Zahrah the Windseeker (15 page)

"Doesn't matter," I said.

I still had to get the egg.
Dari deserves a strong friend, I
thought. "Strong," I said. I nodded and then stood, packing up my blanket. "Strong," I said again. I was shaky but I was standing. Information or no information, I would move on.
If the elgort is not very smart, then I have an advantage over it,
I thought. I was dada, a person destined to be wise.

"And I'm a Windseeker," I said. Whatever that meant.

I kept hearing Dan's voice as I walked. "You should be flying," the voice told me. "It'll get you there faster and you'll be high above any elgorts if you see them. " It was exactly what Dari would have said if he had been with me. I knew the imaginary voice was correct, but I was too afraid to try.
I'm a coward,
I thought. I bit my lip.
An elgort will have a field day with someone as scared as me.

My mouth felt gummy. I hoped to come across a pond soon, though I wasn't sure if I would have the courage to wash in it. Who knew what kinds of things would be floating or swimming around in it.
I'll cross that bridge when I get to it,
I thought, not for the first or last time. I reached into my bundle, brought out my first bottle of water, and took a sip. I sloshed it around my mouth and then swallowed. Then I brushed my teeth.

The air was warm and humid but not too unbearable. Dari's pants and caftan felt comforting, though they were a little stiff from the dirt and didn't smell very good. I splashed some water on my face and reached into my bundle for another flour cake.

For the first time I thought of my parents. I had no idea just how bad things were back home in Kirki, but I could make some good guesses. Many miles south, my mother was probably sitting at the kitchen table wailing as my father paced the kitchen. I couldn't imagine either of them getting any sleep. Instead, the letter I had written would be on the kitchen table, a constant reminder of their only child's certain death.

This was what I wrote:

Dear Mama and Papa,

I've gone into the jungle. It's my fault that Dari ***u in a coma and it'd up to me to make him better. I'll be back ad doon cu I get the elgort egg. I believe it will cure him. I'm sorry for leaving without your permission, but I know you wouldn't have let me go if I asked. And I must go. I love you and please tell Dari that I love him too.

Zahrah

Once they mentally collected themselves, my parents would probably call the authorities that very morning and maybe even alert the press or something. Regardless, because Kirki is such a small, tight-knit town, by afternoon, the news would spread fast.

"Don't look back," I told myself. "Not until you've succeeded." I focused on the plants around me. They grew progressively stranger as the hours crept by. The trees grew much taller, their trunks wider. I saw palm trees that grew so high that when I stood at their bases and looked up, their tops disappeared into the low-hanging clouds. Some of them dropped coconuts the size of large computer monitors. I made sure not to walk directly underneath these trees.

I saw seven long-armed, slow-moving furry black creatures with small heads sitting in some of the treetops. They looked down at me with curiosity, their large red eyes glowing like yam festival lanterns. Their heads could turn all the way around. I was afraid of them, but I had a feeling I could easily outrun them if I had to. They seemed more interested in eating the blue flowers in the trees, anyway.

Soon after that, as I was walking, I came across a very large pink frog with gold polka dots! The same frog I had seen while I was sick from the blue mango. It was real. The frog seemed to purposely stand in my way. Its skin was smooth and moist, and it had big golden eyes and stood in my path with no intention of budging. And if a frog's face was capable of frowning, this one was doing so. Then it spoke!

"What do you want?" it asked in a very annoyed voice, as if I were the one standing in
its
way and not the other way around.

"Uh, nothing ... ma'am," I said, trying not to stare. It spoke with the voice of a tall, demanding woman, sort of like an older, less polite version of Nsibidi. I instantly went into the mode that I use with adults despite the fact that I was speaking to a frog.

"Yes, you do," she said. "You
allllll
do."

"N-no, ma'am," I insisted. "You must have the wrong—"

She sighed loudly and rolled her eyes.

"You can't remember?" she said. "Look at'cha! You shouldn't even be here. Your legs are too skinny, your arms aren't strong enough. You're food for trees, the bushes, the soil!"

Her words made my heart race with fear. She was right and we both knew it.

"Now wait just a minute," I said in a shaky voice.

"I don't have a
minute,
" she snapped. "I don't have a second. I don't acknowledge time. I'm too smart for that. I know everything already,
o.
"

"What do—"

"Annoying, annoying," she said, cutting me off and hopping away. "Never know that you want what you want until you figure out that you want it, and by then you've just
got
to have it, but before that you don't know anything. Not my problem. Your loss and your hardship."

I watched her hop into a bush, still grumbling nonsense. When I was sure she was gone, I just stood there, my heartbeat slowing. Soon I was wondering why the frog so upset me.
Maybe,
I thought,
it gave off some substance that caused me to feel irrational fear. Like the spiders and their body-stunning breath.
I shrugged and continued on my way. Yet another peculiarity of the jungle.

Some time later, I passed a plant with a large green and orange striped pod that reached many feet high. It sat between two thick enormous waxy leaves. Once again, I listened to my instincts and walked a wide circle around it. And once again, my instincts proved correct. As I looked at the plant, a brown horse pranced directly in front of it.

In a flash, the plant snapped up the horse, its pod opening into a large, powerful mouth. The plant had no teeth, but judging from the crunching sound and the blood that dribbled from the pod, it didn't need any. I felt nauseated but quickly moved on, committing the deadly plant to memory and vowing to look it up in the field guide.

Each time I took a break, I practiced levitating. It was more out of respect for Dari than my actually wanting to. I'd sit, close my eyes, and concentrate. I didn't allow myself to float too high. Still, I had to admit I was getting better at it, feeling less shaky and slightly more at ease each time.

