Fatona wondered what the owner of the boneship wanted. Was it Olodumare in disguise, testing their settlement of refugees before gifting them a better future if they passed said test? No. Not after all they had seen in the shared dream. Olodumare would never corrupt his creation to pass a message or bestow a gift. The girl was right: it was a thief coming.
The third babalawo decided he would wait, to see what would happen.
✦✦✦
The thief came at the witching hour.
Gbemisola Olohun awoke, her eyes flying open. She began to cry, calling with every three breaths in elongated tones to all who could hear. They have come.
The sky above Osupa surged with faint violet light. Awojobi and Fagbeja woke after Gbemisola. They moved towards where she seemed riveted to the mat, screaming on her back, her body stiff as wood. They have come, she announced continually. Awojobi, covered neck to toe in dust-stained white, his head bowed to the ground, went outside to ascertain her announcement. When he looked up and saw a shapeless hole rippling with violet light, growing across the sky, he turned his heel and walked out of Osupa. They have come. He was never seen again.
Fagbeja was able to move Gbemisola Olohun to stand on her feet. He didn’t know what else to do. Another object-potency striking her flesh might do her permanent damage. She stood but did not stop crying at the top of her lungs between moments of utter calm. They have come. Fatona stirred at her cry and woke up. Her eyes were wide open, staring hard at the air before her, blind to Fagbeja’s presence. They have come.
Fagbeja walked outside to see the people of Osupa sleepwalk out of their huts. Behind him, Gbemisola’s clarion call became louder. Up in the sky where he looked, he saw as in the shared dream, a blackness staining the night, the emergence of a void in the flesh of reality. They have come. The violet light radiating from the core of the void intensified. Fagbeja could finally hear what was wrong. The night was quiet as a stone; no insect or frog or bird made a peep. They have come. He turned and walked to the lake, out of Osupa, his head and heart beginning to boil over with the always unfamiliar static of madness. He put the pod of poison in his teeth and crushed it, swallowing as he walked into the lake, to sleep beneath pale waters the color of corn cream. They have come.
Fatona watched as Gbemisola walked out of the shrine, her head locked into her shoulders. She did not seem to be losing any steam or power and her voice showed no signs of cracking or fraying, instead it seemed to grow stronger, resonating down the length of her body and out into the air around her. They have come. Fatona shuddered. The time had come. There was only so much he could do.
He turned to Akanbi, who remained rock asleep, and checked with his fingers if he was still breathing. He was, but was strangely exhaling once for every six breaths which Fatona himself let out. Fatona covered him with a piece of white cloth and followed Gbemisola, who was making her way slowly out of the shrine, through the billowing doors of cloth into the night. They have come.
Fatona stepped out of the shrine behind Gbemisola and beheld the people of Osupa, standing and waiting, sleeping on their feet. They have come. Awojobi and Fagbeja were nowhere to be found. He turned back into the shrine to be sure he was seeing right. Yes, his brothers were gone.
“Wake up!” he said as he ran into the midst of the sleepwalkers, panic settling into him. He clapped his hands and shook the shoulders of Gbolahan Olohun, and slapped the faces of the swimmer brothers who had brought Gbemisola and Akanbi to the shrine on the day that they were struck. They have come. Nothing happened.
“Wake up!” Fatona screamed again, and Gbemisola, whose voice had become an essential part of the tone of the air, shut up.
Fatona looked at her. Her face was turned upwards to the widening void in the sky. The brightness of the violet light was now rippling off the earth and the huts and the bodies of the people of Osupa, like midnight sun rippling off water. Fatona watched as all the sleepwalkers around him lifted their heads to look at the sky, their eyes shut.
The prow of the boneship, dark as raw charcoal, broke the surface of the void in the sky. Just as in the dream, it sailed out, titanic and weightless, graceful and deformed. Every inch of its surface was engraved in the language that he had seen in the shared dream. The symbols of this language burned and sparked with violet fire in rapid winks and flashes. It made no sound, even the burning of its symbols was soundless. Fatona was wide-awake. The void through which the boneship had sailed out continued to shimmer with violet light even as the language engraved on the body of the ship glinted and flashed rapidly.
