“It doesn’t sound like there was anything you could do for her,” Nikolai said gently.
A muscle jumped in Ngubi’s jaw. “She looked up at me with those incredible eyes and told me I had to save you.”
Nikolai’s heart clenched. He’d heard this part before, many times. “Yeah. Everyone is trying to save me.”
Ngubi’s mouth clamped before he continued. “She said there would be others like her looking for you, and that I had to keep you safe from them.”
“What is it with these white-haired women, anyway?” Nikolai’s voice rang with frustration. “What are they going to do to me that is so awful? We’ve spent my life running from them.”
Ngubi shrugged. “I wish she’d told me more, but she didn’t. Only that, and your name. And she was right, they came.”
Nikolai gritted his teeth. Ngubi had told him about two of the women showing up in Tsabong within a day of his birth. And sporadically for the first few years afterward. Then they’d given up for a bit—until Nikolai tried to heal his teacher.
He owed Ngubi everything. The Khomani had been forced to take a newborn baby deep into the desert, along with a borrowed female donkey whose milk sustained him. And they’d been vigilant ever since.
Their conversation usually finished at this point. But there was a question that he hadn’t asked, and something prompted him to ask it now, “Do you think the white-haired women found my mother’s grave?”
Ngubi froze. His life essence spiked red, a sign of emotional distress, and Nikolai tensed. The Khomani checked more tubers and pulled some from the fire. But then he cleared his throat. “No, they didn’t. Because I didn’t bury your mother.”
Nikolai stared at him. “But...” They’d visited the gravesite many times over the years. Ngubi had marked it with a pile of stones.
“There is nothing beneath those stones but the clothes she wore,” his dad said. When Nikolai’s mouth opened, he gestured for silence and continued. “Bear with me, my son. I have had much to think about all these years. Because your mother wasn’t like any race of human.”
“What do you mean?” What was Ngubi saying?
Ngubi refused to look at him, and his gaze fogged again with memory. “When I picked you up, she smiled at me, and told me to protect you, right before she died. While I stood there, deciding what to do, her body kind of—disappeared. Crumbled to dust. That sword went with her too. All that was left was her clothing, and this glowing light that swirled around us. My hair stood on end; I wanted to run, but my legs wouldn’t move. It came right at me and then it absorbed through your skin and vanished.” When Ngubi raised his eyes to Nikolai, a mixture of awe and fear filled them. “The animals departed, one by one. Left me alone, with you.”
Ice traveled along Nikolai’s spine. No one, human or animal, crumbled instantly to dust when they died. Even with the help of scavengers, it took time for a body to disappear.
Nikolai’s heart raced, and he swallowed. “Are you saying she was a spirit?” Some Khomani insisted evil spirits were real and dangerous, something to be avoided.
Ngubi uttered a snort of denial. “If spirits exist, they are supposed to be all powerful. No spirit could have been stabbed with a sword.” One hand waved in the air. “My grandfather believed in them, but not me.”
Nikolai stared into the fire, his thoughts swirling. But Ngubi wasn’t done.
“When I looked down to where she’d lain, that’s when I saw the amulet.”
Nikolai’s fingers tightened on it—a rearing horse with a wealth of tossing mane and tail. All he had left of a mother who’d crumbled to dust.
“It’s a horse,” Nikolai said.
Ngubi hesitated. “Maybe,” he conceded.
“What does it mean?”
Ngubi poked at a tuber. “There are many things in this world that I have never seen, but I have heard of. Including rare people that can heal with their minds. But outside of that ability, they live, and die, like normal people.” He shook his head. “But it isn’t just the healing. Her going to dust, the weird glow. The fact you’ve taken so long to finish your growth. The animals come to you, just like your mother. I’ve never been able to explain any of it.” Ngubi watched Nikolai closely. “It is not only beyond the realm of my experience, but of anyone I have asked that I have trusted enough to do so.”
His dad’s eyes reflected his anxiety as he added. “You, like your mother, are different from any human I’ve seen or heard about.”
Nikolai stared at him as his bewildered brain connected the dots. “You are saying I’m not human?”
Ngubi merely shrugged, but his dark eyes reflected his worry.
Nikolai’s heart hammered in his chest. “But if I am not human, then what am I?”
Ngubi’s mouth straightened as he turned to pull more tubers from the fire. “I have no idea,” he admitted.
4
