The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,33

teeth. She reached out her fins, more flexible at the base than any sharks, and grabbed hold.

They were belly to belly, her arms wrapped around it. She plunged her teeth inside its tough skin and shook her head to undo its flesh.

The creature shook and writhed, trying to throw her off, but the appendages at the end of her front fins had suckers that stuck to its scales. It didn’t take long for it to die.

She pressed her teeth into those places where the arteries were juiciest and most prominent, then let the blood drain from it. She let the blood cover her. In lighter seas, she’d have appeared pink with it.

Yetu had never done anything like this before. She’d only seen this precise ritual once in her rememberings.

She exsanguinated it, then danced her body in swirling circles to mix it into a torrent, a miniature hurricane. When she was so dizzy she couldn’t carry on, she was to carry on anyway, submerged in the red lifewater of this ancient creature.

And she was to put all her wills, all her intentions, into telling the ancestors that this was an offering for them, so they might reveal themselves to her and grant her what she desired.

What she desired was to be free of the History.

Yetu was so ill from spinning that she was on the verge of vomiting. Thankfully, her stomach was largely empty.

She near passed out in the blood, and from above, the frilled shark body began to come down on her. She tried her mightiest to push the heavy beast away, and she finally did. More blood came from it. That was why it wasn’t working. The ceremony required every last bit.

She squeezed arteries with her fins. The smell was sickening and metallic all around her.

“Historian!”

Amaba?

“Historian!”

It was many wajinru, her amaba among them.

Several came toward her in the water screaming her name, her title.

Through the chorus, Yetu singled out the voice of her amaba, but instead of calling her by her name, she said historian.

Yetu was too sick to attempt to escape their scrutiny. She didn’t want to remember how she’d failed to live up to the standards of the previous historians, who had carried the History without complaint.

She was a failure. The ancestors hadn’t come to grant her anything. The only wajinru here were the live ones.

Yetu floated in a black, heavy haze of bloody ocean as she lay in wait. When the wajinru came, she could feel their racing hearts, their scrunched noses.

All could smell the uncharacteristic carnage of such a large creature drained of all blood. All could feel the strange, thin texture of blood in the otherwise dense seawater. All could feel maddened energy crackling off Yetu, and they were scared.

“Why would you bring all these people to me, Amaba?” Yetu asked. Her voice was so low and without energy that she wasn’t sure her amaba would hear it.

“My sweet child, why wouldn’t I?” she asked.

Yetu groaned. Was it the nausea, the crowd of frightened wajinru floating in a circle around her, or her amaba’s refusal to accept that she was not her sweet little girl anymore?

“I will send them away. We will go home,” said Amaba, perhaps apologetic for insisting on this gathering that had brought so many people near.

Amaba did what she could to soothe Yetu, but the problem was that she could not share in this tragedy. She could not share Yetu’s loneliness. All she could do was stroke her tremoring, sob-wrecked body.

There was no saving Yetu.

7

OORI FINALLY DID COME BACK three days later, but Yetu didn’t feel as happy by her return as she thought she would. Left alone to stew in her past—the past Oori insisted was so meaningful and important and good—she felt tender. She was fourteen again, too young a creature to hold so many sorrows.

“Say you’re sorry, or go,” said Yetu, channeling the petulant energy of her recently recalled youth. “I will soon be well enough to clear the boulders on my own. I won’t need you to hunt then.”

“I am sorry,” said Oori, and nothing else.

Yetu nodded. “It’s not right to help nurture something back to health, then abandon it before the task is finished. I’ve come to rely on you,” said Yetu. She wasn’t used to speaking so freely about her wants and needs. She wasn’t used to having wants and needs of her own at all. It had always been a battle between what the wajinru needed, what the ancestors needed, and what she