Akata Witch

by Nnedi Okorafor

  from Fast Facts for Free Agents

  4

  Leopard Knocks His Foot

  “I thought today was supposed to be fun,” Sunny mumbled when they got to the bridge. She tugged at her raffia dress. “Ugh, this is so scratchy.”

  “Would you rather have fun or learn the meaning of your life?” Chichi asked.

  “There’s no ‘meaning’ to any of this.”

  “I’ll carry that across for you,” Orlu said, taking Sunny’s heavy purse.

  “Thanks.”

  He rubbed the smooth black stone buried at the bridge’s beginning and stepped onto the bridge. As he walked, Sunny could have sworn that she saw something weird happen to his head. Her entire body went cold. Walking easily along the super-narrow bridge, strolling casually, he soon disappeared in the mist.

  As Sasha followed Orlu across the bridge, Chichi turned Sunny’s head to her. “Focus on me,” she said.

  “What happens when you cross?” Sunny was glad Chichi wouldn’t let her look. She suspected that if she watched Sasha, she’d see the weird thing happen to his head, too.

  “To cross the bridge-well, you need to know some things,” Chichi said. “We’ll tell you everything once we get to Leopard Knocks.”

  Where have I heard that before? Sunny said to herself.

  But to her surprise, Chichi started telling her now. “Okay, as they said, Lambs are people who have no juju. You were never a Lamb, but you have to be initiated to become a functioning Leopard Person. That dress you’re wearing is a dress for new initiates.”

  “Did you have to be initiated?” Sunny asked.

  “Yes, two years ago. But I’ve always known of my Leopard inheritance and I’ve always been able to do small things like make mosquitoes stay away, warm my bathwater, things like that. Initiation meant something different to me than to you. It’s more a mark of beginning my life’s journey. Yours was, too-but it was also the actual beginning of your Self.

  “Every Leopard Person has two faces-a human face and a spirit face. I’ve always known my human and spirit face. When I was born, for the first week of my life, I wore my spirit face. My parents didn’t know what my human face looked like until my seventh day of life.” She paused, looking at Sunny’s shocked face.

  “Oh, relax,” she snapped. “It was the same with Orlu, Sasha-all Leopard People with pure inheritance. Anyway, the spirit face is more you than your physical face, it stays with you, it doesn’t age, you can control it as it controls you. But it’s impolite to show it in public. It’s like being naked. I think it’s because in this form, you cannot lie or hide anything. Lies are a thing of the physical world. They can’t exist in the spirit world.”

  Sunny thought it all sounded like something a crazy old man would think. Imagine some inebriated old man shambling down the street, a bottle of palm wine in his hand, shouting, “My face is no longer of this world, o!” Maybe Chichi, Orlu, and Sasha were all on drugs.

  Chichi went on. “The bridge is a ‘link.’ It’s a patch of the spirit world that exists in the physical world. That’s why Leopard Knocks was built here. Leopard Knocks is on an island conjured by the ancestors.…” She shook her head. “Any of this making sense to you?”

  “Sort of.” Actually, Sunny thought Chichi was utterly insane.

  Chichi smiled. “So, to cross you have to call up your spirit face.” She looked around. Sunny looked around, too. They were alone.

  “I’ll show you mine,” Chichi whispered.

  “Okay,” Sunny said, though she wasn’t sure if she wanted to see it, especially if it was supposed to be like being naked.

  “Don’t think I’ll ever do this for you again, either,” Chichi said. “And don’t you ever dare tell Sasha or Orlu what it looks like.”

  Sunny considered giving an even more cutting response, but then she realized that Chichi was dead serious. “Okay,” she said again.

  Chichi stepped back. Right before Sunny’s eyes, Chichi’s face melted, shifted, and morphed into something inhuman. Sunny stifled a scream.

  Chichi’s spirit face looked like a perfectly carved ceremonial mask.

  It was long, about the length of her forearm, and made of a hard marble-like periwinkle substance. The two eyes were square indentations colored in with what looked like blue paint. Two white lines ran from the eyes to the sides of a pointy chin. The nose was long and outlined in white. The mouth was a large black grin. And it wasn’t just her face that had changed. Her body language changed, too. She was suddenly quick and precise.

