“Okay,” I said.
He paused. “This is difficult. I’ve never spoken this aloud. It is strange.”
I waited.
“There are four points,” he said loudly. “Okike, Alusi, Mmuo, Uwa.”
“Okike?” I asked, before I could stop myself. “But . . .”
“Just names. The Great Book says that Okeke people were the first people on earth. The Mystic Points were known long before this wretched book existed. A sorcerer who believed he was a prophet wrote the Great Book. Names, names, names,” he said with a wave of his hands. “They don’t always equal up.”
“Okay,” I said.
“The Uwa Point represents the physical world, the body,” Aro said. “Change, death, life, connection. You’re Eshu. That is your tool to manipulate it with.”
I nodded, frowning.
“The Mmuo Point is the wilderness,” he said, moving his hand as if it traveled over ripples of water. “Your great energy allows you to glide through the wilderness while carrying the baggage of life. Life is very heavy. You’ve been to the wilderness twice. I suspect that there have been other times where you’ve stepped into it.”
“But . . .”
“Don’t interrupt,” he said. “The Alusi point represents forces, deities, spirits, non-Uwa beings. The masquerade you met the day you came here was an Alusi. The wilderness is populated by them. The Uwa world is also ruled by Alusi. Silly magic men and fortune-tellers believe it is the other way around.” He laughed dryly.
“Lastly, the Okike Point represents the Creator. This point cannot be touched. No tool can turn the back of the Creator toward what It has created.” He spread his hands. “We call the sorcerer’s toolbox that contains the sorcerer’s tools Bushcraft.” He stopped talking and waited. I took my cue to ask my questions.
“How can I . . . I was in the wilderness, did that mean I was dead?”
Aro just shrugged. “Words, names, words, names. They don’t matter sometimes.” He clapped his hands together and got up. “I’m going to teach you something that will make you sick. Mwita has a lesson with the healer today but that can’t be helped. He’ll be back soon enough to care for you if need be. Come. Let’s go tend to my goats.”
A black goat and a brown goat sat in the shade in the shed near Aro’s hut. As we approached, the black goat stood up and turned around. We had a nice view of its anus opening up to push out tiny round black balls of feces. It made the place smell that much more strongly of goat, musky and pungent in the dry heat. I frowned and flared my nostrils, disgusted. I’d never liked the smell of goats, though I ate the meat.
“Ah, one has volunteered,” Aro laughed. He led the black goat by its small horns around to the back of the hut. “Take it,” he said, putting my hand to its horn. Then he went into his hut. I looked down at the goat as it tried to yank its head from me. When I turned around, Aro was coming out of the hut with a large knife.
I raised a hand to fend him off. He stepped around me, grabbed the goat’s horn, turned its head, and slit its throat open. I was so prepared for combat that the goat’s blood and its brays of shock and pain might as well have been my own. Before I knew what I was doing, I knelt beside the terrified animal, pressed my hand to its bleeding throat, and shut my eyes.
“Not yet!” he said, grabbing my arm and yanking me back. I sat back hard in the sand. What just happened? was all I could think as the goat bled to death before my eyes. Its eyes grew sleepy. It knelt down on its knobby knees, looking accusingly at Aro.
“Never seen anyone unlearned do that,” Aro said to himself.
“Eh?” I said, out of breath, watching the goat’s life fade. My hands itched.
Aro touched his chin. “And she’d have done it, too. I’m sure of it, sha.”
“What . . .”
“Shhh,” he said, still thinking.
The goat laid its head on its hoofs, closed its eyes, and did not move. “Why did you . . .” I began.
“You remember what you did to your father?”
“Y-yes,” I said.
“Do it now,” he said. “This goat’s mmuo-a is still around, confused. Bring it back and then mend the wound as you wanted to.”
“But I don’t know how,” I said. “Before . . . I just did it.”
“Then just do it again,” he said, growing agitated. “What can I do with so much doubt, sha? Ah ah.” He pulled me up and shoved me toward the goat’s corpse. “Do it!”
