Crown of Thunder

by Tochi Onyebuchi

  “That has to be it,” Aliya replies. “Equations.” She’s still staring into her cup. “They’ve found a way to bind metal made north of Kos to the inisisa with algebraic geometry.”

  Then Aliya slaps her hand on the table. “A proof. They were writing a proof. Taj, you remember that proof I wrote out in the sand by the river?”

  “The kiwi.”

  “Every item in the universe can be described with a proof.” Her hands move like they’re looking for something to do or hold, but eventually she just folds them in front of her. I bet she was looking for dates to rearrange or a stick to scribble onto the wooden table with. “Even the inisisa. Hardened metal is easy to describe. Its nature and components don’t move. But the inisisa . . . how did they do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Arzu says. “Everything is a weapon in Karima’s hands.” She coughs into her fist. Her hands shake for a few moments, then stop. She grips her cup.

  I move to pour her some water and catch another glimpse of the scar on her neck. Just a portion of it shows above her scarf. She sees me staring and quickly moves the cloth to cover it. I open my mouth to ask her about it, but the look on her face stops me from speaking.

  When we saw her on the shoreline, she had a wide-brimmed hat on her head to shield her from the sun, but other than that, she wears loose-fitting clothes. A shirt that billows around her wiry frame and loose cotton breeches that whip in the wind. I have so many questions for her. How did she escape? Was she in prison? Who gave her that scar? Instead I say, “And Bo? Is he a weapon too?”

  Arzu looks my way and nods. “She has sent him after you.”

  “We know,” Aliya tells her. “We passed through a refugee camp that had survivors of some of his massacres.”

  “Kos as we knew it is dead,” Arzu says. “There is nothing there for us.”

  Their faces flash before my eyes. Tolu. Ifeoma. Emeka. Omar. Noor. Ugo. Ras. All left behind. And then there are those twisted by Karima. Bent to fulfill her will. Those like Bo. And how many others? I refuse to believe it’s over. That they’re all gone. That the city can’t be saved. I refuse to believe that Mama and Baba will be trapped forever in the prison Karima has made out of my city. I refuse to believe that she has won. But I can’t find anything to say to Arzu. I want to tell her she’s wrong, but I can’t bring myself to say the words. I leave the last piece of bread on my plate, uneaten.

  “Iragide,” Aliya says suddenly.

  Arzu and I blink in surprise and wait for more.

  “It’s the art of binding. It’s what algebraists used to do in the Before. To change the physical property of things. They would use it to bend metal, to build statues, to break them down.” Aliya looks at her hands. “Ka Chike, the Seventh Prophet, was the most adept practitioner of Iragide. He could pull water out of thin air. But the power overwhelmed him. It was considered heresy. An affront to the Unnamed because it sought to remake the pieces of the world.” She looks up at both of us. “If used in a certain way, it could shatter mountains. It could break the world. That’s what they’re doing in the Palace. That’s how they’re able to bind metal to inisisa.” She shakes her head in amazement. “It was supposed to be banned. All his notes and proofs were burned with him.”

  “And Karima has that knowledge again?” Arzu asks.

  Aliya shakes her head, still thinking. “Not all of it. Ka Chike knew the Ratio. The one equation that could describe everything. That would mean complete and total control of not just Kos but the entire Kingdom of Odo.” She looks up at me and Arzu. “She’s trying to find it.”

  Quiet falls over us. The rest of Osimiri bustles beneath us, people living their lives, all seemingly oblivious to what’s happening a half-moon’s journey eastward. But Aliya’s words give me hope, strangely enough. She’s still thinking of Kos. She’s still thinking of the troubles its people face. She’s still thinking of a way to fix it.

  Arzu rises to her feet. Stains dot the front of her shirt. Food. Ash. Dried blood.

  “Where are you going?” I ask her. “What are you going to do now?”

  “I’m going west.” Arzu smiles. “I’m going home. To be with my people.”

  “But—”

  “Taj, my mother may be there.”

  I feel my eyes go wide.

  “Your mother?”

  Arzu nods slowly. “After she left Kos, the only place where she could have been cured of her sin is back home. Among the tastahlik. If she survived the journey, that’s where she will be.”

