I remember shaking the reptile off and scrambling outside with a scream that awoke the whole neighborhood and running, as quickly as my feet could manage, to the monkey-crowded forest five miles away from the palace. Apparently, my brothers’ plan worked, for after that day I never bed-wetted again, although this was as a result of my not wanting to be subjected to such horror again.
The failing night, riddled with the Tree’s moans and sighs, reminds me of that horror of waking up to an unwelcome sight and feeling, in this case the Tree’s haggish face and repulsive aura. When I finally rise, I don’t spare the Tree a single glance. I just stretch myself and pluck a chewing stick from the ogilisi plant beside Ogi’s hovel.
Unfortunately, my ears, unlike my eyes, can’t shut her out completely.
Ndu. My Nduka, she cries, will you not console me today?
With my nose wrinkling, I spit a medley of spittle and ogilisi fiber at her and retreat toward my hovel, only to discern a spider as big as my fist abseiling down the eaves of Ogi’s roof like an assassin disguised as an acrobat. When a gasp betrays my presence, the spider ascends its flimsy thread.
A broom lurches out from Ogi’s hovel, slapping the spider to the ground. With a wince, I watch Ogi step into the sun, rubbing a stodgy hand on his naked paunchy stomach. His twenty-year-old skin is charcoal black, and his head is big like that of a white man called Edward. And when he is happy, you can see the moon in his eyes and the sun in his heart.
“Why?” I can’t decide if the disgust twitching all the muscles in my face is for the spider lying motionless in a blanket of yellowish red fluid or for my brother who won’t quit smiling like a fool in love.
“Can’t you see its potbelly?” He laughs, but as my grimace deepens and “I hate you!” darts out of my mouth, he adds, “I despise spiders, especially drunken ones,” before retiring into his hovel whistling with his fingers moving around his broad lips as though playing a flute.
For a while I frown at the spider, resolving that if I ever go near it, it will be to sweep it into the bush. That thought is accompanied by the dread that Osisi will be angry if he awakes and meets the yard unkempt. So I slouch to the broom and, as I pick it up, the spider, which turns out to be lying in a plaster of caked palm oil, hops onto my hand and pecks my skin.
It is merely a pinch, but it is enough to have me dropping the broom and springing away, all the while scratching the back of my hand. The red dot, which nestles inside the snakebite, infuses me with rage—the type that wants to trap the spider in a calabash and let it starve to death; the type that urges me to squash it under my bare foot. By the time I embrace the feeling and lower my gaze, the spider is gone.
This inflames my anger. I can feel my body burning up inside so much that I fear my hairless skin and scalp would grow tongues of flame to compensate for their barrenness.
I scour the yard for the spider, unable to understand why these animals attacked me and why I have so far eluded the pain their assaults should have inflicted. Still I trap the incident inside me lest Ogi should hear and convert it into one of his jokes.
I can’t find the spider. This makes my anger flare toward my brothers and rekindles the perturbing memories of every mockery, every scolding, and every flogging with which they maltreated me in the past.
It doesn’t make sense—how they wrong me and go unpunished. I think this because it is said that the hairless are favored by Ozodimgba; that their minds, to an extent, are impervious to influence and their body to unnatural death; that those who wish them harm meet with pre-emptive mischance. I am hairless, still my brothers mistreat me and go free.
Why should I not be infuriated?
I would rip their hearts out and drink their blood if I could. I would tear those climbing plants away from our hovels and condemn them to the searing heat of the sun. I would cripple the world if its cruelty resided in its limbs. I would uproot the Tree and char her wood, if only to silence her moans and hum.
From the bush bordering our backyard I can hear her beckoning me, and it occurs to me that while I can’t exert my rage on my brothers, I can scar the Tree with my machete. When I spin toward my hovel to fetch the blade, I am confronted by a bee buzzing over a mirimi flower. With a hiss, I try to bat it away, but it stings the back of my left hand, right inside the snakebite.
