Rise of the Rain Queen

by Fiona Zedde

  She turned around to leave.

  “Why did it take you so long to find me?” Duni was now giving all her attention to Ny, the rippling of the river that had so transfixed before, forgotten.

  “I didn’t want to hurt you any more than I already had.”

  Duni nodded. “Okay. Thank you for that.” She pressed her lips together. “I want to apologize too…for denying what happened between us. You kissed me, but I kissed you too. We both were part of it. Whatever that makes us, we are the same.” She pushed out a noisy breath, then looked away.

  “Apology accepted,” Ny said.

  When Duni only nodded again, she backed away. Thinking they were finished, Ny turned again to leave and had made it a few feet down the path before she heard Duni call out to her again. “You can stay.”

  She’d never moved so fast her entire life. Duni laughed at her as she skidded to a halt near her. Ny, trying not to force herself too much on Duni, sat on the small rock closer to the river and took off her sandals. She dangled her bare feet into the water and sighed at its cool eddies lapping at her ankles. The water was almost as soothing as Duni’s presence.

  Duni sat up and smoothed down her hair. It was a loose cloud around her face, big and soft and smelling of the honey oil Ny remembered. Under the moonlight, her eyes were large and shadowed. “Since you were not hunting me,” Duni said, “what have you been doing in the days since the market?”

  Small talk now? Okay. She could do that.

  Ny shrugged. “The usual. You know there’s nothing very much to do in the village except have babies, tend to the animals, and swim in the river.”

  “That is true for most, but not for you. I’ve been asking around.”

  Ny couldn’t stop the jolt of pleasure that Duni had been trying to find out more about her.

  “I need to know more about the one who I might have to report to the council.”

  The sweet feeling died as quickly as it was born.

  Duni laughed at whatever look she must have seen on Ny’s face. Her laughter was soft and musical, even if it was at Ny’s expense. “I was only joking, Nyandoro.” She slid closer to Ny. “Will you be an ambassador like your baba? Did you pass the tests?”

  The tests. Truthfully, she’d forgotten all about them. She told Duni as much. After the market, her mind had been consumed with regret about how she’d treated Duni. The tests and their possible results were barely second thoughts.

  Besides, they were easy. She was her father’s child. She’d traveled with him since she could string meaningful sentences together and knew nearly everything about his position. If ever it came time for her to take a similar post, she was more than ready.

  “The tests mean nothing,” she said at the end of it. “Either I will be an ambassador or I will not.” She smiled at Duni. “For tonight, I’m happy to be here with you.”

  Duni rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.

  “What about you? What have you been doing since that unfortunate day of the yams?”

  Duni smiled again. Relaxation curled into her slender body, and she tossed her head, as graceful as a lynx. Then she waved her arms to encompass the river and everything around them. “This is it. I go to the market. I clean my husband’s hut and teach the younger wives to do what he says, then I come here to escape.”

  “That’s not too bad,” Ny said.

  “Would you say that if you were married to a man and had this kind of life? You have the freedom to do anything you want. Become an ambassador or your iya’s help at home. Marry your own wives or travel the world. Choices like these sound like heaven to me.”

  Ny heard the echoes of need in Duni’s voice, the desire for her own freedom. For more. “Is that what you want to do?”

  “What I want doesn’t matter anymore. I have the only life that I’ll ever have.” The sadness flickered so quickly across her face that if Ny hadn’t been watching her so carefully she might have thought she imagined it.

  “You can have more than this, Duni. If that’s what you want.”

  Duni dipped her head to the water and looked away, but not before Ny saw the quaver in her chin and the way her eyes grew bright with moisture. Moments passed. When she lifted her head again, her chin was firm but her eyes were still wet.

  “I want a room of my own,” Duni said. “I want open skies. I want to go to the river in the daylight and sit with no one around me. I want only my own company for miles and to not feel afraid someone will come and take my solitude from me at any moment.” Her mouth tightened. “Can you give that to me?”

