“Aje is the understanding of creation,” the kite said. “Aje is the force of justice and retribution. Aje is the balance that completes pairs. Aje requires understanding, compassion and morality, beyond most humans’ limited understanding of such things. Aje maintains the harmony of society by enforcing earthly and cosmic laws and by ensuring humans respect and obey the unspoken truths, or else be punished for their transgressions. Aje is naturally passed down from mother to daughter, yet it can also be created through initiation. If the seeker has the will, and a heart that speaks loudly, they may become Aje, they may become Iyaami.”
Anne had reached the end of the gallery, the end of the long rows of begging, demanding masks. There was a final mask and it had no face, no features; it was made of clear glass and something beneath it was the source of the brilliant light. Anne reached out to the mask and found as she touched it that it had no voice, no promises, no threats.
“The Iyaami hear creation’s silent voice in all things in this world and the others. The Iyaami sing to creation, and it respects their will, as they respect it.”
Anne removed the glass mask from the gallery wall and as she did it shattered silently into a million shards. There was a sharp sting of pain in her hand as the glass cut her. Each piece of the mask, as it fell, evaporated into nothing. The pain diminished as Anne looked up from her bleeding hand and stared into her own face, reflected in a beautiful mirror.
“The Iyaami stand alone, among Olodumare, and Orisha, among beasts, and man. They are and must always be,” the bird said. “This is your initiation, your beginning and your end.”
Anne’s hand bled and throbbed. The kite was before her now, no longer a bird but a woman, dressed in robes of brown and tan, matching the kite’s markings. She wore a mask that was a huge bird’s skull, the beak painted a brilliant yellow.
“Who are you?” Anne asked, clutching her bleeding hand.
“If you remove this mask,” the woman said, and it was the same voice as the kite’s, “if you removed any of these masks, tell me what face would you see beneath?”
Anne awoke. She was reaching out to remove the bird mask, but the dream had evaporated. It was still dark out, but she heard the gruff caw of a bird. Her extended hand was covered in dripping blood, but there was no mark upon it.
* * *
The company was finishing the morning meal when Yoruba warriors arrived at the camp. They spoke with Adu in an animated conversation that ended with many muskets being aimed. The Ahosi readied their own guns and blades. Anne jumped up.
“Stop! Nobody do anything, bloody hold!” she shouted. “What is it now?” she said to Adu. “What’s going on?”
“We have been summoned before the Ooni, the king,” Adu said, “his mystics and the city’s priests. Apparently they are not happy with you.”
“What a refreshing change,” Anne said. “This your doing?” Adu shook his head.
“No, but I sense unseen forces moving to thwart you, and I can’t determine who, or what. You need to be careful.”
“‘Unseen forces,’ ‘need to be careful,’ you’re a peggin’ banquet of sagacity,” she said.
“You get what you pay for,” Adu said.
* * *
The Oke-Ile, the king’s palace, was on a hilly rise overlooking the rest of Ife. The five city quarters all radiated out from the palace, literally the center of the Yoruba universe. The soldiers marched Anne, Belrose, Nourbese and Adu down one of the main streets of the city. Masked onlookers muttered and pointed at Anne and Belrose’s red hair. Anne waved back and Belrose chuckled.
“It appears we are the devil’s own,” he said. “White and red-headed, positively diabolic.”
The guards had insisted on Anne’s party leaving their firearms behind. Nourbese had commanded the nine Amazons with her to get word to the others to prepare for the worst. They agreed on a signal.
“Nervous without your guns?” Nourbese said as they walked past the crowds milling on the street. The guards shouted and cleared the way for the group. “Most whites are.” Anne shrugged.
“I didn’t need them to lay your boat out, as I recall,” she said. “I’ll manage.”
The closer they traveled to the center, the more sacred and revered the architecture became. They passed the sacred groves and gardens dedicated to Oduduwa, the mythical founder of the city, a shrine to the warrior god, Ogun, and the temple dedicated to Araba Agbaye, the chief diviner of the universe.
