The Night Masquerade (Binti, #3)(30)

Behind them, the only Himba Council member to show up continued to scream and scream, his voice rolling across the now empty desert.

“I think we should take her into space,” Mwinyi told Okwu. “That’s where she belongs. Not here.”

“How?” Okwu asked. “The launch port is that way, where the fighting is happening. I don’t think…”

“Not from the launch port,” Mwinyi said, shaking his head.

“A Meduse ship?” Okwu suggested. “They will understand. We set our dead free in space too.”

“No,” he said firmly. “I have a better plan.” He paused, shutting his eyes as despair tried to take him again. “I … I know exactly where to take her, too. Will you come?”

“Yes,” it said.

“They would never have listened to us,” Dele sobbed from behind them. He was holding Binti’s only remaining hand.

“Is that why you left her to die?” Mwinyi snapped.

“I didn’t,” Dele said. “I tried. I didn’t agree with the rest of them. But I am just an apprentice; I wasn’t even supposed to be speaking. But I did. ‘We don’t abandon our own,’ I said. They said she was no longer one of us and then I was told to be quiet. And none … none of them believed they could really evoke deep culture. They didn’t believe in … they had no hope. The chief said the Khoush would never listen to the Himba because they don’t respect us.” He squeezed his eyes shut at this as if in physical pain.

“But they respected Binti,” Mwinyi said. “The Khoush and Meduse. Then they forgot about her.”

Dele looked at Binti and started to sob again.

“Come,” Mwinyi snapped. “If you want to do something that would have pleased her, come. Okwu, come.”

Mwinyi walked to the wooden foundation of the Root without looking to see if they were following. With each step he took, he saw more. It was breathtaking, never had he experienced anything like this before. He could see where they were, through his feet. All it had taken was for the one he had come to love so much in a matter of days to get torn apart by two irrational peoples.

He stopped at the place where he’d kicked off his sandals. They lay there like the ripped-off wings of a sand beetle. Okwu hovered on one side of him and Dele stood on the other as they looked down at the charred remains of the Root. Mwinyi breathed a sigh of relief. With his feet he could see much. The zinariya had shown him relatives who had this ability in the past. It was called “deep grounding” and it always kicked in when one “walked far enough.”

He held his hands up for a moment, preparing to send word through the zinariya, but then he noticed that already coming in all around him were messages from the Ariya, Binti’s grandmother, his parents, his brothers, several of his friends, people. The Enyi Zinariya knew what had happened somehow. He had not sent word himself. How did they know already?

“Just stand beside me,” Mwinyi said to Okwu and Dele. How could he explain? So he did not. The storm had awakened it and though the storm had passed, he could still feel it vibrating through his exposed feet. The Root’s foundation had been made on the dead root of an Undying tree. At least, they’d thought it had been dead. The inside of one of the roots had been hollowed out and made into the house’s cellar.

Like Binti, Mwinyi was also a master harmonizer. And his ability was communication in a different way; he could speak to those who were alive. So just as he’d been able to speak with Okwu in a way that allowed him to locate where it had been hurt and where it was best to slather the otjize, he’d been able to speak to the living Undying tree that was the Root’s foundation.

Dele looked back at Binti’s body, lying there alone, and then at her friend, the desert savage named Mwinyi. His bushy hair was a strange red brown, freed like a dust storm and full of dust like … a dust storm. His skin was dark like Binti’s, but where he’d never seen Binti’s skin tone as a marker of being uncivilized, everything about Mwinyi said savage. And so when Mwinyi bent down and placed his hands on the dense charred wood and the ground began to shudder, Dele shouted, “Stop it! What are you doing?” because whatever it was had to be wrong.

Okwu watched Mwinyi closely. The human reminded it so much of Binti. Harmonizers are the same, Okwu thought. And from a distance, it felt many others of its kind agree with it. It stayed there and waited.





Chapter 7

The Root

A tree with strong roots laughs at storms.

Mwinyi could not remember who said this but he’d heard it often as a child. Never did he imagine the proverb was so literally true. The ground was shuddering as he held his hand to the foundation and repeated over and over, “Let go, please. Let go, let go. Please.”

The moment he heard the sound of cracking, he said, “Dele, go!”

“What? Where?” Dele asked. “What is … what is happening? What are you doing?”

“Go where the cellar is,” Mwinyi said. “You know this house better than I.”

“I see it,” Okwu said, floating onto the charred foundation.

Mwinyi and Dele followed it. Mwinyi gasped, ran to the spot, and stared. He shut his eyes, as Dele knelt down beside him. Mwinyi could hear the plant’s voice in his head now and it was so broad that his head pounded and his vision blurred. It spoke no words he could understand, but there was relief and a sigh. Mwinyi waited as he heard more cracking and then the sound of Dele grunting and pulling and kicking.