The people of Osupa screamed when they opened their sleeping eyes to behold the behemoth. Gbemisola Olohun was the first to catch on lilac fire and shoot into the belly of the boneship. She did not scream like the others who, looking at the ship, were trapped and unable to move their bodies or shut their eyes. She sailed up silently. Once she entered the ship, all the symbols on its body exploded in unison and sent a wave of light across the sky before dying down into nothing. The ship was now black as a cold coal.
A single symbol lit up and another person screamed as they were ripped out of their world into the guts of the ship. The symbols began to flash haphazardly, as people caught fire and flew up into the boneship. Some of the people of Osupa combusted with the beautiful fire and turned into ash without flying to the ship.
Fatona watched as they all went up into the gut of the boneship trailing threads of faintest light. Everyone stood and looked bored, insensate, until the moment. The moment a single wail left their mouths just as their bodies caught on fire and they ascended into the black body of the ship. The boneship swallowed all without discrimination: women who had escaped war and men who had refused it and children who did not know its scars until later in their lives.
Fatona staggered backwards away from the harvest, his mind deciding too late that he should have done as his brothers and escaped the moment he realized what was happening. Awojobi had always said his heart was too soft to belong to a babalawo. There were three of them left behind—Akanbi’s guardian, an orphan girl who loved to mold clay heads and talk to them, and him. He watched as the girl screamed loud enough to cause his ears to ring, then her body caught on the hungry fire that was white inside and purple outside. She rose into the air and vanished into the boneship. Iya Akanbi raised her hands up in praise. She screamed as the fire engulfed and pulled her up.
Fatona looked around at Osupa. It was empty. Sadness filled him. He was afraid. He did not look up but only spun around in a circle, riveted to the earth. The boneship remained silent above him.
He remembered Akanbi and moved towards the shrine doors, which were motionless in the stillness of this arcane robbery.
A waterfire that was both cold and hot bloomed in his stomach and flowed up to his heart before it surged out, sank into his skin and wrapped around his long white toga. He threw his head back and screamed in ecstatic agony till his throat seemed to tear.
He went numb, and in his blindness, he became nothing.
TWO
I
SLEEPLESS
Akanbi’s eyes flew open.
He rolled over on the bed of layered cloth and saw that he was alone. The firepit burnt low, the coals going to sleep under a blanket of ash. The air was completely still. Akanbi heard his breath as it slid in and out of his body.
He tried to remember what had awakened him. He last remembered the black bone in the sky eating more and more bodies. Gbemisola had left him alone in the flat green place. He had continued to look and call alone, even as the dream cycled back to the bright spotless plain again, and the big man in white stood in the sky and looked at him with pity in his eyes, his cloth bright as a sun. When the big man disappeared, the winds began to ripple and the blackness of the void started to stain the fabric of the dream.
Gbemisola returned one more time, but there was no more song on her lips; instead she wept as she saw the bodies burn on their way up to the bo
neship. She disappeared in a blink as the nightmare reached the point where the black bone returned into the wound and the wound closed up. Akanbi had noticed her vanish but he couldn’t turn his head until the bone was gone.
Akanbi sat in the shrine and every bone in his back cracked in a chorus. Sharp pains shot through his stomach and enveloped his head. He groaned and remembered. The big man had finally spoken to him, his deep voice circling the flat sky and plain in reverberating echoes. “Wake up, Akanbi! You must follow your people immediately.”
He stood up with great difficulty. His head swam with a migraine that nearly sent him back to the floor. He leaned forward and retched. The white wrapper that Fatona had placed on his body remained on his shoulders. Akanbi began to sob, the discomfort in his body unbearable. The earth rumbled loud and brief, as if a herd of elephants had suddenly run through Osupa with the speed of a bush rat. He stood up, forgetting all pains. It was still dark outside. He walked forward over Gbemisola’s bed, tottering and swaying, fatigued.
