SHADOW OF DEATH
Chapter 29: Discoveries
Loki held the large scroll under one arm as he knocked on the door of the scholar. Goose followed closely after him and insisted on rubbing up against Loki's trousers whenever he ceased moving. He knew it was late, but he could not contain his curiosity. Njeri's servant opened the door and led him into the sitting room. She brought tea and bananas for him and told him Njeri would join him shortly.
The pepper-haired scholar came into the room a few moments later with a stifled yawn. A loose dress was pulled over her night clothes and most of her hair was still covered in a floral wrap. She gave him a warm greeting and bid him welcome. Goose, feeling itself quite at home, settled itself on Njeri's lap and went to sleep before they finished their greetings.
"I apologize for the late hour of my visit," Loki said.
"You are welcome any time," she replied. "What is it you seek me for this time? Another discussion on Midgardian economics or the political organization of Europe or the history of technological development?"
Loki shook his head. "Not this time. You provided a rich bounty of information to my previous questions, for which I am quite grateful. Tonight, I have more questions about Asgard than Midgard."
"A topic you are much more highly qualified to provide instruction on than myself," she replied with a smile.
"So I would have thought," Loki said. He produced the ancient cowhide scroll from beneath his arm and unfurled it to reveal a colorful manuscript written in old Kishenga. He began to read it aloud:
"It was in the days of the reign of X'Tuku, Black Panther and King of Shenga that Gulu, Lord of the Sky, first came to Ntusi. He rode upon a rainbow chariot and his hair was woven from the snows of Mount Bashenga. In his hand, he carried a staff as gold as the sun and his eyes were made of the sky above. He asked many questions of X'Tuku and tested the might and vigor of the greatest warriors of the Bashenga. In exchange for a small portion of vibranium, he showered gifts of iron, weapons, and fine cloth upon the king.
"For many seasons, the Lord of the Sky did not return to the lands of Shenga. When he did return, Opaka, great-grandson of X'Tuku, wore the claws of the Black Panther and served as head of the great council of elders at Ntusi. He did not come alone but in his company, he brought his daughter, Walumbe, Bringer of Death. Walumbe's sorcery was so great she leveled an army with one hand and stole the soul of the strongest of warriors with a single glance. She wore plague as a garment and war followed in her shadow. The cries of the Shenga were great indeed until the footsteps of these deities tread upon other lands and left the Shenga in peace again."
Loki showed Njeri the simple paintings etched on the hide's surface-a white-haired man surrounded by a rainbow and a black-haired woman surrounded by bones and skulls. She considered both carefully and waited for him to speak again.
"I have never heard of such a woman," Loki said at last. "But Lady Jane says she existed-that she still exists."
Loki rose from his chair and began to pace the small space between the front door and the sliding door leading to the garden. He clamped his hands behind his back and kept his eyes fixed upon the tiles beneath where his next footstep would fall.
"I do not understand how Odin could have another child and never speak of her to Thor or myself. I suppose I should not be surprised at his adeptness for keeping secrets or rewriting history, but I do not know what to make of this. I could not find any other manuscripts in the library regarding Walumbe. I found a few accounts of later visits of who they call Gulu and Kiwanuka, but no more references of the daughter. Have you come across any other tales of this Walumbe during your studies?"
Njeri shook her head. "Only that one account that you have found. However, I have read more into the reigns of the kings involved in those accounts. Best estimates are that those kings reigned sometime between 2,000 and 2,500 years ago."
"Over a thousand years before Thor and I were born," Loki remarked.
Njeri sputtered on her tea and then coughed into her hand as she composed herself again. "You are quite young still, Mgeni," she said. Loki gave her an exaggerated bow in response.
"Young enough to still live in ignorance of the most basic facts of my biology and family lineage," Loki responded darkly. "Yet old enough to know it was all a lie."
Njeri left him to his bitter reverie for some time while she stroked Goose's soft head. Then she pointed towards her hall of photographs.
"Prince Loki, have I shown you a picture of my brothers and sisters?" Njeri asked, one eyebrow raised over her caramel brow.
"Yes, once," he responded.
"Which do I most resemble?"
He paused from his pacing long enough to meet her gaze. He shook his head slowly and rose one eyebrow in question.
"It was a rhetorical question. Allow me to answer it. None. I resemble none of my siblings. My father took one wife and they produced ten children who all bear a striking resemblance to each other. All are a deep chocolate brown with thick hair and brown eyes and very similar facial features. Then there is the lastborn- I am as light as well-fried mandazi with strange golden eyes instead of dark brown. Before it turned grey, my hair was a light brown and grew in long ringlets. I never saw another in my family with hair that grew like mine."
"You do not share the same bloodline as you siblings?" Loki guessed.
"More than that. Are you familiar with the history of Kenya?"
"No."
"Let me tell you a story then. There was once a people from northern Europe, called the British, who decided they wanted to rule the world, or as much of it as they could. They saw that Kenya was beautiful and good and so they came and displaced my people, the Kikuyu. They took our land and livelihoods and left many of us impoverished and landless and unable to feed our families.
