I followed Ochieng up the rise of Capa’s flank, her wrinkled skin soft and the occasional spiky hair pricking through my light gown, she groaned and I apologized to her. Ochieng held out his hand for the dagger and I gave it to him hilt-first, and with relief.
“Sing your song, would you?” he asked, and he sounded so tired and dispirited that I obliged. I sang and he murmured instructions to me, having me hold an embedded arrow steady while he cut around it. He threw it to the beach, the fury in the power of the throw the only other sign I’d seen of how he felt inside. Allowing the blood to flow—brighter here, which had to be good, right?—a few breaths, he then sewed up this puncture too.
We repeated the surgery three more times, and Capa lay obligingly. Or too weak to protest. When we finished, Ochieng jumped off of her, then held up his hands to help me down. Keeping his arm around me, we waded onto the beach. He leaned heavily on me.
“Are you hurt?” I asked, abashed that I hadn’t asked before. Ochieng always seemed so bright and powerful to me that it didn’t seem possible for him to be wounded.
“No. Not in body,” he replied. Then he sat, almost a collapse, and I went with him. We leaned against each other. Capa in the water before us. Our wedding log just off to the side. The shadows slanting long as the sun set behind the bluff, smoke staining the light bloodred.
~ 15 ~
“I should get up,” Ochieng eventually said. “Go help the others.”
“All right, I’ll go with you.”
But neither of us moved.
“Should we make Capa stand?” I finally asked. I hated seeing her like that, lying in the water like the corpses of the men we’d killed.
Ochieng shook his head. “Elephants are not like horses. It won’t do her harm to lie down and rest. She’ll stand under her own power or not. We’ve done all we can for her.”
Oh. I nearly pointed out that he’d done all the work in saving her, but it seemed wrong. My hands had wrinkled from being so long in the water and Capa’s blood. Dark crescent moons of dried death lay under the nails and I wished I could clean them. Or rather, that I could wish them clean.
As if reading my mind, in that uncanny way he had, Ochieng folded my hands in his, cupping them together like something fragile. Precious to me. “I liked that song,” he said. “Dasnarian?”
“Yes. Harlan’s favorite. He always called it the baby sparrow song.”
“Can you translate it for me?”
I did my best, though the rhyme and cadence didn’t come through. When I finished, he made an approving sound, and then we sat in silence. I realized how surreal this was. How we talked of nothing that had happened. I wasn’t even sure what question to ask first.
Finally I spoke. “What happened?”
A general question—and one I obviously knew part of the answer to, but he didn’t point that out. Not generous, patient Ochieng. He let go of my hands and smeared his own over his face wearily, speaking into them. “They were Chimtoan. Five more boats, besides the two that landed here. Three stopped at other houses downriver, so far as we can tell. The other two banked just down from here and the warriors went to the storehouse. They split into groups—one to steal elephants by riding them away, another to raid the storehouse.”
I listened to the grim recitation of losses. The injured were being cared for. The dead taken to be prepared for burial, including young Femi. Two elephants lost—two of the younger ones who hadn’t been training. Not Efe, Violet, or Bimyr, a relief I felt terribly guilty for feeling.
“Efe stayed buried in her mud the whole time,” Ochieng said with a half-laugh. “So I suppose she won a point on all of us there. I can only imagine if they’d come a little later—or if I’d gotten you to dig her out of her nest sooner.”
“They could never have ridden her,” I said, feeling the absurd humor of it. “She would’ve gone crazy and killed them.” Like I had. The unspoken words hung between us. He looked at me sideways, long legs drawn up at the knee, long-fingered hands dangling between them, his face somber.
“If you’re regretting that you lost yourself to that inner demon—don’t. You saved my life, Ayela’s, and Capa’s.”
I didn’t say I hadn’t saved Capa’s life, not yet. “Did Ayela come back?”
“Back?” He cocked his head. “She was way ahead of me, calling warning.”
Of course she had. “I told her to run and hide.”