  Although Ny would have liked to give all that to her, and more, she could only tell the truth. “No.”

  “Pity.” A smile, more a grimace really, twitched her mouth. “Then, tell me, Nyandoro. What is it that you want from your life? Maybe it’s more of a possibility than my ridiculous dreams.”

  Water rippled around Ny’s ankles as she moved her feet back and forth in the water. She wanted to pursue the question of Duni’s own dreams, but knew the time for that had passed.

  “I won’t be any man’s wife,” Ny said. Again, Duni didn’t seem surprised. “I’ll have a wife of my own—”

  “Only one wife?” Duni asked.

  “Yes, just one. Just like my baba. She will be all I need.” Ny stopped at the longing that drifted across Duni’s face, an unvoiced need that Ny read as easily as any of her father’s reports. “She’ll help me,” Ny continued. “We will help each other. And we will live in a house as big as this entire village.”

  “This village?” Duni laughed at her, but not unkindly. “And how will you get the wealth for this?”

  “I don’t know, but it will come.” Ny said this with a powerful certainty that rumbled her chest.

  She didn’t need a village shaman to cast bones for her to envision her future. She saw it as plain as day. The only mystery was how to go about making it happen.

  “You don’t know anything about life, Nyandoro. How do you expect success to just come to you? You are a child.”

  “I may be a child in this moment,” Ny said. “But I won’t be a child for long. And I’m free to do what I want. The life I see for myself is the life I’m going to have. I know it.”

  Chapter Four

  Despite the brave words she spoke to Duni, Ny still had her doubts about her future. About how she would get there. If Duni had a place in it. After the night with Duni on the riverbank, she felt consumed by those thoughts and questions, barely able to pay attention to the things actually happening in her life.

  “This is stupid.” Kizo sat up on the large tree branch they were sharing on a day that finally seemed as if it would rain.

  “You’re telling us.” Adli and Hakim shared a look of understanding from their own perch a few feet higher up. The twins passed a pipe of sweet-smoke between them while the sun glistened on their bare shoulders, still sweaty from an impromptu wrestling match.

  The brothers had gotten news of a group of wildebeests making their way north. Ny had never seen one. She, Kizo, Nitu, and the twins had made their way into the forest to lie in wait for them. So far, they were perched in a wide-branched tree, watching and waiting.

  “What are you talking about?” Ny frowned at her brothers.

  “We’re talking about you,” Kizo said. “You’ve been moping for days and that doesn’t suit you.”

  “Not to mention it ruins our good time.” Adli blew a cloud of smoke from the corner of his mouth.

  He and Hakim had fewer opportunities for play than their younger siblings. He was to follow immediately in their father’s footsteps and take charge of a post in a nearby village while his twin had agreed to marry a girl from a place so far away that few knew the name of it. The match was not for love but for duty. It was a sacrifice Hakim was happy to make.

  “So are you going to tell us the reason you’re acting like this or do we have to guess?” Kizo asked.

  Nitu, who had been perched highest up in the tree and kee
ping watch on the far horizon, dropped down next to Ny with only a whisper of his sandaled feet through the leaves. The thick branch bounced from the addition of his weight. “Yeah, does her name start with Duni?”

  “Does it end with ‘married woman’?” Kizo added.

  Ny snorted. “You all think you’re so damn funny.”

  “Not think. We know,” Adli said as he passed the pipe down to Kizo who promptly passed it along without smoking from it.

  Hakim squinted down at her. “Seriously, sister. What do you have going with this woman?”

  Ny exchanged a quick glance with Kizo, trying to tell him with a single glance that she didn’t want to talk about it. Not in the open, not yet. He dipped his head. Yes, he understood. Ny breathed in relief.

  Before she could say anything, Adli chimed in. “It better be good with all the misery you’re going through.”

  I’m not miserable. Ny opened her mouth to say it, but something else entirely came out. “She thinks I have nothing to offer her, that I’m a child.” She blinked, instantly irritated at herself for revealing she’d talked to Duni. And for talking about what she absolutely didn’t want to talk about.

