It was a comb, a tool used for styling hair. Yetu flowed from remembering to remembering. She could only find three combs in her memory. The one in her fin didn’t seem to be one of them, but its origin was clear. It had belonged to one of the foremothers.
Yetu stared at the face of the woman in her remembering, not yet bloated by death and sea, preserved by the iciness of the deep. She was heart-stilling and strange, her beauty magnetic. Yetu couldn’t look away, not even when she felt someone shaking her.
“Yetu? Yetu!”
In the remembering, Yetu was not herself. She was possessed by an ancestor, living their story. Not-Yetu reached out for the comb in the sunken woman’s hair and noted the smallness of her own fins, the webbing between the more stable cartilage finger limbs not yet developed. She was a young child. Old enough to be eating fish, shrimp, and so on premashed by someone bigger, but still young enough to need mostly whale milk to survive.
The little hand grabbed the comb, then Not-Yetu was jamming it into her mouth to stimulate and soothe her aching gums.
During such rememberings, Yetu’s loneliness abated, overcome with the sanctity of being the vessel for another life—and in a moment like this, a child’s life, a child who’d grown into an adult and then an elder, so many lifetimes ago. Yet here they were together, one.
“Yetu! Please!”
It ached to leave the foremother, the peacefulness of being the child, the comb, but she had her own comb now. Nnenyo had chosen his gift for her wisely.
“I’m here. I’m awake,” said Yetu, but her words came out a raspy, meaningless gurgle.
“The Remembrance isn’t long from now,” said Amaba. “You cannot be slipping away like that so often and for so long.”
Yetu was going to ask how long she’d been out, but as her senses resettled and acclimated to the ocean, she could smell that everyone was eating now. Hours had passed. It was the evening meal.
The rememberings were most certainly increasing in intensity. Years of living with the memories of the dead had taken their toll, occupying as much of her mind and body as her own self did. Had she been alone, with no one prodding her to get back, she’d have stayed with the foremother and the child for days, perhaps weeks, lulled.
Yetu might like to stay in a remembering forever, but she couldn’t. What would happen to her physical form, neglected in the deep? How long would it take her amaba to find her body? Would she ever? Without Yetu’s body, they couldn’t transfer the History, and without the History, the wajinru would perish.
“Yetu. Pay attention. Are you there?”
It took everything in that moment not to slip away again.
During the Remembrance, mind left body. Not long from now, the entirety of the wajinru people would be entranced by the History. They would move, but according to instinct and random pulses in their brains, indecipherable from a seizure.
They would be in no position to fend for themselves in that state, so they built a giant mud sphere in defense, its walls thick and impenetrable. They called it the womb, and it protected the ocean as much as it protected them. Wajinru were deeply attuned to electrical forces, and when their energy was unbridled, they could stir up the sea into rageful storms. It had happened before.
Typically, Yetu was the last to enter the womb. There’d be a processional, and then she’d swim in, finally resting at the center of the sphere.
They were still building. When all of them worked together, it took three days, with no sleep or rest. The meal Yetu had awakened to them eating would be their last. They had to fast before the Remembrance so as not to vomit when the ceremony was taking place and to ensure their minds and bodies were weakened by starvation. That made them more receptive to bending. A historian needed her people’s minds malleable to impart the History.
For her part, Yetu feasted, her only companions Amaba and Nnenyo, who alternated shifts every few hours. Nnenyo was off now to gather more food for Yetu and to check on the progress of the mud womb.
Amaba waited silently nearby as Yetu ate. She was still trying to build her resources. Get her fat up. If she slipped away into her mind during the Remembrance, her people would suffer, experiencing the rememberings without her guidance or insight.
Worse, the Remembrance might subsume her. Reliving that much of the History at once—it might kill her in the state she was in. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it already had, that it had been poisoning her for the two decades she’d been the historian.
“Stop fidgeting over there, Amaba. I can feel you,” said Yetu. “Why are you so anxious?”
“There hasn’t been a day without anxiousness since you took on the History,” Amaba said.
“It is different now. More. Tell me, what troubles you? Is it me? Come closer so we might speak proper,” Yetu said, surprised by her own request. Closer meant she’d feel the ripples of Amaba speaking more forcefully, but it had been so long since they’d properly talked. She wanted to know what was on Amaba’s mind and tell her what was on her own. She wanted to be like other amaba-child pairs, with a relationship unstrained by the duty the rememberings brought. It was never to be, but they could share a moment, at least.
“You have enough troubles of your own. You have the troubles of our whole people. I won’t bother you with it. Now quiet. Focus on food and rest. The womb will be ready before you know it, and when it’s done, you need to be here. Here, Yetu. You hear me? Here.”
Yetu focused on the comb still clutched in her fin. She would ask that it be sewn up inside her in death. It was one of the few tangible things she’d touched of the past, a reminder that the History was not an imagining, not just stored electrical pulses. They were people who’d lived. Who’d breathed and wept and loved and lost.
“You are enamored with that thing,” said Amaba, gesturing to the comb, her curiosity plain. Yetu hadn’t let go of it since Nnenyo gifted it to her two days ago.
“It is special.”
“Your remembering told you what it was, then?” Amaba asked.
Yetu stared out at the working wajinru ahead of her. They were a half mile away, and Yetu could just make out the rumblings of their actions pulsating through the water.
“Yetu? Are you here?” Amaba asked.
“I’m here.”
The condemnatory shake of Amaba’s head pressed familiarly across Yetu’s scales, the burn dulled by its predictability.
“I don’t like it when you suddenly stop answering. It scares me,” said her amaba.
“You mean annoys you,” Yetu said. “Not everything is about the rememberings, Amaba. I’m not a child. Sometimes it takes me a moment to gather my thoughts. Or sometimes I just have no desire to honor your questions with a response.”
Yetu felt taken by the same indignation that had often overwhelmed her as a child, inflamed by the slightest of slights. Yetu appreciated Amaba’s caring nature, but sometimes her gentle chiding turned into chafing, and Yetu was reminded of all that was wrong between them. Yetu would never be the easy child, nor Amaba the mother to give space. What hopes Yetu had for a connection beyond caretaker and caretaken were squashed. Would she always be just the historian, over time supplanted by the voices of the past?
Yetu shook her head, calming herself down. Amaba was just worried. She had every right to be. It had only been two days since she’d rescued Yetu from sharks. The specificity of the memory may well already be fading for her, but the feel of it, the fear—that stayed.