"Crows Don't Drown"

Her hands were still on the strap that was not there.

They had closed on the cloth of her own shirt and her thin shoulder under it, in the place the canvas crossed, in the half-second after Kólá's hand went up and before the rifles could come all the way level---reaching for the weight that would answer thirteen guns, and finding only her own bones and the morning air. She had not finished the reaching. There was no end to that reaching; there was only the next part of the dying, and she was waiting for it with her empty hands full of her own shirt when the fat man behind Kólá spoke, and the speaking put a crack in the morning, and the dying did not come through it.

"Commander."

He was older than the rest, a heavy man with a grey beard and a belly over his belt and a rifle slung he had not troubled to bring up, and he was afraid---Kàkà knew afraid, and his afraid was not the loud kind. His was the careful kind, the kind that picks each word up and looks at it before it sets it down. "Before we do this. The ferryman."

Kólá did not turn his head. "Is dead."

"Maybe. The river-one went after him; maybe he's dead." The fat man wet his lips. "I was at the Narrows. After. I saw the boats they brought back, and I saw what one man did to a gun-nest and three crews in the dark on water he knew and we did not, and I have not slept right since, and I am telling you that until somebody puts his body in front of me I do not believe in it. And I do not want to be standing on his water" ---he tipped his chin at the river somewhere below the cliff--- "killing what's his, when he comes back to it." He was not arguing the order. He was past the order. He was a man trying to stay alive in front of another man, and the something he was afraid of was real, and he knew it was real, and that was the whole of why he said it. "Take the wife. Go. Leave the rest for the river. Just don't make him come looking."

Kólá heard all of it. He did not interrupt. He let the fat man finish, and there was a beat after the finish where Kàkà thought---not hoped; she was past hope; only thought---that the careful words had landed somewhere.

They had landed.

That was the thing she understood a half-second too late, watching Kólá's face do the small, flat sum it did.

"You're right about the ferryman," Kólá said.

Then he shot the fat man through the chest. Twice.

⁂

The shots were very loud, and the fat man went over backward with his arms wide and the air going out of him all at once, and he did not move again, and in the half-breath after it Kàkà understood that the morning had stopped being the thing she thought it was.

Because the guns did not come down on the women.

They came up---Kólá's men, the young hard ones off the bikes---and they did not point at the girls, and they did not point at Márànata. They pointed at the other soldiers. At the men in the same uniform. At the ones who had stood half a step back when the fat man spoke, the ones whose faces had moved when he said leave them for the river---and Kàkà saw it in the quarter-second before it happened, the way you see a wave already past the place where it could choose not to break: that this was not a thing going wrong. This was a thing going exactly to a plan.

Kólá's men had known.

They had been standing in the right places the whole while, a little apart, a little ready, and now they did the something they had been set there to do, and they did it fast and quiet and without a word, the way men move who have run the drill a hundred times in their heads and are only now letting their hands catch it up.

It was over very fast. She did not count the bodies. She had Sparrow by the arm and her own back against the rock and her eyes going everywhere, soldier-eyes, counting exits she did not have, and when the firing stopped the clearing was full of men in Vanguard uniform who had been killed by men in Vanguard uniform, and the only sounds were the small metal sounds of reloading, and the wind.

Ésa was on her feet in the middle of it. She was looking at Kólá the way one looks at a thing that has just turned out to be a different thing entirely.

"Who are you," she said.

Kólá looked at her.

That was all he did. He did not answer. He gave her one long flat look out of the one eye, and the look had a something in it worse than any answer, because Kàkà could read it the same as Ésa could, the same as anyone could: that he knew a thing they did not know, and that they would come to know it soon enough, and that there was no time now for the knowing, and that her question was a door he would not open, because opening it would cost time and change nothing, and he was a man who did not spend himself on somethings that changed nothing. Whatever he was, he was still the surest hand in the clearing. He had only turned the sureness around and pointed it the other way and not said why.

He looked from her to his men.

