"The Dry Country"

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The spirits did not ask permission. They never did.

Mida woke with one already inside her.

She felt it as a pressure against the inside of her ribs, a second heartbeat, the familiar crowding of a presence that had no business being inside her skin. The mark on her left forearm went hot, then cold, then hot again, and she pressed her thumb into it hard, the way she'd learned to when the dead got restless.

The act was useless now.

This spirit didn't answer.

But it went still under her thumb, the stillness of a thing that has decided to wait you out. Mida knew that stillness. She was not commanding it quiet; she was borrowing against it, and the dead always charged interest, and the interest on a spirit told not now came due at the worst hour it could find.

She held her thumb to the mark until the second heartbeat sank back under her own.

Then she opened her eyes on the last morning she would ever wake in Uwaifo.

She sat up slowly, pushing her heavy locks back from her face.

Three nights ago, her grandmother had walked her to the mangrove edge in the dream-country where the dead still wore their faces. They had gone together to the last standing root, where the black water gave out into the pale nothing past it, and there the old woman had stopped.

I can't go farther. The spirits past here won't answer to me. You'll be going where I can't follow, child-who-carries. If---

The dream had ended on the word. It had stayed with her three nights, that if, and there was no one left to finish it.

She had woken each morning with the sentence still open in her chest. This morning, she closed it herself. She swung her legs over the pallet and stood.

Outside, the yard was full of her family, and not one of them could come where she was going.

They had gathered on the stilt-platform in the grey before dawn---aunts, cousins, the children too young to know why the water smelled of leaving. Someone had lit the reed-lamps. The tide was out, so the mangrove roots stood bare and black in the mud, and the whole village creaked on its ropes the way it had every night she had ever slept through it.

Her brothers waited by the poled boats. They did not crowd her. The older ones had spent nineteen seasons learning that she liked the crowding of the living no better than the crowding of the dead, and they gave her room carefully, without seeming to.

One of them looked up as she crossed the platform. Koli. He was the only one who had ever been able to feel when the dead moved in her; he would go still and set himself within arm's reach and never once ask what it meant. He did not ask now. He found her dark eyes, and held them, and then looked at the boats, so she would know he was ready whenever she was.

She had no marks for what that deserved. So she looked away, which was the only thanks she knew how to give.

She dressed in the dark. The eel-leather skirt was deep blue, water-resistant, shaped to her hips from a hundred rides through the mangrove. The belt was heavy---a shell for every contract still open, and none were closed. Her top was cropped, left her sternum bare. The marks across her chest were visible. She didn't cover them now. If the spirits were leaving her, the living could see what she had cost.

Mida loosened her headwrap and let the heavy locks fall down her back and over her shoulders. Thirty-seven of them, one for each open contract, black and thick and weighted with memory. Metal rings glinted in the ones her grandmother had fulfilled before she died---five rings, only five, among all that unringed weight. A small nose ring caught the salt light at her left nostril, and a cluster of piercings ran up the shell of her ear, old metal blessed in river-water, old wards against spirits who didn't know their place. Beside them, the dark marks of her living contracts traced and connected across her neck and shoulder like a map of everything she owed.

Then the tide-bell rang, and there was nothing left to make last.

They poled out through the channels while the village was still dark, and she watched Uwaifo shrink behind them until the reed-lamps were single points and then not even that.

The spirits came with her as far as the water went. She felt them in the mangroves and the mist, a hundred small pressures brushing the marks along her entire body---the drowned, the river-buried, the ones who had known her name before she had one. Her belt rang softly as the boat rocked. They heard it. They always heard the shells; it was why the living learned to step aside and the dead learned to lean close.

At the landing where the water ended, her brothers traded the boats for a goru and a team of blunt-horned oxen, and the dry country began.

She had never in her life been more than an arm's reach from water.

The savanna took it a day at a time. Mangrove gave way to reed-flat, reed-flat to grass, grass to a wide gold nothing that ran to the seam of the sky. The mist burned off the first morning and did not come back. The air lost its weight. By the third day, her lips split. By the fourth, the skin across her knuckles cracked and wept and dried and cracked again, and she understood, from somewhere far off, that she was drying out---that a Delta body was a wet thing, made to hold water the way the swamp held it, and the dry country meant to have it all back.

The spirits thinned with the water.

She felt them less each dawn. In the delta they had pressed on her from every side; out here they came one at a time and from farther, like voices called across a field that kept getting wider. The marks still woke for them---a warmth, a tug, a small cold pull at the wrist---but the waking came slower, and the calling came seldom, and she caught herself pressing her thumb to her forearm at odd hours, checking that the road had not taken that too.

