Akata Warrior

by Nnedi Okorafor

  Chukwu was able to drop off Chichi at her hut. Then he dropped Orlu and Sasha at Orlu’s house, Grashcoatah following Orlu and landing in his compound safely hidden behind the house’s surrounding wall. At home, Sunny had time to greet her parents, peek into Ugonna’s room where he just grunted a hello and went back to sleep, take a shower, and unpack her things. It was just as she lay down to get a few hours of sleep that she felt her toes tingle. Then she felt the tingle travel up her body all the way to the top of her head. And it was in the center of her head that she felt the tug.

  “Oh no,” she whispered as she was pulled through her bedsheets and window. Then there she was, standing barefoot in her nightgown in front of the council car.

  “Get in,” the driver said in American-accented Igbo. She was a small woman with long straight black hair, lots of make-up, and large earrings that clinked when she turned her head. Sunny got in.

  On the front lawn of the library, Grashcoatah was chained, shackled, and muzzled. He lay there, looking forlornly at Sunny as she passed. He would flicker into invisibility and then reappear, groaning in despair and biting at his chains.

  “Hang in there,” Sunny said as she was ushered inside. “We’ll get you free!” She hoped. She hoped.

  “Move,” Sunny’s escort said, shoving her along. “Worry about yourself.”

  Sunny would never forget the black classroom in the Obi Library. Even the leather seats and table were black. Sitting in the plush chairs were Library Council members or officials or executioners, Sunny didn’t know or care. They all looked like they could be her angry mean aunt or unforgiving uncle. The only one Sunny recognized was Sugar Cream. Sunny went and stood with the others before the table of adults, feeling irrational with fatigue and anger. She fought back tears of rage.

  “Pull yourself together,” Orlu whispered to her. “Grashcoatah’s life depends on it.”

  Anyanwu, she said in her mind.

  I’m here, Anyanwu responded.

  She felt her muscles flex as she stood up straight and faced the stern, mostly unfamiliar council members. Some were her mother’s age; most of them were much older. But Sunny didn’t care. She was in a sort of zone.

  “Again, here you are, Sunny Nwazue,” an old woman said to her in Igbo. She wore her hair in thin white-gray braids and she looked more ancient than Sugar Cream. “Your third offense. You’d think nearly dying at the hands of a djinn would teach you to follow the rules. Yet here you are, and you’ve dragged your Oha coven and a grasscutter into the trouble with you.”

  Orlu stepped forward. Sunny put her hand on his shoulder. “I’ve got this,” she told him. She was shaking, but it wasn’t from fear; she felt she would burst if she didn’t say what she desperately wanted to say. She told them everything, from the beginning to the current moment. She spoke about her brother being in the secret society, how she ended up thrown into the Obi Library basement, the djinn, the dreams, being doubled, meeting with Bola, Lagos, Udide, almost facing Death, and then Osisi and their great battle with Ekwensu, the Aku masquerade, and Ekwensu’s minions. But again, she kept her encounter with Chukwu to herself.

  When she finished talking, the council officials just stared at the four of them. For several minutes, it was like this. They did not discuss among themselves. They did not write things down. They did not ask questions. They didn’t even move. They just stared.

  “To be doubled is very sad,” Sugar Cream finally said. “Death is always close by, but for you, he will always stand behind you.”

  Recalling the image of Death in her peripheral vision, Sunny felt the shiver run up her spine and an uncontrollable urge to burst into tears. Almost. She remained stoic, mostly due to Anyanwu holding her steady.

  “Your brother,” a tiny dark-skinned man about her mother’s age said. “We didn’t alter his memory. We gave him the choice of forgetting or entering a trust knot. We told him that to enter the trust knot was the hazardous choice. He was still under the Ujo, screaming with terror every few moments. And even then, he chose not to forget. Instead he chose to remember and suffer because he can never share the memory. We don’t normally allow this with Lambs, because with the wrong people this can cause madness. But for your brother, due to the circumstances and his passion to protect you, we allowed it. What will you do with him now?”

