The House of Memory

By midday, Senamé understood why the women who returned from missions preferred to tell their stories standing up.

The elephant’s gait had found every bruise she possessed. Women with firewood, a trader arguing with his donkey, children driving goats: apparently none had required an examination to leave home. Senamé wanted to stop everywhere. She also wanted never to climb onto an elephant again.

Afiwa jogged beside them with a stolen green fruit. She had scarcely bitten into it before their mount reached back and confiscated the rest.

Senamé laughed so hard she hurt herself.

At the next stream, the queen asked them to leave the road.

She gave the direction in a rumble Senamé felt through the travelling seat. The elephant halted with one foot above the water, then slowly returned it to the bank.

“Your Majesty. It is not yet my time.”

Afiwa’s amusement vanished. Senamé looked beyond the stream, where roots crowded a bank no different from any they had passed.

“I know,” Tassi answered. “But someone made you forget who I was. We should find out how.”

For several breaths, the animal remained still beneath them. Then he entered the water.

Branches knitted overhead. At the bank, Tassi dismounted and knelt among flowers caught in the roots. Senamé could not hear her greeting, but the answer travelled up her legs.

The roots loosened around an opening.

Beyond it, sunlight lay on grass.

Senamé slid down and followed the queen through a passage scarcely longer than the elephant. On the other side, an entire valley opened beneath a sky she had not seen from the road.

A white palace stood among its trees.

Through the entrance, the stream and its low branches remained visible, where the palace ought to stand. Afiwa caught up beside her, breathing through parted lips.

For once, neither had anything useful to say.

Terraces rounded by enormous feet descended beneath ivory arches. Some had yellowed like old teeth; others wore golden seams where they had broken. Elephants rested in flowering groves. A young animal washed an old female’s back, patiently returning the water she shook off.

Their mount passed the women and stopped beneath the nearest arch.

“My mother,” he said.

His trunk followed a groove along the ivory.

Senamé had been admiring it.

Arches, doorways, the white ribs supporting the roofs: every curve had belonged to someone. The palace gathered the weight of a thousand absences.

“She used to sharpen it against a tree.”

He remained beneath the arch while they went inside.

In the entrance hall, bands of red earth held reliefs of herds crossing rivers, calves sheltering between adult legs, travellers following the rains. Senamé was tracing one journey with her eyes when the column beside it shifted.

Dust loosened from the folds of an immense foreleg.

Above her, a tusk swept through the light.

She stumbled into Afiwa. The hall seemed built around the elephant’s breathing. Articulated gold plates covered his brow and shoulders; beneath them, his skin held the deep creases of dry riverbeds. His eye turned towards them, and Senamé remembered that she was small.

Tassi walked beneath the tusk.

Tassi pressed her forehead against his descending trunk. Her composure yielded, just enough to reveal what maintaining it had cost.

“I miss Akaba every day,” the Elephant said.

“Me too.”

Senamé kept her questions behind her teeth.

She had known Akaba was a dead king. Here his absence bent the queen’s shoulders. Afiwa loosened her grip without letting go.

Warm air moved through the hall. The Elephant’s great outline contracted, gold gathering around a human body until a tall man stood where the foreleg had been. Ivory curved back from his jaw; white cloth fell from a broad belt, and his eyes retained the same ancient patience.

Afiwa’s fingers tightened again.

Senamé nudged her. The girl had survived the apparition of a legendary beast only to be defeated by a handsome man.

He led Tassi to a tree growing through an opening in the roof. Among its roots, a stone pool held clear water and a single pearl.

Light stirred inside it as the queen approached.

“Has he been quiet?” she asked.

“Until now.”

Tassi knelt beside her brother’s pearl.

The queen’s pearls answered at her throat. Senamé leaned towards the working, then stopped. She might have been listening at a family’s door.

The queen’s fingers hovered above the water. She did not touch it.

When she finally rose, she looked older than she had at the stream.

The Elephant accompanied them back towards the entrance. His attention lingered on Senamé’s necklace.

“What a lovely thing.”

“It was my mother’s.”

He inclined his head.

Senamé waited for the usual question or suggestion that she hide it from the readers. Neither came. Tassi was watching the Elephant rather than the bead.

