We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (23 page)

“Brother Salai,” said Jaeda as the room slipped back into quiet, “I heard you last night… you sang in a beautiful language.”

“Forget it.”

“I think… No, I know it is Turian. I had a sudden memory from when I was a small child. A lullaby or a child’s playful tune. A memory I had forgotten. It’s funny how song can pull us back to emotions long buried.”

Jaeda put her hand on his again, and Salai looked at her. Though her features were relatively plain by Turinam standards, Jaeda did have an air of unassuming strength and intelligent kindness from which Salai felt the prickles of early attraction. He frowned and buried the thought. Now was not the time for such feelings. He spoke of Grandfather instead.

“He was one of the last who remembered our history before the oppressor.”

“Teach me.”

“Teach you what?”

“Turian.”

“I don’t know Turian. We will have to learn it together. And it is forbidden. Risking my own life is one choice—”

“—And risking mine is another. It’s my choice, not yours.”

Salai looked hard at her. “Why do you want this?”

“I am Turian too. I too long for something within me, as if something inside were taken from me—even though I may have never had it. It’s like a painting that has been torn to pieces, and we are trying to pick them up from the floor. If enough of us carry enough pieces, maybe someday we will be able to put them back together. This is how we can fight.”

Salai nodded and managed a weak smile. “If ideas are our weapons, then maybe our only shield can be memories—the knowledge of who we are.”

She smiled too, for the first time since he had met her. They sipped their tea, her hand on his. Outside, the sun was rising.

I Stole the D.C.’s Eyeglass

Sofia Samatar

Dakpa
I keep my sister,
kpoyo
I lose my sister.

Dakpa
I keep my sister,
kpoyo
I lose my sister.

The termites listen. Their hearing embraces all sound, even the smallest. They hear the future. They chew the present away as the dark devours the moon.

I don’t mind if you want to consult the termites first, old man. Ask them:
Should I help this hard-eyed child?

I’ll wait.

You probably think I’m funny, with my skinny body, my big ankle-bones, the spots on my legs where bites have festered and left sores. Sickly, you’ll sigh, and weak. You’ll think of my sister Minisare who could carry a young tree across her back. Tall and lively she was, and when the chance came to work at the D.C.’s house, when a relative of my mother’s who cooked there said,
Send one of your girls
, it was Minisare my mother wanted to send, not me. But Minisare refused. Let the white man clean his own dirt, she said.

That’s how I came to work at the D.C.’s house, to wear a cotton dress and collect chits my mother could spend at the company store. I carried water to the house, so you see I’m strong even though I’m little. I swept his room. He keeps his wife and children in there, framed and pegged to the wall.

When Ture went to the sky he stole a thunderbolt, and when I went to the D.C.’s house I stole an eyeglass.

It was lying on the table in his bedroom, a flat disc like a stone from the river. He’d forgotten to take it with him to the Site. I squinted through it, then dropped it into the pocket of my dress, chain and all. Afterwards, I told the head cook I’d broken it.

The cook slapped me hard, but I didn’t care. I took the eyeglass home, and that night, secret by the fire, I gave it to my sister. It shone in her hand like a snail-track. It was beautiful like her, and strange like her, and she gripped it and kissed me so hard I winced. We could hear my father groaning from his bed: my mother was laying hot stones along his back to ease the pain. The pain of working since dawn at the Site, digging for the D.C. I wasn’t like him, I thought; I was a thief. Reckless and clever as Ture.

Ture climbed to the sky on a spiderweb. When he got there, the clouds were locked. “Hey!” he shouted, pounding on their shining undersides. Rain fell hard, but the clouds didn’t open. Ture began to sing, and his magical barkcloth hummed along with him in the rain.

Door in the clouds, open-o
See the fresh meat I’m bringing-o
Sweet as the oil of termites-o
Cooked by my wife Nanzagbe-o!

Then the clouds opened, and that’s how Ture got in and stole the thunderbolt, bringing fire back to earth after all the coals had gone out. In our time, although you should always try to keep your own embers alight, you can be sure of finding a coal at a neighbor’s house to start your fire. My mother used to send me out with the coal-pot if our fire died, and I’d sing at the edge of a neighbor’s place: “Door in the clouds, open-o!” Minisare taught me that there were other ways. “Here!” she whispered, commanding. “Watch!” She held the eyeglass on a stick.

