Aba Akuri, sitting next to him, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, leaving bits of sorghum porridge trapped in his thick beard. “Perhaps now is not the time to speak of such things, dear husband.”
“If not now, when?” Aba D says. “There is never a good time for harsh truths.”
“You can be so stubborn sometimes,” Aba Akuri remarks, shaking his head.
Salo hasn’t touched any of the roasted meats and vegetables arrayed in front of him. Instead, he’s been idly twisting the new leather band on his right wrist—a recently acquired habit. Now he feels the sting of shame wash over him.
Aba D is right, though, and he certainly knows all there is to know about never showing weakness. Unyielding strength and pure and absolute perfection on the battlefield were the prices he had to pay in order to marry the man he loved without suffering the stigma that often comes with such unions. Anything less, even the slightest slip of the foot or a moment of hesitation, and the stigma would have never left.
An impossible standard to live up to, Salo would say, one he knows he could never achieve in a thousand years. In fact, sometimes he feels like he gathers stigma just by breathing. A walking, living scandal. A blot to be washed clean.
Weak. Useless.
Monti’s wristband was too small for him, so he had to sew longer straps onto it to make it fit. Ama Lira is plucking her lyre with calloused fingers beneath the musuku tree to the beat of bowl-shaped drums. The music drifting from the ensemble muffles Aba D’s words, so Salo and Aba Akuri are the only ones who hear them. But they sting so intensely the man might as well have shouted them to the whole kraal.
Salo wipes his eyes behind his spectacles and says nothing. And then he stops taking his dinners in the chief’s compound altogether.
Life gets no easier, though. The number of crimson loincloths walking around more than doubles in one day when the chief calls almost half the clan’s rangers from all over Khaya-Siningwe to come garrison the kraal.
Worse, Niko doesn’t forget Salo’s promise to train with him and his posse of young Ajaha in the circular glade by the lake, so Salo has to spend whole mornings in the company of people who openly despise everything he is and tolerate him only because their idol tells them to.
More than four times the usual number of aspirants are coming to train with Niko and his crew these days, though this shouldn’t be surprising given the legendary status Siningwe Ajaha have recently acquired. Tales of their bravery during the attack have spread across the Plains like a virus, infecting virtually every young man in the tribe with the zeal to prove himself worthy to don the red.
After Salo suffers yet another humiliating defeat to one of these zealous young men in a stick fight, Niko pulls him to the side with a betrayed look on his face. “You promised you’d try,” he says.
“I am trying,” Salo protests, rubbing the painful welts on his arms.
“You’re better than this, and you know it. And you’ve gone through the training before. You should be walking all over them!”
Salo’s hackles rise at the criticism. “We can’t all be as good as you, all right?”
“No,” Niko says with a level stare, “but you can. You have your aba’s blood in your veins, and your uncle is the greatest warrior this clan has ever seen. Your heart’s just not in it.”
It doesn’t work like that, Salo wants to say, but he holds his tongue. He looks around the forest glade, at the aspirants and rangers sparring for dominance, sticks rattling as they strike each other, faces grimacing, muscles straining. “This isn’t me, Niko. I’m trying, but . . . I don’t know if I can ever belong here.”
Niko’s eyes spark with something hot, and he turns around to shout across the glade. “Mujioseri! That log you and your brother are sitting on. Throw it at me with everything you’ve got.”
Jio and Sibu have been presiding over a stick fight between two young aspirants in white loincloths. Now they trade identical looks and lift their eyebrows at Niko. “Are you asking to die, mzi?” Jio says.
“Just do it already.”
“If you insist.” Jio stands up and pushes his unsuspecting brother off the log, causing a few laughs when Sibu yelps and falls onto his back. The log must weigh more than five men, but Jio slips his hands beneath it and lifts it up like it’s a sack of feathers. Insects squirm in the recess of wet earth where it lay. He smirks as the aspirants gawk at him, wallowing in their admiration like a reptile basking in the suns. Then the log flies across the glade and toward Niko like it’s been ripped upward by a vicious gale.
Salo sees everything clearly: the way Niko flexes his knees and braces his sandaled feet on the ground, the way strength coils in every muscle of his body, the way his chest glistens with sweat as he thrusts his fist forward. A thunderous crack booms as fist connects with wood, and everyone watches, amazed, as the log splinters into a thousand pieces like it was detonated from within.
Niko slowly walks back to Salo, a fierce blaze burning in eyes that usually hold nothing but kindness. “Do you hate being weak, my friend?”
“You know I do,” Salo says in a low whisper, feeling the sting of tears.
“Well, guess what.” Niko spreads his arms as if to take in the glade. “This is a path to strength. With this you can fight back. With this you’ll never have to watch someone you love die in front of you again.”
Salo wipes his eyes and nods. “All right. I’ll try harder.”
“It’s all I’m asking,” Niko says in a softer voice. “Now go back in there and fight like a leopard.”
When the training session ends, Salo wanders to the bonehouse to see if he can’t steal something from their stores to quench the fire in his limbs, as well as maybe something to soothe his heavily battered ego.
The bonehouse is actually a circular cluster of five drystone buildings surrounding a well-groomed garden whose focal point is an ancient witchwood tree. Salo finds Nimara brewing tonics in the alchemical workroom attached to the largest building, which has a wraparound timbered porch and recently renewed thatching. She’s set her spider talisman on her table and commanded it to display a cascade of semitransparent charts and figures that drift and flicker, feeding her information only she can understand.
She’s been busier than usual since the attack. Over a dozen people still require intensive medical care, and while she has several women who help her around the bonehouse, Nimara has the tendency to micromanage everything under her purview. She’s barely been seen outside in almost a quarter moon.
Salo quietly wanders into the spacious workroom and sits down on a stool by the west-facing windows. A faint whiff of beeswax floor polish hangs in the air. The place is never anything less than scrupulously spotless, everything arranged in parallel lines, from the glass vials in the cabinets to the journals and sheaves of stacked paper resting on the mahogany work tops, not a lick of dust in sight.
Nimara doesn’t take her attention off the alchemical reactor in front of her, a brass apparatus of chuffing pipes and moving cogs, powered by the mind stone from a tronic eland cow. A smoky liquid churns in the glass sphere at the center of the reactor. Salo watches her carefully insert pegs of red steel into slots around the sphere—he knows that each of those pegs has a unique enchantment of alchemical Earth craft. She uses her talisman to keep track of how they influence the smoky liquid over time.