Who Fears Death

  Luyu came out of her tent. “Me, too,” she said. “I don’t care about you putting your hands on me. Anything to enjoy intercourse again. I don’t have time for marriage.”

  Binta came scrambling out. “Me, too!” she said.

  All I felt was doubt. “Okay,” I said. “Tomorrow night.”

  “So you know exactly what to do?” Luyu asked.

  “I think so,” I said. “I mean, I’ve never done this before, obviously.”

  “What do you think you’ll . . . do?” Luyu pressed.

  I thought about it. “Well, something can’t come from nothing. Even a bit of flesh. Once Aro pulled an insect’s leg off, threw the leg aside, and said, ‘make it walk again.’ I was able to do it but I can’t tell you how. There’s a point where it goes from me doing something to something working through me and doing what’s to be done.”

  I frowned considering this. When I healed it wasn’t all me. If it wasn’t all me, then who else was it? It was like that moment I told to Luyu, when you wake up and don’t know who you are.

  “Once I asked Aro what he thought happened when he healed and he said it had something to do with time,” I said. “That you manipulate it to bring back the flesh.” The three of them just stared at me. I shrugged and gave up explaining.

  “Onye,” Binta suddenly said. “I’m so so sorry. We shouldn’t have gone there.” She threw herself on me, knocking me over. “You shouldn’t have been there!”

  “It’s okay,” I said, trying to sit up. She still clung to me and now she was crying hard. I wrapped my arms around her, whispering, “It’s okay. Binta. I’m okay.” Her hair smelled like soap and scented oil. She’d braided her Afro into many small braids the day before we left Jwahir. Since then, the braids had grown out and still she hadn’t undone them. I wondered if she’d decided to go dada. Two of the camels humphed from behind Luyu’s tent where they were trying to rest.

  “For goodness’ sake,” Fanasi said coming out of his tent, “Women.”

  Mwita came out of his tent, too. I noticed Luyu looking at his bare chest and I wasn’t sure if it was out of the usual curiosity people had about the bodies of the Ewu or something more carnal.

  “So it’s decided then,” Mwita said. “That’s good.”

  “Indeed it is,” Fanasi said cheerily.

  Diti gave him a dirty look.

  CHAPTER 35

  I SPENT MOST OF THE NEXT DAY AS A VULTURE, soaring, relaxing. Then I returned to camp, dressed, and walked for about a mile to a place I had scoped out while flying. I sat under the palm tree, put my veil on my head, and pulled my hands into my garments for protection from the sun. I cleared my head of thought. I didn’t move for three hours. I returned to the camp just before sunset. The camels greeted me first. They were drinking from a bag of water Mwita held for them. They nudged me with their soft wet muzzles. Sandi even licked my cheek, smelling and tasting the wind and sky on my skin.

  Mwita kissed me. “Diti and Binta have made you a feast,” he said.

  I especially enjoyed the roasted desert hare. They were right to want me to eat. I needed my strength. Afterward, I took a bucket of water, went behind our tent, and washed thoroughly. As I poured water over my head, I heard Diti shout, “Don’t!” I paused, listening. I couldn’t quite hear over the sound of dripping water. I shivered and finished my bath. I dressed in a loose shirt and my old yellow rapa. By this time the sun had set completely. I could hear them all gathering. It was time.

  “I’ve chosen a place,” I said. “It’s about a mile away. There’s a tree. Mwita, Fanasi, you stay here. You’ll see our fire.” I met Mwita’s eyes, hoping he understood my unspoken words: Keep your ears open.

  I took a satchel full of stones and the four of us left. When we got to the tree, I dumped out the rocks and warmed them up until my joints loosened. The night was very cold. We’d come far enough for the weather to change. Though the days remained hot, the nights had become utterly frigid. It rarely got this cold at night in Jwahir.

  “Who wants to go first?” I asked.

  They looked at each other.

  “Why not do it in the order of our rite?” Luyu said.

  “Binta, you, then Diti?” I said.

  “Let’s do it the other way around this time,” Binta insisted.

  “Fine,” Diti said. “I didn’t come here to get scared.” Her voice was shaking.

  “Spit out your talembe etanou stones,” I said.