  “Protect him,” Sunny said, before she’d fully thought her answer through.

  Again the silence.

  Not long after that, the four of them were told that they could go. Outside, Grashcoatah was released. And quickly, calmly, steadily, they all walked away from the Obi Library. It didn’t matter that it was nearly morning and they weren’t sure how they’d get home. Best to leave before the shock the council members were in wore off. Best to not run in order to maintain the look of innocence. Once they reached the Leopard Knocks shops, they climbed on Grashcoatah and off they flew.

  35

  HOME, AGAIN

  Sunny arrived back at home around eleven A.M.

  It was Saturday and her parents weren’t home. Ugonna was at his girlfriend’s house. But Chukwu was there sitting on the doorstep as if he’d known she was coming. He had his cell phone in his hands and it buzzed as Sunny walked up to him.

  “You all right?” he asked, glancing at the text message he’d just received. He put the phone in his pocket and looked up at Sunny. He was wearing sweatpants, Adidas slippers, and a T-shirt. All clothes their aunt had sent from America, clothes that Chukwu only wore when he was trying to passive-aggressively impress.

  “Yeah,” she said.

  There was a long pause. Neither of them could speak their thoughts to the other and the cause for this was juju, not reluctance.

  “Why are you home?” Sunny asked.

  “Came to see Akunna. She’s coming over,” he said. “Of all the girls, she’s the coolest. Otherwise, I’d just ask her to come to the university to see me.”

  Sunny smiled, sitting beside him. “Such a gentleman.”

  They sat like that for a while. Shoulder to shoulder. Full of questions. But relieved. Relieved to be alive and well and home. When Akunna arrived, Sunny waved at her and got up and went inside.

  In her room, Sunny threw her purse on the floor, shut and locked the door, and lay on her bed. She savored the quiet. The stillness. Her brothers were visiting with girlfriends. Her parents were at work or food shopping. They were okay. Everything was okay. But she couldn’t quite smile. She looked at her barely used computer, her dresser and cabinets, her pile of books, the early edition of the Leopard Knocks newspaper on her bed, and the window. Then she hugged herself. She looked around her room again. The effect remained. Her room didn’t feel the same. This place felt cramped, useless. It felt like it belonged to someone else.

  She frowned, trying to hold the tears in. She’d gone out to find herself and in the process lost her home . . . and in a way, herself. How had that happened? At the same time, she and Chukwu were closer than ever, she and Ugonna, too. And though her parents felt more distant, a sort of understanding had developed between her and them. They had not stayed home and waited for her to return. But maybe they’d gone out because they couldn’t stand the waiting. So much had changed in the last two years.

  Something buzzed beside her ear. “Oh,” she said, sitting up. “Della!!” In all the adventure and trouble, she’d forgotten about her wasp artist! Her entire body tensed up. Wasp artists were known to be overly emotional, especially when neglected. Their response to neglect was stinging their owner/audience with a paralysis-inducing compound. The paralyzed victim was then forced to watch the wasp artist dramatically commit suicide. Sunny had been gone for over a week and when she’d returned last night, she hadn’t had time to check on Della. She frantically looked around the room.

  There was a loud buzzing coming from her closet. She crept up to it and paused before sliding it open. If Della was in th
ere, maybe it was better to keep it trapped. But it clearly could get out, since it had just been right beside her ear. She threw open the closet door. For a moment, Sunny wasn’t sure what she was looking at. Then she wondered if she was seeing correctly. Could wasp artists create things like this? Della had indeed been improving in its artistic skill but . . . “Is this . . .” She knelt down and picked it up. “For me?” she whispered. “Is it mine?”

  Della buzzed loudly, now hovering above her head, watching Sunny’s reaction closely.

  “I was gone for so long,” she said, holding the hair comb. “You knew I was coming back?”