And it hits me—the pain of it all: the gnawing spasm of the scorpion’s sting, the sickening sensation of the snakebite, the oven-hot fever from the spider’s bite, and the itchy tingle caused by the bee’s stinger. It leaves my legs quaking, and I crash to the ground, shivering and whimpering as though death has its massive black hand around my heart and is draining it of blood with a mighty squeeze.
For the one hundred accelerated heartbeats the sickness lasts, my mind is assaulted by wave after wave of knowledge—visions that offer a purpose to the fear, hatred, and anger that followed the first three animal attacks.
Lying there in the bush, sweating like one being boiled alive, I know that Ozodimgba is truly gone. I see his ethereal essence bleeding out through wounds from Adamma’s unyielding stabs as he channeled all his strength into containing her in a tree cage. I see him fall. I see him dissipate, and his gifts disperse and seek out tiny beastly hosts. This awakens my foreboding, for I also envision the city drowning in its own malice in the absence of its god.
It is on the path to the city’s destruction that I glimpse my brothers throwing in their own malevolence. I withhold my anger, but not my loathing from them because a stronger vision hovers in my mind. The Tree. I see her. She wants to scour the world, unrestrained by Ozodimgba, leaving bodies and blood in her wake. Her desire to destroy is so potent that my urge to punish my brothers for their future crimes pales before it.
As I stumble to my feet, it is with the thought to warn my siblings, one who would shove a man to suicide by swindling his wealth away, another who would beat another man to death, and the third who would rise to power and oppress the city. The Tree has also seen this, and she wants to drink their blood.
I understand. I too want to drink their blood.
However, while my vision shows me the cruelty in the world and compels my anger to action, it also places my own heart before me. I don’t want to kill.
I bound toward the hovels with half a mind to forewarn my brothers about the Tree’s plan and the other half to thrust my hand into their hearts and rip them out, but as I reach the yard a great pang visits my head and I stagger to a stop.
My Nduka.
The Tree’s voice is adorned with feminine lure that has me sauntering, not toward my brothers’ hovels but toward her. As I walk, I close my eyes and the ground again sags away from my feet, and her shadow engulfs me, yearning.
Nduka m, she coos, Touch me. Gently. You have the Will now. Give me some. I can teach you how to wield it. Together we will judge them.
The Will? I open my eyes and the ground marries my feet, and I realize I now stand just a few strides from the Tree, my left hand outstretched, reaching for her trunk. The realization spurs my pulling back and putting my hand behind my back, safe from her jagged, lichen-infested bark.
But I am beautiful, she cries. Can’t you see? Look inside. You saw my enameled skin once. You can see it again. Close your eyes.
Her words slip into my mind and flow gently through my thoughts, caressing my foreboding away with their soothing fingers, and I close my eyes again. The ground sinks and once again her shadow envelops me.
I see her. Her skin is ebony and unblemished, despite the ember-hot iron chain that binds her and sears her flesh. Her skin scorches, but the burns fade as quickly as they are inflicted. Her nose stands like those of the white men from the southern sea; her lips are like black rose petals, her cheeks wet with twelve-moon-old tears, and my ears can discern the remnants of her powers echoing weakly inside the Tree.
Enough of the wandering thoughts. Her voice no
w borders on desperation. You must touch me now. Touch me.
I reach out with my left hand again, but another voice, one outside the shadow, begs my attention.
“Ndibe anyi bia nu o!” Osisi shouts to our brothers in Igbo. “Agu! Ogi! Nduka is flying o!”
Flying? I pry my eyes open, but when I look down, my bare feet discern the soil.
No! the Tree shrieks. Don’t leave. Touch me.
But I don’t listen anymore. Instead I turn around and run toward Osisi and my other brothers, who also scurry toward me from their hovels, bedazzled. “We must leave at once,” I am blurting when I notice the jute rope in Osisi’s hand. I don’t know how I do it, but a peek into his dingy mind further reveals that he intended to whip me for defecating in his pot.