The palace was built to stand at the crossroads of the city’s three major roads. Crossroads, Adu explained, were locations of great spiritual power in Yoruba Vodun. The crossroad before the palace that Anne, Belrose, Nourbese and Adu were marched along was known as “the king’s mouth.”
The gates to the palace were tall, brightly polished bronze doors. Past the gates were a series of mud-walled buildings stretching across the compound. These buildings included barracks and quarters, as well as the private sanctuaries of their royal oracles.
Their escort was joined by other warriors, most with guns, until they were outnumbered five to one. They were led into the throne room through an ancient door of dark wood. The door was carved with images of kings, gods and warriors as well as faces that reminded Anne of her dream.
Ojigidiri, the Ooni of Ife, was a middle-aged man in an old man’s body, his face hidden behind a bronze mask that Anne suspected was actually fashioned to look like a younger version of his own features. He wore a long loin cloth and several heavy necklaces of gold and ivory. Adu had mentioned on the way to Ife that the Ooni was forbidden to leave the city and only appeared outside the palace during certain annual festivals and rites. It showed in the king’s physique. His body was softer than Agaja’s, with no scars or signs of battle, and he had a prodigious gut.
The room was full of men, dozens of them, all in masks, all talking. Their conversations hushed as the party was escorted into the room and brought before the throne. Besides the beautiful decorations of bronze and terracotta sculpture that adorned the room, there was a large wooden table that stood a few yards before the throne. The table was covered with cloth.
“My diviners tell me your presence here angers the Orishas,” the Ooni said. His English was not bad, and his voice was higher pitched than his body would have suggested, and it sounded hollow and metallic behind his mask. “The priests say they have had dreams of your coming, woman, and they say the same. The gods are angry with you, and wish you to go no further in your journey.”
“Nobody likes me these days,” Anne said. “Well, your majesty, how exactly do we settle this, then?” She looked over her shoulder at the soldiers, with their guns loaded and ready for a word from their god-king to open fire. She saw Belrose figuring the odds and planning where he’d move. Nourbese was doing the same, occasionally giving her a bitter glance. Even Adu looked worried, but remained still as a column.
“I have consulted the oracles, the mouth of the Orishas,” the king said. “You must show your loyalty, your respect, to the gods.”
Two of the masked priests removed the cover off the table and revealed row upon row of masks, each representing a god. She could almost hear the echo of their voices whispering from their vacant mouths. Anne looked back at her people. Belrose and Nourbese both looked relieved. Adu looked … lost. Anne looked across the table, then turned to the Ooni.
“And what happens once I choose?” Anne asked.
“You join us in celebration and thanksgiving to the spirits that we serve,” the king said. “You will be given all the supplies you need to continue your journey and protection through my empire and the realms of my kin.”
“A moment to consult with my … diviner, your majesty?” The king reclined in his throne and immediately had a priest at either shoulder hissing words into his ears. Anne stepped back to her people and they huddled, whispering.
“Pick a damn god and let’s be on our way,” Belrose said. “I thought for sure they were going to shoot us and then eat us!
”
“Spoken like a true European pig,” Nourbese said. “You must choose carefully, Bonny. A callous choice will reflect poorly on you with all the Orishas and into the afterlife. Choose the one that speaks to your soul, your true self. This is a sacred thing.”
“This would explain the energies gathering to oppose you that I sensed,” Adu said. “The gods and spirits wish to know where you stand in the scheme of things. Truly, the universe itself is aligning against you.”
“They’re real,” Anne said. “They’re all real and they all are ganging up on me?”
“In this city, with these people, yes,” Adu said. “They are as real as you or I. There are places upon this earth where the forces of other worlds, other rules, apply.”
Anne looked over at the table, then back to Adu. She looked a little frightened. “What … what should I do?”
“I … cannot say,” Adu said. Anne arched an eyebrow and stared at the mystic for a moment, and he stared back, then she nodded.
“Get ready,” she said to her companions, and turned back to address the king.
“Ready?” Belrose whispered to Nourbese. “Ready for what?”
“Who can say with her,” Nourbese replied. “She’s mad, that’s why the gods hate her.”