  “She has a point,” Hakim said. “What can you offer her now?”

  “Can you rescue her from her terrible marriage?” Nitu asked.

  “No. Not yet. I—”

  Adli stood up on the sturdy branch to twist his hips. “Can you make love to her until she forgets everything and everyone else but you?”

  She could try, but even about such a thing, there was no certainty. “You know I can’t give her any of that, not yet. Maybe later on…”

  “Then you should leave her alone,” Hakim said. In that moment, she hated him a little.

  “But what about love?” she asked a little desperately. “Isn’t that worth something?”

  Adli coughed out a laugh. “What do you know about love? You’re still living in our parents’ house.”

  “That doesn’t matter.” Hakim made a dismissive motion, and Ny could have kissed him for defending her. But when he opened his mouth again, she knew she’d thought well of him too soon. “Do you love Duni or are you infatuated? You don’t even know her.”

  His twin chimed in. “What makes her cry when she’s at her most vulnerable? Where do you kiss to make her scream out your name in pleasure? What are her most enduring desires?” Adli jerked his chin at Ny, knowing she didn’t have the answers to his questions. “These are things a lover should already know or at least be willing to know,” he said. “Just last week you were talking about wanting more freedom and leaving this village behind for good.”

  Her brothers all hummed in agreement, even Kizo who had been silently supporting her.

  “You can’t have it every way, sister,” Hakim said, though his voice was soft with sympathy.

  Ny squeezed her eyes shut, knowing they were right but not wanting them to be. She had craved Duni for so long. And now, for the first time, she was actually within reach.

  “But if you insist on going after her,” Kizo finally said, his tone a low warning, “you have to show her you’re serious about being a partner and life-half to her.”

  “But you’re not ready to do that,” Nitu said. “Instead you’re out here with us.”

  “Being out here doesn’t mean we’re not serious about the other things,” Hakim said with an annoyed frown.

  “I’m talking about Nyandoro, not you,” Nitu muttered. “She tries to be everything to everyone and ends up being nothing to no one.”

  A rush of heat, then cold swept through Ny’s body. She turned to Nitu, a snarl on her lips. “That’s not true! Take it back.”

  But he just laughed in her face. “I won’t eat my words for a child who gets frightened by the sound of them. Are you a child afraid of words or are you the onek epanga who will rescue delicious Duni from her dead marriage bed?”

  Suddenly, it was all too much. Ny scrambled up from the tree limb, ignoring Kizo’s call and climbed down and off the tree to drop the last five feet to the ground. She turned her back on her brothers and slipped into the cool comfort of the forest, away from the hot sun and the blazing furnace of their teasing. She wasn’t ready for their questions, for her lack of answers, for any of it.

  She felt like the earth, scorched from the lack of something it needed. Rain. Understanding. Duni. By the time she got back to the village, the clouds were still heavy with rain’s promise. But it was a promise that would remain unfulfilled.

  *

  Ny knew what she had to do. It was time she stopped taking from those around her, like a child, and learned how to give. So, she changed the things she did. She stopped hunting so often with her brothers and instead helped her mother more.

  Sitting with her mother at the wide table in their receiving room, Ny helped to organize upcoming parties for visiting diplomats and plan naming day ceremonies for the three babies recently born into their extended family. She even tried, and failed, to weave baskets, a task her mother immediately pulled her from when she saw the mess she was making.

  When her mother was sick of having her underfoot, Ny went with her father to his village meetings and sat in on the boring but necessary discussions about crops and family alliances and the potential threat of foreigners from the sea. She sat in the circle of elders, slightly behind her father since she had not yet earned her place among them. The white-haired men and women spoke in self-important, droning voices that were like lullabies to Ny’s ears. If she was bored, she rationalized, then it was only her childishness that made her bored. If she fell asleep, she chided herself to try harder.