"Don't kill her." A tip of the head at Ésa. Then at the girls, at Márànata, at the rest: "The others. Take them."

He did not say where. He did not say to whom. He said nothing at all about the why of any of it, and the not-saying came down over the clearing colder than the shooting had, because the shooting at least she had understood.

Then he crossed to Ésa and turned the pistol in his hand so the grip came forward, and he brought it down against the side of her head, once, with nothing in his face, and she went into the dirt without a sound, and the gold band on her hand caught the grey light and then lay still.

⁂

The men moved.

One took Márànata. She fought but the pistol was empty in her hand and there were three of them, and they bore her down and something came across the back of her head and she went loose. One took the small barefoot one, Sparrow, and Sparrow made the high thin sound again, and Kàkà heard it cut short, and did not let herself look to see by what.

The one who came for her was young. Seventeen, perhaps less. And he made the mistake every grown person made with her: he came slow, because she was small, because she was a child, because children do not do anything but stand and shake.

Kàkà had stopped being only a child a long time ago, and her body knew the one thing it had been taught----that when the hand comes for you, you do not freeze; you move. She did not think it. There was no time for thinking, and thinking had never once helped her anyway. She put both hands flat into the young soldier's chest and shoved with all of herself, and his heel caught a loose stone, and he went down, and the space where he had been was open, and she went through it.

She ran.

She ran the way she had run on the goat path, the way she had run out of the camp the night the firing started---low, fast, not looking back---and she ran the only way the ground let her run, which was toward the edge. Toward the drop. Toward the sound of water somewhere far down under it. She did not know what was below. She knew what was behind. She had always known how to choose between a thing she did not know and a thing she did, and she chose the river the way she chose everything, her legs deciding it before the rest of her could be asked.
Behind her Kólá's voice said one word.

The rifle fired.

She cut left and the round came for her and missed the center of her back and took her in the left shoulder instead---not the hot wire she half-knew from before, not the line drawn quick over the skin and gone; this one went in and stayed, a blow more than a burn, a fist of dense cold iron driven into the meat of her that spun her a quarter-turn before the pain had even caught up to tell her what it was. Her body had made the cut without asking her, and the cut had saved her from the spine of her, and it had cost her the shoulder and the half-step she had no balance to spare, and her foot came down half on the edge and half on the air.

The air won.

She went off the cliff.

⁂

The drop was higher than it had looked, and the air did not last long enough to be afraid in.

She hit mudbank first---soft, thick, the colour of old blood---and it caught her and rolled her, and the slope was steep and it took her down, over roots and stones and the sharp edges of things she couldn't see, and every turn of her drove the thing in her shoulder deeper and lit it white, and then her leg hit something solid and a second pain went through her from the other end, a bolt that ran all the way to her hip.

Then the mud ended and the water took her.

The water came up grey and hard and she hit it wrong, sidelong, and it was not soft; it was a wall that gave way a half-second too late, and something under the surface---a rock, a root, the river's own bones---caught her left leg as she went in and turned it the way a leg does not turn, and the white bolt ran up it to the hip and didn't stop.

It was cold and it was fast and it was black, and it closed over her head and rolled her, and she did not know which way was up, and she fought it.

She fought it.

She did not let go.

There is a thing people do in the water---she had seen it---the going-still, the giving-it-over, and her body would not do it; her body had never once in its life done the easy thing, and it clawed at the black water for the top of itself with the one arm that still worked and the leg that did not, the breath going out of her in a string of silver she could not see.

Crows don't drown.

She had said that to a soldier once, in a life that felt like someone else's. She had not known then if it was true. She did not know now. She only knew her arms did not believe in drowning, and she let them not believe in it, and she fought.

And the dark, while she fought it, gave her the thing the dark had always kept for her.

He is ten, and she is six, and they are at the river.

Not this river. A smaller one, a slow brown one, the one below the village where the women beat the cloth on the rocks. The sun is going down and the water has gone to gold, and her brother is crouched at the edge of it with a stone in his hand, turning it, hunting the flat of it, and she is beside him with her own stone that is round and wrong and will not do what his does.