"When my people cried out and rebelled, our colonizers imprisoned hundreds of thousands of us. During our imprisonment, they did terrible things to us. Their wrath first fell on the Kikuyu freedom fighters who fought in the shelter of the forests. However, the British knew it was the Kikuyu women in the villages who brought the homemade firearms, food, and other supplies to their husbands and fathers and brothers. Thus, both men and women were punished, imprisoned, and tortured. Their blood and sacrifices bought us our freedom, but we paid for it in blood and grief and the deaths of tens of thousands.
"Our men knew their wives had suffered during their imprisonment, just as they had. It was many a man who came home after the Mau Mau rebellion ended and found their wives with a baby unmistakably sired by a Briton. Most asked no questions and raised them as their own. No one left that time unscarred and if families were to heal, it was better not to press too deeply into those tender wounds.
"I was born during the middle of 'the Emergency,' as it came to be called, and it was not until I was much older that I started asking questions. My mother and my father would never speak of it. My uncle, when drunk, insinuated that the British soldiers took my father's manhood and left me as mockery of his impotence. My grandmother only said that my mother spent time in the camps and 'it was too too bad' but would tell me nothing else. I have done enough research to be able to put the pieces together to know it is better not to ask for the details.
"My father loved me and treated me the same as his other children. I never doubted that. Still, when I figured it out, I struggled. I was angry. I wished they would speak to me of what happened and tell me the truth. But it is not our culture to talk about such things. It would be shameful to speak so openly of the wounds of the past and so I read between the lines instead.
"Eventually I realized I needed to forgive whoever my sire was and forgive his people for the shame and pain they brought on my family and my people. They did terrible things, but my people are just as capable of inflicting terrible things on others. Until I recognize that the capacity to do the worst things in the world is within me as much as within those who have hurt me, I cannot be freed of it. I need to see the worst in myself and the best in my enemy or else I will become my worst enemy to someone else. I will wound others in the same ways I have been wounded.
"When I let go of my anger and hatred, it was my own burden and poison that I released. And my own freedom I gained. My father may not be my biological father, but he was my social father and he raised me as his own and that is more important by far. He is not perfect, but he is mine, and I am glad I had him. When he died, I mourned his passing."
"But they lied to you," Loki interjected. "They made you think you were something that you weren't." He sat again and leaned forward in his chair during her tale to listen in more intently. Now he met her eyes with a fervent gaze of both curiosity and echoes of his own internal struggles.
"Yes. It helped that my family thought I was the most beautiful-I was exotic and sought out because of my appearance and not hated for it-but I do not begrudge them their lie. It is not our culture to discuss such things openly.
"However, I still struggled because I was conceived as a 'punishment' to my mother for supporting my father as he hid in the forests and fought for our freedom. Everything about me that set me apart, that made my community find me beautiful, came from a man who violated my mother and conquered my people. Just as Kenya could only be considered 'good' if bent into the image of the European, so my blood could only be beautiful if marred by European blood. Could I not be Kikuyu and Kenyan and still good?
"When I traveled to London for studies, it was not my biological father that defined me but my biological mother. I was African and no amount of European heritage could change that, could wipe the darkness away, could make me light enough to be worthy of the land of my biological father. No amount of education could remove the stain of 'savagery' from my blood. I would forever be branded as 'primitive and uncivilized' because of my place of birth, the place I love, the people who called me their own without any question of my origins.
"I am proud to be Kikuyu and Kenyan, but I have had to come to peace with both halves of my identity. I am just as British as I am Kenyan and, for many years, I struggled to accept both bloodlines as both felt soaked in shame."
"In Asgard, the poets sometime speak of 'the delicate dance between creatures and land, blood and earth, seasons and traditions' that forge the way of life on each realm. Where does blood stop and custom begin? It is nigh impossible to extricate the two for they are so deeply interwoven together into the tapestry of Yggdrasil," Loki responded. He lost himself in his thoughts for some time before addressing Njeri again. "How different would your perception of your mother's line have been if you had been raised in the land of your sire?"
She shook her head sadly. "It would not have been good. We have a saying that 'history is written by the victor' and conquest is often justified through tales of the inferiority of those conquered."
"There is truth in that," Loki said. "Lady Jane believes I was born on Midgard during the Ice War. My father was the king of the Frost Giants, the sworn enemy of Asgard, and I always assumed my mother was his queen. Jane believes my mother was not of Jotunheim. I did not ask her the land of my mother."
"Why not?" Njeri asked.
"Because I did not wish to know the answer," Loki replied. "I prove my own cowardice in how I shy away from the truth of myself. I would have preferred to remain ignorant of all the most basic facts of my identity and continue to believe myself Aesir, biological son of Odin and Frigga, even if a lie, than face the truth. My history has been rewritten in so many ways in recent years, I find myself unable to keep up with the rate of change."