  “Why?” Luyu asked.

  “I think they’re charmed, too,” I said. “But I’m not sure how.” Luyu spit hers in her hand and put it in a fold in her rapa. Diti spit hers into the dark. Binta hesitated. “Are you sure?” she asked.

  I waved a hand at her. “Do what you like.” She didn’t spit hers out. “All right,” I said. “Ah, Diti, you have to . . .”

  “I know,” she said, taking her rapa off. Luyu and Binta both looked away.

  I felt nauseated. Not out of fear but more from a deep sense of discomfort. She would have to spread her legs. But even worse, I had to also place my hands on the scar that was left from that swift cut nine years ago.

  “You don’t have to look like that,” Diti said.

  “How do you expect me to look?” I asked, annoyed.

  “We’ll just, ah, walk this way,” Luyu suddenly said, taking Binta’s hand and stepping away. “Call us when you’re ready.”

  “Is the fire warm enough?” I asked Diti.

  “Can you make it warmer?”

  I did. “You’re going to have to. . . . do what you did . . . before,” I said, kneeling down beside the rocks. I looked at the sky as she lay down beside me and spread her legs. I took in a deep breath and lay my hands on her. I focused my mind immediately, ignoring the moist feel of my friend’s yeye. I focused on pulling up handful after handful of what there was plenty of. I took strength from the fear and excitement of Luyu and Binta nearby. I pulled from the restlessness of the camels, the mild worry of Mwita back at the camp, and the confused anxiety and excitement of Fanasi.

  I could feel her scar but soon I could feel heat and a breeze pushing from behind me. Diti was whimpering. Then crying. Then screaming. I held on, my eyes closed, though I could feel the same burning, tearing, knitting between my legs. Her screams had to reach Mwita and Fanasi. I held on. The moment came. I took my hands away. Instinctively, I plunged my hands into the sand. I scrubbed them as if the sand were water. I used Diti’s rapa to clean off my hands.

  “It’s done,” I said in a husky voice. My hands were itchy. “How do you feel?”

  She wiped the tears from her face and gave me a dirty look. “What did you do to me?” she said, her voice hoarse.

  “Shut up,” I snapped. “I told you it would hurt.”

  “You want me to see if it works?” she asked sarcastically.

  “I don’t care what you do,” I said. “Go and get Luyu.”

  Once she was standing up, Diti seemed better. She looked down at me for a moment and then slowly walked away. I rubbed more sand on my itchy hands. “Everything has a consequence,” I mumbled to myself.

  All three of them screamed.

  “Leave me here,” I said when I finished with Binta. I was out of breath and sweating, still scrubbing my hands with the sand. I could smell all three of them on me and I was twitchy all over. I scrubbed harder. “Go back to the camp.”

  Neither they nor I needed to check if what I did worked. It had. I understood now that there was no reason to doubt myself with something so simple. “I can do much more,” I said to myself. “But what would I suffer?” I laughed. My hands itched so badly that I wanted to place them on the hot rocks. I held them up in the fire light.

  “Oh Ani, what did you make when you made me?” I whispered. My skin was chaffing. I picked at a small piece of skin. A swath of it the size of the entire back of my hand sloughed off. I dropped it on the sand. Right before my eyes, I saw the new skin begin to dry and chafe. It too would peel off. I grated it with s
and. Layer after layer came off. The itching continued. There was a pile of skin on the ground and I was still peeling when Mwita spoke from behind me.

  “Congratulations,” he said, leaning against the palm tree, putting his arms around his chest. “You’ve made your friends happy.”

  “I . . . I can’t make it stop,” I said frantically.

  Mwita frowned and looked more closely in the dim light. “Is that skin?” he asked. I nodded. He knelt beside me. “Let me see.”

  I shook my head, holding my hands behind my back. “No. It’s awful.”

  “How do they feel?” he asked.

  “Terrible. Hot, itchy.”

  “You need to eat,” he said. He brought out a hunk of red cactus candy wrapped in a cloth. It was just the way I liked it, sticky and ripe.

  “I’m not hungry,” I said.

  “It doesn’t matter. All that skin requires energy and production from you, juju or not. You need to eat to replace it.”