  “Her sin?”

  Arzu looks to me with a sad smile on her face. She has the same gray tinge to her skin as the refugees. “She dared to love a Mage. And he dared to love her.”

  “You were born in the Palace,” Aliya says.

  Arzu nods. “My mother used to say that restlessness had brought her to Kos. She tired of life with the tribe. One day, in the street, she met a man. Fell in love. And that man found her a job in the Palace so that they could be near each other. My mother was still new to her job when I was born. My mother’s position meant that I was cared for, even though my mother had birthed me unwed.

  “Children notice everything. And of all the people in the Palace who tended to me, there was one man who spent more time with us than anyone else. He was a Mage. A kanselo—a lawmaker. Sometimes, he and my mother would look at each other strangely. She saw him differently from the other Mages. Treated him differently. There was no way I could have known back then, but he was my father. I didn’t discover until much later that he had tried to change the law so that what he and my mother did would not be illegal.” She shrugs. “I’m the result of a crime.”

  I almost can’t believe it. The Kayas, in my mind, are so far apart from the rest of Kos that the idea of anyone in the Palace having a child with a regular person is unfathomable. And I remember how I used to think of Mages. I remember the Mages who used to round up aki after every Baptism, scouring the dahia for the newly orphaned or, in some cases, ripping them from the arms of their parents as soon as it was discovered that their eyes had turned. And I remember the Mages who would come to the slum where we aki lived and would call on us whenever someone in the Palace or some rich person up on the hill needed to have a sin removed and could afford to pay for it. I used to think all Mages were the worst kind of ruby-lickers, that all they cared about was money and using aki to get it, draining us dry until we Crossed and couldn’t Eat any more sin, then tossing us into the rubbish bin. Then I’d met Aliya and, after that, the Mages who had tried—and failed—to rebel against Izu and the Kayas and save Kos from the planned invasion of inisisa.

  Now a Mage in love is no longer so astounding a thought. Maybe they are just like the rest of us.

  “What was his name?” I ask.

  “It does not matter.” When she sees the question in my eyes, she says, “He is dead. The Kayas had him murdered when his crime was discovered. He tried to escape with my mother but was hunted down and killed. They did not even give him a trial.”

  And Arzu’s mother was given a reprieve only as long as her daughter was stripped of her ability to have children and made to serve Karima for the rest of her days, ending their family line.

  So, just like that, Arzu’s family was scattered. Ripped apart, then thrown to the wind. Her father dead, her mother disappeared. And now here she is, stranded in a land not her own.

  “We’ll come too!” It’s not until I hear the words that I realize I’m the one who said them.

  “Wait, what?” Aliya can only blink at me.

  “There’s a bounty on my head. Eventually, word will arrive in Osimiri. Or, worse, Bo will come and turn this whole obodo into ashes on the river.” I turn to Aliya. “We were heading in that direction anyway, right?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “There’s a ferry leaving tonight,” Arzu says. “I’ve already booked passage. The smu
gglers know me; there will be no problems getting you on board.”

  I get to my feet. “Done,” I say, and that settles it. After Aliya glowers at me for a few seconds, she and Arzu get to talking, and I wander to the edge of the roof and look out over Osimiri. I stuff down that lingering shame that bubbles up whenever I remember Noor and Miri and Nneoma and Dinma and all the others I left behind in the forest. It’s not my guilt, I say to myself. It’s just the sins I’ve Eaten doing their job. Even as I think those words, I know it’s a lie.

  In Arzu’s homeland are the tastahlik, people just like the aki with their sin-spots and their ability to consume the sins of others. But over there, they’re revered. Respected. Every time I think of Kos, I feel pain. I can’t go back. I want to. For the chance to see Mama and Baba and know that they are safe. For the chance to know for certain that Karima never loved me, had only meant to use me. For the chance to talk Bo out of whatever lahala Karima has convinced him to do. But what good would I do just dancing back into Kos after all of this? At least by doing this, helping Arzu find her mother, getting far away from the people I may put in harm’s way, I can feel useful again.

  Water runs like a scar at the horizon, just beyond the city. Arzu’s home is there. Her people. Maybe my future’s there too.

