Nomvula

41. The Dark Earth

"You should forgive her."

Asanda glared at Anket through the gaps between his fingers. He prodded around the bruise on her cheekbone, his sharp focus a contrast to the rheum in his eyes. The old man was no healer, but his palms were the warm, leathery texture of one who cared well for plant life, and his air of patience had always wrapped itself around Asanda like a wood-oil fragrance

She brushed his hand aside. "No."

"Why not? I know you do not think her a monster. Not truly."

"Anket--"

"I would know if you did." He went back to prodding the tender spot in the middle of the bruise. "I have a daughter too, you know."

"Your travel tablet says you only have a son to your name."

"Of blood, clever one. But I have also had students that I loved, yelled at, and feared for as though they were my own children. Some were girls and women. Therefore, I have daughters, and though my sons can climb hills, my daughters bare mountains."

He stopped speaking there because he knew her. Asanda chewed at her frown as she waited for Anket to throw back the veil between her and his point, because it would be easier to hear him make it aloud. But he didn't, and so the eternally incoming wave that was her mind carried the jagged coral of his metaphor to shore. 

Her grandmother loved to tell of all the things Asanda and her brothers had inherited from their mother; she spoke of their father's traits too, but never with the same convictions. 

To a woman of the Sunlands, a father's traits were garments, things to put on to impress guests or to hide yourself from those who only knew your clan name. But to hear Grandmama tell it, Ndoda had taken iron skin from his mother.  The trouble was Asanda had always thought of him as the most sensitive between them -- the last to bruise in battle, but in wits, the first to bleed. Khaya -- and here Asanda agreed -- had inherited Nomvula's back. He had a rod of pride running down his spine. Grandmama spoke highly of this, but Asanda knew that bones were made to bend. A proud bone shattered. 

For Asanda, Grandmama had insisted, Nomvula had set aside a blindness of sorts. When she'd first heard this, Asanda had laughed, then at her grandmother's silence, she had feared. The blindness was not to the outside world, no -- Mama always saw the world for what it was. It had a different name in the older tongues of the Suns, a word for the numbness of a body that has been in the desert heat too long but refused to collapse. 

"The ability to carry a mountain and not feel your bones breaking and your sinew tearing," Grandmama had said.

Asanda, in her Nomvulaness, had asked the clearest question in her mind. "But bones are still breaking and sinew is still tearing?"

"Hmm, but your feet walk and the mountain has not fallen from your back."

Asanda looked up at Anket. "I shouldn't have to think of my mother as a mountain to bare."

He stepped away and stretched until his back popped three times. "No, you should not. Nor should you have to spend your free time theorising about cages to contain her or milkwater elixirs to drown the war god roiling under her skin." Anket's gaze flitted to the Diviner sleeping on one of the beds by the far wall. "And no, Wayfarer clay wouldn't help to contain it. You would be safer holding a lump of firestone in a damp fist."

Ever restless in that unhurried way of his, Anket walked to the three beds against the far wall. Clasping his hands behind his back, he bowed to inspect the dressing on a sleeping Lifa's leg.

Asanda thought to get up off her desk, then thought better of it. If she stood, she'd either want to go to her garden or her bed, and she would find no rest in either, just more time wasted while the Sunspear in her mother stirred and a madman waited to kill her brother.