  “I don’t want to touch it. I don’t want to touch anything with them.”

  He put the cactus candy aside. “Let me see, Onyesonwu.”

  I cursed and gave him my hands. It was always so humiliating. I would do something and I’d always need Mwita to put me back in order. As if I had no control of my abilities, my faculties, my body.

  He looked at my hands for a long time. He touched the skin. Peeled some of it off, watched the new skin become old and peel again. He grasped my hands in his.

  “They’re hot,” he said.

  I envied him. I was the sorceress but he understood so much more than I. He wasn’t allowed to learn the Mystic Points, yet he had sorcerer’s ways.

  “Okay,” he said to himself after a while.

  When he said nothing else, I asked, “Okay, what?”

  “Shh,” he said, reminding me of Aro. Sola, too. All three had a habit of listening to a voice or voices I couldn’t hear. “Okay,” he said again. This time he was speaking to me. “I can’t heal this.”

  “What?”

  “But you can.”

  “How?”

  Mwita looked irritated. “You should know.”

  “Well, obviously I don’t!” I snapped.

  “You should,” he said, laughing bitterly. “Ah, you should know how to do this. You have to practice more, Onye. Start teaching yourself.”

  “I know,” I said, looking annoyed. “That’s why I was saying we should be careful when we have intercourse. I’m not . . .”

  “That chance is better taken,” Mwita said. He paused, looking at the sky. “Only Ani knows why she made you a sorcerer instead of me.”

  “Mwita, just tell me what I should do,” I said, rubbing my hands with sand.

  “All you need to do is to wash your hands in the wilderness,” he said. “You used your hands to manipulate time and flesh and now they’re full of flesh and time. Take them to the wilderness where there is no time or flesh and it will stop.” He got up. “Do it now so we can go back.”

  He was right, I hadn’t been learning or practicing. Since we’d left, I’d only used my abilities when we needed them or when I needed them. I tried to drop into the wilderness. Nothing happened. I was unpracticed, and I had not fasted. I tried harder and still nothing happened. I calmed myself and focused inward. Letting my thoughts peel away, like the flesh on my hands. Gradually the world around me shifted and undulated. I watched the colors for a while as several pink hazes of color circled my head.

  Then in the distance, I saw it, the red eye. I hadn’t seen it since I was sixteen, since initiation. I quickly stood up. I was Eshu which meant I could shift into the bodies of other creatures and spirits. Here I was blue. Except my hands, which were a dull brown. I stared defiantly back at the eye.

  “When you’re ready,” I said to him. Daib didn’t reply. I pretended to ignore him. I held up my hands. Immediately they attracted several free happy spirits. Two pink ones and a green one passed through my hands. When I brought them down, my hands were a rich blue like the rest of me. I sat down and with relief came back to the physical world. I looked at my hands. They were still covered with peeling skin. But when I stripped the skin off, only stable rich skin was underneath. I looked at Mwita. He was sitting at the base of the tree, looking at the sky.

  “Daib was watching me there,” I said.

  He turned around. “Oh, you’re back.” He paused. “Did he try anything?”

  “No,” I said. “He was just that red staring eye.” I sighed. “My hands are better, though. But they’re still a little warm, like they have a fever, and the skin is tender.”

  He held and looked them over. “I can help this,” he said. “Let’s go back.”

  When we got within range of the camp, we heard shouting. We walked faster.

  “Is that all you think about, Fanasi?” Diti was yelling.

  “What kind of wife are you? I didn’t even say anything about . . .”

  “I’m not staying with you tonight!” Diti screamed.

  “Will you two just shut up!” Luyu shouted.

  “What’s going on?” I asked Binta, who was just standing there crying.

  “Ask them,” she sobbed.

  Fanasi turned his back to me.

  “None of your business,” Diti grumbled, putting her arms around her chest.

  I went to my tent, disgusted. Behind me, I heard Fanasi tell Diti, “I should never have come with you. I should have let you leave and been done with it.”

  “Did I ask you to come for me?” Diti said. “You’re so selfish!”

  I slapped aside my tent flap and crawled in. I wished that it had just been Mwita and me who’d left, that they’d all just stayed home. What can they do when we get to the West, anyway? I wondered. Mwita came in.