I squatted beside her. The world was full of Sunday-morning quiet, the diggers sleeping, voices coming faint from the church. Sweat dripped down my neck. Minisare glared with terrible concentration at the pile of dry grass she’d made on the ground.

The eyeglass glittered, fixed in the twisted wood.

Sun filled the forest. I yawned.

Then something tickled my nose: the smell of burning.

“See!” Minisare breathed.

I stared. A thread of smoke uncurled in the air, and a tiny flame cracked its knuckles in the grass.

Sorcery, then.

For a long time I waited for something to happen: for the D.C. to shrivel and fade, for the Site to collapse, for the diggers to stop their pounding. But it seems the eyeglass was only a minor magic, for nothing stopped, as you know, you can hear the roar of the diggers even here. That endless roar, and the thunder of flying-machines rolling overhead, manned by slave-soldiers from a foreign land. People say the noise chased the game from the forest, once, but then the animals got used to it. We’re used to it, too. Show me a child who can’t read lips.

Nothing changed at all—except my sister.

At first, it seemed only a stranger form of her usual stubbornness. She wouldn’t go to the farm. When I went home at night, I heard my mother complaining: “Why did I marry from the west? This is their blood showing, this worthless girl!”

She said this because my father’s people came from the western forest: my grandfather had gotten trapped on our side during the Breaking of the Clans. When I got close to the fire I saw her slapping her palms together as if in grief, and Minisare plaiting a mat.

Minisare plaited with tense, quick movements. She’d split the reeds into narrow strands. Firelight streaked them. “You’ll ruin your eyes,” I said.

She only jerked the reeds harder.

“Her eyes!” my mother said. “If that’s all she ruins, I’ll consider it a blessing. What she needs is a husband—one with hard hands.”

The words chilled me, and later I told Minisare: “You should help our mother on the farm.”

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?”

“I have to do something else.”

“Something else? What else?”

The darkness was soft, complete, I couldn’t see her at all.

“Out in the forest,” she said. “I’ll show you.”

On Sunday, when I’d washed the dress and spread it out to dry, I followed my sister deep into the forest. Walking before me along the path she was still my own Minisare, cool, long-striding, pushing the grass and branches aside with the ease of a swimmer. Several of the neighbors’ children trailed us, chattering in high voices. We entered a sunny space where the growth had been cleared as if for a farm. A jumble of objects littered the short grass: pots, blankets, barkcloth, cooking-stones. It was like a house shaken inside-out.

She turned to us, the little children and me. “Now,” she smiled, pointing. “You fetch grass. You find me some nice long, hollow canes. The rest of you run to the charcoal-burners and beg whatever you can. Pai-te, stay with me. I want you to check my stitches.”

Her eyes were red. She hadn’t washed her face. Her hair needed rebraiding. But her energy was the same as ever, her laugh as the children scattered, her taut jaw as we leaned together over the patchwork she wanted me to see, a swollen thing like a dead calf.

“What do you think?” she asked. “You’re good at stitching—will these hold?”

“What
is
this thing?”

“I’ll put oil on it afterward, of course, to keep off the rain. I think the oil will help the stitches too, it’ll keep the air from getting through.”

“Minisare.” I put my hand on her arm. “Tell me. What is it?”

She looked at me. And I saw for the first time what my mother saw, what other people saw when they whispered about my sister: the chameleon-eye. One of her eyes was a spirit-eye, flecked with cloud, the whole forest trapped in it. Ghosts hung in the trees.

I only saw it for a moment.

“I can’t tell you yet,” she said.

“You said you’d tell me.”

She shook her head. “I said I’d show you.”

I looked at the stitches. She’d put pieces of leather and barkcloth together, goat-hair blankets, near-transparent bits of bladder.

There were also scraps of cotton. “Where did you get these?” I demanded.

Her face went stubborn, closed. “Just tell me about the stitches.”

I sighed. “They’re fine.”

“Thank you.”

She stood up, the chain I’d given her swinging at her skirt. In place of the eyeglass it held an ugly iron spike.

