I turn on my back, swivel onto my elbow, and with all the strength I can muster, I kick at Ajala’s ankles.
A sharp pain runs into my shin, like kicking the edge of a concrete pillar, and I feel like this leg will be useless for a while.
Ajala turns and slams his foot into my ribs. Then he kicks again, and again. And again.
I have never felt more human in my entire life. At this point, I no longer feel pain: the first kick sends waves of pain down my whole side, so great that I’m numb to everything after it. All the while he’s shouting, but what I hear is something—or somethings—greater, larger, more ancient than him.
As I lay on the ground, I see that the gate is open, and beyond that, Papa Udi and Onipede huddle next to one another, the ward about them shimmering with taboos throwing themselves against the perimeter. The little fire of hope in my chest blazes, and I suddenly find myself feeling… joy? They’re alive, is all I can think. The charm is obviously done, but the taboos have smelled the Reveal already, tasted of it, and will not be sated until they get a piece of him for calling. They hurl themselves against the circle, howl when it burns them, but they pick themselves up again and hurl themselves back. They’re like zombies.
A kick slams into the back of my head, and my brain stops functioning for a minute.
I’m seeing a woman I don’t recognise before me, her hair wild and her eyes fire and her arms strong and firm. She is a warrior, she is home, she is a bosom. Her mouth isn’t moving, but I’m hearing what she’s telling me nevertheless.
She says it’s okay. To be human, to be weak. To not be the only one who can solve all the problems. She’s saying it’s okay to not be the hero; for now, at least. That time will come. She says this is not the time to despair but to remain strong. This is an example, something to show me that there are greater evils in this world, and dealing with evil requires a special kind of crazy that I’ll have to become. That I have to be willing to step outside of the conventional, of the normal. It’s a risk I will have to take.
Or, maybe it’s just me telling myself these things.
Ajala’s eyes are full of fire now.
“I see you won’t give up,” a chorus of voices say, and then I recognise the undiluted, hot-ice essence of an orisha. Aganju has fully commandeered Ajala’s body now.
Oh, that’s not good at all—not for Ajala, who’s definitely going to die now, if this god ever leaves his body; and not for me, because I’m going to be fighting a full-blown high god.
Aganju does that shrill noise with his mouth, the one that tells me he’s preparing to cast a charm. Then he puts out his arm, and the fires from the burning vehicle lean towards him. Then he pulls, and a large blob detaches from the inferno and flies towards me.
I have just enough time to brace for impact.
The fire vanishes into smoke an inch from my nose.
The shock on my face is mirrored by Aganju’s, his mouth slightly open in astonishment, his eyes focused on me—
No, behind me.
I turn about.
Fatoumata is standing there, a tiny figure in her low-cut hair and one of my undershirts. She has shrugged off her robe, her face a billboard of fury, her chest heaving with the power just sponged off Aganju. Her eyes lock on him, hatred and bile spilling up within them. I sense all the collected energies in her insides, her godessence forming, roiling, burning.
Aganju works his mouth into a grimace, deciding what path to take. I’ve seen power corrupt often enough; I don’t need two guesses to know what he will do.
I dive at Fatoumata before he casts the second fire blast towards her.
It’s a pointless dive. Though I catch her in time to shove her out of the way, tumbling us both to the ground, her sponge is still doing its job. She seizes the charm before the fire even reaches Aganju’s hands, and contains it. It dissipates into a bulb of smoke. Her body shudders as power settles into her, like an electric current grounded by earth.
“You ungrateful—” Aganju grits his teeth and fires three blasts in succession. Fati rises and collects them all in one great puff of smoke. She shivers again, staggers, and plants herself back, ready. Her brow furrows in concentration.
Then, Fati puts her hands forward and screams.
A hurricane slams into the barracks. All the energies present about the barracks rise in response and rush towards her, into her. Every living thing, everything with an ounce of godessence within them, shudders, their godessence yanked from them.
Everything, except me.
The taboos are the first. Their screams are shrill and eerie and fill the compound, like a school of crying fish. One by one, their godessences leave them. I feel them whooshing across the barracks and into Fati’s little body. Others follow—the energy in every living thing rises, liberated by Fati’s sponge, flying across the yard.
