Rise of the Rain Queen

by Fiona Zedde

  “I wish she was my wife,” Ny said.

  But Kizo only made a sound of impatience. “Come on. There are prettier girls in Sky Village without husbands ready to kill you for lusting after what’s theirs.”

  And although that should have been it for Ny’s instant and paralyzing infatuation, it wasn’t.

  Chapter Two

  At first light, Ny checked on the curing meats with her mother before meeting with the men and women of the village council to take the last of a series of tests that would determine if she could follow in her father’s footsteps as an ambassador or even administrator if she chose. She wasn’t sure which of these paths she wanted to take, but she knew what she didn’t want.

  Ny respected her mother and the work she did at home, but that was not where she saw herself. Being trapped in the village without having a chance to see the rest of the world would feel like death. In less than one season, she would be twenty and an adult in the eyes of the village. That was all the time she had to decide both her personal and her political future. It was too bad the path to both was as dark as a moonless forest.

  With her future weighing heavily on her mind, she left the council and headed for the market to buy her mother some kanga cloths. Three village women just had babies, and her mother wanted gifts for them, as well as some cloth for herself.

  Dust rose up under Ny’s sandaled feet as she walked the crowded stone path through the market. The village hadn’t seen rains in over a season. Too long had passed with the ground dry and packed tight, on the verge of cracking from lack of life-giving moisture. From what her father said, the elders were in discussion about petitioning the Rain Queen, a figure only half of them believed in. Ny wasn’t a believer herself. She only trusted in the things she could see or experience for herself and, so far, a crowned woman with rain at her beck and call had not made herself known.

  If the elders agreed to ask this queen for rain, then she would demand as payment one of the young virgins from the village. Once the payment was received, then the rain would come. As an escape from the monotony of village life, many virgins had volunteered themselves, but the elders were still undecided.

  Ny gently pushed her way through the market crowd, half-smiling at the everyday pleasure of friendly bodies pressing close to hers in passing. She was still flush from the victory of kissing Duni the night before. Everything felt good. Her bare arms were warm from the heat of the sun, and her muscles ached pleasantly from the previous day’s hunt. Even the combined smells of sweat, perfumed oils, and just-ripe fruit were sweet to her. A pair of boys, no older than she was, shouldered past her, reminding her to adjust the leather purse with the money at her waist, putting it in front of her in case of thieves.

  Vendors called out to her as she passed, mostly women and teenagers, saying their yams, broad beans, cho-cho, oranges, pineapples, jackfruit, and papayas were the sweetest of all at the market. Ny shook her head at them all and slipped between other shoppers to the stall belonging to her mother’s favorite cloth woman.

  She stood holding up a fold of freshly dyed kanga when she heard someone call out a name. Ny looked up.

  “Does my kanga please you, miss?” The cloth woman, wearing her own bright yellow kanga wound tightly around her body from breasts to hips, asked. “I can give it to you for a good price. Only for you.”

  But Ny wasn’t interested in the cloth anymore. She searched quickly through the brightly dressed women, the heads gracefully holding up wide baskets, dismissing the ones with children strapped to their backs. Then…Duni.

  She refolded the cloth and dropped it back in its pile. “No, I’m sorry,” she told the cloth woman. “Please, excuse me.”

  Ny slipped through the crowd until she was close to what she wanted. Duni. Glowing in a pale green kanga knotted behind her neck and flowing down to her knees, and with a basket balanced gracefully on her head. She stood with three other women who looked her age or younger. The sister wives, all except one. The youngest and newest wife must have been at home underneath their husband.

  “Duni.”

  She glanced up at Ny with little surprise. “First light greetings to you, Kweli’s daughter.”

  Ny’s face warmed with heat. Kweli’s daughter. She called Ny by her father’s name, reinforcing how much of a child she thought Ny was. But she didn’t let the embarrassment put her off. “It’s good to see you, Duni.”

