Who Fears Death

  “Come on then,” Mwita said. He looked around Daib, at me. “Onyesonwu, you know exactly what’s true and what are lies.”

  “Mwita!” I screamed so loudly that I felt blood burst into my throat. I started running toward them, barely aware of the deep bruises and lacerations the wilderness tree had inflicted on my body. Before I could get to them, Daib leaped at Mwita like a cat. As they both crashed to the floor, Daib’s clothes split, his body undulating, thickening and sprouting orange and black fur, large teeth, and sharp claws. As a tiger, he tore at Mwita’s clothes, slashed Mwita’s chest open, and sunk his teeth deep into Mwita’s neck. Then Daib grew weak and fell over, wheezing and quivering.

  “Get OFF him!” I screamed, grabbing Daib’s fur. I shoved him off Mwita. So much blood. Mwita’s neck was half torn off. His chest gurgled out blood. I lay my left hand on him. He shuddered, trying to speak. “Mwita, shh shh,” I said. “I’ll . . . I’ll make you better.”

  “N-no, Onyesonwu,” he said, weakly taking my hand. How was he even able to speak? “This is . . .”

  “You knew! THIS is what you saw why you tried to pass initiation!” I screamed. I sobbed. “Oh, Ani! You knew!”

  “Did I?” he asked. Blood spurted from his neck with each beat of his heart. It was pooling around me. “Or did . . . knowing . . . make . . . happen?”

  I sobbed.

  “Find it,” he whispered. “Finish it.” He took in a labored breath and the words he spoke were full of pain. “I . . . know who you are . . . you should, too.”

  When he went limp in my arms, my heart should have stopped, too. I grasped him tightly. I didn’t care what he said. I would bring him back.

  I searched and searched for his spirit. It was gone. “Mama!” I screamed, my body shuddering as I sobbed. My mouth felt so dry. “Mama, help me!”

  Luyu came in. When she saw Mwita, she fell to her knees.

  “Mama!” I screamed. “He can’t leave me here!” I heard Luyu get up and run out and down the stairs. I didn’t care. It was all over.

  Daib lay there, a naked human being, slobbering and shuddering. Still stuck to his neck was the piece of cloth scribbled with symbols. Ting must have given Mwita this juju. She had to have used the Uwa Point, that of the physical world, the body. The most useful and dangerous point to the Eshu born. As I held Mwita’s body, a thought occurred to me. I grabbed and immediately acted on it. I didn’t consider the consequences, the possibilities, or the dangers.

  Mwita and I had not slept last night. I recalled how he’d moved inside me and released. He was still inside me. He was still alive. I felt them in me, swimming, wriggling. I was not at my moon’s peak but I made it so. I moved my egg to meet what I could find of Mwita’s life. But it wasn’t I who joined them. All I could do was make it possible. Something else chose the rest. Something wholly outside of and unconcerned with humanity. At the moment of conception, a giant shock wave blasted from me, a shock wave like the one so long ago during my father’s burial ceremony. It blew out the walls around me and the ceiling above me.

  I sat there with Mwita’s body, in the dust and debris, hoping something would fall on me and end my life. But nothing did. Soon all began to settle. Only the staircase remained intact. I could hear screams and shouts in the streets and buildings. All higher pitched voices. Female voices. I shuddered.

  “Wake up!” some woman screamed. “Wake up!”

  “Ani kill me too, o! ” another woman cried.

  I thought of the female apprentice Sanchi, who’d obliterated an entire town when she conceived as a student. I thought of Aro’s reservations about training girls and women. And in my arms, I held Mwita. Dead. I wanted to throw my head back and scream with laughter. Was it the thought of our child in my belly? Maybe. The sinking shock I felt for the consequences of what I’d just done? Possibly. The clarity of mind brought by too little food and rest and too much distress? Maybe. Whatever it was, the clouds in my mind cleared to bring me to my dream about Mwita. The island.

  Someone was running up the stairs.

  “Onye!” Luyu shouted, leaping over a chunk of sandstone and a case of books that had fallen on Daib. “Onye, what happened? Oh praise Ani, you’re all right.”

  “I know what we have to do,” I said flatly.