He smiled, a brief quirk. “Stubborn, that one.”
“I don’t understand why they shot Capa if they wanted elephants.”
Sighing, he shifted his gaze to the elephant. “It’s a technique of theirs. Confuse the elephant with arrows—see how they weren’t all that long? Just enough to prick and agitate—then they climb on and urge them into a panicked run. Capa took that bad wound in just the wrong place to bleed out, because I used her to attack. She took a spear.” He looked at me again. “You slit the throat of the man who did it.”
I didn’t remember. None of it. And I couldn’t decide if that was a curse or a blessing. Because he watched me steadily for a reaction, I shifted the inquiry away from my crazed psyche. “Is the house gone?”
“Part of it. Thanda and some of the kids got it put out before it got too far. Wood and fabric. We live in a pile of kindling.”
“Built on stone,” I said, then felt silly because the stone hardly mattered.
But he took my hand again, smiling, a shadow of his usual sunniness in it. “Very true. All in all, we did not lose as much as we could have. Thanks in great part to you and your warning.”
“At least it’s over with,” I said, but he was shaking his head before I finished.
“No. If only. They didn’t get away with much, and we know their ways from the past. This was a test. A strike force to assess our defenses and scope our stores. They took samples, to report back with.”
Samples. They killed our people, kidnapped two of our tribe, and Ochieng called them samples. He squeezed the hand he held, then stood, drawing me with him. “It’s good to be angry. We will need our anger for the days ahead. Help me push our wedding log into the river.”
Stricken, I looked from him to it. He cupped my cheek, eyes full of grief now. “We will cut another, when this is done. This one has blood on it. Blood drawn in violence. I won’t build our marriage on that.”
So I helped him roll it into the river, downstream of Capa, and just far enough for the sluggish current to catch it and carry it away. We dragged the bodies of the enemy out there too, to wash downstream as a warning, though Ochieng doubted they’d heed it. More of them had gotten away than had died.
I agreed, because I knew very well what desperation could drive people to do.
Then we washed off the blood as best we could, though we’d only get soiled again. We had a long night’s work ahead, to recover from the attack and brace for another. Everyone labored, even the kids, exhausted and covered in grime. No one spoke of the festival. Not even Zalaika, who bathed the body of her dead great-grandson, singing a mourning song that made my hair stand on end.
It occurred to me that it didn’t matter what Ochieng and I carved our wedding poles from. Our marriage—if it occurred—would always be built on blood drawn in violence, desperation, and grief, because that was my fate and my destiny. It seemed I’d never escape what I’d been born to be. And whoever made contact with me would share in my curse.
* * * *
Just before dawn, I took Violet to visit Capa. Ochieng’s suggestion, of course. We’d all been checking on Capa periodically—or sending one of the kids to do it—and she still lived, but hadn’t yet gotten up. While it wouldn’t hurt her to rest lying down, we all understood that whether she ever got up again would be a threshold moment.
Ochieng thought having the tribe matriarch with her might rally Capa’s spirits. Efe had buried herself so utterly that
only the bare tip of her trunk stuck out. Only by tickling her snout and feeling for her slow inhalations and exhalations could I verify she lived. If she hadn’t come out later in the day, Ochieng had said, we’d have to dig her out and try to get her to eat and drink. And he’d fully intended to take Violet to Capa, too.
That was before he fell into exhausted sleep, in midargument with Desta. He’d sat down, tipped his head back, and went straight out. Thanda and I told Desta to do likewise—both men had gone gray from fatigue—and I eased Ochieng to lie down on the bench right there. It didn’t wake him in the slightest to be thus rearranged, which said something.
I knelt beside the bench after Thanda left, looking down on Ochieng’s sleeping face, something I’d never done before, watching a man asleep and vulnerable like this. With Harlan on our mad escape, though I’d known he slept, I’d been so weary from my injuries inside and out that I’d been absorbed with myself and never paid attention to his sleep. Even on the journey to Nyambura, when I’d stood watch, I’d had my focus outward, alert for danger, rather than looking at the sleeping men.