“I’m ready to choose,” Anne said to the king and the assemblage of soothsayers and holy men, who fell silent once again.
“Choose which god your soul is yoked to, girl,” Ojigidiri said. Anne walked to the table, circled it. She looked across the masks to the assemblage of those who made their coin off the gods: a crowd of hungry false faces, all studying her intently, waiting, ready to claim her. Among the king’s advisers, Anne now saw the old woman in the bird-skull mask, waiting as well. No one else seemed to notice her, and when Anne looked again, the bird-woman was gone.
“Do you wish to wait until I am a god myself?” the king asked. “Come along now, girl!” The men of the court chuckled at Anne’s uncertainty and hesitation. Anne looked over the faces of the gods a final time.
“I’ll have none of them,” Anne said. “I’ve got no use for the lot!” There was an uproar from the oracles, the shamans, angry voices behind frozen visages. The king stood, his voice shaking behind his metal face.
“Execute them all!” he cried. “The gods demand blood for such arrogance!”
“The gods want blood,” Anne snarled. “We’ll give ’em blood.” Anne flipped the table, and the masks flew everywhere, clattering, crashing to the stone floor.
There was a shimmer in the air, like the heat coming off the ground in stifling summer. Anne caught sight of a blur of bright yellow moving about the throne room. The blur was gone as quickly as it had appeared. The Yoruba warriors had raised their rifles to open fire on the company, but their guns crumbled before their eyes into broken pieces of wood and steel in their hands. Not a single shot was fired. Anne drew her machete as Belrose, Nourbese and Adu drew their own swords.
Anne dove toward a trio of stunned guards closest to her, each frantically fumbling for their Ida blades. “Nourbese, the signal!” Anne shouted as she crashed into the mass of warriors. Anne opened one man’s throat before his blade had completely cleared his scabbard, drew and claimed the warrior’s sword as her own with her free hand. Continuing the turn, out and away from the spray of blood, Anne slashed another warrior’s mask with her machete and followed through by stabbing his companion’s stolen sword deep into his chest. The second Yoruba warrior groaned, red bubbles foaming at his mask’s lips, and died. Anne managed to parry the third warrior’s blade, high, with her own, while she planted a foot on the second warrior and pulled her newly acquired blade free of the dead man’s chest as he thudded to the ground.
Belrose gave a brief salute to the soldiers who closed upon him, a look of peace settling over the former Musketeer’s face. Belrose’s slender blade made the very air hum with its speed and the force with which the mercenary wielded it. He used the extra length of his rapier to excellent advantage, piercing the eye, then the brain of one and opening the artery in the throat of another before the remaining Yoruba could get within range with their shorter, heavier and wider Ida. The two men fell dead and the other two circled Belrose, looking for an opening in the Frenchman’s whirring wall of defense; his foil seemed to be everywhere at once. If Anne’s fighting style was a drunken tavern jig, then Belrose’s was ballet.
Nourbese slipped a small ball out of her satchel as she maimed a charging warrior with a low slice to the leg that made the man fall, screaming. She used the second his fall gave her, blocking his companions, to fall back behind Belrose’s guard. The iron sphere was roughly the size of a piece of marula fruit. Nourbese and Adu had painted various symbols for household guardian spirits and protector orishas on its uneven and pitted surface. The Yoruba had ignored it when Nourbese explained it was a Fon woman’s tool for crushing grain into meal. She removed the plug in the ball and turned it to reveal a primer fitted into the other side. She popped the plug back into the ball’s hole, which was filled with black powder.
Nourbese fell back more, and spent a moment dueling with two more Yoruba warriors. She allowed the two men to follow her back to the wall of the throne room. Once she felt the wall’s cool smooth surface against her back, the Amazon drove the iron ball into one of the guards’ faces. The warrior’s teeth shattered like glass and his nose made a sound like a snapping twig as it broke, and he tumbled back clutching his face. The other guard pressed his attack at that moment. Nourbese parried his blade low and then reached up without taking her eyes off the warrior she was dueling and held the primer to the guttering torch in a sconce high on the wall. When she heard the hiss of fuse, she brought the armed grenadoe, a pirate bomb Bonny had given her to use if needed, down. She turned the Yoruba’s blade aside and hacked a deep wound into his left shoulder, almost taking off his arm. She turned and tossed the bomb through one of the narrow windows that ran along the top of the throne room wall, and managed to pivot in time to narrowly avoid being run through by the warrior with the broken nose and teeth. They traded another round of lunges and parries before there was a tremendous, reverberating explosion from the grenadoe, and the whole palace seemed to shake.
