The Deep

2

IT WAS NO LONGER SUNG.

For that morsel of mercy, Yetu gave thanks. She understood why all the historians before Basha performed the Remembrance to melody, that impulse to salvage a speck of beauty from tragedy with a dirge, but Yetu wanted people to remember how she remembered. With screams. She had no wish to transform trauma to performance, to parade what she’d come to think of as her own tragedies for entertainment.

Wajinru milled the sacred waters, a mass of bodies warming the deep. Yetu felt them embracing, swimming, sliding against one another in greeting, all of it sending a tide of ripples Yetu’s way. The ocean pulsated. The water moved, animated. The meaning behind their name, wajinru, chorus of the deep, was clear.

Many wajinru lived far apart, alone or with friends or mates in dens of twenty or twenty-five people. The wajinru had settled the whole of the deep but were sparsely populated. While there was the occasional larger group who lived together, up to fifty or one hundred, there was nothing like the cities Yetu had seen in her rememberings.

For a people with little memory, wajinru knew one another despite the year-long absence. They didn’t remember in pictures nor did they recall exact events, but they knew things in their bodies, bits of the past absorbed into them and transformed into instincts. Wajinru knew the faces of lovers they’d once taken, the trajectory of their own lives. They knew that they were wajinru.

Because they tended to live so far apart, when they did gather en masse, it was an occasion of great celebration. Everyone shouted their greetings, swam in excited circles, joined together to dance a spiral. Soon, what had started as something intimate between two or three spread to twenty, then suddenly a hundred, five hundred, then all five thousand or six thousand of them. They moved spontaneously but in unison, a single entity.

It was this same energy Yetu would use to share the History with them.

“I’m relieved you’re here,” said Nnenyo, Yetu’s care-maid during the Remembrance. When Yetu required everyone to hush, he would tell everyone to hush. When she needed stillness, he’d make everyone be still. If words didn’t work, he’d compel them softly with his mind: a little nudge that felt to most like a mild, compulsive urge. A cough. A sneeze.

Few had such power of suggestion, but he was getting on, almost a hundred and fifty years old. The average wajinru lifespan was closer to one hundred, and while it wasn’t impossible to live for so long, Nnenyo was the oldest wajinru in a long time. He’d learned to harness the electrical energy present in all wajinru minds. That was why he’d been elected to oversee the historians. He was the one Yetu was to inform about the next historian when she discovered who might be capable of taking on the task, and he was the one who’d facilitate the harvesting of memories from Yetu to her successor when the time came. If he was unable, one of his many children would take on the task.

“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.

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.

Amaba whistled softly. Had she been feeling less sensitive to Yetu’s needs, she’d have screeched. Such a thing might’ve killed Yetu. That was the truth. “Why wouldn’t you want to answer my question? It is a simple one, no?” asked Amaba. “Do you know what the object Nnenyo and his children gave you is, or don’t you?”

“I know what it is,” Yetu said, her head beginning to tense and throb. She’d had more interaction in the last few days than she’d had in the past year. Her patience was waning. She could only be the good daughter, the compliant wajinru, and the dutiful historian in short bursts. After a time, the constant conversation and stimulation wore her patience down. She was becoming a sharp edge.

“Well? What is it, then?” asked Amaba, letting her voice get away from her. She spoke loudly enough that Yetu had to swim away several feet. “I’m sorry. Though this would be much less difficult if you answered when I spoke to you, like someone normal.”

“Someone normal wouldn’t be able to tell you that the object is a comb. Someone normal wouldn’t be able to tell you that a comb was a tool the wajinru foremothers used in their hair,” said Yetu. “Someone normal would never know these things. Someone normal couldn’t fill your hole. You are someone normal, and you don’t know anything.”

For several seconds, Yetu’s amaba didn’t speak. She had the look of something wounded, her fins moving in an agitated fluster but her wide mouth puckered shut.

Yetu should’ve felt guilty, perhaps, for her harsh and bitter words, but instead she soaked up the silence, drunk it like the freshest whale milk.

She didn’t mean to be so cruel, but what else was she to do with the violence inside of her? Better to tear into Amaba than herself, when there was already so little left of her—and what was there was fractured.

“I’m sorry,” said Yetu.

“No need. It is already in the past.” Amaba swam closer, so the two were near enough to touch. “I demand too much. Ask too much of you. I don’t even understand why I care so much about that stupid, what did you call it? Comu?”

“Comb,” said Yetu.

In one of the rememberings, there was still hair caught in a comb belonging to the foremother. Salt water had washed any hair strands from the tines of Yetu’s new comb, and now she could only imagine how the bonds of black keratin had once choked the carved ivory.

Yetu didn’t explain to her amaba further. She would not be mined for memories yet.

This one knowledge, this one piece of history, it was hers and no one else’s.

Nnenyo came back not long later with more food for Yetu, but she’d finally had her fill. Her stomach was bloated and overstuffed, so even though she was hungry, she could not bear to eat another bite.

She had become so ragged, not just since the last Remembrance but over the course of her youth and young adulthood. It all had a cumulative effect, didn’t it? She imagined a sunken ship, heavy with cargo, pieces peeling and rusting away year by year like dead scales. Yetu wasn’t as hardy as those feats of two-legs innovation, though. She would die, and corpses were not eternal.

“We are almost ready for you to join us in the womb,” said Nnenyo.

“Already? So fast?” asked Amaba.

“They are ready for the History. They’re working faster than usual, like nothing I’ve ever seen before.”

So much for three days. It had only been two. Yetu wasn’t ready.

“It will be fine,” her amaba said.

Her stomach twisted and coiled, and her heart raced. She tried to settle herself, to feel the lovely, cool water entering her gills, restoring oxygen to her blood. But she was suddenly short of breath.

“Don’t worry, Nnenyo. Like always, she will pull herself together in time,” said Amaba.

In the early years, in fact, Yetu had been much worse, unable to keep down food or do such basic things as hold her bowels for more than a few minutes.

“How are you feeling?” Nnenyo asked.

Yetu nodded her head. “I will do what is asked of me.”

“You are a blessing,” said Nnenyo.

“I am what is required,” she said, no warmth left in her even for Nnenyo. Everything tense, she just wanted this whole thing to be over. Fine. Let the Remembrance begin right here, right now, for all she cared, womb or no womb.

“Breathe,” said Amaba. “Breathe.”

“It hurts,” Yetu said, ashamed of the vulnerability. She wanted to flee and be in her discomfort alone, like she’d been this past year. In front of Amaba and Nnenyo, it wasn’t so bad, but the whole of the wajinru people would see her in this state. “I’d hoped to be stronger by this point,” she said. She wanted there to be more of her, to be steady on her feet, or else the Remembrance would steal what remained of her.

“They don’t care if you are strong. Only that you remember,” said Amaba. “Do you remember?”

A flurry of tiny bubbles left Yetu’s mouth as she sighed. “I do.”

“Good,” said Amaba. “That is all we ask.”