  “I am Igri,” Chichi said in a deep male voice. She laughed, doing a backflip. Sunny stumbled away, startled by Chichi’s sudden flexibility and agility. Chichi was always quick and on point, but now those qualities were exaggerated. The oddest thing was that Chichi’s spirit face still somehow looked like Chichi. She did have a pointy chin and a long face. She changed herself back, and for a moment the girls just stared at each other.

  “What’s Igri?” Sunny asked.

  “My spirit name.”

  “So I have my own spirit face, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sunny held the chewing stick Sasha had given her, and though it was all frayed, she put it in her mouth. She was glad it was still minty. “So, how do I-”

  “Do you remember how you felt when Anatov brought you back?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Like the best ballet dancer on Earth.” Chichi smiled. “Wait a minute, you and Orlu-and Anatov-”

  “Yeah, we all saw,” Chichi said, looking guilty. “I only looked for a second before I turned away.”

  “But you said it’s like being naked.”

  Chichi smiled sheepishly. “Yeah.”

  “Oh my goodness! I’m so embarrassed!”

  “Come on, we’re your friends.”

  “Look at all the stuff you said before you would even give me a peek of your spirit face! Yet there I was for everyone to see! It’s like my butt was exposed!”

  “Different context,” she said with a laugh. “And your spirit face is nothing like your butt.”

  “At least Sasha wasn’t there,” she mumbled. “So… what did I look like?”

  Chichi gestured at Sunny’s umbrella. “It’s funny. You know how you told me you need this when noon hits? Well, your spirit face looked… you looked like the sun!”

  Sunny shrank back. “What?”

  Chichi just shrugged. “So you felt like a ballerina?”

  Sunny blinked and then nodded. “Yeah. All graceful and…” she tapered off. “I’ve always loved ballet but I can’t do it.”

  “Okay, well-here.” Chichi reached into her pocket and took out a knife with a jade handle and a bronzed blade. She cut the air in front of Sunny and spoke some words. Sunny didn’t understand, but she recognized them as Efik, the language and ethnic group of Chichi’s mother. Suddenly, classical music began playing. Right above Sunny’s head, to her left, to her right, she couldn’t tell where it was coming from.

  Sunny had always felt a strange, sometimes painful, pull whenever she heard classical music. It was part of the reason she liked ballet so much. Now that feeling was stronger than ever.

  “Concentrate on the ballet music and cross the bridge,” Chichi said quickly. “Your grace will protect you from falling… I think.”

  “You think?” she asked. But something was taking her over. She could feel that tightening sensation on her face. A languidness in her body. She strode onto the bridge, disregarding its narrowness.

  She felt so good and confident that she laughed, thinking, Man, this is going to be easy. With her peripheral vision she could see golden points radiating from her face. Her spirit face had sun rays, too! She laughed again, feeling a wave of pleasure as the classical music hit a crescendo. She danced over the narrow bridge on her sandaled toes, once in a while doing leaps that took her dangerously close to the edge. She felt not an ounce of fear.

  Beneath, the water swirled, pounded, gushed, and thrashed. She watched it as s
he danced, glimpsing an enormous dark, round face under the water. Whatever the creature was, the river’s strength was nothing to it. It was watching her. She did a leap for the monster, a chaîné turn, and then a pirouette. She looked it in the eye, another laugh in her throat. Only a few feet away, the white mist swirled and gave way to the end of the bridge and whatever lay beyond it.

  Suddenly, her confidence wavered.

  The wind blew harder and Leopard Knocks opened up before her like the New York skyline. It was nowhere near as big, but it was grand. Huts stacked upon huts like hats at a hat shop. Not a European-style building in sight. All this was African.

  She quickly walked to the end of the bridge. When she got there, something possessed her to stretch herself into an arabesque. The music abruptly stopped. She felt her spirit face pull in and she gasped, teetering on the bridge’s slippery wood. Directly below, she saw something undulate. The river creature! She thrust out her arms to keep her balance.

