Binti, The Complete Trilogy: Binti ; Home ; The Night Masquerade

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “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 buil
dings 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.

  “Who are you talking to?” I asked.

  “Your grandmother,” he said. “You know how she loves plants. These will blow her mind.” He paused. Then he chuckled. “She knows of them already.”

  I smiled then I coughed, Okwu’s gasp billowing all around me. I heard footsteps scrambling away. When I looked back, I saw a group of children hiding behind the Undying trees, several of them giggling.

  “They’re just curious,” I told Okwu in Meduse, hoping the low rumbly vibration of the language would scare the young girls off. It didn’t.

  “One of them touched my okuoko,” Okwu rumbled back. The children fled at the sound of its Meduse voice. “If they want death by stinger, I will give it to them.”

  “Remember,” I said, switching back to Otjihimba. I smiled. “My otjize healed your okuoko. The little girl who touched you was covered with otjize. She can’t be bad for you.”

  “Her otjize would burn my flesh,” Okwu rumbled in Meduse, irritably.

  “If she touched you, then her otjize is on your okuoko,” I said, laughing. “I smell nothing burning.”

  “Your people are rude,” Mwinyi suddenly snapped. He was glaring at three men standing at the front of a building laughing. One of them pointed at Mwinyi and opened and closed his hand. “Crude, rude people.”

  I grasped his arm and pulled him along. “I apologize on their behalf,” I said.

  “Small-minded insular people,” he muttered. “I can speak their language, they can’t even greet me in mine.” Thankfully, he let me pull him along. I didn’t allow myself to think about what they must have been saying about me all this time. And now that there was Khoush-Meduse violence again that had led to the destruction of part of Osemba, and here I was bringing a Meduse to the town’s most sacred space, those sentiments would surely worsen. But in our walk across Osemba, though more kids and a few adults taunted Okwu and several spat and shouted at Mwinyi, not one person spoke to me.

  * * *

  The Osemba House was a giant smooth dome made of sandstone that sat on the eastern edge of town. The Root was on the westernmost edge, so the two buildings were as far from each other as one could get and still be in Osemba. The Osemba House was built between three Undying trees and inside was a stone platform built around the Sacred Well.

  Daily, women from this side of Osemba came to collect water to drink, for the water here had a refreshing taste and settled upset stomachs in a way that the water pumped around town from the underground river did not. My mother would venture to this side of town once in a while and when she brought home the strange water, we’d all fight each other for our tiny cup of it that we’d sip after dinner. In the back, the outdoor meeting grounds faced the open desert.

  “Let’s go around,” I said. “That’s where they’ll be.” I wasn’t sure how anyone would tolerate the three of us, tainted individuals by Himba standards, walking so close to the Sacred Well.

  Okwu stopped for a moment and seemed to contemplate the building. When I turned to look at it, I laughed despite everything. “The Himba are a passive-aggressive people,” it said in Meduse.

  I nodded. “We have ways of making our point strongly without saying a word.” It was only now, after being so close to a Meduse, that I gazed upon the Osemba House and realized it looked very much like a Meduse, the enemy of a people who treated the Himba like intelligent slaves. Everything is so complicated and connected, I thought. Everything. And nothing is coincidence, or so my mother used to always say. The space between my eyes stung. “Used to.” No longer. I walked faster.

  Before I came around the side of the building, I heard the fire. The Sacred Fire was always burning, but only when an Okuruwo was called was it grown to this size. They all turned. They had all been waiting for us. Five old men, including Chief Kapika, two old women, including Titi—the woman who led the pilgrimage into the desert—and one young man.

  I sighed, my eyes meeting the young man’s eyes. It was Dele, my best friend who’d stopped being my best friend when I snuck away to attend Oomza Uni. Who over the last year had decided to grow a beard and was tapped to become an apprentice to Chief Kapika. I had spoken to him just before the Enyi Zinariya came for me. He’d contacted my astrolabe. We’d spoken briefly and he’d looked at me with a pity so painful I’d been glad when the conversation was over. The last thing he’d said to me was, “I can’t help you, Binti.”

  They all sat around the fire, the men wearing deep red kaftans and pants and the women wearing clothes similar to mine, a red wraparound skirt and a stiff red top. Both Titi and the other women had otjize rolled locks, braided into tessellating triangle patterns and extending down their backs. Dele’s head was shaven on both sides, the dense hair on top twisted into a thick braid that extended behind his head like a horn, stiff with a thin layer of otjize.

  “Come,” Chief Kapika said.

  Okwu’s voice came to me as if it were thrown. I don’t like fire, it said.

  I approached the Himba Council. It won’t hurt you if you don’t get too close, I responded. Stay behind me. I glanced at Mwinyi and he gave me a brief nod. I led the way, Mwinyi behind me and Okwu behind him. I still wore my pilgrimage outfit that my mother had bought me. Fine, fine clothes for one of the finest moments in my life. But now the red skirt was caked with sand and my stiff top was dirty with my own sweat and old otjize. And my family was dead.

  They sat around the Sacred Fire, Dele on the other side, beside Chief Kapika and another man, the two women on both sides of me, Titi to my right. I took a seat in the space made for me, completing the circle, and Mwinyi and Okwu settled behind me.

  I lowered my head. “I’m honored that the Himba Council has answered my call for
this . . . Okuruwo,” I said, speaking the word a bit too loudly as I pushed it from my lips. “Thank you.”

  “The council recognizes its daughter,” all of them responded. Except Dele, who said nothing. But he was not here as an elder, so he could not speak as one.

  “Binti,” Chief Kapika began. “You left us like a thief in the night, abandoning your family—”

  “I didn’t ‘abandon’ my family,” I insisted.

  “You gathered us here tonight, small woman,” Titi snapped at me. “Don’t interrupt an elder.”

  I fought my indignation and the others waited to see if I could control myself. I exhaled a long breath and lowered my eyes.

  “You abandoned your family,” Chief Kapika repeated. “Like a thief in the night. For your own needs. Nearly died for your decision and were forced to accept a partnering with the Meduse in order to survive.” He paused, looking at the others. “But blood is thicker than . . . water. Like a good Himba, you came home. But you brought the enemy of a people who sees us as less than they are. And when the Khoush came for it, they came for us, too. Now there is war in our homes and around our lands again. Instigated by the actions of one of our own, you. Your lineage here is dead and you’ve bonded with the savage other part of your bloodline . . . why shouldn’t we simply run you out of Osemba?”

  I looked up sharply. Angry. “Because the Himba do not turn their own out. We go inward. We protect what is ours by embracing it,” I said. “Even when one’s bloodline is . . . dead.” I paused, the rage and the sight of the roaring fire making me feel more powerful. I stood up before the Sacred Fire. “I left because I wanted more,” I said. “I was not leaving my family, my people, or my culture. I wanted to add to it all. I was born to go to that school and when I got there, even after everything that happened, that became even clearer. I fit right into Oomza Uni.