On the fifth day, when the mark on her wrist answered slower than it should have, a Savanna girl offered her food.

A pronghorn‑beast carried her: proud horns, long stride. She rode the drakiga beside the wagon the way her people always had---loose, untroubled, one with the animal. Her shoulders bore clan scars---raised geometric patterns, white against brown skin, meaning something. Her jigida clacked at her collarbone: coral-red and bone-white beads, Wind Clan, old enough to be passed down. She was marked in ways Mida couldn't read, in ways that meant she owned nothing and owed nothing but her name. She had a wide face and no fear of Mida at all, which unsettled her more than fear would have. Fear Mida understood. Fear was a debt the fearful owed, and she had learned to collect it or forgive it as the situation required. This girl owed nothing, feared nothing, and held a strip of dried meat across the gap between them as though it cost her nothing to offer.

"You haven't eaten since we joined your company," she said.

Mida looked at the meat, and at the open hand beneath it, and did the sum she had always done: a gift was a debt, and gratitude was a debt, and she carried enough debt on her skin already. She reached out, took the girl's hand, and set it back against the animal's neck. Food and all.

"I'm Badina," the girl said, as if a refusal were a kind of greeting.

Mida said nothing. She turned back to the gold ahead. But that morning, when she pressed her thumb to the mark at high sun, the answer came slower than it had at dawn. A long pause. Then a flicker, like a flame catching in wet air.

Badina did not go. She clicked her tongue and fell in beside the goru and rode there, close, unbothered, as though a person could be worn down simply by refusing to be left. She did not offer food again. She did not speak. She only stayed---a steady, unhurried presence at the edge of Mida's vision---while Mida learned to check the mark less often and find it slower each time.

By the time the light failed, Badina was still riding there. And Mida had stopped wanting her to leave.

On the eighth morning the answer came slower still, the flicker guttering low before she felt it at all. She pressed again at high sun; it was fainter. She did not press a third time that day.

On the twelfth morning she pressed and felt nothing. She told herself she'd missed the spot and pressed until it hurt. The mark stayed quiet beneath her fingers---warm, ordinary, a scar.

She had never been only skin before.

She sat in the swaying wagon with her wrist in her hand and did not weep, because weeping was water and she had none to spare, and because there was no mark for this and never would be. She only sat inside a body that had gone quiet from the inside, and listened to how loud one heartbeat is with nothing underneath it.

Ahead of the goru, Koli rode without looking back, giving her the room. She wished, once, that he would turn around. Then she folded the wish up small and put it away, because a wish was a debt like any other.

And the mark stayed quiet. Dawn, high sun, dusk---her thumb found it by habit now, not hope. The skin was warm. The skin was all there was.

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The dry country changed one last time on the twenty-first day.

The grass gave out. The gold went grey and then to a hard pale crust that crunched under the oxen and threw the light back into her eyes. Salt. The ground was salt now, and the wind off the flats ahead was drier than anything the savanna had shown her, and it tasted of nothing at all---not clay, not river, none of the thousands of living smells she had grown up inside of. Only cold, and mineral, and gone.

She climbed down to walk the last of it. She had worn sandals for the road; here she pulled them off and left them in the salt, and set her bare feet on the crust the way she would have set them in the good black mud at home, because it was the last thing she still owned that was hers to decide. The salt was cold through her feet. It bit at the cracks in her skin. She walked on it.

The Gate rose out of the haze ahead: a low dark fortress of rammed red earth and black stone. Five banners hung at the cardinal points---one for each Land---and beneath them, figures moved the way warriors moved when they owned their own weight.

Mida's marks tingled.

All of them at once, every one of the thirty-seven---awake, alive, prickling up her arms and across her shoulders and over her bare chest, the way they woke when a spirit crowded close in the dark. She stopped on the salt with her thumb already gone to her wrist, out of habit, out of a hope she had not known was still in her. She listened to her own skin the way she had not been able to for days.

There was no spirit here.

There was only the salt, and the walls, and whatever the salt was keeping.

The gate swung open. Beyond it a yard opened wide---packed dirt scarred with old claw-marks and older stains, crowded with strangers and their beasts, and under all of it a hum she felt in her back teeth more than heard.

Mida of Uwaifo walked in off the salt with her sandals left behind her, and did not yet know what her skin had felt, or how far down the salt was keeping it.

Behind her, on the far side of the gate, Koli had stopped at the edge of the salt. He had walked her as far as the living were permitted and no farther, and he stood now with his hand on the flank of the lead ox, watching his sister cross the threshold with her back straight. He did not call out. She did not turn. The Gate closed between them, and the salt took her footprints one by one.