I knelt down and rested my hand on its bloody neck. I shivered with revulsion, not from the dead goat, but the fact that it had died so recently. I froze. I could feel its mmuo-a moving around me. It was a light shifting in the air, a soft sandy sound nearby.
“It’s running,” I said softly.
“That’s good,” Aro said behind me, the frustration gone from his voice.
The poor thing was terrified and discombobulated. I looked at Aro. “Why did you kill it like that? That was cruel.”
“What is it with you women?” Aro snapped. “Must everything make you cry?”
Anger flared in me and I could feel the ground beneath me grow warm. Then it felt as if I knelt on hundreds of metal-bodied ants. They moved about underneath me, conducting something through me. I understood. I pulled it up from the ground and pushed it into my hands. More and more—there was an endless supply of it. I drew from my anger at Aro and from my own reserve of power. I drew from Aro’s strength, too. I’d have also drawn from Mwita if he’d been there.
“Now,” Aro said softly. “You see.”
I saw.
“Control it this time,” he said.
All my eyes saw was the goat’s dead body. But its mmuo-a ran circles around me. I felt it right next to me, its hoof on my leg as it watched what I was doing. Beneath my hand, the cut to its neck was . . . churning. The cut’s edges were knitting themselves up. The sight made me nauseated.
“Go,” I told the mmuo-a. A minute later, I removed my hand, turned my head, and was violently sick. I didn’t see the goat stand up and shake its head. I was vomiting too loudly to hear its cry of joy or feel it lay its head on my thigh in thanks. Aro helped me up. In the short walk to Mwita’s hut, I vomited again. Much of it was filled with hay and grass. My breath tasted like the odor of live goat and that made me vomit again.
“Next time, it will be better,” Aro said. “Soon, bringing back life will have little physical effect on you at all.”
Mwita returned late. Aro wasn’t a good caretaker. He made sure that I didn’t choke on my own vomit but he had no soothing words. He wasn’t that kind of man. Later that evening, Mwita shaved off the goat hairs growing on the back of my hand. He assured me that they wouldn’t grow back but what did I care? I was too sick. He didn’t ask me what had made me so ill. He knew from the day I started learning that there would be a part of me that he’d have no access to.
Mwita knew more than Jwahir’s best healer. Even the House of Osugbo thought him worthy of its books, for Mwita consumed many medical books he’d found there. Because he was such an expert on the human body, he was able to calm mine. But there were things I suffered from that came from the wilderness. He could do nothing about those. So I suffered much that night, but not as much as I could have.
This was how it was for three and half years. Knowledge, sacrifice, and headaches. Aro taught me how to converse with masquerades. This left me hearing voices and singing strange songs. The day I learned how to glide through the wilderness, I was ignorable for a week. My mother could barely see me. Several people probably thought I was dead after seeing what they thought was my ghost. Even after that, I was prone to moments of not being quite either there or here.
I learned to use my Eshu skills not only to change into other animals but to grow and change parts of my body. I realized that I could change my face a bit, altering my lips and cheekbones, and if I cut myself, I could heal the wound. Luyu, Binta, and Diti watched me as I learned. They feared for me. And sometimes they kept their distance
, fearing for themselves.
Mwita grew closer to and more distant from me. He was my healer. He was my mate, for though we could not have intercourse, we could lie in each other’s arms, kiss each other’s lips, love each other dearly. Yet, he was barred from understanding what it was that was shaping me into something he both marveled at and envied.
My mother allowed what was to be. My biological father waited.
My mind evolved and thrived. But it was all for a reason. Fate was preparing for the next phase. After I tell you, you decide for yourself if I was ready for it.
CHAPTER 24
Onyesonwu in the Market
MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE OF THE POSITION OF THE SUN. Or maybe the way that man inspected a yam. Or the way that woman considered a tomato. Or maybe it was those women laughing at me. Or that old man glaring at me. As if they all had little else to worry about. Or maybe it was the position of the sun, high in the sky, bright, sizzling.
