That left squid. Clever and therefore difficult prey. She didn’t have time for that.
Then she caught a wisp of it on her skin. Something gargantuan moving, perhaps a mile away from her, several hundred meters closer to the surface than she.
She swam toward it, disguising her identity by fluttering her webbed fins and blowing bubbles in interesting shapes and patterns so her prey might think she was only a school of deepwater fish.
As she got closer, the creature’s contours became clearer. She could just begin to make out what it was. Something strange. Something she didn’t see often.
Yes, yes, she could see it now, feel it on her skin. A frilled shark. Perfection. She swam decisively toward it, realizing speed now was more important than anything else. In the dark, it wouldn’t be able to see her well. She rarely saw the frilled shark this deep. It’d be less used to the complete blackness.
She’d come on it like a sudden current from underneath. Open her jaw and crush its throat. Swimming faster and faster, she was almost there. She bared her 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 needed. A single lonely girl, her own needs never won.
It was days before Oori and Yetu returned to something approaching their previous level of companionship. Nothing so personal as their earlier discussions, just practical matters. Hunting techniques, currents, winds. Yetu could answer many of Oori’s questions about the sea, and Yetu was happy to be her font of knowledge.
“What is the biggest creature in the sea?” asked Oori next, her face stern. Her drive for knowledge wasn’t gently curious, as one might expect, but ferocious and consuming. A part of Yetu could understand why she would lust after something like the History so much.
“Leviathan. Like you, she’s the last of her kind. Larger than a blue whale by several degrees. She holds air long enough to be underwater for days at a time, and comes up only at night to breathe.”
Oori seemed to perk—as much as she ever perked—as she listened.
“She must be lonely,” Oori said.
“She’s nearly as old as the ocean. It is her companion, as are its many creatures,” said Yetu.
“Still. Who could truly know her when there are no others of her kind?” said Oori.
Some days, Oori discussed the place she came from, how there’d been only a few families left for several decades. Disease took all but her in the end. “When there are so few of you, anything can ravage you in moments. What chance did we ever have at survival?” she asked.
Yetu thought she remembered something about another young woman whose family was wiped out in an instant by disease, but she couldn’t put it together, couldn’t think of who it would be. Another half memory from the rememberings.
“And your husband? Or your wife? Or is it wives? What happened to them?”
Oori snorted. She stood in the water on the other side of the rocks from Yetu, in the shallow part of the open ocean. She had a spear, but she wasn’t fishing.
“I have never had any of those things,” said Oori.
“Friends?”
“No,” Oori said, her voice sad.
“Me neither.”
Though that wasn’t true, of course. It was a long time ago, so distant now that it seemed to have happened to someone else, but it wasn’t someone else. It was Yetu, as a girl, with a small group of peers who tolerated her anxiousnesses. How different might her life have turned out without the History stealing them from her? Would she still love them? Would they have become her lovers or mates? Would they share a den now?