Touch me. Please.
“Nduka, you were flying,” he says.
“How did you do it?” Ogi asks.
Touch me!
Fools. They disregard me, as usual. This heats up my body. They deserve to die, if only because while I neglected their future atrocities, they conspired to punish me.
You don’t ignore me, the Tree growls, and for a moment I think my brothers hear her this time, for their faces all jerk toward her, but it is actually the wind suddenly whooshing from her that alarms them. The Tree begins to shake with the bluster, as though being jiggled by giant hands, and the ground trembles with a great tremor.
We all disperse toward our various hovels, stumbling, falling, crawling as the world around us continues to judder. A gash opens in the earth, all the way from the Tree to my door. This makes me stop even as my brothers scramble into their hovels to gather their belongings.
I spin around in terror. The earth around the Tree sinks, as if stripped of the pillars suspending it over an enormous abyss, but instead of the Tree following, she keels over toward me. I stumble backward, the weight of my vigorous heartbeat pulling me to the ground and, lying there helpless, I bring my hands over my face as the Tree crashes on me and the hovels with my brothers inside.
For three days, I sit on a mud boulder, staring at the remains of my brothers, with tears soaking my cheeks. Osisi sprawls in the rubble of his hovel, decapitated by a branch, while Ogi lies crushed under another, a medley of his blood, flesh, and guts splattered on the fallen Tree’s leaves as if the hideous beauty of a sacrifice. Agu’s torso is buried under a mass of dying shoots. I don’t see his other half, and I don’t have the mind to look further.
From my vantage, I watch, unmoving, as the Tree’s green leaves turn brown, wither, and fall off one after the other into the ruins of the backwoods, covering my brothers’ decaying corpses. The stink in the air is overwhelming, but I don’t care. I could bury the bodies just with a wave of my hand, I figure. I could, with a whisper, even call on the city a hundred miles away to perform the funeral rites, but I don’t.
The stench and carrion repulse the Tree, so I condemn her to them. She killed my brothers; now she will rot with them.
Please, she begs, touch me. I don’t want the Will anymore. Just touch me. When I ignore her, she begins to shake and heave in an attempt to raise herself, but the powers within her are only imprints of what she once had, enough to effect a displacement in her balance, but not enough to achieve the feat to which she aspires. Alright. She is resigned. Raise me. Please. Just raise me from this decay.
As she pleads, I can sense her dread that I will never set her roots into the soil again. I loathe her, and she despises me. My anger wants to throttle her and her rage wants to shred me. But I am unassailable, and my surviving her crash unscathed can testify to that. Her feebleness keeps her at bay, but my desire to suffer her is what keeps her alive.
She yields to her anger in the only way that she now can. Those are my powers! she growls.
“Shared among the beasts by your husband,” I say.
Ozodimgba is dead. I willed those beasts to you, just as I willed you awake and to me all those nights. Her voice breaks down. We talked. You loved me. Why don’t you love me now?
“It was very stupid of you to have imagined you could sway me to free you and give the Will back to you.” It was, for with each power I received, she lost much of her influence over me. “Having wielded it before, you should have known that could never have worked. Or was it a gamble?”
She lets out a sigh that flows through the deciduous bush surrounding us, inciting more sighs from the plants there. You are just like me. Or will be. Soon.
“Not if I don’t go into the city and wreak havoc like you did.”
But the visions. … The vague ones will always pull you there. You see them, the malice, the big events, the end of the world, and you want to know who the perpetrators are, because the closer you are to them, the more precise the visions. And you, my dear Nduka, want to prevent these visions from materializing. How long can you resist when you have thousands of years ahead of you? She pauses for a while, as if contemplating. I too take the time to ponder on my options. When she speaks again, her voice embraces wistfulness. You know, I was good. I still am … just. I just wanted … want to keep the world safe. Don’t you?
“Not in the way you are proposing,” I say, but I can feel that darkness growing inside me.