"You throw it too hard," Shèyí says. "It isn't the hard that does it. It's the flat. You have to find the flat ones, and you have to throw them so they want to stay up."

"Stones don't want."

"These ones do. Look."

He stands and turns sideways to the water the way he does, low, easy, and his arm comes round, and the stone goes out flat and quick and touches the gold and lifts, touches and lifts---one, two, three, four---four times, before it remembers it is a stone and goes under. Four. She counts them. She has always counted; she counted them before she could have told a soul why; the counting is only a thing she is, the way the brown of her eyes is a thing she is. She counts her brother's stone across the gold water, and the number is four, and she keeps it.

"Give me a flat one," she says. "A good one."

He looks for a long time. He picks one up and turns it and sets it down and picks up another, and the one he gives her is flat and smooth and dark and worn round at the edges by the water, and it sits in her palm and fills it, cool, a small good weight---the kind of stone a person could carry a long way without ever being able to say why they kept it. She throws it. It goes straight down. It does not skip at all.

"That's alright," Sèyí says. "That one was only shy. Try again."

She tries again. She tries the whole gold end of the afternoon, and her stones go down and down, and he does not laugh at her and he does not get tired of her; he only keeps finding her the flat ones and putting them in her hand, and at the very last of the light she throws one and it touches the water and lifts off it---once, a single hop, before it goes under.

And her brother makes a sound like she has won a war.

"That's it! You saw it? You saw? One skip! Best skip on the whole river!"

"It was only one."

"It was the best one. How many did it do?"

"One. I counted."

"You counted." He is grinning at her, all his teeth, the low gold light on his face. "You always count. One skip and you've got the number already. You're a stone-skipper now, you. Best stone-skipper on the river."

"There's no one else on the river."

"Best one anyway."

And she laughs, and he laughs, and the water is gold, and their pockets are heavy with the flat stones they did not throw---the good ones, the ones too good to skip---and they go up the bank toward the village together in the last of the light, the stones knocking soft in their pockets---

The current found her ankles.

Not the brown river. This one, the cold black one---except it was not fast now. It was slack and shallow, pulling weak at her feet, and there was mud under her face, cool and soft and stinking of the deep of the river, and her mouth was at the edge of the air, and she was breathing it. Had been breathing it. Her body had gone on hauling air the whole time she was away down the gold afternoon with her brother, the way her body went on doing everything she never asked it to.

She was face-down on a mudbank with the river at her ankles and the grey sky on her back.

And the hand she had come down on---the right one, flung out ahead of her in the mud---was still curled. Still half-closed. Still holding the shape of the throw. She looked at it without lifting her head. It was the shape her hand made around a stone. It was the shape it had made all that gold afternoon, throwing wrong, throwing wrong, until the once it threw right. It was the shape it had made yesterday on the goat path, around a rock, before the rock went into the front of a man's face and made the sound. The same hand. The same shape. She did not work out why those were the same. She did not have the room. She only looked at her own curled hand in the mud, empty now, holding the shape of a thing that was not in it, and then she shut her eyes and rested, because she had to rest before she could do the next thing.

⁂

When she could move again, her hand went to her pocket.

It went there before anything else---before she lifted her head, before she tried the leg---down her wet side and in past the soaked cloth, and it found the shell. The cowrie. Still there. Cool and ridged under her fingers, the one a woman she had never seen had sent her across the water, the one that knew her name or did not. Still hers. The river had taken the morning and the cliff and very nearly the rest of her, and it had not got the shell, and her hand closed on it in the dark of the pocket, and that was how she knew she was still in the world: that there was a thing in the pocket, and a hand that needed to be sure of it.

Then she tried to stand, and the leg told her she would not be standing.

It would not take her weight. She got it under her once and the white bolt went up it and the world tipped and she came down into the mud with her teeth shut on the sound. The leg was a thing she had now in the place where a leg had been. So she did the other thing.