Minisare speaks of iron.

She weeps for the lost arts. There were smiths among us, once. They made leaping knives, the sight of which killed hope. The women plucked gold from the rivers and the smiths fashioned it into bangles, hot metal dashing into the mold like a young snake. Now smithwork is against the law, like carving, like drum-talk, like kingship, like the intricate and half-remembered varieties of marriage. You can find old pieces of iron in the forest, native iron it’s called, black lumps like tree-gum chewed up and spat in the weeds.

Minisare talked all the time when she was at home, sometimes so fast she stuttered. She spoke of going to visit our father’s people on the other side of the line.

“You’ll never get there,” I said. “They’ll put you in prison.”

She laughed and cuffed my shoulder, throwing me off balance: her arms were heavier than she knew. Heavy with muscle, and ornaments too: wires strung with chunks of iron, battered metal cuffs, strings dangling bags full of something that clacked whenever she moved. She wore iron sticks in her hair and she kept a coil of string there for emergencies and her face was strong and preoccupied and filthy. But she could still sing in a voice as gentle and blue as the mushroom season:

House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers,
Strangers are eating oil there
.

And sometimes, though less often now, she looked at me and smiled. “Little one,” she’d say, and stroke my cheek with a bruised fingernail.

My mother’s rages brought the neighbors running. “Look at you!” she screamed. “A brute, a beggar, a sick dog covered in filth from the white man’s rubbish pits.”

She ran at Minisare, one hand still clutching a lighted tobacco twist, a whorl of dried stuff like a smoky flower. She tried to pull off Minisare’s strange ornaments, and Minisare let her try. After a while my mother gave up and sat down on the ground. Minisare walked away toward her place in the forest, leaving deep footprints. When she came back she wore a burn down the length of her arm.

“You have to stop,” I said. But she couldn’t stop. Even at night she couldn’t rest: she worked on her mat because her fingers would not lie still. I found her plaiting by moonlight and she turned her head to look at me, the souls of the dead awake in her spirit-eye. Sometimes I couldn’t find her at all: she was prowling at the Site, risking the guards, or sneaking off to see the old witch-woman of the lake. She begged me to come with her. The witch was teaching her the old drum-language, she said. She seized my hand and tapped out a crazy rhythm.

“No!”

I snatched my hand away.

Minisare stared, gaunt in the firelight, her beauty in chains.

“But it’s important,” she whispered. She took my hand.

My eyes grew hotter and hotter, until the tears came. She didn’t notice. She kept on tapping, insistent, my palm the drum’s belly, my fingers its liver and heart.

Do you know what the world looks like through the D.C.’s eyeglass?

I do. It’s a blurred place; you can’t tell the real things from the shadows.

People call you the Old Man of the Wood. You were a carver, once, but life in the mines made you bitter, and now you live alone. Still, I know you’ve heard of Minisare. Stories like hers travel everywhere, noisy and eager as the drone of the diggers. Stories like hers fall over the world like rain. Minisare, the girl who cooked iron. The girl who could carry a young tree. Big stories, and all of them true. But the small stories are also true. There’s the story of how I went to the Site every day to deliver the D.C.’s lunch. The story of how he gave me a chit as a tip, and I grasped that soft scrap of paper and shouted out as the cook had taught me: “
Thank you Commissioner Sir!
” The story of how he seized me in the bedroom one cold morning, his enormous thumbs making my hipbones crack.

This story is also true. My head struck the wall, knocking down two frames. The D.C.’s wife stared up from one of them, pale, trussed in cotton up to her chin. The D.C. muttered. He didn’t touch me twice. I twisted and scrambled, I dashed from the room on all fours. Out on the road, I tore off the cotton dress.

I ran. I ran through the cutting grass without feeling anything. When I jumped in the river all the tiny cuts on my legs sang out in pain. I sank to the bottom, through water brown and clotted like a huge fungus. Then I kicked my way to the surface and came out gasping.

House of Gbudwe, house of my grandfathers, strangers are eating oil there
. That’s a true story, too. What comes up from under the ground of the Site, but oil? Stones, you say; but the D.C. wants them, the D.C. eats them like groundnuts. They are as delicious as oil in the world beyond the glass.