  “Ah!” she shouted as she fell. Something tugged hard at her neck. Sasha had her by her gold necklace. He pulled her forward and she stumbled into his arms. As he held her, she looked back, tears in her eyes.

  “Here,” Sasha said, helping her to a nearby picnic table under a large iroko tree. “Sit.”

  “You okay?” Orlu said, running over.

  She nodded. “Thanks, Sasha.”

  “Thank your necklace,” he said.

  “What happened?” Chichi said a minute later, after emerging from the mist.

  “What do you think?” Orlu said.

  “Oh,” she said. “The juju should have lasted longer than-”

  “Come on, the river beast can break that, easy,” Orlu said. “It probably waited until she was close to safety to make the fall to her death more dramatic.”

  “One of these days, someone’s going to get rid of that thing,” Chichi said, kneeling before Sunny.

  Sasha laughed and said, “Girl, please. Anatov told me that monster is older than time. It’ll be here messing with shit long after we’re all gone.”

  Sunny shivered, knowing they’d have to go back over the bridge to get home. It was already noon. I’ll cross that bridge when I get to it, she thought drily.

  As her heartbeat slowed, she took in her surroundings.

  So this was Leopard Knocks. The entrance was flanked by two tall iroko trees. They were slowly shedding a constant shower of leaves, though their tops remained healthy and bushy. At the foot of each tree were small piles of leaves. Beyond was the strangest place Sunny had ever seen.

  She’d traveled to Jos in Northern Nigeria to visit relatives. She’d been to Abuja, the capital of Nigeria, too. She’d been to Amsterdam, Rome, Brazzaville, Dubai. She, her parents, and her brothers were seasoned travelers. But this place was something else entirely.

  The buildings were made of thick gray clay and red mud with thatch roofs. They reminded her of Chichi’s house, but more sophisticated. Almost all of them were quite large. Many had more than one story; several had three or four. How clay and mud could stand up to this kind of use was beyond her. Every building was full of windows of various shapes and sizes. Large squares, circles, triangles-one building had a window shaped like a giant heart. All were decorated with white intricate drawings-snakes, squiggles, steer, stars, circles, people, faces, fish. The list of things was infinite. Pink smoke billowed from the center of a large one-story hut.

  The buildings were crowded tightly together. Still, tall palm trees and bushes managed to grow between them, and a dirt road packed with people wound among the buildings. From somewhere nearby, up-tempo highlife music played. She turned around and saw more people emerging from the mist. She stepped closer to Chichi, feeling like an intruder. “Maybe I should just go home,” she whispered. She thought about the monster again and cursed.

  “Huh? Why?” Chichi said, looking surprised.

  “I’m not supposed to be here.”

  Chichi laughed. “You’ve got over a hundred chittim in your purse! Trust me, you’re very welcome here!”

  She took Sunny’s hand and they followed Orlu and Sasha. There were a few people ahead of them. She stopped. Iroko leaves were falling around her, and as she watched, one of the leaf piles took a humanoid shape. It sloppily cartwheeled over to a man and fell apart, burying the man in its green leaves. As the leaves covered him, the man looked more annoyed than afraid. When the leaf thing took a humanoid shape again, a gun was disappearing into its chest.

  “Biko, please!” the man begged, holding his hands up and smiling, embarrassed. “I forgot I was carrying that.”

  The leaf person cartwheeled back to its place in front of the tree and was motionless again. Orlu and Chichi were snickering.

  “Idiot,” Sasha said in a low voice. “What’s he packing for? I’ve got more powerful juju in one finger. Grown man probably didn’t even make Mbawkwa.”

  Sunny looked closely at the leaf person on her left as she passed it. Even up close it was just a bunch of leaves.

  “This is the forefront,” Chichi told her. She waved at a boy passing by and slapped hands with him. He wore baggy jeans and sneakers like Sasha, but she could tell he was Nigerian. Something about the way he wore his American-style clothes, but he looked Nigerian, too. Probably Yoruba.

  “Friend of mine,” Chichi said.

  “Yeah, Chichi’s got a lot of friends,” Orlu said.