  “Is this by chance?”

  Ny was blank for a moment, then she realized what Duni was asking. She lowered her voice. “If I wanted to hunt you, I would go to the rock where I’m guessing you dream every night away from your sister wives and husband.”

  Duni bit her lip and looked away. But a smile hid beneath the clasp of her teeth.

  They spoke too softly, too quietly, Ny thought, to be heard above the noise of the market. But Ifeyalo, the woman behind the stall who she’d known since birth, gave her considering looks while she talked with Duni. Ny remembered her father’s words. Or at least her version of what he meant. Caution.

  Ny smiled widely at Ifeyalo. “Two yams, please.”

  “Only two?” Ifeyalo said with a similar smile. Equally insincere. “Your family is so big, Nyandoro. They would not be content with just two yams.” Her smile sharpened.

  Ny clenched her jaw. “How many do you think would make them contented?”

  The woman seemed surprised, as if she hadn’t thought to get this far in the negotiation. Then her uncertainty dropped away. “At least twelve. Don’t you think so?”

  Duni gasped and stepped back, catching on to what the woman was doing. She glared at Ny, then at the woman.

  Ny practically threw the money at the woman and took the yams, juggling them in her hands since she hadn’t brought a bag. Duni backed away from the stall, and she followed.

  “Are you trying to make this thing we don’t have between us into a dirty secret?” Duni hissed the question at Ny. “Because if you are, you should walk away now. I’m not someone who would ever do that.”

  But the knowledge of what happened on the riverbank pulsed between them, heavy and thick.

  “I didn’t kiss myself last night!”

  The words escaped Ny’s mouth before she could catch them. Her father’s temper pricked her rarely, but when it did… She dropped the yams on the ground and was vaguely aware of them scattering around her feet, heard gasps, saw from the corners of her eyes hands scrambling to pick them up.

  “What kind of person do you think I am, then?” The frustration at wanting and not getting spurred her, and she grabbed Duni’s arm, jerking Duni toward her. Duni cried out, a hand rushing up to steady the basket on her head. “Don’t play with me like a child and act shocked when I bite back like an adult,” Ny said, ignoring the sudden onslaught of stares. “Because, believe me, I do bite.”

  A calloused hand clasped the back of her neck. She smelled the familiar scent of cinnamon chew stick, sweat, and flint.

  Ny grit her teeth. “Kizo, let go of me.”

  But his touch was enough for her to let Duni go. Duni gave her a sharp look, then reached up to hold her basket steady as she turned quickly away to find her sister wives.

  “Sister, you’re not thinking clearly.” Kizo tightened his grip on her neck and shook her lightly, just once. “If you care for Duni, don’t let her become the talk of the village. Her husband will abandon her.” He emphasized the word with a sharp click of teeth.

  Ny looked around her at the quickly averted gazes, heard the whispered conversations in the crowd, and felt keenly the possibility of someone telling Duni’s husband what they’d seen. “Shit…”

  Kizo seemed to relax then, his teeth releasing their clench around his chew stick. “I hope you’re not planning on kissing our iya with that mouth.”

  At the mention of their mother, her regret deepened. She cursed again.

  “Come,” Kizo said. “Get what you came here for or leave these women to their market day. I think you’ve done enough
for the day.” He grabbed the only two yams not stolen by enterprising beggars and dropped his arm around Ny’s shoulder. Ny nodded, not knowing what else she could do. She looked around, and yes, the villagers and vendors were still looking at her, some slyly, others with knowing and direct stares. Her father was going to send a blade straight through her stupid head.

  “I think I need a drink,” she muttered.

  “I know just the place.”

  He took her to a bar she’d never been before. Filled mostly with men, it was a lodge on the far edges of the village with the dried carcass of a monkey hanging from the eaves of its small verandah. A group of men sat on stools trading old stories while two women sat nearby sharing a jug of liquor.