Whatever it was, it got me thinking about my last lesson with Aro. The lesson was particularly infuriating. The purpose was for me to learn to see distant places. It was rainy season, so collecting rain water wasn’t too hard. I took the water inside Aro’s hut and concentrated on it, focusing hard on what I sought to see. The storyteller’s news from years ago was on my mind.
I expected to see Okeke people slaving for Nurus. I expected to see Nuru people going about their business as if this were normal. I must have tuned in to the worst part of the West. The rainwater showed me ripped oozing flesh, bloody erect penises, sinew, intestines, fire, heaving chests, mewling bodies engaged in evil. Without thinking, my hand slapped the clay bowl away. It crashed against the wall, breaking in two.
“It’s still happening!” I shouted at Aro who was outside tending to his goats.
“Did you think it stopped?” he said.
I had. At least for a while. Even I’d exercised some denial in order to live my life.
“It ebbs and flows,” Aro said.
“But why?? What is . . .”
“No creature or beast is happy when enslaved,” Aro said. “Nuru and Okeke try to live together, then they fight, then they try to live together, then they fight. Okeke numbers dwindle now. But you remember the prophecy that storyteller spoke of.”
I nodded. The storyteller’s words had stayed with me for years. In the West, she’d said, a Nuru seer prophesied that a Nuru sorcerer would come and change what was written.
“It will come to pass,” Aro said.
I was walking through the market, rubbing my forehead, the sun beating down as if to provoke me, when the women laughed. I turned. It had come from within a group of young women. Women my age. Around twenty. From my old school. I knew them.
“Look at her,” I heard one of them say. “Too ghastly to marry.”
I felt it go snap inside me, in my mind. The last straw. I’d had enough. Enough of Jwahir, whose people were as bloated and complacent as the Golden Lady herself. “Is something wrong?” I loudly asked the women.
They looked at me as if I were disturbing them. “Lower your voice,” one of them said. “Weren’t you raised properly?”
“She was barely raised at all, remember?” one of the others said.
Several people paused in their transactions to listen. An old man glared at me.
“What is with you people?” I said, turning around to address all around me. “All this is unimportant! Can’t you see?” I paused to catch my breath, actually hoping an audience would gather. “Yes, I am talking, come and listen. Let me answer all the questions you’ve all had about me for so long!” I laughed. The crowd was already larger than the meager gathering that came to hear the storyteller speak that night.
“Only a hundred miles away, Okeke people are being wiped away by the thousands!” I shouted, feeling my blood rise. “Yet here we all are, living in comfort. Jwahir turns her fat unmoving backside to it all. Maybe you even hope our people there will finally die off so you can stop hearing about it. Where is your passion?” I was crying now and still I stood alone. It had always been this way. This was why I decided to speak the words Aro had taught me. He’d warned me not to use these words. He said I wasn’t remotely old enough to speak them. I’ll pry your cursed eyes open, I thought as the words tumbled from my lips, smooth and easy as honey.
I won’t tell you the words. Just know I spoke them. Then I flared my nostrils and drew on the anxiety, rage, guilt, and fear swarming around me. I had unknowingly done this at Papa’s funeral and knowingly done it with the goat. I crossed over. What will they see? I wondered, suddenly afraid. Well, it can’t be helped now. I dug deep into what made me me and took them into what my mother went through.
I should never have done this.
All of us were there, only eyes, watching. There were about forty of us and we were both my mother and the man who helped make me. The man who’d been watching me since I was eleven. We watched him get off his scooter and look around. We saw him see my mother. His face was veiled. His eyes were like a tiger’s. Like mine.
We watched him ravage and destroy my mother. She was limp beneath him. She’d retreated into the wilderness and there she’d waited as she watched. She always watched. She had an Alusi in her. We felt the moment my mother’s will broke. We felt her attacker’s moment of doubt and disgust with himself. Then the rage that came from his people took him again, filling his body with unnatural strength.