Outside, their mount knelt.

The Elephant lifted the scarred ear and rested his fingers against its base. A shudder passed through the animal, so violent that Senamé reached for the travelling seat to steady it. Beneath the healed skin, something moved.

A black point emerged.

Senamé recognized the magic before she could see the object clearly. That thin, repeating insistence had run through the lightning yesterday. Her injured palm throbbed with the memory.

“There,” she said. “That was in the attack.”

The Elephant drew out a barbed metal thorn. Blood welled behind it, then stopped as his thumb passed over the wound.

“Oya’s men have been taking tusks from the living,” he said. “Now they put these in those they leave behind.”

Their mount’s trunk curled tightly against his chest.

Senamé remembered the terror she had mistaken for rage. Someone had buried an order in his flesh and ridden it through his mind.

“Does he remember?”

“I remember you,” the elephant murmured.

She laid her hand against his cheek. It was the only answer she could find that did not make it worse.

Tassi received the thorn in a square of cloth. A mark had been stamped into its flattened head; she studied it before folding the packet.

“I’ll take this.”

“Keep it wrapped.”

A low call reached them from the valley. Another answered beyond the palace, too distant for Senamé to locate. Their mount lifted his head.

The Elephant turned towards the sound.

“Riders on the southern road. Asking after a woman with two girls.”

Tassi tucked the thorn into her sash. Whatever had softened beside the pool was already being put away.

“Is the stream clear?”

“For now. I will bring you out farther downstream.”

The queen glanced towards the tree inside the hall.

“He can stay,” the Elephant told her. “Go, Tassi.”

Senamé mounted without complaining. Beneath her, the animal seemed to breathe more freely, though he lingered once beside the ivory arch. His trunk brushed it in passing.

Then they followed the Elephant between the roots and returned to the narrow stream.

The valley closed behind them. Senamé remembered the queen beside that small pool, leaving her brother in the only room where she could not remain.

For three days, they kept moving.

Afiwa scouted each bend; Tassi chose busy roads where a disappearance would have witnesses. By the fourth evening, Senamé knew how to sleep against the travelling seat and how little comfort being good at it offered.

The roadside inn offered a walled yard, a well and supper already on the fire.

The owner lodged the elephant behind the kitchen. Her son watched him empty a wooden tub in one draught. Senamé helped refill it while Afiwa negotiated for beds without asking the price.

They ate facing the kitchen, with the road gate to their left. Senamé pursued smoked fish through peppery green sauce and maize dough. After days of food from leaves, the bowl felt civilized.

Across the table, Tassi had covered her pearls. Dust dulled the folds of her wrapper, and nobody watching her divide the fish would have guessed how many people lived beneath her authority.

Afiwa returned from the kitchen and announced the price of the rooms.

Senamé stopped chewing.

“Are we buying them?”

The proprietor arrived with more sauce before Afiwa could defend herself. Tassi paid for the meal, and the woman counted the cowries twice. Her son had disappeared from the yard.

Kékéli landed against Senamé’s shoulder. His claws caught through the cloth, unusually hard.

In the proprietor’s voice, he whispered, “The woman and the two girls. Yes. In the back.”

Senamé kept her hand beside the bowl.

Beyond the wall, a horse stamped. Tassi’s eyes met hers, then moved towards the kitchen, where the proprietor’s husband stood holding an empty tray. A hand caught his collar from behind and dragged him out of sight.

Afiwa was already getting up.

“I’ll see about our mats.”

Senamé stayed beside Tassi, who asked whether the sauce was too hot for the benefit of the men behind the screen. Absurdly, her tongue still complained about pepper while somebody was being hurt in the next room.

Afiwa returned without the easy swing of her shoulders.

“Mother and boy tied in the storeroom,” she murmured. “Two men inside. More at the gate.”

The wooden bar dropped into its brackets.

Tassi emptied her water over the brazier. Their shadows vanished from the screen in a hiss of steam, and Senamé hurled the heavy jug at the man coming around it. Clay burst against his raised arm and face. Before he hit the ground, she was through the kitchen doorway.

The husband blocked her path, backing towards the storeroom with blood running from his mouth. A musket followed him. Behind its barrel, the shooter caught sight of Senamé and shifted his aim.

