Chương 7: B1 Chapter 6

We waited outside Eyowon's hut while Joa took the caiman and the rest of my spoils to be skinned and gutted. The air smelled of wet earth, crushed leaves, and the sharp musk of the river. Flies gathered in the shade, buzzing around the blood that darkened Joa's hands. Somewhere beyond the huts, children shouted and splashed through a shallow pool, their laughter rising and falling beneath the strange colors overhead. No one spoke about the sky. No one knew what words could describe it.

Standing there brought back a memory I could never forget. I had been climbing a tree while Eyowon scolded me from below. She had been angry about something, perhaps the fruit I'd stolen, the path I'd taken, or the fact that I'd ignored her warnings again. I couldn't remember anymore. The details had faded with time, worn smooth by years of remembering. But I remembered her voice.

I remembered the way she stood beneath the tree with one hand resting against the trunk, her blind eyes lifted toward me as though she could still see exactly where I was. She had always known where I was. She could hear the shift of my weight on the branches, the scrape of my feet against the bark, the breath I tried to hold whenever I thought I was being clever.

"You'll fall one day," she had warned me. I had laughed. I had been a boy. I believed falling was something that happened to other people. Then I looked down and saw the viper. It lay beside her bare foot, so close that its scales brushed the leaves whenever it breathed. Its body was coiled tightly, its head drawn back, its mouth slightly open. I could see the dark points of its fangs. Eyowon hadn't seen it. She couldn't.

Her eyes had been blind for as long as I'd known her, but blindness had never made her helpless. She could walk through the jungle without stumbling. She could find water by listening to the earth. She could tell which child had entered her hut by the sound of their breathing. But she couldn't see the snake. She couldn't see death waiting beside her. I shouted her name. She turned toward my voice, smiling faintly, still angry with me. She asked what I wanted, and I remember thinking that she sounded so ordinary.

So alive. She was still scolding me. Still waiting for me to climb down. Still expecting there to be a next moment. The viper moved. I didn't think. I threw myself from the tree. I struck the ground hard enough to drive the breath from my lungs. My elbow came down upon the snake with all the force of my falling body. I felt its spine crack beneath me. Its skull crushed against the stone, and its fangs snapped shut inches from Eyowon's ankle. For one heartbeat, everything was silent. Then pain tore through me.

I had landed on a rock. It drove into my back with such force that I thought the world itself had split open. I couldn't breathe. I couldn't move. I couldn't even scream at first. My body lay twisted beneath me, and somewhere inside it, something had broken that would never truly mend. Eyowon heard the impact. She dropped to her knees beside me, her hands searching through the leaves. Her fingers found my face first, then my shoulders, my arms, my chest.

She kept calling my name, each repetition more frightened than the last. When her hands reached my back, she stopped. The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation. I felt her fingers tremble. She knew. She had always known more than people gave her credit for. She knew the shape of bones beneath skin. She knew the difference between a bruise and a break. She knew, before anyone told her, that I would never climb another tree the way I had before.

"What have you done, you stupid boy?" she whispered. Her voice broke on the last word. That hurt worse than the stone. I wanted to tell her I was fine. I wanted to laugh and say she was still angry over nothing. I wanted to climb back into the tree and prove that she had been wrong about me falling. Instead, I lay in her arms and felt my legs grow distant. She lifted me as carefully as she could, though every movement sent fire through my spine. I heard her breathing become ragged. I heard her trying not to cry.

Eyowon had never cried in front of us. Not when sickness took her sight. Not when hunger emptied our stores. Not when the river carried away people we loved. She had always been the one who endured, the one who placed a hand upon our heads and told us that pain was only another thing the body could survive. But that day, holding me, she made a sound I had never heard from her before. It was small. It was almost nothing. That made it worse. I looked at her and said the only words I could imagine saying.

"I did what I did, and I'm proud of what I've done. Even if my life is over, I'm glad yours is not." She went completely still. For a moment, I thought she hadn't heard me. Then her arms tightened around me, and her fingers dug into my shoulders as though she could hold my broken body together by force.

"Don't say that," she whispered. I had never heard fear in her voice before. Not fear for herself. Fear for me. She pressed her forehead against mine. Her tears fell onto my face, warm and startling. I remember lying there beneath the tree, staring into the darkness where her eyes should have been, and realizing that she was crying because of me. I had saved her life. And I had broken her heart.

She looked at the boy I had been, though she couldn't see him, with an expression I only came to understand many years later. There was pity in it, though something harsher lived beneath that pity. It was almost disgust at the thought of a boy sacrificing his life to save an old woman. She had already lived most of her life. The boy lying broken in her arms had barely begun his, yet he'd given it to her as though it were the most natural thing in the world. I didn't understand then what I had taken from her.

I thought saving someone meant giving them more life. I didn't understand that sometimes the life you save becomes a burden they carry forever. Every step Eyowon took after that day, every meal she prepared, every morning she woke to the sound of my uneven breathing, she would remember the price I had paid. She would remember that I had chosen her. And she would wonder whether she had deserved it. I would've done it again in a heartbeat. Even knowing the pain.

Even knowing the years of weakness, the crooked healing, the nights when my back burned so fiercely that sleep became impossible. Even knowing that Eyowon would blame herself for the rest of her life, I would still have thrown myself from that tree. I would've done it for any of my brothers, any member of my tribe, or anyone who needed me. That desire lived at the core of who I was. It was my truest calling long before the gods gave it a name.

If carrying a mountain meant someone else wouldn't have to bear its weight, I would've lifted it without hesitation. I shifted against Makua's shoulders and tightened my hold to steady myself as we waited. The old pain in my back stirred, as though the memory had reached through the years and found the place where the stone had struck me. I could still feel Eyowon's hands trembling against my spine. I could still hear her telling me not to leave her. I had never told her that I remembered.

I had never told her that, for one terrible moment beneath that tree, I had been more afraid of her crying than I had been of dying. Makua adjusted his stance beneath me, careful not to jostle my back. His shoulder pressed against my ribs, solid and warm through the thin cloth between us. I could feel the slow rhythm of his breathing, the effort he made to remain still while carrying my weight. He did not ask whether I was hurting. He knew better than to make me answer.

Beyond him, Joa's knife struck bone with a wet, steady rhythm. Each blow carried through the village. The sound was practical, familiar, almost comforting. It belonged to the world as we understood it: hunt, kill, prepare, eat. Yet the lights above us made even those ordinary sounds feel distant, as though they were echoes from a life already ending. Eyowon's hut stood dark behind us. The woven walls shifted whenever the wind passed, and the charms hanging from the doorway clicked softly together.

She was inside, divining the meaning of the lights and whatever had disturbed the world beyond our village. I could imagine her seated in the darkness, hands moving over her bones, shells, or stones as she listened for answers no one else could hear. I wanted to call for her. I didn't. Some part of me feared that if she answered, the memory would become the present again, and I would be a boy beneath the tree, helpless beneath her tears. Above us, the light remained unchanged.

Purple and blue stretched across the broken sky, pressing down upon the village with a weight I could almost feel. The world seemed to be fracturing around us. In truth, it was. I wouldn't understand the scale of what had happened until much later. I couldn't have imagined how far those lights reached, what had awakened beyond our jungle, or how many lives had changed alongside mine. With everything that followed, I'm grateful I didn't know.

Knowledge would've cost me far more than the blissful ignorance in which my family, my tribe, and I still lived. We grew within that ignorance.