  “Shut up,” Chichi said coyly. “Anyway, so most of these places are shops. That’s Sweet Plumes, it’s a juju powder shop.”

  Sweet Plumes was one of the first buildings, a double one-story red mud hut decorated with thousands of tiny white circles that gave it an almost reptilian look. The front door was round and covered with a silver cloth that moved in and out as if the building itself was breathing. As they passed it, she smelled a sulfuric odor, like rotten eggs.

  “They sell good product except when you get to the really, really advanced juju. But that’s to be expected,” Chichi added. “By then, it’s best to grind your own.”

  They passed more shops. Many of them sold normal stuff like clothes, jewelry, computer software, and cell phone accessories. Sunny and Orlu waited outside while Chichi and Sasha went into a tobacco shop to buy Banga brand herbal cigarettes. “They’re supposed to be healthier than tobacco cigarettes. Smell nicer, too,” Orlu said with a shrug. “But to me a cigarette is a cigarette. A nasty habit.”

  “Agreed,” Sunny said.

  Next, they stopped outside a place called Bola’s Store for Books.

  “We’ll be quick,” Chichi said, when Orlu gave her a look. They were all hungry. Chichi took Sunny’s heavy purse. “Come on, Sunny.”

  It was large and cool inside. In the center, wicker chairs were set up around a wicker coffee table. A woman wearing a big metallic blue headwrap and a matching expensive-looking traditional dress was reading a dusty book. When she turned a page, she ground the book’s filth into her lovely clothes a little more. Her hands were covered with the book’s dust, too. What book is that interesting? Sunny wondered. She wanted to see, but Chichi led her in a different direction.

  There were books written in Hausa, Urdu, Yoruba, Arabic, Efik, German, Igbo, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sanskrit, even one written in a language Chichi called Nsibidi. “Can you read N-Nsibidi?” Sunny asked with a laugh, picking up the book. What kind of name was that? It sounded like a stifled sneeze.

  “Later, Sunny,” Chichi said, taking the book from her and putting it back. “I’m starving. Let’s make this quick.”

  All the people in the store were quiet, reading and browsing with such intensity that she ached to look at some of the books, too. They passed an empty section with a warning posted above it saying, ENTER AND BUY AT YOUR OWN RISK.

  “Here it is,” Chichi said. They stopped at a shelf marked, INTROS/OUTED/EYES OPENED. She picked up a slim green paperback titled Fast Facts for Free Agents. “Come on,” she said. “Orlu’s going to spontaneously combust if we don’t hurry.”
>
  Sunny held her heavy purse as Chichi fished out a copper chittim and handed it to the old man behind the table. He looked at the chittim, reached into his pocket, brought out a pinch of what looked like sand, and rubbed it against the chittim. There was an instant burst of wet mist. It smelled like roses. The man smiled and rubbed his hands in the mist. Chichi did the same. Sunny imitated her and found that her hands came away smelling like roses, too.

  “Just making sure,” the man said.

  “After so many years, you still don’t trust me?” Chichi asked.

  “Efik women and girls are the craftiest charlatans,” he said.

  Chichi laughed. “My father was Igbo, remember, Mohammed?”

  “Eh,” the man said, handing her the book and five shiny silver chittim. To Sunny, these looked much more valuable than the dull copper ones. “Daughters are their mother’s children inevitably.” He motioned to Sunny. “The book’s for her?”

  “Yes. This is Sunny,” Chichi said, handing her the book. She put the chittim and the book in her purse and waved shyly at the man.

  He looked at Sunny for a long time and then said, “You should take her to my second wife for a divination reading.”

  “I know,” Chichi said. “Not today, though. Tell your wife to expect us sometime.”

  “She probably already knows when you’ll be coming.”

  They were starving and it was nearly two o’clock, so Sasha suggested that they go to Mama Put’s Putting Place. The small outdoor restaurant was quick. It was run by a fat woman named Mama Put, like many Nigerian women who owned food stands. She stood behind a counter collecting money and barking out orders to her employees. Sunny ordered a large plate of jallof rice and roasted spicy chicken and a bottle of orange Fanta. She paid with one silver chittim and Mama Put gave her back six small gold ones.