My skin, my bones—I feel the little energies in them agitate, but they do not move. Somehow, she is controlling and focusing the sponge—somehow, she is blocking me.
I realise that if she isn’t blocking Papa Udi and Onipede as well, she is going to break their ward. Worse yet, she’ll accumulate the whole of Aganju. She cannot survive harbouring such power in her little body.
“Stop!” I stare in horror as divine energy pours into her like a flood. She stands her ground, her eyes locked on Aganju, gritting her teeth through it. Aganju himself remains untouched, the same halo about him that stopped my dagger still standing, protecting him from her charm.
The dagger. The second one is still sheathed in my hip.
I see it now, the solution. Fati’s plan to sponge everything will only work if I can get through Aganju’s halo, if I can pierce a hole through it and break his shield. And I must do so before she collapses.
I reach down and pull out the second dagger. The blade is hot in my hand, the ebo slowly losing its potency to Fati’s charm. I scramble up to where Aganju is standing, bracing himself against Fati’s efforts, throwing more will into keeping his barrier fortified.
With all the strength I can muster, I lift the dagger in my two hands, drive it into the air an inch from Aganju’s sand-fire eyes, and drag down to his feet.
There is a loud whistling, like a large truck’s brakes, and Aganju has just enough time to register surprise before all the power within him whooshes through the tear in the shield, blasting out with such force it kicks him back.
There is a sucking sound, as if a vacuum cleaner has been turned on, and the superimposed image of the god disappears. The fire vanishes from the eyes of the body in front of me, and only Ajala’s familiar voice is left, screaming in agony. Energies tear out of him with a fury, growing ever brighter. It breaks his skin, cracks of white fire beginning to appear. I lift a hand to shield my eyes, now understanding what Papa Udi used to say about absolute power: that it doesn’t just corrupt absolutely, but will in the end consume you.
The fire of the gods is too much for a body so human.
Ajala falls to his knees, burning slowly without smoke, without smell. He does not scream, he does not wince. Instead, he smiles. And in that smile, I see it again; the flash of sand, fire, magma, ash. And something else, a message. Like the snapshots I receive from my mother.
Congratulations, it says. You have taken this one. But we will meet again.
Then Ajala crashes to the ground, and the Yasal bottle hanging from his neck shatters. The energies trapped within burst out like a firehose.
“No!” I scream, running for it. Too late.
The essences settle into Fatoumata, and the girl shudders one last time, then crumples to the ground.
Everything stills.
I stand there, watching embers and ashes settle. Watching the charred body of Lukmon Ajala, the Baálẹ̀ of Agbado, smoke away without smell.
All around me there is movement. One by one, the former taboos pick themselves up, and suddenly I no longer see monsters, but children in tattered clothing, stained with soot and blood, examining themselves,
confused. One begins to cry, and another follows, and another, and soon the whole barracks rings with the cries of children.
Onipede rushes into the compound, gathering the wailing children. Papa Udi trudges in past her, towards Fatoumata, his face falling as only a truly broken man’s face can, his shoulders sinking with a new weight as he wears the gravity of his mistake, our mistake.
I pull him to myself into an embrace, his bony arms limp beside him. He doesn’t hug me back, but he doesn’t object either.
Then, a coughing behind us catches our attention. Fatoumata’s eyes are shut, her head rolling, as if in a dream. Papa Udi and I rush and kneel beside her. I shake her shoulder gently.
“Fati, wake up,” I’m saying. “Please, wake up.”
A smile plays over her lips, then her eyes open. There are no pupils. All that is there is white, icy-hot burning. Ashẹ, the fire of the gods.
“Thank you for saving us, orisha ’daji,” the voices say, and though I can’t separate them, I will recognise Ibeji anywhere.
Chapter Twelve
I STILL HAVE aches from those blows at the barracks two weeks ago. Suleiman and the boys on the roof of Cardoso House are not helping with their hammers on zinc either. Even though I’m seated as far away from them as possible—under the guava tree skeleton in our backyard, on a small plastic chair that can barely take my weight—the clangs of their hammers still send shock waves through my migraine. My body is healing, but I still ache so much that I can forget about anything hunting-related for a month or more.