  No one on the verandah looked up when Kizo guided Ny through the doors of the lodge and into a wide room littered with tables, only half of them occupied. The place was filled with the stink of drink and sweat, a cocktail of sorrow and regret. Or maybe that was just what she was feeling.

  Light poured in from the single large window looking down the mountain. It would be easy, Ny decided, if someone wanted to drown their sorrows in drink then end their life in the same place. A quick jump out the window and tumble to the rocks into the forest canopy below.

  Kizo ordered drinks for them both then took Ny out the back door to a smaller verandah, this one empty except for a few empty chairs and tables. A baobab tree fluttered its leaves overhead. She drew a grateful breath of clean air.

  “What the hell were you doing out there?”

  “Making a mess of things?” She wanted to drop her head to the surface of the table and groan out her frustration at herself.

  But Kizo didn’t let her. He shoved the mug between her head and the table, giving her a look of brotherly disgust. “Drink.”

  The drink was honey-colored and looked sweet, almost pretty, in the rough-hewn wooden mug. Ny took a single gulp. And gasped. The liquor burned her tongue and her throat going down. “What the f—?” She gasped again, unable to go on. The drink scoured her belly as it settled.

  “It’s a drink.” Kizo drank from his own mug and gave her a look of utmost patience.

  Ny pressed a hand to her chest, willing the burning to go away. She swallowed again and looked away from the awful drink, wishing her deepest wish for a cup of water. A tub. An entire river.

  “Stop being so dramatic.” Kizo slapped her on the shoulder, but Ny squirmed under that brief touch. Even her skin burned.

  “Fuck…” Ny dropped her head back and blinked at the open blue sky, at the occasional bird that floated by. She breathed until the fire was gone and she could talk again.

  She licked her lips and the taste of spice lingered on them. “Okay. I think I’ve actually survived this assassination attempt.”

  “Assassination? You’re not that important, sister.” He drank again, licking his lips in a way she knew he did just to fuck with her. At her annoyed look, Kizo rolled his eyes then held out his cup to her. “Here, have some of this.”

  She took a sip, then stared at him. “You asshole!”

  He was drinking water.

  She tried to glare at him while guzzle-gasping from his mug.

  Kizo laughed in her face. “I’m not the one who almost dragged off someone else’s wife in the middle of a crowded market. Why would I need a drink?” He took his water back from her and took another deep drink.

  “I didn’t almost drag anybody off.”

  He ignored her. “Yesterday you promised our baba you wouldn’t shipwreck the girl’s marriage, but today here you are practically shouting to the entire village that you want to fuck her.” Kizo sighed like he was the most put-upon brother in the world. “And she didn’t exactly look like she was telling you no.”

  Ny felt her face warm again. Her second round of embarrassment for the day. “That’s not what I meant to do.”

  “But that’s what happened.” Kizo could look as serious as their father when he wanted to. He apparently wanted to now. “Do you think she’ll even talk to you now?”

  “Shit. I hope so.”

  “Put yourself in her place. Would you?”

  Ny drew her cup closer, sniffed it, then took a cautious sip. She winced. It wasn’t that bad. “It depends on how much I wanted the woman who did that to me.”

  “That’s a load of shit. No lover likes being rough-handled in public with so much at stake.”

  Ny loved her brother, but he was really making her feel like crap. She sighed and stared down the mountain. The heavy trees, summer thick with green leaves despite the absence of rain, wavered in the breeze. Far, far off, the peak of the mighty mountain Kilimanjaro hovered among the clouds. Ny knew she was being a child about this. One denied a sweet that she had been almost able to taste.

  “I don’t really know what happened to me.”

  “Yes, you do.” Kizo gave her one of his searching glances, the one that said he wasn’t buying whatever garbage she was trying to sell. “You have to realize the power you have here,” Kizo said. “If you do this, she could lose everything.”

  Something about the way he said the last word flashed Ny back to her grandfather, a small man drunk on his small power.