I also read a little from the digi-book, when I could get it to work. It helped keep panic at bay. Because I was being bombarded with so many strange, dangerous things, educating myself about the jungle helped calm my nerves some. But the elgort entry continued saying "error" whenever I tried to access it, and sometimes the digi-book simply wouldn't turn on. What if it never turned back on?

The farther I walked, the more I realized I needed it. "The Forbidden Greeny Jungle is so alive that you shouldn't be surprised when what you thought was a rock starts to walk away," the book said one of the times I got it to work. To me, this meant, Be suspicious of everything.

The more I traveled, the more I felt amazed at just how right Dari was, just how right
The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide
was. The people of Ooni all lived rn a very small part of Ginen. They
were
very limited. They
were
living in ignorance,
I
had been living in ignorance.

But I'd been happy as long as Dari was around. The jungle had always loomed just behind my village, but I'd never thought much about what was in it. At least not that deeply. Nor did I wonder about how far it went. I used to think the same way as almost every other person in the Ooni Kingdom; now I felt silly for it.

When I was lonely, I talked to my compass.

"Good day," the compass said in its chipper voice. "You're exactly nineteen miles north of your village and two thousand miles from sanity. From the information you typed into me, you are a thirteen-year-old girl who seeks to find an unfertilized elgort egg for your friend?"

I held the compass to my mouth and said yes.

"Then you are truly mad."

I laughed as I stepped over a small fallen tree. I probed some leaves to make sure no snakes were hiding underneath them.

"No, I'm merely on ... a mission," I told the compass. "Yes, a mission."

The compass paused, processing what I said.

"It is exactly three-thirty in the afternoon," the compass said.

"What do you know of elgorts?" I asked the compass.

"Nothing, but you are nineteen miles from home," the compass said.

"But you do know that they are from the Greeny Jungle at least, " I said.

"I am only programmed with a little information on Ooni culture and literature, medical, gardening, and marital advice, anecdotes, and children's stories," it said. "Turn back. If you go five miles a day, you'll make it back in four days."

"I'm on a mission," I said, looking through the trees at the sky.

Then I stopped to look at an ugly yellow fungus growing on the trunk of a tree. It throbbed slightly, as if it were breathing. "Aren't you in the slightest bit curious about this place?"

"No," the compass said. "I only know the miles within the Ooni Kingdom."

I nodded. The compass had been programmed with the same philosophy that kept all people, except the explorers who wrote the field guide, from seeking life beyond the borders of Ooni. It was useful in telling me where I was, but at that moment, I turned the compass off.

For several days, I was sure the jungle was trying to kill me. That maybe those farmers had been right after all and that the jungle was some giant superintelligent beast manipulating its enormous body and thinking of creative ways to cause my demise. It had lured me in with its mystery, but once I traveled far enough into its body, it closed around me and showed me what it was really like. And when it was finished playing with me, it would just swallow me up. These were the days when I looked death in the face and, because of this, learned how to survive.

For a while, I was still bothered by my dirty clothes, which I couldn't change because I
had
no other clothes. I broke out in an itchy rash because of the heat and lack of bathing. Whenever I stepped under patches of sunlight, the rash itched horribly! But in desperate times, even old habits die, I guess.

I was from the north, and that meant that I was used to tidy, clean, and civilized attire. Back home, I went through great pains every morning to make myself look just so. My hair had to be neat, my clothes perfectly matched, my shoes scuff free. It's just something you learn as you grow up, like the slang of your community.

Still, my habit of obsessing over my appearance started leaving me the minute I began my journey. I had no choice, really, with all the sweating and the dirt and no place to bathe. But it left me completely the moment I realized that I could be much worse off than dirty, that I could die a very painful, ugly death. And that was when I came face to face with the giant scorpion.

It came clambering down from a nearby tree while I made a snack of a mango. I now know what it's like to feel absolutely sure that death is moments away. What could I do against
this
thing?! The scorpion was an ancient-looking beast whose flat disk of a gray body was bigger than a grown man's! It was a scurrying nightmare. The scorpion hissed angrily as it moved on many thick pairs of legs armed with double rows of sharp spines. It clicked its large, scissorlike mandibles, a yellowish saliva dripping from them. Even from where I stood I could smell that saliva, or maybe the stench came from its entire body. The strong acidic odor stung my nose.

I had encountered a scorpion once back home. It was standing quietly on the side of a tree, black, shiny, and smaller than the palm of my hand. I'd run inside and got my father, who flicked it into the bushes. Scorpions are deadly when they sting, but they sting only when attacked.

This scorpion, though, was nothing like that scorpion back home. Aside from being far more aggressive and many, many times larger, it had no stinger. Instead, it had a large gray whip. And at the tip was a sharp piece of white cartilage the length of my arm that could slice more efficiently than the sharpest metal knife!

I stumbled back, hunching low. I'd scrambled up a tree twice to escape a pack of bush dogs and outrun a small wild boar, but in this case, that wasn't going to help. This creature was obviously an adept tree climber. Unlike regular scorpions, which had eight legs, this one looked like it had a thousand! All of them very strong and nimble. My heart felt as if it would leap from my chest, and every part of my body quivered with adrenaline.

The scorpion was only a few yards away, moving softly side to side as it studied me and prepared for the kill. It flicked its whip three times, sending sliced leaves and branches into the air. Yes, entire branches! It was that strong. I had to be quick, no matter what I did. It snapped its mandibles and cocked its tiny black head. The scorpion's large, shiny black eyes didn't fit the small size of its head and looked like bulbous black mirrors.