The worst of the blast hit the other side of the wall, but the explosion still sent a strange, queasy ripple through the bellies of everyone in the throne room, and their ears felt as if they were filled with water from the fury of the blast. The wall behind Nourbese began to crack and crumble. The Amazon let fly a series of powerful attacks that drove her opponent backward so that now his back was to the spasming wall. Nourbese felt daylight warm her face and she broke off her onslaught and let the collapsing wall finish off her opponent. A huge section of wall struck the Yoruba on the head and then more debris buried him.
Anne had four warriors on her now, and she didn’t have time to do more than give a quick glance in the direction of the crumbling wall. She saw Adu was surrounded by a half-dozen soldiers too. The ancient man had his blade lowered, and was standing still, his head down and his eyes closed. He said something to the men but she couldn’t make it out over the ringing from the explosion in her ears and the low tone of his voice. The men raised their blades and closed on Adu. Anne had to concentrate on saving her own skin at that point. She parried with one blade and tried to force a line through the men circling her. It wasn’t working. She felt an impact and then a sharp sting on her upper leg. The warrior to her left rear had scored a minor hit. Nothing too bad—a few stitches, at best—but it showed her defense was beginning to falter. She took advantage of the warrior’s overextended line to hack at him, scoring a deep slash to his upper chest. The man cursed her and fell back, but one of his fellows took advantage of Anne’s assault to swing a powerful overhead blow at her upper back and right arm; even her spine was vulnerable in that instant. The warrior’s sword was parried at the last instant by Nourbese’s blade. The Amazon drew two of the warriors off Anne and the two women circled each other in dea
dly orbits, swords swinging, spiraling, flashing.
“The signal has been sent,” Nourbese said matter-of-factly.
“I noticed,” Anne replied. “Thanks.”
Anne spared a second to see how Adu was faring. All six warriors were dead, their blood on Adu’s sword. The mystic was still standing, head bowed, eyes closed, arms open as if inviting his assassins to move closer as another group of Yoruba fighters took his bait.
Belrose was careening about the room gracefully, leaping from spot to spot, killing as he darted. He jumped onto the throne itself, and used its high back as a rearguard, tipping the heavy chair back so it and he were balancing on only two of the chair’s legs as he parried and then dispatched two more guards. Belrose joyfully launched himself from the teetering throne to dive into a mob of Yoruba guards. The king, his holy advisers and seers were all shouting, cursing, praying and cowering in the section of the room behind the throne.
All Anne could see were masks and blades everywhere, crashing, shouting, steel biting steel. She had an ugly wound on her side now, to share with the one bleeding on her leg. Anne had got it saving Nourbese from a warrior’s frantic advance. The two women were back to back now. They had killed dozens, but there were still too many to count.
She had known that, known that rejecting the gods, rejecting the king and the priests and the oracles’ control would lead to this. They were going to die, they were all going to die, because of her and her … what, whatever the hell pushed her, filled her up with blinding, burning anger and made her do the things she did. Every choice she had made in her life was pushing its way into her mind, unbidden but unrelenting.
“Why?” her father was asking. “You fight against your schoolmaster, you fight against the priests, you openly defy me at every turn. Why do you do it, Annie?”
“Andy,” she corrected. “Always Andy, remember, Da?” She was twelve, and living in Charleston. In months, her mother would be gone, and looming in her near future was beautiful, dangerous Jim Bonny and the beginning of the life she chose, a chaotic, bloody, joyful, miserable pageant. There were thin scars on her arms and legs, some of them crimson, others pale, faded ghosts of her secret war, her constant struggle to control the pain, the rage, her life.
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