Papa Udi moves about the yard with purpose, giving Suleiman and his underlings and clackety-clack tools directions. Most of them are escapees from Ajala’s clutches, boys and girls looking for a way to pay us back for our help. The way I see it, it’s Papa Udi who’s helping them, since he’s keeping them in gainful employment in the interim. They get to stay off the streets this way—no more police pickups. Also, I think Payu is really trying to fix their frail and broken trust in wizards, by doing the actual thing Ajala lied to the public about doing.
Papa Udi suddenly looks sprite, stronger. His slouched shoulders are gone, and he marches about, giving commands in a voice no longer frail and hesitant, but rich and round and ready. I’ve never seen him more alive since the moment Ibeji decided they were going to remain within Fatoumata, riding her body like a shell, until he figured out a way to get them out without consigning her to the same fate as Ajala. You saved us, so we will save this one, they said. It sounded more like Taiwo than Kehinde, though I can no longer tell the difference. Now Papa Udi suddenly has a purpose, finally found a way to help people as he’s always wanted—a divinery of his own, where he’ll work on solutions to an actual problem. I wonder if it will take more disaster for me to feel awakened, unravelled, unleashed too.
Fatoumata (or should I say, Fatoumata, Kehinde and Taiwo) is seated next to me. For a week or so since the barracks, I’ve struggled with not referring to her as them, because I just can’t help sensing all those divine signatures within the house. She stares calmly at the activity in the yard, bobbing her head every now and then, her low haircut finally growing in patches. She’s ditched the hijab and robe for good now, and wears a cotton blouse of her own size, under old shorts of mine slim-fitted to her size.
Her eyes no longer burn white, but there’s a sparkle in them now that wasn’t there before. She’s still small and is still a teenager, but she’s become something bigger than herself, bigger than Cardoso, bigger than Lagos.
She sees me watching her and smiles back. It’s not the childish smile I saw at my window that other day. This one is laden with meaning, with knowing, with things much older than my forefathers.
“Still wondering?” she says. Her natural voice is a young girl’s, but I don’t know why it comes off as if from someone older. It reminds me so much—too much—of Kehinde’s.
“Wondering what?”
“About your mother,” she says, looking back to the distance.
“And what about her?”
She smiles. “Taiwo knows.”
I say nothing, waiting for her to make her point.
“He hears what she used to be, at least,” she continues. “He knows she was born of war, of chaos, David, as are you.” She turns her face to me now. “Do you know what this means?”
I shrug.
“You saw her that night, didn’t you? You’ve seen her, other times too. Do you know why?”
“Nope.”
“She feeds on chaos, David. She always has. Your connection is strongest at the peak of chaos and despair. You, too, when you come to recognise yourself for what you truly are, will feed on chaos. You are here for a reason—whether it is to make chaos, as she does, or to prevent it.”
“I don’t want any trouble,” I say.
“But it will follow you nevertheless, because of chaos were you conceived. For all the times you raise turmoil, you offer a sacrifice to your essence. It is something from which you cannot hide.”
I look back into the yard. Papa Udi explains to a couple of young boys how he wants the new extension to be expanded, how he wants floating shelves to fit inside it. One teenager is asking what kind of car will fit in there, and Papa Udi is staring at him, asking if he’s never heard of a divinery before.
“How soon?” I ask.
Fati smiles, looking at the sky above, heavily clouded in late afternoon violet, blocking out the lowering sun.
“Soon,” she says. “Those who first came for the gods of abundance will come again.”
“And I’ll have to protect them.”
“Yes,” she says. “You will need help, David. We will stay with you.”
Yeah, but how does that help me?
“You are not alone,” she says, answering my unasked question. “You have an army.”
Is this is a prophecy of some sort? (Do gods have powers like that?) I’m sure she isn’t talking about Onipede and her LASPAC men. She means a supernatural army, like Ajala’s taboos. I will have to become like Aganju, in order to defeat any more to come after. The thought makes me want to laugh.