  He had had more money than their father, more influence, and every day it seemed he had bought a new woman, or bought the courts away from some trouble he’d gotten himself into. And he had the temper of a storm newly unleashed. Young with an endless capacity for destruction. Even as an old man, he’d been terrifying in his efforts to keep Ny’s parents apart. When they came and stayed together despite his wishes, he’d simply dedicated himself to making her mother’s life miserable. Telling her how worthless she was. How she could never compare in looks to the woman her father should have married. Ny had been glad when he died. Furiously glad.

  And, all too often, her father told her how like her grandfather she was. Ny didn’t want to be that small. She swallowed the lump of hot stone that suddenly appeared in her throat.

  “I have to apologize to her,” she said.

  “You have to stay away from her.”

  Kizo shoved her drink back into her hands and Ny drank from it but did not wince this time. The burn was no less than she deserved.

  Chapter Three

  The village was small enough that it was nearly impossible to avoid someone, but Ny tried. She did errands for and with her mother, helped her father in the usual ways, spent time with her brothers, but did not seek out Duni. She was trying to be better. Over a week passed.

  The only thing she did not give up in her quest to be a better person was the late nights she spent at the river. At her usual place, she purposefully did not think about Duni.

  She sat on the wide and worn rock on the river’s edge, thinking of everything but the night she’d finally been able to talk with Duni, touch her hand, steal a kiss. Ny toed off her sandals and lay back on the rock, her bare back pressing against the stone, her breathing light and even. She closed her eyes.

  A handful of moments later, her eyes opened at a far off sound. She stared upriver, craning her neck in a vain attempt to see around the curves and hidden branches of the winding snake of a river. Where her sight was limited, her hearing was not. She knew the sounds reaching out to her from beyond the shadows. It was Duni’s song. Ny closed her eyes again and listened. The humming melody from the last time she had seen Duni on the river.

  She sat up, tense, on her rock, fighting equally strong urges to stay where she was and to find the source of the song.

  Stay away from her, Kizo had said. Stay away.

  But the sound coming from upriver was truly a siren song, impossible for Ny to ignore. She slipped from her rock and followed the sound to its source. Duni lay on a patch of grass near the water, her slender form outlined in moonlight. Ny’s desires made flesh. The melody she hummed was constant and sweet, rising into the night, mixing with the sound of the wind moving like its own kind of music through the trees. She was so beautiful that Ny’s breath s
topped in her chest.

  “It’s dangerous for you to be out here by yourself at night,” Ny said once she could breathe enough to speak.

  Duni didn’t seem surprised to see her this time. Her humming song stopped, and she rolled her head to glance at Ny before she turned her attention back to the sky. “Do you think only you have the right to the night?”

  “That is not what I meant,” Ny said.

  “It doesn’t matter what you meant.” She sounded resigned, unhappy. “Why are you here? Will you lie to me again and tell me you’re not hunting me?”

  “Bathing, not hunting.” Ny crept closer to Duni, sank to her knees in the grass near her feet, but still kept a respectful distance between them. “Even though I wasn’t searching for you here, I’m glad I found you. I—” She took a breath. “I want to apologize for what I did at the market. I had no right to say those things to you. I had no right to touch you.”

  “Rich men and women have been doing what you did since long before I was born.” Duni dropped her gaze from the sky to the water, to the rocks scattered along the riverbank. Anywhere but at Ny. “That time was no different and you are no different.”

  “Please, don’t—I wouldn’t want you to believe I’m like that.”

  “And it’s always about what you don’t want, right?” Duni made a scornful noise. “Until you show me differently, there’s nothing else for me to believe.”

  Ny nodded. The futility of what she was trying to do, get forgiveness from a woman whose life she could have destroyed with her careless actions, struck her like a blow. “I’ll leave you alone.” She stood up and brushed off her knees. “I am really sorry about what happened.”