The husband seized the weapon.

Its report struck the little room like a door slammed inside her skull. Smoke swallowed the hearth; through it she saw the man crumple, still clinging to the barrel. Senamé drove her heel into the shooter’s chest and sent him crashing against the opposite wall. The musket tore free and skidded beneath a bench.

A child screamed behind the storeroom doors.

The second attacker had been binding their handles together. Now, with Senamé between him and the courtyard, he snatched a brand from the hearth and thrust it into the dry matting above them.

Flame climbed the reeds.

He knew they were inside. She could see that he knew: he glanced towards the boy’s voice before turning the burning wood on her.

Senamé ducked beneath his swing and drove into him with her shoulder. His back struck the wall hard enough to shake soot from the rafters. She caught his wrist before the brand could fall against her clothes, forced it open, then flung him aside to reach the doors.

The cord bit into her injured palm. She pulled until it snapped.

One door opened; the other jammed against a grain sack. Through the gap, the boy struggled in his mother’s lap, his ankles bound to hers. Senamé shoved the sack away with the door itself, splitting its seam. Grain poured around her feet as she knelt to free him.

Afiwa slipped in beside her.

“I have his mother.”

Senamé lifted the child. His face pressed into her neck, hot and wet, his bound hands trapped between them. She carried him through the smoke and passed him to Afiwa at the courtyard entrance.

“Take them to the elephant.”

The husband lay beside the hearth. Tassi had reached him and was pressing cloth over the wound in his upper arm. Above them, a pale shield curved beneath the burning roof. Sparks scattered across it like insects striking glass.

“Clear the gate,” the queen ordered. “We need a way out.”

A man entered behind Senamé.

The scrape of his boot gave her just enough warning to turn. His blade passed her cheek and struck the doorframe; before he could wrench it loose, she trapped his forearm against the wood and drove her knee into his belly. He folded over it. Using his own momentum, she dragged him backwards into the yard and flung him across their supper table.

The dishes broke beneath him.

Two men held the gate. A working tightened through the spearman’s legs. Senamé caught its rhythm a moment before he crossed the yard: three short pulses, each releasing the next movement before the last had finished. She barely had time to turn as he thrust low to keep her away from the bar. She sidestepped, caught the shaft under her arm and pulled him into the blow of her palm. Pain jolted through her wounded hand. His grip loosened, and she tore the spear free, sweeping its butt across his companion’s knees before either man could recover.

The second fell against the gatepost. The first reached for her.

She struck him across the shins and shoved the spear beneath the wooden bar. A wrench of both arms ripped it from its brackets.

Outside, travellers scattered as the gate swung open. A woman dragged her little daughter behind a cart. Senamé planted herself in the opening while Afiwa ran past with the boy, his mother stumbling close behind.

The two men scrambled towards the road. Senamé could have caught them before they reached their horses.

Then something gave way inside the kitchen.

The crash sent her back across the yard.

A burning roof beam had fallen diagonally across the doorway. Beneath it, Tassi’s shield held the remaining reeds above the wounded husband, but there was no room to bring him through. The queen could not release either working long enough to move the timber.

Senamé tipped the rain barrel against the wall. Water swept into the kitchen, drowning the embers around her feet. With the long dining bench wedged beneath the beam, she lowered her shoulder and pushed.

The load came onto her slowly, then all at once.

Heat scraped the back of her neck. Her sandals slid in the wet ash, and the scales at her hip pulled as she forced one foot forward. The beam rose far enough for Tassi to bring the man beneath it, his good arm hooked across her shoulders.

Senamé watched his dragging heels clear the threshold.

Only then did she let go.

The beam struck the floor, throwing sparks into her face. Through them she saw the man who had lit the reeds crawling beside the hearth. A knife flashed in his hand as he reached towards Tassi’s trailing wrapper.

Senamé caught his wrist under her heel.

His cry barely reached her. She hauled him upright by his shirt and drove him through the doorway, following him into the mud before he could turn over.

Her foot settled against his throat.

Behind her, Tassi called for clean cloth. People were gathering outside the gate. Senamé heard them as though she had remained inside the kitchen, with the fire between them and her.