  “What?” Luyu said.

  “Find the Seer,” I said. “The one who made the prophecy about me.” I blinked as it came to me. “Rana, his name is Rana.”

  Sola had spoken of Rana just before we left Jwahir. “This Seer, Rana, he is the guardian of a precious document. This must be why he was given the prophecy,” Sola had said.

  From outside, women continued to scream and wail. “Then . . . then say good-bye and let’s go,” Luyu said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “He’s gone.”

  I looked at her. Then I looked at Mwita.

  “Stand up,” Luyu said. “We have to go.”

  I kissed his lovely lips one last time. I looked at Daib’s naked quivering body and sneered. I had no saliva left in my mouth or I’d have spit on him. I did not kill him. I left him there, too. Mwita would have been proud of me.

  You think that sand brick can’t burn hot? It can. I would never have left Mwita’s body there to be found and desecrated. Never. All things can burn, for all things must return to dust. I made the General’s building blaze bright. Was it my fault that Daib was still in there? I doubt Mwita would have been angry at me for burning down the building while Daib happened to lie helplessly inside.

  General Daib’s building wouldn’t stop burning until it was ash. Still, as we stood before it, I saw a large bat laboriously fly out the blaze like a piece of charred debris. It flew a few yards, dropped several feet, caught itself and then flew on. My father was crippled but he still lived. I didn’t care. If I succeeded in what I had to do, he would be dealt with in his own time.

  We walked quickly down the street as women ran amok. No one looked twice at us. We made our way toward the lake with no name.

  CHAPTER 59

  “ I FEEL STRANGE,” Luyu said. Then she ran to the edge of the river and vomited for the second time this day.

  I stood with my face exposed waiting for Luyu to finish. No one cared about me. People may have heard things about a crazy Ewu woman but what was happening in the town of Durfa had usurped that. For the moment.

  Every single male human in the central town of Durfa capable of impregnating a woman was dead. My actions had killed them. The armies I had seen, every single one of those men had instantly died. As we’d walked to the river, we saw male bodies in the street, heard cries from houses, walked past shocked children and women. I shuddered again, helplessly thinking about Daib . . . He is my father and I am his child, I thought. We both leave bodies in our wake. Fields of bodies.

  “Are you finished?” I asked. My face felt hot and I too felt like I was going to vomit.

  She grunted, slowly standing up. “My belly feels . . . I don’t know.”

  “You’re pregnant,” I said.

  “What?”

  “So am I.”

  She stared at me. “Did you . . .”

  “I made myself conceive. Something happened because of it. Something . . . terrible,” I looked at my hands. “Sola said my greatest problem would be a lack of control.”

  Luyu wiped her mouth with the back of her hands and touched her belly. “So . . . not just me, then. All the women.”

  “I don’t know how far it went. I don’t think it touched the other towns. But where there are dead men, there are pregnant women.”

  “W-what happened? Why are the men dead?” she asked.

  I shook my head and looked at the river. It was better for her not to know. A woman screamed from nearby. I wanted to scream, too. “My Mwita,” I whispered. My eyes burned. I didn’t want to look up and see bereaved women running amok in the streets.

  “He died well,” Luyu said.

  “A son kills his father,” I said. But Daib isn’t dead, I thought.


  “Apprentice kills his Master,” Luyu said tiredly. “Daib hated you, Mwita loved you. Mwita and Daib, one can’t thrive without the other, maybe.”

  “You speak like a sorcerer,” I grumbled.

  “I’ve been around enough of them,” Luyu said.

  “My Mwita,” I whispered again. Then I remembered and reached into the folds of my rapa. I hoped it wasn’t there. It was. I held the tiny metal disk up. “Luyu, do you still have your portable?” Inside a building across the road, a woman screamed until her voice cracked. Luyu winced.

  “Yeah,” she said. She squinted. “Where’d you get the disk?”

  I stepped closer as she carefully slipped the disk in. My heart was beating so fast that I clutched my chest. Luyu frowned and held me close to her. There was a soft whirring sound as a tiny screen rose up from the bottom. Luyu flipped it over.