"If you discover that your mother was from Midgard….?" Njeri asked slowly. She watched his reaction as disgust warred with dismay and fear. He quickly replaced all his emotions with a mask of impassivity mixed with arrogance.
"Then I will be the only being in the Nine Realms with a claim to not just one but three thrones on three realms and have successfully bestowed punishment onto each realm that has a claim upon me," he replied with a smirk.
Njeri shook her head and gave him an exasperated smile. She reached out to take his hand in hers. "Do not fear the truth," she exhorted passionately. "It may be painful, but if you do not fight it or ignore it, it can be the thread to sew the fractured parts of you together into a coherent whole again."
He nodded and she released his hand. Before long, he left Njeri to her rest. His own rest was hard to find as his eyes remained fixed on the ancient scroll, his mind whirling with the implications of an elder daughter in the house of Odin.
ooooooo
"Hey! Are you ready to run through these numbers with me?" Jane asked. She failed to take her eyes from the orange numbers flitting across her screen. Loki glanced over to where she sat on one of the stools in the lab. The colors of the screen reflected off her face with an eerie glow made all the more fey by the subtle way her blue eyes glowed from within with a light of their own.
"Not quite. I need to finish these up here," he replied and quickly returned to his final adjustments on the data Shuri gave him.
"What aren't you telling me?" she said. She turned to face him, raised one eyebrow, and crossed her arms across her chest.
"Will you cease with your fortune-telling tricks, madam?" replied Loki.
"Sorry. It's just…I can't help it, ok. My brain is all kinds of rewired and I can just sense things and I can't stop till I know the truth."
"Your unceasing quest for knowledge will be the death of me, Lady Jane."
"You know, that statement may be true."
Loki threw up his hands in exasperation. "Insufferably irritating woman," he hissed.
She grinned. "Also a true statement-but only half true-you aren't speaking the other part."
"And what, pray tell, am I missing?"
"That you like me," she said.
"I most certainly do not."
"Not true…I can tell," she said.
Loki groaned. "If you are so well-informed on my innermost workings, why must I review your calculations?"
"Because they don't work," Jane said. "I've done this again and again and I can't figure out a way to make the design for the bifrost work. In each scenario, it fails."
"It fails?"
"Yeah, you know, like explodes or implodes or vaporizes or punches a hole through the atmosphere-it fails and does so spectacularly. I really wish you had more data or blueprints on the Asgardian bifrost."
"As we are rather far from Asgard's great libraries, it is not a particularly realistic wish."
"Come on," she said. "What do the other realms use to get around? Is Asgard the only one with a bifrost?"
"Yes. The Dark Elves and the Dwarves use slow, cumbersome interstellar vehicles. The Light Elves use magic to traverse the paths and portals inbetween realms. The Frost Giants do not leave Jotunheim," Loki said. Jane interrupted him before he could continue listing any of the other realms.
"Wait-I thought you said those guys invaded Earth. How did they get here if they can't leave Jotunheim?"
"They had their own power source that they used to transport their army between realms," he answered.
"Ok. How did that work?" she asked.
"I am unsure," he said. "I never thought of using it that way. They used an ancient relic called the Casket of Ancient Winters. It was Jotunheim's greatest prize and served as power source, weapon, shield, and their method of travel between realms."
"That doesn't sound so different from the bifrost. Did it have an observatory and a bridge similar to Asgard?" she asked.
Loki shook his head. "No. It is a portable device that is hardly larger than the screen you are working upon. I assume it not only carried Laufey's army to Midgard but was carried by Laufey for him to inflict the poor peasants of Midgard with its full destructive potential. He also used it to transport this army back to Jotunheim upon their expulsion by Asgard's forces. It was captured as a war prize and as punishment for their unprovoked aggression. Odin kept it in the weapon's vault in Asgard and the Frost Giants never forgave the Aesir for its loss."
Jane scribbled notes furiously onto her notepad as he spoke. "So, what powered it?" she asked.
"I do not know."
Jane groaned. "Come on! Have you seen it? You've gotta give me something here."
Loki nodded his head once. "I have done more than seen it. I have wielded it."
"Ok. That's something. What does it do?"
"It coats everything within 60 paces with a thick layer of ice and decreases the temperature of all it comes in contact with until it is well below freezing."
"Wow-I know how much energy it took to run our stupid little air conditioner in New Mexico…that had to be some serious power making it go," Jane mused as she chewed on her pen. "Tell me what it looked like. Or, better yet, draw it for me."
"Would you prefer to see it for yourself?"
Jane dropped her pen and swung her head to face him again. "What?"
"I clearly asked my question. Would you prefer to see the Casket of Ancient Winters for yourself?"
"How?"
"We will have to cross the borders so I may access my magic, but I have it in my storage."
"Wait, wait, wait-you have it with you? You've had it this whole time and never told me?"
Loki nodded and smirked at Jane's dumbstruck expression.
"What are you waiting for?" She finally asked. "Let's go."