I felt it inside me, too. Like a demon buried under my skin since my conception. A gift from my father, from his corrupted genetics. The potential and taste for amazing cruelty. It was in my bones, firm, stable, unmoving. Oh, I had to find and kill this man.
There was screaming from everywhere, from everyone. The Nuru men and their women, their skin like the day. And the Okeke women with skin like the night. The din was awful. Some of the men sobbed and laughed and praised Ani as they raped. Women called to Ani for help, a few of these women were Nuru. The sand was clumpy with blood and saliva and tears and semen.
I was so transfixed by the screaming that it took seconds for me to realize that it had started coming from the people in the market. I pulled in the vision as one folds up a map. Around me, people sobbed. A man fainted. Children ran in circles. I didn’t think about the children! I realized. Someone grabbed my arm.
“What have you done?” Mwita shouted. He pulled me along at such a fast pace I couldn’t immediately answer. People around us were too stunned and shaken to stop us.
“They should know!” I shouted, when I’d finally caught my breath.
We’d left the market and started up the road.
“Just because we hurt doesn’t mean others should!” Mwita said.
“It does!” I shouted. “We’re all hurting whether we know it or not! It has to stop!”
“I know!” Mwita shouted back. “I know it more than you!”
“Your father didn’t rape your mother to create you! What do you know?”
He stopped walking and grabbed my arm. “You’re out of control!” he hissed. He threw down my arm. “You only know what you’ve seen!”
I just stood there. I was far too defiant and unwilling to own up to the stupidity of my comment and my lack of self-control.
“I will tell you,” he said, lowering his voice.
“Tell me what?”
“Move,” he said. “I’ll tell you as we go. Too many eyes here.” We walked for two minutes before he spoke. “You can be really stupid sometimes.”
“So can . . .” I shut my mouth.
“You think you know the whole story, but you don’t.” He looked behind us and I looked too. No one was following us. Yet.
“Listen,” he said. “It’s true that I traveled east alone until I met Aro. But there was some time there, just after . . . When the Okeke and the Nuru were fighting and I turned myself ignorable to escape, I didn’t know how to stay ignorable for long. Not yet. Only for a few minutes, really. You know how it is.”
I did. It too
k me a month to sustain it for ten minutes. It required serious concentration. Mwita had been so young; I was surprised he was able to hold it at all.
“I made it out of the house, out of the village, away from the real fighting. But out in the desert, I was soon captured by Okeke rebels. They had machetes, bows and arrows, some guns. I was locked into a shack with Okeke children. We were to fight for the Okeke side. They killed anyone who tried to run away.”
“That first day, I saw a girl raped by one of the men. The girls had it worse because they weren’t just beaten into obeying, as we all were. They were raped, too. The next night, I saw a boy shot when he tried to escape. A week later, a group of us were forced to beat a boy to death because he’d tried to escape.” He paused, flaring his nostrils. “I was Ewu, so they beat me more often and watched me more closely. Even with all the sorcery I knew, I was too afraid to attempt an escape.
“They showed us how to shoot arrows and use machetes. The few of us who showed that we had good eyes were taught to shoot guns. I was very good with guns. But twice I tried to kill myself with the one given to me. And twice I was beaten out of doing so. Months later, we were taken into the fighting against the Nuru, the race of people I was raised to live with as family.
“I killed many.” Mwita sighed and continued, “One day, I got sick. We were camping in the desert. The men were digging mass graves for those who’d died in the night. There were so many, Onyesonwu. They threw me in with the bodies when they saw that I couldn’t get up.
“I was buried alive. They moved on. After a few hours, the fever I was suffering from abated and I dug myself out. Immediately, I went looking for medicinal plants to cure myself. And that was how I was able to travel east. I’d spent two months with those rebels. If I hadn’t looked dead, I’m sure I’d be dead. Those are your innocent Okeke ‘victims.’ ”
We’d stopped walking.
“It’s not as simple as you think,” he said. “There is sickness on both sides. Be careful. Your father sees things in black and white, too. The Okeke bad, Nuru good.”
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