Black Panther by Jesse J. Holland

Author:Jesse J. Holland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Titan

RETURN OF THE QUEEN

TANANARIVE DUE

YOU CANNOT truly know any nation unless your feet have touched its soil, T’Chaka had often said on long foot treks he had forced his son to endure as a boy, answering T’Challa’s complaints about walking so many kilometers when hoverbikes were plentiful. As a prince, he could have chosen from a fleet of hoverbikes!

His father was less stern during their long walks, one of the reasons T’Challa secretly had looked forward to those journeys despite his blistered feet. Over the years, it seemed they had walked Wakanda from end to end, one tract at a time. As his father had expected, T’Challa learned to value the difference in the texture and color of the grasses in Birnin Azzaria and the Alkama Fields, the crispness of the mountain air in the Jabari-Lands, the grasslands drenched with the rich golden strawberry hues of dusk. When reporters and researchers asked him to describe his attachment to his homeland, he did not think first, as they did, of the valuable stores in the Vibranium mines, the mystical legacy of the Heart-Shaped Herb, or the wonders in his laboratory—he thought of the unparalleled coffee crops and plentiful cape crows and the beauty of the mighty cascading froth at Warrior Falls he had gazed upon at his father’s side.

You cannot truly know any nation unless your feet have touched its soil. T’Chaka always finished his adage by saying, Just as you cannot know another’s heart until you have walked at their side.

Today, after only a short afternoon’s walk in the midday sun with the Queen of Canaan, T’Challa had learned a lifetime’s worth about the neighboring monarchy—not from the woman’s grief-drenched words, but from her soil. And from the aged queen’s weary walk.

The land in the Kingdom of Canaan was dead. Dark veins of shadow traversed the soil like uncountable gnarled fingers, making the plain appear as rows of stones. Queen Sojourner Truth, an American expatriate like many of this nation’s citizens, at times stumbled across the uneven soil, but even at her advanced age, she was too proud to accept the assistance of T’Challa’s subtly outstretched arm. No land in Wakanda had ever been so parched, had ever known drought. As a boy, T’Challa had not realized how little Wakanda resembled the rest of the world, even the nations closest to him. The mopane trees that shared their border did not know if they were Wakandan or Canaanite. But Wakanda’s soil sang with fertility. Here, dust floated as if the nation itself might blow away in a breeze.

“Shoot—we saw the drought in South Africa and pitied their dilemma,” Queen Truth said. “How’s that for irony? Shared resources. Loans. And then, nearly overnight, we have the same problem—and worse. Even when it rains, the ground soaks it up so fast there’s no water left for the crops. It evaporates. Farming is in ruins, of course. But worse, our water supply is dwindling as if it’s being sucked beneath the soil. It’s just not natural.

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