  CHAPTER 8

  “DO YOU STILL see them?” I ask Aliya as we lie on a boat deck beneath the stars. This is the ship that will take us westward. In less than a quarter-moon’s time, we’ll be in Arzu’s homeland.

  We both have our pallets rolled up, serving as pillows. It’s warm enough, even with the sea breeze, that we don’t need blankets. We’re on the outer edge of Osimiri. Most of the noise and bustle of the city is behind us. Here, boats large and small are docked, tied to moorings that stretch around the city and touch the shore.

  “The equations,” I elaborate. “Do you still see them when you look up at the stars?” I point at the scattered bits of light in the blue-black sky. I like talking to her. It keeps me from thinking about the band of black ink on my forearm, all my other markings, and the people back home.

  “Of course I see them,” she replies, smiling.

  Young men and women, bare to the waist except for cloth over their chests, work on the ship, tightening and testing ropes, moving crates, lounging about, chatting or drinking, some of them quietly gazing at the stars just like us.

  Her smile widens. “Every child is told about the constellations and the stories we make out of them.”

  “I wasn’t.”

  She gets quiet, and I can tell she’s realizing the mistake she made. Aki aren’t like regular kids. We don’t grow up with our parents and go to school. We’re not told stories about the stars at bedtime. As soon as our eyes change, we’re snatched up by the Mages and taken into indentured servitude, Eating other people’s sins for next to nothing. “I’m sorry,” she says at last.

  I snort. “I don’t care for that lahala anyway. I’d much rather make up new stories. I bet the old ones are pretty boring.” We grow quiet. “You lot are trouble, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Apparently, according to Arzu, making a child with a Mage is a capital offense.”

  She squirms a little next to me. “I’ve heard that, yes.”

  “That would never be me. Aki and Mages, we are two different things,” I say.

  For a long time, neither of us says a word.

  “Are we?” Aliya says, breaking the silence with her whisper. “You’ve also seen Mages and aki fight alongside each other—sacrifice themselves to save a city.” She turns toward me and looks me in the face. “And you’ve seen a very kind, helpful, and, I must say, quite intelligent Mage console you while you were busy pining over an evil queen. Frankly, I think that one’s the more noble effort. Certainly the tougher out of the two.”

  I let out a laugh. “That’s true.”

  “Which part?”

  Our eyes lock for a second. I’m not sure who looks away first, but our gaze breaks, and we settle back into the night’s tranquility. Eventually, the only sound we hear is the soft rolling of the sea beneath us.

  “They come to me in my dreams too,” she says, so softly I don’t know if it’s to me or to herself. “The equations.” She’s still staring at the stars. “They build on each other.”

  “What do they show you?” I ask after a few seconds of silence.

  She’s quiet for a long time. Then she says, “Kos. But not Kos as we left it. A Kos that’s beautiful and bright and Balanced.”

  CHAPTER 9

  THE JOURNEY IS a blur.

  Arzu, called a lascar by the others, bounds back and forth across the boat, pulling on ropes and scaling masts and peering out over the water. She shouts words and commands I can’t understand in a language that seems like a stew made of a whole bunch of other languages. Watching her is weird, because she moves with a freedom I never saw before. In the Palace, she was all stiff and terse. The rare times I could pull a sentence of more than four words out of her were victories. Here, she barks at the other lascars, the sailors, and she challenges them to dangerous games that involve running along thin beams of wood on the ship or racing across the deck, dodging crates and barrels and the ship’s mates. She sings with them too, loud songs that I’m glad I don’t know the words to, because if I started singing them, I’d probably embarrass both Aliya and Arzu straight into Infinity. It’s almost like whatever sickness Arzu had in Osimiri has vanished. Maybe being on the water has cured her.

  Even after what she told us in Osimiri, I know so little about Arzu’s past and that she could do all these things. I feel a little bit ashamed I didn’t ask about her more when we were together in the Palace. Before everything went cracked. When did she learn to fly through the air like that? Or to speak the way these other lascars speak? Where did she learn about boats and how to stay steady on them even as they rock and sway on the waves? How does someone born and raised in the Palace know all these things? Arzu had spoken earlier about what brought her mother to Kos, and I wonder if her mother felt the same restlessness I sometimes feel. That itch to be in other places, to see new and dangerous things.