Papa Udi gesticulates some more, getting worked up by the young men who still can’t understand what he means by a divinery.
“So we’ll get more people to join us,” I’m saying. “Me and Papa Udi. We’ll make better, stronger potions. You’ll help us?”
She’s still looking at the clouds. “We could. But we won’t be enough. You’ll still need to decide your fate in the end, orisha ’daji. You must dig deep. Deeper.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
The edges of Fati’s mouth rise in a little smile. “When you meet your mother, ask her.”
Another prophecy?
Who knows? Or really, who cares? I join her to watch the violet-streaked clouds.
Maybe I will somehow reach my mother, gain this knowledge that no one but her seems to possess. Maybe I’ll have to engage in more chaos to get there. If there’s more violence, war and death coming, well, so be it.
I shake my head, sigh and relax into the plastic chair.
I knew this was going to be a bad job.
Chapter Thirteen
THE WOMAN IN the white Kia Rio is thinking about killing her husband once she gets home. I see how she’ll do it: she will mix otapiapia into tonight’s ofada and wait for his body to turn stiff in the morning. The waiting is the part she’ll hate. That’s why she first thought about using a gun—easy, quick, efficient—before deciding it was too messy. For a moment, as her mind lingers, I feel the oily weight of the pistol she tried to cop under an overhead crossing bridge at Agege on Sunday night last week. It’s laziness, you know? She really hates cleaning, and blood is so much work.
“Change, ma,” I say, rolling up the cash and ticket and passing them through my toll booth window with the tip of my fingers.
She looks at me, her eyes glazed and distant, her cheeks contoured with several shades of bruises in different stages of healing. When she c
ollects it, she touches me again, because she’s oblivious, just like when handing me the money.
A jolt, and a new impression ripples across my consciousness, a barrage of ants marching under my follicles, pressing into my skin and my mind. Now she reconsiders, thinking about Jasmine, her teenage daughter. How will she raise her without her father? It was him who taught her to play piano. Will she ever play piano again after?
This is exactly why I wear three pairs of rubber gloves. Without such protection (if I can call it that, really), people like these will easily rest their heaviness against my heart, a block of lead on my chest through simple skin-to-skin contact. I don’t care much for lugging the weight of the world around. It’s really not my business, and it never will be.
I press the barrier open. I don’t watch her drive away.
Trying to turn off the impressions is pointless as usual, so I focus on the cars instead. I mean, I did tell this to Ibeji, right? I understand that learning better ways to use my powers is a good thing, but the problem is that uncovering them is like digging a hole. You’re going down, down, taking the earth and tossing it above you, and suddenly you’re in too deep, can’t climb out, no protection, no way to take the sand and close it back up again. Stuck.
The next car rolls into my lane: a shining black Highlander. I recite the classes and fees while the window comes down and the driver’s hand stretches out, holding a thousand naira.
Class three, SUV, five hundred.
I pluck the money from his strong grip, roll out the change and ticket from the machine and hand it out with the tip of my fingers. Too many people try to touch me even when I make it clear that I do not want to be touched. This driver is one of them, still managing to brush my fingers, just enough for me to get a whiff of his hard, throbbing anger. Something about overtime hours, delayed wages and an insensitive boss perched in the owner’s corner behind him.
I press the barrier open. Nope. No, sir.
“You must learn to embrace it, open up to it,” they said. Well, Fatoumata’s mouth did the talking, but it was Kehinde who said it. These days, it’s much easier to uncover the speaker behind the words without stopping to parse sentences: Kehinde tends to be more commanding, prodding, harsh; Taiwo, more soothing and nudging, more telltale. Sometimes both of them speak at once, and it comes out in a susurrus of sibilants, like a snake pit choir. That sound on Fati’s lips always puts me on edge. Fati herself barely speaks, save for a few nods and a couple of gestures. The pockets of silence between statements are the times I think the gods within her have gone to sleep, and Fati herself takes over. I’m not sure if Fati is still speech impaired, or if the shock of having two high gods renting her body for accommodation has caused her to make a choice to remain mute.
David Mogo Godhunter Page 10