Akanbi knew that Osupa was already empty, but feeling it in reality made him want to go back to sleep. The night outside yawned with uncertainty and this, this new trembling outside. He walked across the shrine, one unstable step after the other.
The shrine was hung with various strips of white cloth, horns and teeth in strings. Bundles of object-potencies made from wood, limestone and mud swung in pouches from the roof. He walked past the altar which sat at the center of the shrine—three different statues of pale gold, black and dark red wood stood in a triangle on a layer of wood-shavings. Around their knees stood more object-potencies, a golden pyramid and several cubes of white marble. The statues were carved bluntly, exaggerating the features of their owners. Beside the statues was a gourd of chalkwater. Behind the altar, a white cloth hung covered completely in cowries. Akanbi’s pointed cap was beside the altar. He bent and picked it up. The cowries rattled in the breeze that was now blowing through the shrine. It smelled sweet, of unwashed body, rotten fish and soil after rain.
Akanbi tottered past the altar and towards the billowing door of cloth. He stopped just before it. The cloth blew around his body as his heart beat hard in his chest. He wondered if the big orisha in white was protecting him. He prayed for strength, shut his eyes and walked forward into the night.
When he opened his eyes again, Osupa was empty as he expected. The huts in a circle around the shrine were hollow and void of firelight and the chatter of people. Looking closer, he saw that there was something different in the low light of the waning moon above. Akanbi saw what had caused the brief rumble of the earth. There was a pit in the ground which looked like an open mouth, red and black and slippery inside. Something heavy began to rise up out of the mouth. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
The last thud of her small feet brought the ofiliganga out of the gut of the earth where she and her sisters lived. Akanbi took three steps backward as she walked onto the land of Osupa properly. She was five times as tall as Akanbi, and thick as a full-grown tree. Soggy skin the color of overripe oranges hung in fatty layers around her wide body. She was naked as a worm. Every inch of her body jiggled gently as she finally heaved her bulk to a stop. Her head was bald. Eyes and full thick lips took up either half of her face and her nose was a small nib in between.
Akanbi didn’t know what to say. They both stared at each other for what seemed like forever, so much that Akanbi could now tell that dawn was on its way. Her eyes were clear pools of shifting black glass. They unnerved Akanbi. He held on tighter to his cap as new waves of hunger surged through him. The ofiliganga lifted her arms and spread them out on either side of her body, still looking towards where Akanbi stood. She brought them together with a clap! The air shuddered. Akanbi’s bones seemed like sand and he fell to his knees.
“Boy. Nla Nla calls you.” Akanbi stood up to his feet and bent over. His stomach was going to eat him before he understood anything that was happening to him.
“Do you hear me boy? Come down now.” Her voice was deep and husky and made him feel suddenly surrounded by smoke.
Akanbi nodded. She turned back towards the slick red mouth in the ground, swinging buttocks each the size of a boulder over Akanbi’s head.
“Follow me.” Her voice echoed into the pit and she thudded down inside. Akanbi followed, sliding his abeti aja over his head. He looked back at the empty land of Osupa before he slid down, following the ofiliganga into the sticky warmth within the belly of the earth.
II
BONESHIP
The stolen bodies from Osupa numbered a total of fifty-five. They each lay fetal, entombed in clear eggs that hung in the void of the belly of the boneship. Each egg was streaked with veins that glowed like trapped lightning. All the veins led into the throats and circled the heads of the catatonic human beings, pulsing as it nourished or fed on them. The clothes on their bodies were disintegrating slowly, dissolving into clouds of color.
The people of Osupa neither slept nor dreamt as the boneship streaked through an endlessness of stars, planets and moons and swirling eyes made of stardust. It shuddered as it broke through wave and portal, a grain of sand in an ocean of process and disorder, chance and order. It rode currents made by the sinuous bodies of suneaters and passed beneath wars flashing silent in systems beyond.