She chuckles. There is a fine line between salvation and damnation. Sometimes you have to damn to save.
“I have the Will now. There will be no damnation, and I want you to quit talking to me.” I don’t put much effort to it. They are just words. But she resigns to weeping and lamenting.
I relish her agony while the sun comes and goes ten thousand times and my jute robe, unlike my young body, succumbs to time and falls away like autumn leaves. With every passing day, my visions expand, my fear for the city thumping, my hatred for the evil I see tugging, and my anger nagging me to lash out into civilization and judge and damn. I feel my resolve failing, and I wish there would be an Ozodimgba to cage me if I eventually yield to the darkness.
But this, on the contrary, could be a matter of when, because my rage is soon surmounted by the thought that no one cares enough to come and look for me and my brothers, even as the city encroaches, bearing in the sounds and sights of droning traffic and sky towers. We are all but forgotten, the reality of the lost princes reduced to tales for moonlight gatherings.
It could be a matter of when, because twelve moons later three woodcutters arrive.
They are oblivious of my presence, and I see that the raffia hat-wearer among them will axe his wife to death because of her infidelity, that the bald one will sacrifice his son to the dead Ozodimgba with a prayer to become king, and that the third, the limper, the one carrying a caged spider, will die by the arrows of a hunter in a moon’s time. This excites my rage, but I subdue the urge to damn the choppers with the vision of the remaining vestige of goodness in my heart.
See? the Tree taunts. Their hearts are drunk with malice. Judge them. Drink their blood.
I don’t listen. Instead I focus on the caged spider. It seems to be resonating with power and stares at me from atop a web too small for its oversized body and with eyes too keen for an arachnid. And I remember that the day Ozodimgba dissipated, as my visions portrayed it, his gifts, like those of Adamma, scattered across the lands, seeking tiny bestial hosts.
This compels me to hover to the cage as soon as the limper sets it down beside the bush. When I, for curiosity, slip my left hand, with its scars of bites and stings, inside, the spider shrinks from me. Therefore, I retrieve the hand and slide the right one through the rusty iron bars.
The spider skitters onto the hand as if confronted by an irresistible prey and nips my skin that until now I imagined was invulnerable. My nerves, however, convey no pain to my mind, but I feel an effulgent stream of affection coursing into my heart, lighting and softening its nooks, and overriding the loathing that resides there.
I stumble backward in midair, woozy with conflicting
emotions, the Tree’s sudden wail pulling my attention to her. The woodcutters have begun hacking away at her wood, and, lying there frail, she feels every strike as it lands. For a while, I stare at her, unable to summon my hatred for her.
Please. Please stop them.
Her weepy moans permeate me and seek the ever-spreading soft regions of my heart, and they almost find mercy, but the memory of my brothers’ demise barricades their path and imprisons my thought to blunt the choppers’ blades in a fiery corner. So I savor every pain that haunts her and let them break her, lug her home, chunk by chunk, and char her.
And while pieces of her dwell in charcoal and ash, witnessing in helpless rage the very human nature she fears and loathes, I scour the world, not to judge and damn, but in search of the hosts of Ozodimgba’s other powers.
When I find them, I shall offer them my right hand to bite and sting, and my fear and anger to counteract. Then I shall be fit to return home.
How to Become an Illustrator
by Larry Elmore
Larry Elmore has been an illustrator for forty years. Of those years, he has worked the last twenty-seven as a freelance illustrator.
Larry was the first illustrator to be inducted into the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) Hall of Fame, and he is also a 2016 Hugo award nominee. Larry is best known for his cover paintings for Dungeons & Dragons and his many book covers for the Dragonlance series. His art graces the front cover of this very volume.
His paintings have served as covers for many role-playing and tabletop games throughout the gaming industry. He has done cover work for many paperback and hardcover book publishers of fantasy and science fiction. During his long career, he has painted covers for magazines, comic books, computer games, collector card games and toy packaging, such as Thundercats and Willow.