The Deep - Rivers Solomon Page 0,47

Now I know, my child. I know, and I will not see you bear it without your amaba, without your kindred.”

But maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe, instead of taking the History from them, she could join them as they experienced it. Just like with the Remembrance, she could guide them through the rememberings so it didn’t overtake them with such violence. They could bear it all together.

Usually, after the Remembrance, the historian waited nearby, empty of memories, but what would happen if they stayed? What could happen if someone with experience stayed with the wajinru past the moment of completion? Could she wrangle them back toward consciousness, without taking the memories back? Could they live out their days all sharing the memories together?

Zoti Aleyu wanted the wajinru to be one, together. But they never were. They were two. Historian and her subjects. It was time for the two to be merged.

Yetu let herself feel how the other wajinru felt, flooded by sensation. She welcomed the barrage of thoughts. They subsumed her, the same way they subsumed everyone else.

“I am here,” she said. “Enough.”

“It hurts,” they cried. “We hurt.”

“Yes,” said Yetu, acknowledging their pain in a way it never had been for her.

Yetu ebbed and flowed with them, caught up in the wave of rememberings, but she’d learned over the years how to make an inch for herself.

“How?” someone asked, and it came out as all of them asking it in unison. “How do we make an inch?”

Yetu showed them a picture of the day with the sharks, how lost she’d been, bleeding, seconds away from death before her amaba scooped her up and dragged her to safety. “We must save one another,” said Yetu.

Yetu showed them what she did when she found the History most overwhelming and brutal, projecting images from her own mind into theirs. When the History threatened to end Yetu, she went to one memory in particular: their first caretaker. In this remembering, there is a lone wajinru pup floating, alive and content. It was the ocean who was their first amaba.

* * *

It took three days for the storm inside all of them to settle. They each held pieces of the History now, divvied up between them. They shared it and discussed it. They grieved. Sometimes, they wanted to die. But then they would remember, it was done.

Whenever an event triggered a remembering, they spoke those words. “It is done.” Because it was. Yetu thought of life on the surface for Oori. She had lost most things. Knowledge, rituals, prayers, family. Gaps could be survived and made full again, but only if you were still living.

“You look woeful,” said Amaba.

“I am trying to remember something,” Yetu said.

“What?” her amaba asked.

“What it was like to be in the womb.”

She’d always thought the first memory had been the stranded wajinru pups, tethered to their dead first mothers, but if wajinru existed before the birth, inside the bellies, there should be memories of that, too.

Yetu explained her thought to Amaba.

“It is possible you have had a remembering of such a thing, but have forgotten it.”

It was impossible to forget. “What do you mean?”

“Do you have memories of darkness?” asked Amaba.

“Of course.”

“Of loneliness?”

“Yes.”

“All I’m saying,” said Amaba, “is that there is very little difference between a bornt wajinru pup and one still encased in the womb. What if some of your rememberings of dark loneliness as a pup were you inside a belly, and it was hardly distinguishable from floating in the deep? It is all waters.”

Yetu circled her mother slowly. “It is all waters.”

“When I think about the rememberings I’ve had, I believe this to be the case. I remember the womb from the first wajinru. I remember the ocean teaching us to breathe water. Once we were born, it would’ve been too late, but in the womb, it came to us naturally. That is why it changed us then.”

It was strange to be having such a conversation with her amaba, discussing their varied interpretations of the History. What had always seemed certain to Yetu wasn’t so immutable. The living put their own mark on the dead.

Goodness, how had she missed it?

“I need to look for someone,” admitted Yetu. “She is probably dead, but regardless, I would like to at least locate her body. She means a great deal to me.”

“Oh? A wajinru?”

“A two-legs.”

Amaba tried to act neutral but Yetu caught her attempt to smooth down a smile into cold neutrality. “She had markings on her face, these