“I’m sorry for the delay. I—”
“Bygones. You are here now. That is what matters. I have a surprise for you,” Nnenyo said.
“I don’t like surprises,” said Yetu. She found it difficult enough managing the quotidian and routine.
“I know,” he said. “But I couldn’t help it. I’m an old man. Allow me my whims.”
Yetu let his words wash over her fully despite herself. The warmth of his tone settling even if the raw sensation of it stung.
Nnenyo was decent. Though he preferred a life in the moment, free of the past, like other wajinru, he recalled more than average. Were it not for his age, he would’ve been the historian to replace the previous historian, Basha. Yetu was the next best choice.
“So? What is it, then? What’s my surprise?” she asked quietly. She needed to save her strength and didn’t want to waste energy projecting her voice.
Nnenyo had no trouble feeling Yetu’s words despite the surrounding bustle of conversation. Yetu was focusing every bit of her energy on picking his words out of the onslaught of information pressing against her skin. “Ajeji, Uyeba, Kata, Nneti, now,” he called with a sharp whistle that pierced through the water.
Yetu wanted to vomit the various food items Amaba had stuffed her with to strengthen her for the Remembrance. Her skin was an open sore, and Nnenyo’s call had salted it.
“I apologize,” said Nnenyo.
“Do not make such sharp sounds around her,” said Amaba, who’d been working quietly near Yetu, minimizing movement in order to lessen the disturbance to Yetu. “Can’t you see how it stings her?”
Amaba pampered Yetu now, but it hadn’t always been like that between them. Yetu’s early days as a historian were marked by endless discord with her amaba. It was only in adulthood that their relationship had settled. Thirty-four years old, Yetu’d matured enough to predict and therefore avoid most quarrels.
That didn’t mean there wasn’t still hurt. Unlike Amaba, Yetu remembered the past and remembered well. She had more than general impressions and faded pictures of pictures of pictures. Where Amaba recalled a vague “difficult relationship,” Yetu still felt the violent emotions her amaba had provoked in her, knew the precise script of ill words exchanged between them.
“Such things don’t matter with all of this going on,” Yetu said, though it was a lie she told just so Nnenyo didn’t feel bad. He was close enough to her that the impact had bombarded her full force.
Amaba looked on the verge of arguing, then seemed to think better of it, returning to her work instead. She was wrapping sections of Yetu’s body with fish skins and seaweed to help block out sensation. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it would make the Remembrance more bearable.
Nnenyo’s children arrived not long after. They’d been far away to conceal the surprise, so Yetu couldn’t discern the shape of it. Of course, the gift was wrapped, but that didn’t always matter. Sound traveled through everything, and though a second skin could dull things, it usually wasn’t enough to hide something completely.
Ajeji, the youngest of Nnenyo’s children at only fifteen, handed Yetu a corpse. Still reeling from the shock of Nnenyo’s whistle, she accepted it without pause, question, or upset.
“Don’t worry,” said Ajeji. “We did not kill it. It was already dead. We just thought it’d make a good skin for your gift.”
A vampire squid, strange and complex in form, did make a good disguise, though she hated holding it. She dealt with death every day during her rememberings, and more again when she was lucid enough to hunt for food. For once, she wanted to avoid confrontation with such things, reality though it may be. It never ceased to trouble her that peace depended on the violent seizing and squeezing out of other creatures.
It was perhaps dramatic to compare that to her own situation, but it was true. Her people’s survival was reliant upon her suffering. It wasn’t the intention. It was no one’s wish. But it was her lot.
“Such a beautiful creature,” Yetu said, front fins massaging the squid so she could memorize the shape of it. She had not yet determined what gift lay inside, too enamored by the textures of the externals. “I have never touched one or even been this close. Remarkable.”
She wanted to cry for the dead thing draped in her front fins.
“You have always been such a tender thing,” said Nnenyo as Yetu clutched the vampire squid. “Does it help to know that when we found it, there were no marks upon it? It did not die at the hand of another, as far as we can tell, but peacefully of age.”
Yetu nodded. It did help. She didn’t understand why everything couldn’t be like that. Gentle and easy. No sacrifice. No pain.
Yetu handed the body back to Ajeji, unwilling to break inside the creature’s flesh. “What’s inside of it?” she asked.
One of Ajeji’s siblings—Yetu guessed Kata by the precise, jagged movements—opened up the slit they’d cut in the flesh cut and removed a small, flat object, which she handed to Yetu.
“What is it?” she asked.
“We don’t know, but we know how much you like to have old things you can actually hold. It was found here near the sacred waters, lodged inside the skull of a two-legged surface dweller, which itself was inside the belly of Anyeteket,” Kata said.
“Anyeteket?” she asked. She hadn’t thought of that shark in some time. Anyeteket had only died last year but had lurked in these waters since the first wajinru six hundred years ago. Her age and infamy had earned her a name, which was not an honor bestowed on most sea creatures.
It wasn’t common for frilled sharks to be bound by such a limited area as she was, but she had two reasons to stay: One, she’d probably never forgotten the rain of bodies that descended here when two-legs had been cast into the sea so many centuries ago. Sharks didn’t usually feast on surface dwellers, but easy meat was easy meat. Two, being sickly, she couldn’t travel far to hunt. Wajinru supplemented her diet by bringing her grub.
Yetu was intrigued by the present being offered her. She guessed the two-legs skull inside of Anyeteket had been what had made her so ill all these years. There was a chance the head was one of the first mothers, the drownt, cast-off surface dwellers who gave birth to the early wajinru.
Yetu rubbed the flat object from the skull against the sensitive webbing of her fins to get a better sense of its precise shape. Sometimes, when she came across something she’d never seen before, she could reach her mind out to the History and find it: a tiny detail she’d missed in one of her rememberings.
At first feel, the object resembled a jaw, for there were tiny, tightly spaced teeth, dulled by time. Closer inspection revealed something purpose-made. It was too regular, its edges too smooth, for its origins to be animal. There were complex etchings in it. Teeth marks? Yetu enjoyed the feel of complex indentations against her skin.
“A tool of some kind?” Amaba asked, her voice tinged with desperation. She was anxious for knowledge, any sort of knowledge, keen to fill the various hollows she’d amassed over the past year. The Remembrance was late, and her lingering sense of who the wajinru were had started to wane.
Yetu closed her eyes as she felt a remembering tug her away from the present. Amaba, Nnenyo, and his children were reduced to a distant tingling, and the wajinru who were gathered in the sacred waters felt like a pleasing, beating thrum.
In the sacred waters, there was never color because there was never light. That was how Yetu knew the remembering had overcome her, because there was blurred color. Light from above the ocean’s surface peeked through, painting the water a dark, grayish blue. It was bright enough to reveal a dead woman floating in front of her, with brown skin and two legs. There it was, something pressed into her short, coarse hair.