Beneath the Bala Tree

Chapter 1

51 AC

The execution was quick.  

The roll of thunder coming from the collapsing scaffold sent a tremble through more than just the Craig trees that held the body.  Zea felt the scream of the scaffold’s metal beneath her skin long before the lifeless cocoon was dropped from the trees’ branches.  By the time Aba swung around to cover her eyes, the damage had already been done.   She was able to not only smell the Reacher’s death, she was able to sense the snapping of the mechanisms used to hang him.   

Since the time she was a little girl, and Aba had taught her the meaning behind her name, Zea had practiced looking for light in the darkness.  It was this reasoning that kept her alive.  Her belief, that the world could not condone a man's death for simply reading a book, allowed her to see the sliver of light.   It was the color of honey, and it filtered through the gaps of Aba’s closed fingers across her face.   So when she finally pushed Aba’s hand away, the honey remained.

There was no gentle place for Zea to rest her eyes.  Gosha was crowded with Reachers moving back and forth from the market in Rann.  They shuffled along, making the red dust that characterized the hoodstate rise above them.  She watched her world from the hood of the vermilion shadow. Makeshift stalls leaned in different directions with vendors selling black water fish that had been dried over open fires.  One man sold hornet beans.  Another old tins.  And at least a dozen, that she could count, sold seeds that promised growth and provisions where there was no guarantee.  

“Aba,” she called, but Aba didn’t respond.  

His chin rested against his chest, and between his slumped head and bent shoulders from the satchel of wood he carried, Zea thought he looked like a question mark against the world.  

She tried to settle down and lean into the quiet space between them.  Reachers bargained at the stalls, and hariis leaves were ground into gold in heavy mills beating in rhythmic patterns.  One man argued with a woman.  Another argued with himself.  And the whir of a RASH scanner pushed the noise of the market away as Zea retreated into herself again.

 “I am empty,” she whispered just as the scanner’s light glided over her.

She tensed as it swept across the Reachers around her and did not relax again until it drifted away.  Only then did her heart and lungs remember their work, drawing breath and cleaning the air so she could keep moving through Saiid as a Reacher. 

The road that took them home narrowed as they moved outside of the market, and it twisted out of the quad of stalls and vendors into a strangling wood of Craig trees.   Zea squared her shoulders to avoid the injury of the hanging branches, but Aba introduced another.  

“We have to talk about the Kiente,” he said.  

Zea shuffled the load of branches strapped to her own back and pretended not to hear him this time.  Her Aba usually talked in bygone stories that he remembered from the old world.  Happy stories of sounds and smells and tastes she and her brother Raiil had never known.  Today, Aba wanted to talk about power.  Zea watched as the scanner glided away from Gosha, but it would return, and the thought unsettled her almost as completely as the marriage petition the Kiente had made. 

“I don't like it either Zea,” Aba insisted when she kept quiet.  “But there are three tribes that survived the old world.  The Banu is the most powerful. The Kiente is..”

Zea watched her Aba struggle.  His forehead creased, as if he was trying to find a word that would fit the Banu Kiente without offending her, but Zea had already chosen a word of her own.  

“The Kiente is arrogant,” she argued.

She looked at him from the corner of her eyes, at the branches that stretched from behind him, that seemed to grow from his back, and she bit her lip.  He had been walking from Gosha to Rann and from Rann to Gosha for as long as she could remember, buying wood they could not afford, that they could have cut from their back yard if it were permitted. 

One word then nothing.  Two more than nothing again.  Zea understood it. There was no story Aba had memory for that would soothe her, so he shifted beneath his load and shared a myth that would remind her of the tribe the Kiente would one day rule.

“The Banu are lions, Zea.  The lions were favored by the Blue Sky Gods.  When the jealous gods of the other animals scattered them, their roars were weakened.  Their manes thinned, and they followed the other animals completely lost.  But when a young cub saw himself in clear waters one day, he roared, and the lions that heard him gathered around him.  The grass parted. The other animals hid, and not even the hyenas dared to challenge the cub.”

They walked steadily.  Silent for a while.  Zea tried sifting through the books she had read, that the Crenshaw allowed them to read, to counter the weight of Aba's folktale about the Banu.  Aba tightened his jaw, and despite the growing branches at his back, he raised his head.  Zea sadly lowered hers.

“Tell me,” he asked obligingly, “what do you think you know about the Kiente’s arrogance?” 

“The Kiente acts as though he is better than me,” she responded sharply.

Aba kept quiet, but all the opinions he didn’t share leapt to Zea’s mind, unfiltered, and  left her feeling miserable.

The Kiente was not a Reacher, and he was not just Banu.  He was a man who could likely have his pick of women, women who would happily marry him, but his petition for her had prompted a different response.  There was a new erasure happening within her.  When she thought of the Banu Kiente, she thought about the Reachers she’d seen stepping out of his way.  He walked as though he was controlling the wind, and whenever he looked at her, she had to look away.

“Zea,” Aba said. “The Kiente might be Banu, but you are Zea Elise Morin.  You are light in a dark place.  What good is his title or status if he has none.  Maybe it’s  your light he craves.”

Zea felt a cry rising in her, but she swallowed it as effectively as she swallowed the red dust and focused on the new smell in the air.  The hornet beans most Reachers were able to afford offered less protein than the old world beans did but cooked faster and smelled of fruit.  

“What do you want to eat,” she asked Aba abruptly.  

It was a game they often played, but Zea knew the risk there was in asking Aba for his memories.  They could just as easily trigger sorrow as they could comfort, but she watched as he swung around to face her again.  An eager smile spread across his tired face.

“Hot cakes,” he said, and she laughed at how happy he seemed remembering the old world taste.

“Chicken,” he groaned.  

“Ham sandwiches,” he said, and he turned away.

Zea watched as his mood changed, and she was sorry.  It was a habit of hers to ask for his memories of the old world, if only for a brief escape.

“All things we have no hariis to acquire,” he argued. “But as a Banu, you would have access to whatever you want Zea.  Food… decent shelter…and education.  The Kiente would be able to give you things that I never could—”

“He won’t give me any choice,” she countered stubbornly.  “I have never needed anything else.  You and Amma love me completely.  There was never anything else I wanted.”

“You talk childishly.”

“I talk honestly.” 

Aba jerked his eyes away.

Zea studied him.

His front teeth were missing at the top of his mouth from years without proper care. The healer in Gosha, who had no formal training, had fitted him with replacements that were wrongly sized, but Aba had learned to make do.  He never allowed Zea or Amma to see him without them.  But sometimes, in the mornings when he overslept and Zea crept into his room to wake him, she would see the gap where what he’d lost should have been. Whenever he woke to find her there, he scrambled frantically to find the missing piece before he even took a breath.

“The Kiente’s hariis will not make me happy,” Zea said softly.  “And nothing he can promise me will make me grateful.

“He can promise you safety,” Aba fussed, looking around him nervously.  “It is enough.”

Their pace quickened, but their conversation stilled.

By the time they reached a well to draw water, they were less than  a quarter kilometer from home, but Aba turned off the main road to join other Reachers who were purchasing water tins.  

Zea watched as he pressed his way forward in the crowd, and she thought of something else he had said about the Banu tribe.  

The Banu aren’t just lions.  They are the Banu blue lions.  

And a memory of the Kiente at the market pushed past Zea’s need to keep him at a distance.  

He had been tall in his saddle.  Riding a horse like he owned everything.  

She squeezed her eyes closed to shut out the memory of the Kiente_and the dust rising from the hustle of Reachers at the well.