My home village Osemba was a palette of dusty browns from the dirt roads to stone and sand-brick buildings. The oldest buildings were groupings of several solid stone structures, like the Root with its many traditional conical roofs. The Root sits at the very edge of Osemba. About a mile west, the sand dunes begin threatening to reclaim the clay-rich land. In the opposite direction, straight down the main dirt road, past other homes and a small area reserved for the western morning souq, is the lake. The rest of Osemba spreads along the lake’s edges.
Okwu and I walked up the road in the dark of deep night. We, Himba, are a people of the sun. When it sets, we retreat. The night is typically for sleep, family, and reflection. Thus, Okwu and I had the road to ourselves and I was glad. I used my astrolabe to light our way. I glanced at Okwu every so often and noted how as it floated beside me, it turned this way and that, observing Osemba; the first Meduse to ever do this, in peace or war.
“I can smell the water,” Okwu said, minutes later.
“It’s right in front of us,” I said. “Those tables and wooden medians are for the souq that’s here every morning; it’s similar to the marketplace on Oomza, but with just humans, of course.”
“Then that’s not like Oomza Blue Market at all,” Okwu said.
“No, the setup. People sell things outside. Come, the lake is just past it.”
“How can the air smell of water?” Okwu asked in Otjihimba. The awe it felt was clearer when it spoke in my language. I smiled and walked faster, enjoying Okwu’s rare excitement.
When I stepped onto the sand, Okwu beside me, I quickly took a deep breath and held it. Phoom. Okwu’s gas plumed so thickly around me that for a moment all I saw was the line of my astrolabe’s light tinted lavender. I took several steps from Okwu, fanning the gas away until I reached breathable space. Still, I coughed, laughing as I did. “Okwu,” I gasped. “Calm down—”
But Okwu wasn’t there. I quickly flashed my astrolabe’s light around me and noticed two things at once. The first was that Okwu was floating to the water, moving swiftly as if blown by a strong wind. The second was that I didn’t need my light to see this because the light from the lake was more than enough. Light from the water, I slowly thought as another thought competed for my attention. Can Okwu even swim? Salt is in water, too.
“Okwu,” I shouted, running toward the water.
But Okwu floated into its waters and quickly sunk in. Then it was gone. I splashed in all the way to my knees, the warm buoyancy of the water already feeling as if it wanted to lift me up. “Okwu?” I shouted. Around me was blinking electric green light. It was clusterwink snail season and the water was full of the spawning bioluminescent baby snails, the tiny creatures each flashing their own signals of whatever they were signaling. It was like wading into an overpopulated galaxy.
I waded farther into the water looking for Okwu. I paused, wondering if I should dive in to search for it. I couldn’t swim, but because of the high salt content, I couldn’t drown; the water would just push me to the surface. Still, if I went after Okwu, the water would wash off my otjize. And if anyone saw me, if my people didn’t think I was crazy yet, they certainly would after word spread that I’d been outside otjize-free.
“Okwu?” I shouted one last time. What if the water just dissolved its body? I looked at the glowing water and braced my legs to throw myself farther in and paddle out to find Okwu. Then yards into the water, within the twinkling green stars, I saw a swirling galaxy. Okwu’s silhouette surrounded by swirling twinkling baby snails. “What?” I whispered.
Then Okwu’s dome emerged; Okwu was adeptly swimming, half-submerged. It came toward me, but stopped when the water got too shallow for it to stay half-submerged. “My ancestors are dancing,” Okwu said in Otjihimba, its voice wavering with more emotion than I’d ever heard Okwu convey. Then Okwu swam back into the water. For the next thirty minutes, it danced with the snails.
I sat on the beach, my long skirts covering my otjize-free legs, in the twinkling green of my home lake. Traditionally, it’s taboo for a Himba woman or girl to bathe with water, let alone openly swim in the lake. I’d developed a love for bathing with water in the dorms on Oomza Uni. Though I’d only do it when I was relatively sure no one was around. As I sat there, watching Okwu dance with its god, I thought about how strange it was that for me to swim in water was taboo and for Okwu such a taboo was itself a taboo.
I remember thinking, The gods are many things.
*
I don’t know why I was doing it.
Even after seeing Okwu dancing with its god, some of the fury and pain from my dinner with family still coursed through my system. So an hour later, there I sat on my bedroom floor working my fingers over my edan’s lines as I hummed to it as Professor Okpala had taught me—mathematical harmonizing plus the soft vibration waves from my voice sometimes reached normally unreachable sensors on some edans.
My window was open and outside a cool desert breeze was blowing in from the west, pushing my orange curtains inward. The current of the breeze disturbed the mathematical current I was calling up. The disturbance caused my mind to weave in a tumble of equations that strengthened what I was trying to do instead of weaken it.
As I hummed, I let myself tree, floating on a bed of numbers soft, buoyant, and calm like the lake water. Just beautiful, I thought, feeling both vague and distant and close and controlled. My hands worked and soon I slid a finger on one of the triangular sides of the edan. It slid open and then slipped off. Inside the pyramid point was another wall of metal decorated with a different set of geometric swirls and loops. Professor Okpala described it as “another language beneath the language.” My edan was all about communication, one layer on top of another and the way they were arranged was another language. I was learning, but would I ever master it?
“Ah,” I sighed. Then I slipped the other triangular side of the pyramid off and the current I called caught both and lifted them into the air before my eyes. “Bring it up,” I whispered and the edan joined the two metal triangles. They began to slowly rotate in the way they always did, the edan like a small planet and the triangles like flat cartwheeling moons. A small yellow moth that had been fluttering about my room attracted to the edan’s glow flew to it now and was instantly caught up in the rotating air.