  It buzzed again. How did it know that she no longer had the hair comb Mami Wata had given her? Only Chukwu knows, she thought, as she pressed the comb into the side of one of her cornrows. She went to admire herself in the mirror. The comb looked like it was made of tiny shiny multicolored glass beads, even the teeth. Yet it had a way of sparkling yellow orange when she turned her head just so. She took it out and held it to her eyes. When she looked closely, she saw only shiny sparkling pin-sized dots of light. “What is this made of?” she asked.

  Della flew circles around her head until she let her question go and laughed. “Yes,” she said. “I love it. I love it so much. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen!”

  More loop-the-loops, and then Della zoomed into its mud hive on her ceiling and was quiet. “Wow,” Sunny said, admiring the piece of wasp art. She lay back on her bed, smiling as she tucked it into her hair. There was a flash of red on her dresser. A ghost hopper was walking down the side. As it walked, it slowly disappeared.

  Now her room felt more like her room.

  36

  THE ZUMA ROCK FESTIVAL

  The Zuma Rock Festival came a month later. All of them went, except Orlu. He and Grashcoatah had gone instead with Taiwo and Nancy the Miri Bird to witness the mass spawning of some sort of butterfly in the Cross River Forest. Sunny missed him, but Orlu’s excitement about going delighted her more than his absence depressed her.

  Despite all that she’d been through, she was still able to experience the festival with fresh eyes. The three of them went to the art fair, and Sunny bought a new wrapper and matching top. Chichi bought a bookmark made of shed Eji Onu masquerade raffia. When placed between the pages of a book while reading the book, it made the images one imagined that much more alive. Sasha didn’t buy anything because he was saving all his money for the book fair near the end of the festival.

  A jewelry maker was awed by the hair comb Della had made for Sunny. He offered to pay her an insane amount of chittim AND naira for it. He said that it was made of zyzzyx glass, a serum that wasp artists secrete when they reach their first artistic peak. Few wasp artists willingly gave away their zyzzyx glass artwork; it was too beautiful to merely be worn as a “bauble by some young girl.” Insulted and intrigued, needless to say, Sunny refused to sell her zyzzyx glass hair comb.

  They moved on to the book fair. It was enormous. They hadn’t been to this last year, and Sunny was kind of glad. The festival had been so overwhelming back then that she’d nearly gone catatonic. If she’d been to the book fair, she would have screamed to go home and never had her amazing experience of playing soccer in the Zuma Cup.

  The book fair consisted of row after row of books packed on the field that would later be used for the Zuma Cup soccer match. Here, people argued and sometimes fought over books, and some of the books argued with and fought people. Sasha got into a disturbing altercation with a dark-skinned man wearing a Tuareg-style indigo face veil. All Sasha had done to spark it was reach for a thick, brand-new-looking book with The Great Book burned into the spine in Arabic. To Sunny’s shock, the man had slapped Sasha’s hands and then slapped him hard across the face as he shouted something in Arabic.

  Sasha had shouted right back at the man in Arabic. The man simply ignored him, turning his attention to the book as he grabbed and opened it. Sasha was too angry to notice and Chichi was too busy trying to pull him away. However, Sunny saw the inside of this book. It wasn’t really a book at all. Its inside looked more like the touch screen of a tablet.

  Then she was helping Chichi shove Sasha away from the man. After looking at other books, Sasha settled on a book that was the size of his hand. It was sticky with old honey and had print so small that even a child with 20/20 vision would need a magnifying glass to read it. It also had several pages torn out of it. “But it’s a book of practical joke jujus written by an Abatwa!” Sasha said. He purchased it for a whole bronze chittim, managing to haggle a discount due to the missing pages. He refused to talk about The Great Book.

  They skipped the wrestling match and from what they heard it was again a bloody match, though neither of the champions was killed like last year. Nevertheless, Sunny found herself watching the sky and the constant milling festival crowd around her, looking for the fallen champion turned guardian angel Miknikstic. She even snuck to the spot where she’d first met him last year in front of the soccer field. Sasha and Chichi were at the table where they’d all just eaten lunch. They were debating the recent election of the governor of some state, and their discussion was so heated that they hadn’t even noticed her slip away.