  Aliya spends all her time belowdecks working almost in the dark. There’s a window in her room that lets the sunlight in when the sky is clear. Sometimes, at night, I peek in to see her working by candlelight. One of the mates snuck her some parchment early on, and I’ve barely seen her since.

  I spend most of my time looking out on the water. Animals shimmer beneath the surface. Fish and bigger fish. I bet Arzu knows the names of them, even the ones that sometimes jump out of the ocean and arc in the air, all sparkles, before splashing underwater again. Some of the lascars look like darker-skinned fish themselves. The way they move about the ship, you’d think they were born on it.

  Two of the masts have what the lascars call “bird’s nests” on them, circular platforms near the top that ring the wooden pole. Lascars often hang out there or sometimes sleep there. I look up and see two of them, about my age, shouting back and forth at each other. I can’t tell what they’re saying, but it looks like they’re making fun of each other. I catch myself smiling. They remind me of Bo and myself. Racing across the rooftops of the shanties to see who could cross the dahia the fastest. Slipping on sheet metal, vaulting over balconies, crashing through people’s laundry, sometimes falling through holes in a roof to land on some family’s dinner. We were so fast and free.

  I squint at the bird’s nests. If only Bo and I had been born elsewhere. Maybe that could have been us.

  I’m pulled out of my thoughts when a sharp whistle cuts through the air. The lascars in the bird’s nests both turn. There, just over the horizon, a mountain peak. All of a sudden there’s a flurry of activity, and as we get closer, I see the tops of other ships. Out of nowhere, other ships surround us. Merchant vessels, it looks like. Everyone’s shouting commands or yelling out signals.
The ship changes shape before my eyes. Sails unfurl and billow in the breeze. Someone’s winding a crank somewhere, lowering one beam of wood and raising another. It all unfolds like a choreographed dance. Everyone knows exactly where to go and what to do.

  I spy Arzu high on the part of the deck closest to the shoreline. She’s standing completely still. I can only imagine the look on her face. She looks so stoic and imperial on that platform. The wind whips her baggy clothes around her. Her blond hair flows in waves. She looks like someone from one of the storybooks we used to spin as kids, the ones we would steal from the booksellers’ stalls and peer through in alleyways or on balconies we’d snuck onto. Or the ones Auntie Sania and Auntie Nawal would give us in the marayu. Before I can walk up to Arzu, a door opens behind me. Aliya walks out of her cave and peers into the sun, hand over her eyes.

  “We’ve made it,” she says.

  “How do you know? You’ve spent the whole trip cooped up like a hen in that dungeon of yours. I’m surprised your hands haven’t fallen off yet.”

  She raises an eyebrow at me. “You know that this is a ship, right?”

  “Of course I know that.”

  She crosses her arms, faces ahead, and smirks. “Then of course you’d know that there are maps on this ship.” She glances at me to see if I’m blushing or not. “And navigational charts? And ways of tracking distance during our journey?”

  “Well, yeah, that’s obvious,” I lie. “I pay attention to these things.” I point to the closest bird’s nest. “I know what that is.” I point to some of the rigging. “And I know what that’s for, and I bet you don’t know how they let those smaller boats over there into the water, do you?”

  She chuckles but says nothing. Shaking her head, she makes her way through the chaos on deck to where Arzu stands. I follow, making sure not to get in anyone’s way, managing just barely to dodge a few lascars practically leaping through the air from one task to another.

  In Arzu’s clasped hands is a string of stones. Each pellet sits in a bronze clasp with rings attaching them to the string around Arzu’s fingers. They’re like the prayer beads Izu and other Mages would hold, but rougher. “The sky is our ceiling, the earth our bed,” she whispers. “The sky is our ceiling, the earth our bed. The sky is our ceiling, the earth our bed.” Her head is bowed. Her eyes are closed. It’s like a prayer, but one I’ve never heard before. I look in the direction we’re heading and see a range of mountains. And on those mountains, little black dots are moving. We get closer, and I see that they’re people. “The sky is our ceiling, the earth our bed.”