  Days passed. Then weeks. Her brothers complained about her abandoning them, but she assured them she wasn’t. Being an adult took sacrifices, and like they told her, she had no experience with sacrifice. It was time she learned.

  Being an adult was exhausting. At least the kind of adult that did women’s work, men’s work, and everything in-between with no time for games and pleasure. Resentment ate at Ny because of it, but she was determined to stay the course.

  It was late when she and her father finally returned from a tribe meeting two villages away. Before leaving Jaguar Village, Ny had asked her father to consider using one of the zebras she and her brothers had tamed for riding, just like the Arabians had done to their horses. But her father, staunchly old-fashioned and leery of the zebras’ powerful kicks, refused. So they walked the many maili to the village and back. Ny was used to this much walking and more, but she would have rather been home in time for the evening meal and a bath. Now, all she wanted to do was wipe the travel dirt from her skin and fall into her sleeping mat.

  “It was a good day,” her father said. “I think these old-fashioned men are getting used to seeing you at the meetings.”

  “And, you, are you getting used to seeing me at these meetings, Baba?”

  “I am, daughter, and I am proud of your interest.”

  Ny felt a rush a happiness, and guilt that she hadn’t thought to do these things with her father more often. She felt embarrassed that it took the chance at getting between a woman’s thighs for her to give her father the support he needed. Her oldest brother, Ndewele, had no interest in politics. Instead, he worked to create a way for the fields to produce more crops than they did now. Adli and Hakim had already committed to leaving the village and do their duty by their father. Nitu was often off chasing women, and Kizo was still himself a child although he had long since reached the majority age. Hunting, joking, and dreams were his passions. Ask him about anything else and his eyes glazed over.

  “I want you to be proud of me, Baba.”

  “I am proud, my daughter.” He rested a hand on her shoulder, a warm and reassuring weight. The exhaustion she’d felt before didn’t feel so crippling anymore, and her feet felt strong enough to walk another half day. Well, almost.

  They continued walking the quiet road through the village, greeting passersby and dissecting the events of their day
. Soon, the family compound was a dim light down the path. Two torches lit at the entrance, welcoming light from deeper inside the wide ring of houses. Home.

  A movement just behind her paused Ny’s footsteps. Her father was talking about the meeting they had earlier that day, policy changes that needed to be made, but Ny was distracted and barely heard the rest of what he had to say. At first, she thought it was Kizo, coming to waylay her for ignoring him for so long. But the softly treading steps and smell of honey oil told her it wasn’t her brother.

  “Baba, forgive me. I think I’ll stop by the river after all to wash away the travel from my skin.”

  Her father’s eyes were a sharp glimmer in the starlight. He turned to peer briefly behind him, seemed ready to say something that would keep her at his side. But in the end he only nodded and tightly clasped a hand on her shoulder. “See you soon, Nyandoro.”

  As soon as her father disappeared through the entrance to the family compound, Ny turned to the woman half-hidden in the shadows.

  Duni tugged the kanga cloth even more around her face, turned, and walked toward the river, obviously expecting Ny to follow. Duni took them on the smaller path, winding through the high trees, and away from any potential prying eyes. Ny forced herself to be calm and not read too much into Duni’s actions.

  At the riverbank, Duni walked past Ny’s usual bathing place to the rock where they’d had their first real conversation. Wordlessly, she pulled the long kanga cloth from over her face, tugged it from her shoulders, and dropped it at her feet. Her hair was pulled back in neat corn rows away from her face, and a curved comb, white and wide like a fan, sat anchored to the crown of her head. She looked like a queen under the silver moonlight, her skin like obsidian, remote and untouchable. But she dipped her eyes and stepped back, then looked briefly at Ny. A seductive woman once again.

  With a graceful motion, she climbed the high rock, more than twice as high as she was, to swing her legs over the moving water. Ny sat beside her, copying her pose.

  Duni’s gaze latched on to her right away, a strong pull she felt like a literal touch. “Don’t throw your youth away,” she said. “Not for this.”