The man clawed at her ankle.

Those hands had bound the doors. That mouth had heard the child begging. She bore down, watching his face change, waiting for something in it to explain how he had been able to do it.

“Sena.”

Afiwa’s hand closed around her arm.

The man’s heels scraped furrows through the mud. Senamé could stop them. The knowledge was simple and complete; no pearl had ever given her anything so certain.

“You’ve got him,” Afiwa said. “Move your foot.”

She wanted to answer that he had tried to burn them alive. Afiwa knew. She had been there. Yet her hand remained on Senamé’s arm, firm enough to hurt.

At the gate, the little girl behind the cart was staring.

Senamé lifted her foot.

The man rolled onto his side, dragging in air. The sound made her stomach contract. She stepped away and discovered that her hands would not stay still.

Tassi emerged from beside the well, where the innkeeper now lay beneath a shelter.

“I need him alive.”

Afiwa bound him with the cord cut from the storeroom doors. Two travellers took the captured weapons and agreed to watch him until the local guard arrived. Someone had already sent for a healer; neighbours were carrying buckets through the gate.

The proprietor crouched beside her husband, rubbing the marks around her wrists.

“They showed us a seal,” she told Tassi. “They said you had stolen from the emperor. They wanted us to put you in the rooms.”

Her voice broke when she looked at the boy.

“My husband wouldn’t let them take him.”

Senamé listened from beside the elephant. The woman had served them food with those men behind her. Senamé had mistaken fear for greed when she counted the cowries.

Tassi asked her to describe the seal, then told her to repeat the account to the captain.

Only when the queen bent over the wounded man did her pearls slip clear of her wrapper.

Recognition drained the proprietor’s face. Tassi caught her before she could kneel.

“Stay with your husband.”

The boy brought Senamé’s bag across the yard. She reached for it, but he stopped beyond her hand and lowered it to the ground.

She had carried him out of the fire. He had buried his face against her throat.

Now he watched her feet.

Afiwa took the bag to the elephant. Senamé followed, grateful nobody asked what was wrong. Every breath still tasted of the burning kitchen.

Tassi steadied her as she climbed. There was barely space for the three of them, but Afiwa squeezed alongside her without complaint. The ropes of the travelling seat loosened beneath the queen’s fingers and settled across their waists.

Behind them, the inn glowed through its broken roof. Neighbours passed buckets from the well, their voices carrying over one another as they called for ladders, cloth, more hands.

The elephant turned south.

Under the blanket, Afiwa found Senamé’s trembling fingers and drew them into her lap. She held them there as the fire dwindled behind the trees.

Morning reached Senamé through the smell of bread warming over charcoal.

She woke against Afiwa’s hair, her hand still between her friend’s knees. Women walked the field ridges with hoes. At a roadside hearth, a man turned cakes with bare fingers too quickly for the heat to catch him.

Her stomach tightened.

She had left most of her supper beneath a broken table.

At a well, Tassi bought breakfast while Senamé washed. Smoke remained in her hair. Across the square, two children practised carrying a basket, each failure prompting an argument about whose head was wrong.

She watched them over the edge of her cup.

The innkeeper’s son had been about their age. She remembered the weight of him against her chest more readily than his face, and then the distance he had kept when he brought her bag.

Afiwa passed her a warm parcel.

“Eat before Kékéli notices.”

Kékéli’s beak was already under the fold. Senamé pushed him away and split the steaming cake. A few mouthfuls reminded her how hungry she was.

Tassi returned from speaking to a mounted watchman. He rode north with two others before she reached them.

“For the inn?” Senamé asked.

“And the prisoner.”

Over breakfast she could almost make a reasonable account of what had happened. But Afiwa had seen it, and the queen had seen enough.

“The boy wouldn’t come near me.”

Tassi settled beside her beneath the shade.

“He saw you save him. He also saw what happened afterwards.”

“He tried to burn them alive.”

“Yes.”

The agreement left her with nowhere to put the rest of the argument. She looked towards Afiwa, who was refilling their flask at the well. Her friend had not needed a queen’s order to stop her.

Senamé folded the empty leaf along its seam.

“I heard her the first time.”

Tassi waited.

“I just didn’t want to move.”