  My mother was looking right at us as she lay in the sand. My father stabbed the silver knife into the sand beside her head. I noticed that its hilt was decorated with symbols very much like the ones etched into my hands. Ting would have known what they meant. He pulled my mother’s legs apart and then came the grunting, panting, and singing, and the snarled words between the singing. But this time I was watching a recording, not a vision from my mother. I was hearing his Nuru words outside of my mother’s perspective. I could understand.

  “I’ve found you. You’re the one. Sorceress. Sorceress!” He sang a song. “You’ll bear my son. He’ll be magnificent.” Another song. “I’ll raise him up and he will be the greatest thing this land will ever see.” He burst into song. “It is written! I’ve seen it!”

  Something made of glass flew out the window of the house across the road. It crashed to the ground. The sound of a sobbing child followed. I was numb to it all; the images of my mother raped by a Nuru sorcerer scorched into my eyes and my thoughts grew dark. I thought of the pained women, children, old men around me, wailing hurting, and sobbing; they had allowed this to happen to my mother. They wouldn’t have helped her.

  What would have happened if my mother had been the sorceress her father had asked her to be when Daib attacked her that day? There would have been such a battle. Instead all she had to protect her was her Alusi side.

  “Enough,” Luyu finally said, snatching the portable from me.

  People were filling the streets. They ran, dragged themselves, walked up and down, to the side of that road, going to places that I didn’t care about. Ghosts of their former selves, their lives changed forever. I stood there, my eyes unfocusing. My father actually prized this disk enough to keep it for twenty years.

  “We have to keep going,” Luyu said, dragging me along. But as we walked, tears dropped from her eyes, too. “Wait,” she said, still clutching my arm. She dropped the portable. “Step on it,” she said. “With all you have. Mash it into the ground.”

  I stared down at it for a moment and then stamped down with all my might. The sound of its breaking made me feel better. I picked it up and took out the disk. I crushed the disk with my teeth and threw it into the river.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  When we arrived at the lake, we took a moment. I’d seen it before, yes, but during my vision I hadn’t had a chance to stop and really take it in. Somewhere in the lake was an island.

  Behind us was chaos. The streets were full of women, children, and old men running and stumbling about and wailing “How can this happen!” Fights broke out. Women tore at their clothes. Many dropped to their knees and screamed for Ani to save them. I was sure that somewhere, the few Okeke women left were dragged out and torn apart. Durfa was diseased and I had caused its disease to rise up like a fevered cobra.

  We turned our back to all this. So much water. In the bright sunshine it was a light blue, the surface calm. The very air felt damp, and I wondered if this was what fish and other water creatures smelled like. A metallic sweet scent that was music to my sore senses. Back in Jwahir, neither Luyu nor I could ever have imagined this.

  Several water vehicles came to a stop at the edge of the water. They cut and interrupted the water’s tranquility. Boats, eight of them. All made of polished yellow wood with square blue insignias painted on the front. We quickly walked down the hill.

  “You! Wait!” a woman shouted behind us.

  We moved faster.

  “That’s the Ewu girl!” the woman said.

  “Get the demon!” another woman shouted.

  We started running.

  The boats were small, barely able to hold four people each. They had motors that let out smoke and a belching noise as they churned the water. Luyu ran for a boat operated by a young Nuru man. I could see why she chose him; he looked a little different from the other boat operators. He looked shocked, whereas all the others were staring at me with horror. When we got to him, the same expression remained on his face. He opened the gate to his boat. We got on.

  “You . . . you’re the . . .”

  “Yes, I am,” I said.

  “Move this thing!” Luyu shouted at him.

  “That woman killed all the men in Durfa!” a woman running down the hill screamed at the men. “Get her, kill her!”

  The man got his boat moving just in time. Smoke dribbled out and it made a sharp noise. He grabbed a lever and the boat shot forward. The other boatmen scrambled to the edges of their boats. They were too far to jump on ours. “Shukwu!” one of them shouted. “What are you doing?”

  “Eh, he has already been bewitched,” another boatman said.

  A crowd of women were running down the hill. A stone hit the boat and then another hit me in the backside as I turned away.

  “Where to?” the boatman named Shukwu asked.

  “Rana’s island,” I said. “Do you know where it is?”

