“Is it even real?” I asked.
“Don’t answer a question with a question. Why do you think you saw it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Remember when we first met?”
“Yes.”
“Why were you out there?”
“I found that place, I liked it,” I said. “I wasn’t supposed to be out there, I know.”
“And look where it got you.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you hadn’t found the edan, would you have questioned and grown? Would you have gone? And even if you would have, would you be alive now?”
It came suddenly in that way that it had been for so many months. The rage. I felt it prick me like a needle in my back and my okuoko twitched. I took a deep breath, trying to calm it. “It doesn’t matter,” I muttered, my nostrils flaring.
“Why?”
Another wave of rage washed through my body and I angrily reached into my pocket, glad to have a reason to move. I felt my okuoko wildly writhing on my head and Ariya’s eyes went to them, calmly watching their motion. No matter, I thought, bringing out the small pouch. I leaned forward, breathing heavily through my flared nostrils, and wildly dumped it all out before her onto the carpet. The sound of tumbling metal pieces echoed and then came a thunk as the golden grooved center fell out. I motioned to it with my hands to emphasize it all. “Because I broke it!” I shouted, my voice cracking. “I broke it! I’m a harmonizer and I de-harmonized an edan!” My voice echoed around and up the cavern. Then silence.
I should have treed to calm myself. This was Ariya, priestess of the Enyi Zinariya, I’d just met her, and here I was behaving like a barbarian. “I know,” I added. “I’m unclean. This was why I came home. For cleansing through my pilgrimage. But I didn’t go… I’m here instead…” I trailed off and just watched her stare at the pieces and the golden center. What felt like minutes passed, giving me time to calm down. My okuoko grew still. The rest of my body relaxed. And my edan was still broken. I broke it, I thought.
“Unclean? No,” Ariya finally said, shaking her head. “That part of you that is Meduse now, you just need to get that under control.”
In one sentence, she explained something that had been bothering me for a year. That’s all it was. The random anger and wanting to be violent, that was just Meduse genetics in me. Nothing is wrong with me? I thought. Not unclean? It’s just… a new part of me I need to learn to control? I’d come all this way to go on my pilgrimage because I’d thought my body was trying to tell me something was wrong with it. I hadn’t wanted to admit it to myself, but I’d thought I’d broken myself because of the choices I’d made, because of my actions, because I’d left my home to go to Oomza Uni. Because of guilt. The relief I felt was so all encompassing that I wanted to lie down on the rug and just sleep.
Ariya slowly got up, her knees creaking. She dusted off her long blue dress. “Sometimes, the obvious is too obvious,” she muttered, walking away. Then over her shoulder, she said, “Stay there.”
I watched her ascend the stairs and when she reached the top, she walked off.
I lay on my back and sighed. “Just Meduse DNA,” I muttered. “Or whatever it is they have for genetic code. That’s all.” I laughed, sitting up on my elbows. My eyes fell on the disassembled edan still lying on the rug. I stopped laughing.
She was gone for what might have been an hour. I’d dozed off right on that round blue rug, lulled by the cool darkness and incense. The sound of her sandals at the top of the stairs woke me. She stepped onto the first stair, paused, and then quickly descended. The moment her upper body came into sight, I saw the creature. Was I seeing what I was seeing? When she reached the bottom of the stairs, I stood up. It was an almost involuntary action. But what else was one to do when a great woman came down the stairs with a great owl perched on her arm?
The owl was about two feet tall with white and tan feathers, a black bill, a rounded frowning bushy eyebrowed face, and wide yellow eyes. At the top of its head were brown and black feathers that looked like horns. Ariya’s arm was protected by a brown leather armband, but that was all the protection she had. The owl could pluck out her eyes, slash her with its long white talons, slap her with its massive powerful wings if it wanted to. Instead, it stared at me with such intensity that I wondered if I should sit back down.
“If it’s waiting outside, then it is right,” she said. “It was right there when I came out. Help me.”
I assisted as she slowly sat down with the owl perched on her arm. I sat across from them and gazed at the enormous bird.
“Is it heavy?” I asked
“Birds who spend most of their lives in the sky can’t be heavy,” she said. “No, this one is light as… a feather.”
“Oh,” I said.
“In my forty-five years as priestess, I have not done this,” she said. “Not even once.”
Suddenly, I felt cold. Very very cold. With dismay. Deep down, I knew. From the moment my grandmother told me about the Zinariya, I’d known, really. Change was constant. Change was my destiny. Growth.
“Why?” I still asked.
“Because it’s the only way you can fix it and you have to fix it, so you can use it to do what it needs to do.” The owl hadn’t taken its eyes off of me. “Do you know what zinariya means in the old language?”
I shook my head.
“It means ‘gold.’ That’s the name we gave them because we couldn’t speak their true name with our mouths and because that is what they were made of. Gold. Golden people. Their bodies, their ship, everything about them was gold. They came to the desert because they needed to rest and refuel and they loved the color of the sand… gold. Your edan is Zinariya technology; I knew this when I met you. I just thought, since it allowed you to find it, you could solve it without… without—”
“Needing to be activated.”
She nodded. “No one who was not one of us has ever known about the zinariya and those who marry out or leave, they’re so ashamed of being Enyi Zinariya that they don’t tell their families.”
“Like my father,” I said. “It’s like having some genetic disease, in a way. If Himba or Khoush knew of it, they’d…”
Ariya smiled. “Oh, they know, someone in those clans knows enough to build toxic ideas against us right into their cultures. That’s really why we are so outcast, untouchable to them. To Himba and Khoush we are the savage ‘Desert People,’ not the Enyi Zinariya. No one wants our blood in their line. Anyway, the Collective knows the names and faces of all your siblings and their children.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling a little better. “Well, that is good.”
“But that’s all.”
We stared at each other for a moment.
“Do you want to do this?” she asked.
“Do I need to?”
“Hmm. You’re still ashamed of what you are.”
“No,” I said. “I’m Himba and proud of that.”
She raised her eyebrows. “Not your grandmother. She is Enyi Zinariya. And we are a matriarchal clan, so your father is, too.”
“No,” I snapped. “Papa is Himba.” I could feel the sting of my own nearsightedness. It was irritating and pushing me off-balance in a way that made it hard for me to think. My confusion evoked a flash of Meduse anger.