  “It was supposed to make things better,” I hissed.

  “You can’t fix everything,” he said. He held out a bowl to me. “Here, eat.”

  “No,” I said, putting it aside.

  He gave me an angry look and left. We were all falling apart, all right. We’d been falling apart since we left but when I broke that juju, the cracks became more permanent. It wasn’t my fault, I know, but back then I felt everything was. I was the chosen one.

  It was all my fault.

  CHAPTER 36

  I FELL SICK THAT NIGHT. I was so angry and disappointed with all the bickering that I’d refused to eat anything and gone to sleep on an empty stomach. Mwita had been out most of the night, trying to talk sense into Fanasi. If he’d been there, he’d have forced me to eat before I slept. When he returned just before dawn, he found me curled into a tight ball, shivering and grumbling nonsense. He had to feed me spoonfuls of salt and then the broth from last night’s stew. I couldn’t even hold the spoon.

  “Next time, don’t be stubborn and thoughtless,” he’d said angrily.

  I was too weak to travel, but I was soon able to sit up and eat on my own. The camp was tense. Binta and Diti stayed in their tent. Fanasi and Mwita went off to talk. Luyu stayed with me. We lay in my tent practicing Nuru together.

  “What think Diti’s problem?” Luyu asked in very bad Nuru.

  “She’s stupid,” I replied in Nuru.

  “I. . . .” Luyu paused. In Okeke she asked, “How do you say freedom in Nuru?”

  I told her.

  She thought for a second and said in Nuru, “Think I . . . Diti taste freedom and now can’t without.”

  “I think she’s just stupid,” I said again in Nuru.

  Luyu switched to Okeke. “You saw how happy she was in that tavern. Some of those men were lovely . . . None of us were ever allowed to be that free in Jwahir.”

  I laughed. “You were.”

  She laughed, too. “Because I learned to take what wasn’t given to me.”

  Late that night as I lay beside Mwita, I was still thinking about Diti’s stupidity. Mwita breathed softly, deep in sleep. I heard soft footsteps outside. I was used to the movement of the camels who often went out forag
ing at night or to mate. These footsteps were not big or many. I closed my eyes and listened harder. Not a desert fox, I thought. Not gazelle. I held my breath, listening harder. Human. The footsteps were going toward Fanasi’s tent. I heard whispers. I relaxed. Diti had finally gotten some sense.

  Of course I kept listening. Wouldn’t you? I heard Fanasi whisper something. Then . . . I frowned. Listening closer. There was a sigh and then soft motion and a low groan. I almost woke Mwita up. I should have woken him up. This was bad. But what right did I have to stop Luyu from going into Fanasi’s tent? I could hear their rhythmic breathing. They went on like this for over an hour. Eventually I drifted off, so who knew when Luyu returned to her tent.

  We packed up our things before sunrise. Diti and Fanasi didn’t speak to each other. Fanasi tried not to look at Luyu. Luyu acted completely normal. I laughed to myself as we started walking. Who knew there could be such theatrics in a small group in the middle of nowhere?

  CHAPTER 37

  BETWEEN DITI’S IGNORANT ARROGANCE, Luyu’s boldness, and Fanasi’s confused emotions, the next two weeks were far from boring. They were my distraction from darker thoughts. Luyu would set up her tent next to Fanasi’s and sneak in there late at night every few days. They would both be exhausted come morning and spend the day not looking at each other. I must say, they put on a good act.

  In the meantime, I practiced dropping into and gliding through the wilderness. Each time I did, I saw the red eye in the distance, watching me. I surprised Mwita by sneaking up on him as a desert fox. I cut and healed my skin over and over, until cutting and healing myself was easy. I even started a three-day fast, trying to evoke a traveling vision. If Daib wanted to spy on me, then I could spy on him.

  “How come you didn’t eat your breakfast?” Mwita asked.

  “I’m trying for a vision. I think I can control it this time. I want to see what he’s up to.”

  “It’s a bad idea,” he said, shaking his head. “He’ll kill you.” He left and returned with a plate of porridge. I ate, no questions asked.