  Now she stood in the very spot looking at the field. It was here where Sunny had felt so out of place, so overwhelmed . . . by everything. Not this time. The festival now felt almost underwhelming, even with the intriguing and fascinating parts like the book and art fairs, even the wrestling match.

  She turned around and looked at the Leopard People going about their business. They laughed, talked, explored, did their juju. They were so comfortable. Like her parents and all the Lambs she knew. When did she wind up on the outside again? She’d met Miknikstic here, as well, a man who less than an hour later would transform into so much more. She crossed her arms over her chest, squeezing the muscles of her strong ropy biceps with her hands. With her right foot she sketched a series of loops and swirls into the dirt—the Nsibidi symbol for “I am here.” She paused for a moment, looking for any sign of movement in the symbols. As if she were good enough at it yet. She chuckled and returned to her friends.

  An hour later, she stood center on the field holding the soccer ball. The field had been cleared of the stacks and cases and shelves of books. Now there was nothing but uneven grass and the white lines of the field, bold and perfect. She felt good in her white uniform, and this time she wore brand-new soccer cleats that she’d bought with some of her chittim in Leopard Knocks, months ago. Sasha was behind her to her left.

  She looked at Godwin, the green team’s leader. He was playing goalie. He gave a nod of confidence.

  “I’m going to wipe the field with you, ghost girl,” Ibou said. Sunny grinned at him, setting the ball down. “No,” she said. “You’re not.” Ibou had grown about three inches and his shoulders were even broader. But Sunny had grown taller and become more muscular, too. The ref blew his whistle, and Sunny took the ball with her dancing feet. She felt Anyanwu reveling in the art of motion and grace. She kicked the ball to Ibou’s left as he came at her. She did a turn, moved behind him, and caught the ball with her feet. She laughed, spotting her teammate Agaja to her right. He was open. As she passed the ball to him, she could already see Agaja blasting it into the goal.

  Goooooooooal!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  First and foremost, a gracious thanks to the Universe for bringing this novel together on its own time.

  I’d like to thank my former Penguin editor Sharyn November for helping me strengthen the continuation of Sunny’s story. Thanks to my current editor Regina Hayes for jumping in and making this novel really shine. Thanks to my Nigerian editor Bibi Bakare-Yusuf for helping me smooth away so many of the Americanisms I couldn’t help putting in the novel. Thanks to producer Mark Ceryak and filmmaker Barry Jenkins for those days years ago working on that film treatment that ended up helping me generate some of the idea
s in this novel. Thanks so so much to Success T for letting me weave the nonfiction of his own experiences with confraternities into this novel; that chapter was practically word for word. Thanks to illustrator Greg Ruth for the two stunning renderings of Sunny Nwazue that are the covers of Akata Witch and Akata Warrior. Thanks to Jim Hoover, who designed this book’s beautiful jacket, for his meticulous eye for detail and zing. And thank you to my mother, my father, my daughter Anyaugo, Ifeoma, Ngozi, Emezie, Dika, Obioma, Chinedu, and the rest of my family in Nigeria and scattered about the Diaspora, because family na family, o.

  The masquerades dance and the ancestors smile,

  And these in themselves make it all worthwhile.

  NNEDI OKORAFOR is a novelist of African-based science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism for both children and adults. Born in the United States to Nigerian immigrant parents, Nnedi is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi’s work, The New York Times called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning.” Nnedi has received the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, and the Nebula Award, among others, for her novels. Her fans include Neil Gaiman, Rick Riordan, John Green, Laurie Halse Anderson, and Ursula K. Le Guin among others.

  Nnedi Okorafor holds a PhD in English and is a professor at SUNY Buffalo. She divides her time between Buffalo and the suburbs of Chicago, where she lives with her daughter. Learn more at nnedi.com or follow her on Twitter @nnedi.

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