His face softened in his sleep, making him look younger, and I caught a vision of how our son might look as I soothed him into sleep. It burned like touching snow with bare feet, the longing for that to be possible. And in the same way, numbness soon followed, knowing that it simply couldn’t be. Smoothing back the hair that had come loose from his queue, I brushed a kiss over his mouth, soft in sleep, making me feel all that much more tender.
Then I took Violet to Capa, which had been the last thing Ochieng had asked me to do. I rode Violet, as I hadn’t since the night we rescued Efe, as I still found it easiest to direct her that way. When we came in sight of Capa, Violet picked up her pace, trotting to her fallen sister and nuzzling her, dusting her wounds with her trunk and making a groaning noise. Capa lifted her head a little, answering with a creaky moan, then lay back down again.
Violet stood over her, staring off into the pre-dawn gloaming, as if keeping watch for attackers. There could be predators, I supposed. The lions I’d seen, or the great toothy crocodiles Ochieng had told stories about. Perhaps that had been his intention in asking me to take Violet to Capa, which made me wish I’d complied sooner. Only there’d been so much work to do, so many wounded to tend. And Ochieng had seemed so uncharacteristically dispirited that I hadn’t wanted to stray far from him.
Which made no sense, because what could I do? But still, I’d felt better when he finally slept.
Perhaps because I’d slept so much while I was healing, or because I’d spent the bulk of the time they were all fighting holding my vigil by the river with Capa, but I felt burningly awake. I couldn’t imagine lying down and trying to sleep. Wading into the river, I dunked myself in the cool water, scrubbing at the grime as best I could. At least in the gray light I couldn’t see if blood still washed away from me.
I didn’t want to go back to the house, have to see its gaping wounds, smell the char, bear witness yet again to Femi’s small, bloodless body and hear the weeping of his family. Cowardly of me, no doubt, but I felt emptied out and unable to face any more.
The shadows stirred, the mist of morning moving and reshaping. The large, shadowy forms began to join us. The other elephants, moving in a silence that rivaled my own—and that never ceased to astonish me—coming down to the river, touching Capa with their trunks, then wading in deeper. I’d seen them do this before the rains, standing in the river at dawn, raising their trunks to the rising light and trumpeting.
And it occurred to me to sing the prayers to Glorianna, as I hadn’t done since that first day that the sun came out.
I didn’t feel moved to celebrate as I had that day. Something else gripped me. A need to feel something other than despair. I waded to shore, against the tide of elephants, slipping between them and touching their questing trunks with my hands as we passed each other, exchanging our own greetings.
The light grew pink, the sky brightening, and more elephants arrived. More than our tribe, ones from the other Nyamburan families—and wild ones, including the great bull elephant I’d glimpsed only a few times, with his enormous tusks and grizzled hide. All up and down the river they appeared, making me glad so many still survived, and gripping me with terror that another dawn would change that.
My feet on dry ground, I moved through the rituals Kaja had taught me. Kneeling, standing, genuflecting, I offered up my mourning, my grief, all the anguish and bitter shame. I asked Glorianna to intervene with Her exacting sister, Danu. I’d rather have what Glorianna offered—love, beauty, peace—but I’d pledged myself to Danu and Her stern, unyielding justice.
After a while, I stopped thinking about anything, not wishes or regrets. I simply danced, improvising on Glorianna’s prayers as the Chiyajuans elaborated on each other’s songs, making it into something of my own as the elephants sang their morning song.
As the sun rose, pouring Her light over the river, I let it all flow away from me. Wash away downriver, like my wedding log. Emptying me out.
~ 16 ~
By the time I got back up to the house, my feet sore from dancing on the stones, my heart curiously still hollow, most everyone was sleeping. Except for Desta, who met me as if he’d been waiting for my appearance. Which perhaps he had been.
“Has Capa gotten up yet?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Is Ochieng all right?” Desta had never sought me out for conversation that I recalled.