She crawled.

One arm. The right one---the good one---reached and bit into the mud and pulled. The left she could not use; the shoulder had the round in it still, and the river-cold had got into the wound and turned it from a screaming thing to a heavy cold far-off thing, an arm that belonged to someone else now and would not answer when she called it, and that was worse, in a way she had no time to look at, than the screaming would have been. The leg dragged behind. She did not look at it either. She reached again with the right arm and pulled, and the body came up the bank behind the arm, a hand's length, and stopped, and breathed, and reached again.

There was shade up the bank---a dark place under the roots of a big tree leaning out over the water, where the sun did not reach.

She put her eyes on it and did not take them off. It did not come nearer the way a thing comes nearer when you walk to it. It came the way the far bank comes when you are swimming hurt: a little, and a little, each time you looked, never while you looked. One arm. The mud. The pull. The rest. One arm. Somewhere along the way she stopped keeping the count of the pulls, around the place where keeping count of anything stopped being a thing the body could spare itself for. There was only the arm and the mud and the shade that would not hurry.

Her right hand came down, one of those times, on a stone.

It was loose in the mud at the waterline, and her fingers closed on it the way fingers close on anything in a crawl---to push off it---and then did not push off it, because the hand had felt the shape and the hand knew the shape. It filled her palm and sat there cool, a small good weight, the kind of stone a person could carry a long way without ever being able to say why they kept it.

She did not skip it. There was no one to skip it for, and nowhere for it to go, and no strength in the arm to throw it.

She brought it up out of the mud and put it in her pocket, beside the shell, beside the spoon she had taken off the island that was too kind, and the three of them lay together against her hip---the one she had been given, and the one she had stolen, and now this one, the one she had only found, that was the oldest of the three and the newest, that had been waiting in the mud of a river she had never seen to be exactly the stone her brother would have stopped and picked up. Three weights. She had no word for what the third one was. She put it with the others and let it be a thing in the pile, and she crawled.

She got under the roots. She pulled herself into the dark of them and set her back against the bank and lay with the leg out in front of her and the breath sawing in her and the wet of the river going cold on her in the shade.

And out on the water, the thing she had half-heard come up while she crawled---the thing whose sound she had not let herself stop for---lifted the rest of the way out of the river, and she saw what it was.

A hippopotamus.

It was not a beast, nor a monster rising out of the deep. It was a hippo, where a hippo would be, in the slack water off a mudbank in the last of an afternoon. She had lived on water her whole life. She knew the shape of the back breaking the surface and the small high eyes set so the thing could watch the bank without the rest of the head leaving the water, and she knew the way the river ran different around a mass that size, heavy, the wake of it wrong. She knew what it was the way she knew a rifle, or a checkpoint, or the size a man's shoulders go before he hits you. And she knew the other thing---the something everyone who lived on the water knew and the books did not: that the slow grey shape in the river killed more of them, every year, than the crocodiles and the snakes and the soldiers' guns put together; that it was not slow when it chose not to be; that it had no reason in the world to love a thing face-down and small at the edge of its water; and that she could not walk, and could not run, and could not climb, and could not talk it into being anything other than exactly what it was.

She had the stone in her hand. She had taken it back out of the pocket without deciding to, and it sat in her palm in the old shape, the throwing shape. She did not know whether she meant to throw it. There was nothing in throwing it that would stop the thing in the river, and some part of her that had counted four skips on a gold afternoon knew that; and some other part had closed her hand on the stone anyway, because a thing in the hand was more than nothing, because her whole life the having of a thing had been better than the not having of it, and the stone was a thing, and she had it.

The hippo watched her. Its eyes did not blink. The water ran off the great dark back of it, and the light was going down out of the sky behind it, the long gold going, the grey coming up after it from the east the way the dark always came---slow, and certain, taking the river an arm's length at a time.

No one was coming. She knew the shape of that too.

She held the stone, and she watched the water, and the dark came on.