Afiwa came back before Senamé could decide whether saying it had helped. She offered the flask without asking what they had been discussing, and Senamé drank.

They joined the morning traffic.

Traffic thickened: carriers with jars, carts laden with cloth, impatient messengers. Senamé smelled hot oil, leather and sun-warmed fruit. A loom clattered behind a wall.

Through Kékéli’s eyes, settlements had seemed comprehensible: roofs, paths, a market around a well. Down here, each opening led to another trade, another argument. A single street could occupy her all day.

Then the people ahead began moving off it.

A carrier lowered his jar so abruptly that water spilled down his legs. Their elephant stopped, his ears spreading beneath Tassi’s hands.

Through the soles of Senamé’s feet came a distant impact.

Another followed.

Birds burst from the trees beyond the road. Afiwa caught the rail, her eyes fixed on the shaking canopy.

Kékéli launched from the seat.

Senamé reached for his sight, and the world fell away beneath her.

Air rushed under her wings. Her heart became a frantic little engine, driving blood through a body built to escape before it understood. Every gap between the branches shone with an invitation to flee. She fought the urge long enough to turn.

Something vast was running beneath them.

A spotted back flowed between the trees. Shoulders rose and gathered, then released a body so large that each bound swallowed the clearings between trunks. Kékéli wanted height. Senamé wanted another look.

The clash of those desires pitched her sideways in the seat.

Afiwa seized her waist as she broke the connection. Human weight returned in a sickening rush; for a moment her arms still expected feathers.

“It’s a panther.”

“I can see that.”

The creature cleared the roadside ditch.

Dust billowed beneath her landing, coating the nearest leaves. She stood taller at the shoulder than their elephant, her forepaws planted across most of the road. A claw slid from its sheath as she settled her weight, long enough to open Senamé from hip to collarbone.

Afiwa’s grip became painful.

“You’ve always been my best friend.”

“Don’t start saying goodbye. I’ll be sick.”

Tassi was climbing down.

She approached the beast with her head bowed, and the nearest travellers sank to their knees. Senamé followed as well as the ropes allowed, bent awkwardly over the rail beside Afiwa.

“My child.”

The voice came through the elephant’s back as surely as through the air.

“You return by troublesome roads.”

“Someone has been making them so.”

“I heard the shot.”

Senamé looked up.

That immense strength had been within hearing while a boy lay trapped and a man fired the reeds.

“Then why didn’t you help?”

Afiwa went rigid beside her.

Warm, fur-scented breath reached the seat. Senamé’s courage retreated, but the question already stood between them.

“I guard the crown,” the Panther answered. “I would have come had her life been failing.”

“There were other people.”

“Yes.”

Tassi remained beside the great forepaw. She neither corrected Senamé nor rescued her from the silence.

The Panther brought her muzzle closer.

“And you went back for them.”

Senamé could not tell whether it was praise. Beneath that gaze, she remembered her foot against the man’s throat and wished she had remained bent over the rail.

The creature inhaled.

Her whiskers stirred against the baggage. Kékéli, returning overhead, thought better of landing.

“Smoke,” she murmured. “Blood. And an old serpent.”

Senamé’s fingers closed over her necklace.

“We visited the Python.”

The Panther regarded her a moment longer, then withdrew. Dust rolled from her paws as she stepped aside, revealing the road and the red walls beyond it.

Tassi rested a hand against her foreleg before returning to the elephant.

“Kpo,” she told the girls quietly. “Remember to greet her before questioning her next time.”

Senamé was still trying to persuade her lungs that the meeting had ended.

At the outpost, a clerk rushed forward, his bow faltering at the queen’s bloodstained sleeve.

Tassi sent him to summon her captain.

“And tell the palace I have brought guests.”

Guests.

Senamé glanced at Afiwa. Beneath the road dust, her friend was smiling.

Drums passed the queen’s return from courtyard to courtyard. A woman with folded cloth called a greeting. Tassi answered.

Senamé straightened despite the pull of her bruises. She smelled of a burned kitchen, her hair was full of dust, and she had just reprimanded the kingdom’s ancestral protector.

She wished she had worn the blue cloth.

Ahead, the gates opened wide enough to let them through together.