Eventually it started to move so fast that it seem to have stopped moving altogether. The black coal of its body began to burn, heating up to an unimaginable degree in the span of three breaths. It vibrated white hot in a standstill spot, although it was now moving at the speed of light. Then it disappeared, or rather it moved forward from the speed of light into that of thought and all of the cosmos stopped and the path of the flight of the boneship ceased to be linear. It spun with dizzying speed, carving circles of white fire in the void of the cosmos. Its motions became more ragged and haphazard as it swam through the body of the universe, traversing the breadth of twenty galaxies in mere blinks.
After a while, the boneship winked out of existence into the unknown.
III
AKANBI IN THE NEST OF THE OFILIGANGA
The ofiliganga thundered down the throat inside the earth. The air became more humid and dense with powerful smells as Akanbi slipped and slid after the running giantess. The earth beneath his feet was red and wet with mud. The ofiliganga reached the end of the tunnel and jumped. Akanbi’s mouth fell open as he slid down the slope after her just in time to watch her fold into a ball as she fell down inside a vast well that made her large bulk seem inconsequential. He followed, slipping off the edge like an object flung, falling into nothingness.
Akanbi wanted to scream but did not. The feeling of falling into a hole in the earth made his belly feel hollow and cold, scraped of all its soft warmth. He held on to the abeti aja on his head as he fell head down, his heart beat slowing, the sickening cold in his belly growing. He heard a thud that reverberated through what he realized by the echo that widened forever, to be a cavern. The ofiliganga had landed on solid ground. Akanbi tried to turn around or twist his body, but the speed of his fall was immense and afforded him no extra motions, except to put his hand on his head. After falling for another eternal moment, Akanbi suddenly felt the ground rushing up to meet his face; it was the head rising off it that made him know. He started to scream, loud and unstable; but he barely got any sound out before he collided with a mound of softness that shut him up.
The mound drew him slowly into what felt like a pool of deep, warm dough, softer than fresh mud. Akanbi was plastered on all sides by it, but still kept sinking slowly, not yet done falling. Then his fall stopped abruptly. The thick warmth still covered him on all sides. He heard a familiar sound begin to surround him. dim.dim. dim.dim. dim.dim. Heartbeats. As the mound ceased to yield, causing him to rise back up to its surface, Akanbi realized he was surrounded by skin and sunken into the flesh of a great body. He struggled to sit up, but it was no use. The body was too soft, and his legs gave before he could even kneel properly
.
A hand pulled at his waist and he was lifted through the air and placed on hard solid ground again. Akanbi wobbled and then stood still. His eyes adjusted to the lightless pit into which he had fallen, and he saw a host of very dim fires burning inside the sleeping bodies all around him. They beat: dim, dim, dim, dim. A nest of ofiliganga. Their massive voluptuous bodies rose in furrowed hills and valleys and layers dark and fair around him.
“Boy, come.” The ofiliganga that brought him was standing right in front of him. He could barely see her apart from the mass of bodies lying around. Her voice was even deeper down here inside the earth.
“Boy, don’t make any sound or the sisters wake and you no like that.” Akanbi nodded.
“Boy, look where you put your feet.”
He checked for the wholeness of his body, which was already adjusting to the warmth of the bodies around. His abeti aja was in place and the white wrapper under whose cover he had woken in Osupa was still around his neck and shoulders.
“We no see toy in longest time,” she said as she began to walk forward, swinging her body like a cat down the path that the bodies of the sleeping ofiliganga created. Her footsteps were completely silent.
Akanbi followed. The bodies rose around as he made his way through a maze of rippling flesh. There were hundreds and hundreds of them. To the one who brought him it was a normal situation but to him it was like walking through a dense forest made of limbs and buttocks, a house of sleeping skin.
After a while, Akanbi could feel the motion of their warmth rushing past him like an invisible river, could see little details and tell if he was looking at fingers or toes or shut eyes. And he could see bellies moving and hear breaths hissing.
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