughed, gently shoving him away. We sat there for a moment, gazing at the Sacred Fire. I could feel the darkness of my family’s death trying to pull me down, and I scooted closer to Mwinyi. He turned to me and touched my okuoko and I didn’t push his hand away.

  “You shouldn’t allow that, Binti,” Okwu said from behind us.

  Mwinyi quickly let go and stood up. Then he knelt back down, brought his face to mine, and kissed me. When he pulled back, we looked into each other’s eyes smiling and …

  Then darkness.

  Then I was there again …

  … I was in space. Infinite blackness. Weightless. Flying, falling, ascending, traveling, through a planet’s ring of brittle metallic dust. It pelted my flesh like chips of glittery ice. I opened my mouth a bit to breathe, the dust hitting my lips. Could I breathe?

  Living breath bloomed in my chest from within me and I felt my lungs expand, filling with it. I relaxed.

  “Who are you?” a voice asked. It spoke in Otjihimba and it came and it came from everywhere.

  “Binti Ekeopara Zuzu Dambu Kaipka of Namib, that is my name,” I said.

  Pause.

  “There’s more,” the voice said.

  “That’s all,” I said, irritated. “That’s my name.”

  “No.”

  This was true but the truth of it made me flinch …

  … I fell out of the tree. From Mwinyi’s eyes. My gold ball was floating beside us. Rotating like a small planet. It dropped to my mat.

  “Where did you go?” he asked, leaning away from me. “Where was that?”

  “You saw it too?”

  “It’s different when it’s human master harmonizers,” Okwu said from behind us.

  “I know that place,” Mwinyi said. “That’s the ring of Saturn.”

  I frowned, “How do you know? I thought you said you’d never left Earth.”

  “I haven’t, but the Zinariya have,” he said. “And they gave us the zinariya. I’ve looked at their memories of space travel; Saturn and Jupiter have always been my favorites. Why are you seeing Saturn’s ring? Flying through it like a bird?”

  “It’s something the edan keeps showing me,” I said. “Even after it fell apart. Maybe I’m meant to go there.”

  “Never seen a Himba constantly called to leave home,” Mwinyi said more to himself than me. He kissed me again, and this time I leaned forward and took his face in my hands and kissed him back. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close and for a while, we lost ourselves in each other. Dele and I had shared kisses a few times when we were younger, but his strong traditional beliefs made him begin to keep his distance as we grew older. And when my friend Eba had asked me to sneak away with her behind the bushes as some of the girls liked to do, I had laughed and said, “No thank you.”

  Now, I was overwhelmed. There were no taboos or hesitations in the way. And when I pulled my lips from Mwinyi’s, his arms still around me, I didn’t look into his eyes. “I feel like I’m falling,” I breathed. He kissed me one more time and let go. I was leaning on my elbows on the mat, my body throbbing and my mind a swirl of so much, when he stood up.

  “I need to go into the desert,” he said. “I’ll be back.” I held up a hand and he took it. “You should remove your sandals and stand outside in the sand,” he added. “It’ll ground you and that way, you won’t feel so much like you’re falling. Because you’re not.”

  “That’s what the Night Masquerade said to me.”

  “It spoke?”

  I hesitated then nodded. “It said, ‘Death is always news. A bird who has flown off the earth and then returns to land is still on the land. Remove your shoes and listen.’”

  Mwinyi clucked his tongue as he wrapped his braid around his finger. “I repeat, maybe you should take your sandals off and go stand outside,” he said.

  I went back to looking at the jar of otjize after he left. I picked it up and put it back down. I sighed, unsure. I picked it up and stood up. “Okwu, are you alright?” I said.

  “I would tell you if I were not,” it said, puffing out enough gas to envelope itself.

  I coughed. “I’m going to stand outside near the fire for a bit.”

  “I will be here listening to the waters below,” Okwu said.

  The night was cool, but the fire made the area around it warm, even at its decreased size. Its light reached out into the open desert, but where it did not reach was blackness. It reminded me of when I looked out the window while traveling in the Third Fish. Though that blankness was much deeper.

  I put the otjize beside me and raised my hands. “Are you alright?” I typed. Then I pushed the red words off into the desert. They fled as if blown by a powerful invisible wind, scaling and disappearing over a nearby sand dune in the direction Mwinyi had gone. A moment later, “Yes. Get some rest. Don’t test the zinariya,” came back to me in his green letters. Then I heard the strange whispers and it seemed as if I saw a planet peeking over the horizon. I looked down, closing my eyes until the whispering stopped. When I opened them, the planet was gone.

  Despite Mwinyi’s warning, I considered testing my tolerance of distant zinariya. I needed to reach my grandmother and tell her what happened. It needed to be me, not Mwinyi. But if I tried and my still fresh mind reacted badly to the attempt again, with Mwinyi gone I only had the injured Okwu to help me. Okwu needed rest. No, I thought. I’ll tell my grandmother when I have some good news. I’ll try after sunrise. Another sunrise in a world where my family was dead. I felt the hot embers in my chest begin to burn. Quickly pushing the pain away, I thought to Okwu, Can you hear me? My okuoko wriggled gently on the sides of my face and against my shoulders. He was close, so my effort did not have to be much.

  Yes.

  I sighed, bringing the golden ball from my pocket. I no longer thought of it as an edan; I saw it more like a little planet. No reason. It was just what was. And I was floating around it, untethered, homeless. I allowed myself to tree and then called up and ran a current over it and watched it rise before my eyes on the electric blue current, slowly rotating. I reached up and took it in my hands, ru
nning the pads of my fingers over its fingerprint-like surface.

  I picked up the jar of otjize, unscrewed the lid, and dug my index and middle fingers into it. I spread it on my body.

  Chapter 4

  Homecoming

  The first class I took at Oomza Uni was Treeing 101. It started the equivalent of seven Earth days after I’d reached Oomza Uni alive and become a hero. It was one of several first-year student classes from all specialties—from Weapons to Math to Organics to Travel, and more. I placed out of it that first day. The class was conducted in one of the large fields between Math, Weapons, and Organics Cities. The dry yellow grasses there had been cut low but still were occupied by hopping ntu ntu bugs, their brilliant orange-pink pigmentation eye-catching in the sunlight. All the students sat in a huge circle to listen to the instructor Professor Osisi, who looked like a tall wide tree with fanlike leaves bigger than my head.

  We were all dazzled as Professor Osisi called up ten thick currents at once as it told us about the class. After what felt like a half-hour of talking (I was still adjusting to the faster cycle on Oomza Uni), we were split into smaller groups of about six, in which teaching assistants had us each step forward and tree in front of our groups. In my group were two Meduse-like people, someone who looked like a crab made of diamonds, and three blue humanoid types who kept touching my okuoko and humming in a way that seemed a lot like laughter to me. None of us spoke similar languages, though all of us spoke in sound.

  “My name is Assistant Sagar,” our teacher said, a sleek hairless foxlike person with eyes on its snout who stood on two legs at my height. When it spoke, it touched something near its throat and though I understood it, I also heard other voices speaking at the same time, probably in languages the others could understand. I smiled, delighted. The way people on Oomza Uni were so diverse and everyone handled that as if it were normal continued to surprise me. It was so unlike Earth, where wars were fought over and because of differences and most couldn’t relate to anyone unless they were similar.