“He’s fine. Sleeping still.” He said it with a slightly dismissive tone, as if Desta himself hadn’t been doing the same, the last I saw him. “It’s good, because I want to talk to you without him interfering.”
I raised my brows, my mother’s gesture, yes, but it centered me. In conversational combat, I’d been well trained and need not fear losing myself to awaken covered in blood.
“He protects you like a mother hen,” Desta continued when I said nothing. “He’s in love with you, you know.”
“Yes, he told me as much.”
“But you don’t love him.” Desta’s face settled into cold lines. So much like Ochieng’s face, but without his native ebullience, Desta looked harder overall. He nodded at me, as if I’d confirmed his sally, which I supposed I had. “You and I are alike,” Desta said, not what I’d expected. “You have a coldness to you I recognize. We know the world is not some happy, sunny paradise. Has Ochieng ever told you how our father died?”
Again—not what I’d expected. Ochieng had never mentioned his father, and I’d never thought to ask. My fault, no doubt, as the burden of breaking my silence lay on me. For so long I hadn’t been able to ask him questions, then when I could, it hadn’t occurred to me to ask them.
“No,” I replied, offering nothing more. Conversational combat isn’t unlike the physical sort. When you don’t know the skill or strategy of your opponent, it’s best to keep your defense tight, providing no openings for them to strike.
Desta gave me a hard look. “You are cold, that you don’t even care.”
Deliberately I shrugged, Dasnarian style, raising one shoulder and letting it fall. Neither confirming nor denying. Which annoyed Desta further. I can’t say why I baited him in this way, except that my mother had drilled this into me. When someone so clearly wants to tell you something, they always have a reason—and almost never is it to benefit you. Desta had some motivation for wanting to tell me this story, and I suspected he meant to hurt me with it. Perhaps to drive me away.
The joke would be on him in that case, as I’d likely be leaving. I should. I couldn’t burden Ochieng and the D’tiembos with my curse any longer. All that remained was to find a way to do it so Ochieng wouldn’t come after me. Preferably without hurting him, though I didn’t see how that could be.
“He was murdered,” Desta bit out. “By the Chimtoans.”
Ah. This did not surprise me at all. In fact many of their arguments f
ell into place. “I’m very sorry to hear that,” I said, with feeling. “Losing Femi in the same way must be especially painful.”
“What do you know of it?” Desta fumed now, jaw clenched in anger. “You let him die. You have all this skill—you killed those warriors, both here and your people who came after you—but you held back.”
Apparently I’d dropped my guard at some point, because his attack went right through me. Perhaps not a mortal wound, but one that bled and weakened me with it. I opened my mouth to explain, but found I had nothing to say. I had frozen. And this skill Desta referred to belonged to a part of me I’d rather cleave away. Ochieng understood—though how, I had no idea—but how could the rest of the family? All they knew was that I’d failed to act soon enough.
“And were you there to help us drive away the Chimtoans? No.” Desta folded his arms, inquisitor and judge together. “You stayed behind. We have countless injured who might not be if you’d cared enough to fight for them.”
“Ochieng asked me to stay with Capa,” I explained, knowing as I said it that my mother would be shaking her head in condemnation. A weak counterstrike that only exposed that he’d hurt me.
Indeed, Desta smiled, a cruel and satisfied twist of his stern mouth. “Yes. Always protecting you. When will you step up and protect him?”
I didn’t know how to answer that. I’d totally lost control of this sparring match, as if Kaja had disarmed me and chased me, smacking me with the flat of her blade, demanding to know what I planned to do next.
“Our father was murdered because he went alone to parley,” Desta said. “Our mother stayed behind. They didn’t agree, you see. And because he had no one to guard his flank, he was betrayed and she’ll forever live with that guilt. She thinks that if she can grow this family, she can redeem herself. But even she knows that nothing can ever make up for not being there for her spouse. Simyu and I are a team.” He made two fists and punched them together. “I know if I die, it’s only because my wife died before me, to leave me unguarded.”
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