The next morning, Tak and I met in the empty barn by my family house, hoping that a full night’s rest had given our N’Keles enough time to attune to their bearers. The cold, dewy dawn unearthed the dampness sleeping amid the wood-plank walls and straw-covered floor, while the overcast sky seeped inside through cracks in the roof and window blinds hanging askance on rotten hinges. Leaning against a wooden beam, I sat on the ground, and, cautious not to touch any of the four beads, pulled my N’Kele from under the collar.

“You haven’t touched yours yet, have you?” I asked. “Sorry, I know you haven’t,” I added before Tak could reply.

“Have you?” he asked.

I shook my head. “Wanna go first?”

Tak nodded, closed his eyes, and pinched the leftmost bead on his N’Kele. Furrowing his brows and forehead, he puffed through his nose with a faint wheeze, like a baby concentrating on a new toy, trying and failing to grasp it with hands she’s yet to learn to control. Tak went through all four beads, spending about half a minute on each. At last, he opened his eyes, blinked, looked around as if he’d forgotten where he was, then smiled at me.

“What did you see?” I asked, agitated by the wait.

“It’s –” he began, but cut himself short and fell into quiet rumination.

“It’s what?”

“I think, ‘see’ is not the right word,” he finally concluded. “I felt, on the first bead, a sense of familiarity, two shapes, I think they were you and I. I. . . I think it was just us sitting here, though I am not sure. . .”

“And then? Come on, Tak, go on!”

“Then on the second one I saw some other presence, also familiar, and there was also a gap or an opening of some kind, and more light around, but it was even harder to make out. The rest of the beads felt very bright and fresh, and they had a sense of moving, perhaps walking, but I can’t make out anything else, it got more and more blurry as I went up the beads, as if it were a dream I was forgetting more and more at each next bead.”

“I see,” I said, having nothing to add.

For a long moment, we sat, consumed in our thoughts, listening to a lonely crow cawing outside. Me – looking at the beads on my N’Kele and gathering the strength to touch it, Tak – going over his once again.

Without warning, Tak jumped up and yelled “It changed, I saw it tick, it just ticked!”

I stared at my friend, stupefied by his uncharacteristic excitement.

“Remember I said I felt a presence,” he went on, almost tripping over his words, “somebody familiar, but not very close, and also an opening, on the second bead? It now jumped to the first! I felt it tick!”

“So yours probably ticks every few minutes then, like you always wanted?”

“Like I always wanted, yes! Oh, Kanne, I am so –” He kneeled beside me and gave me a tight hug. “I was so scared mine would tick on weeks, or, God forbid, months. That my N’Kele would be useless for hunting and that –”

Before he could finish the phrase, the barn gate creaked. Light flooded in through the entrance, and it took a moment for my squinted eyes to discern that the silhouette in the doorframe was none other than Joso.

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“Oh just look at you, lovebirds,” Joso said.

Tak released his embrace and sat a few feet away from me, red-faced and embarrassed.

“Anyways. . . Kanne, come with me, I need to teach you something. It’s urgent,” Joso commanded.

“Um. . . Tak, do you know who he refers to?” I asked, feigning confusion and raising my eyebrows.

“No idea,” Tak said with no trace of irony, already regaining his composure.

“Alright, alright, M’Tak, M’Kanne,” Joso said with a smile, “I’ll treat you with due respect. Would you be so kind as to walk with me, Master M’Kanne? Master M’Tak, you are most welcome to accompany us.”

###

The three of us went along the main trail, treading in the wake of yesterday’s carnival, the remnants of which now lay abandoned and trampled into the dust: brooches and kerchiefs, bracelets and sandals with torn straps, brightly painted ribbons and feathers, clay ocarinas, and origami figures of various kinds ranging from birds to fantastic geometric shapes. Those whose huts faced the road were left with the task of cleaning these remnants of revelry, which might turn out to be a boon or a burden, as decided by the ratio of bracelets to sandals lost on a given year.

“Now listen carefully, Masters,” Joso said, breaking the silence as we approached the N’Kele square. “I don’t know if you’ve already figured it out, but you can’t move the sightings around. If a bead shows, say, what will happen at seven o’five February twenty-seventh, that’s what it will show until a tick,” –

Tak and I nodded, unsure where Joso was leading.

– “And even then, if the gap between bead sightings is, say, three hours and fifteen seconds, it will always stay the same. A tick does not change that – it simply shifts all sightings by one bead to the left, discarding the one that shows the present, and adding a new one in the future.

“Now, you see,” he continued, “very few among the young Masters get a click lined up with the exact time during the Ceremony when they need to raise their hand and step forward. And that’s the problem you’ll have to solve a year from now,” Joso concluded with a smile, stopping next to the Maker, which was now covered in hides and hidden under a makeshift tent for protection against elements.

“So you’ve brought us here to brag about a problem that you’ve solved?” I asked.

“You’re too mean to me,” Joso said. “I’ll show you my solution, just like my predecessor did. Although it might not work for your N’Kele, depending on its timing, you might be able to adapt it. You see, my beads are spaced by exactly seventeen hours, twenty-six minutes and thirty-one seconds, and, before the Ceremony, I happened to see myself standing in this very spot and naming my position in the Ceremony order.”

“We only have a watch this precise at M’Julu’s laboratory,” I said. “Are you going to stand here for the better part of the hour, repeating ‘I was fourth, I was fourth?’ That’d be quite a sight,” I added, nudging Tak with an elbow.

“No, I’ll say it just once, thanks to this –” Saying that, Joso brought his hand to my face, hiding something in it. As I bent to look, he pinched my nose with two fingers and yelled “Joso from the past, you were fourth,” after which he let me go and laughed.

“Sorry, young Master,” he added, now enunciating “Master” with unrestrained irony, “but that’s exactly what I saw seventeen hours ago. Since I doubt you’d let me repeat the process, I must have guessed the right moment, and Joso from the past is now all set for the Ceremony yesterday.”

Try as I might to find a proper retort, nothing better came than a surprise shin kick, which Joso dodged.

“Such a precious lesson, and that’s what I get for gratitude!” Joso teased, backing off. After a few steps, he spun around and trod away, knowing that though he was two years older, we’d be evenly matched in a scuffle.

Tak and I returned to the barn, devising a thousand and one ways to get back at Joso. In no more than fifteen minutes, however, both the grievance and our stratagems were forgotten. Like a match thrown into the heart of a blazing star, all the worries I’d had till that moment evaporated in the instant my fingers squeezed the cold bead of my N’Kele, and when, no matter how hard I tried, I felt nothing but a muddled confusion of colors, smells, and sounds.