  “I do,” he said, turning the boat south, into the water’s belly.

  Behind us, the women quickly talked to the men. They started their motors and quickly gave chase.

  “Stop the boat!” a man shouted. They were about a quarter of a mile from us.

  “Shukwu, we won’t hurt you!” another shouted. “We only want the girl.”

  Shukwu turned to me.

  I looked him in the eye. “Don’t stop the boat,” I said.

  We kept on.

  “So are the rumors true?” he asked. “Have all the men . . . what happened in Durfa?” He had come from across the lake, possibly from Suntown or Chassa. News traveled fast. He’d taken a great chance coming across the water. What could I tell him?

  “Why are you helping us?” Luyu asked, suspiciously.

  “I . . . don’t believe in Daib,” he said. “A lot of us don’t. Those of us who pray five times a day, love the Great Book, and are pious people know this isn’t Ani’s wish.” He looked at me, inspecting my face. He shuddered and looked away. “And I saw her,” he said. “The Okeke woman that no one could touch. Who could hate her? Her daughter could never do anything evil.”

  He was speaking of my mother going alu and trying to help me by telling people about me. So she was also appearing to Nurus. She was telling everyone what a good person I was. I almost laughed at the thought. Almost.

  Despite their heavy loads, we couldn’t outrun the other boats. Behind them, I saw five more boats full of men. “They will kill you,” Shukwu said. He pointed to the right. “We just came from Chassa and all was fine. Please. Tell me what has happened in Durfa?”

  I only shook my head.

  “Just get us there,” Luyu said.

  “Hope I’m doing the right thing,” he muttered.

  They shouted curses and threats as they approached.

  “How far?” Luyu asked, frantic.

  “Look up there,” he said.

  I could see it, an island with a thatch-roofed sandstone hut on it. But the boat’s motor was laboring, spewing out even more greasy black smoke. It started to make a chugging sound that couldn’t have been good. Shukwu cursed. “My fuel is almost done,” he said. He grabbed a small go
urd. “I can refill . . .”

  “No time! Go,” Luyu said, grabbing my shoulder. “Change and fly to it. Leave me. I’ll fight them.”

  I shook my head. “I’m not leaving you. We’ll make it.”

  “We won’t make it,” Luyu said.

  “We will!” I shouted. I got on my knees and leaned over the side. “Help it!” And I started paddling with my arm. Luyu leaned to the other side and did the same.

  “Use these,” Shukwu said, handing us large paddles. He gunned the motor to full power, which wasn’t much power at all. Slowly we approached the island. Nothing was going through my head except, Get there, GET THERE! My blue rapa and white shirt were soaked with sweat and the cold water of the unnamed lake. Above, the sun shined. Overhead a flock of small birds flew by. I paddled for dear life.

  “Go!” I shouted, when we got close enough. Luyu and I jumped out, splashed through the water and ran onto the tiny island that barely had room for a hut and two squat trees. Only a few yards to the hut. I paused to see Shukwu frantically paddling his boat away.

  “Thank you!” I shouted.

  “If . . . Ani . . . wills it,” I heard him breathlessly shout. The boats of Nuru were closing in. I turned and ran to the hut.

  I stopped beside Luyu at the threshold. There was no door. Inside slumped Rana’s lifeless body. In the corner was a large dusty book. I don’t know what happened to Rana. He could have been one of my victims, but did the death I accidently inflicted reach out this far? I’ll never know. Luyu turned and ran back the way we’d come. “Do it!” she shouted over her shoulder. “I’ll hold them off.”

  Outside as I was in that hut, those men who’d followed us saw her come out. Luyu was beautiful and strong. She wasn’t afraid as she watched them step from their boats, taking their time now that they knew we were trapped. I think I heard her laugh and say, “Come on, then!”

  Those Nuru men saw a beautiful Okeke woman protected only by her sense of duty and her two bare hands which had grown rough with use in the last few months. And they pounced on her. They ripped off her green rapa, her now dirty yellow top, the beaded bracelets she’d taken from the gift baskets only yesterday, a lifetime ago. Then they tore her apart. I don’t recall hearing her scream. I was busy.