He said something to their pilot and the boat veered, heading straight for shore. Amina gasped, convinced they would crash into the wall of mangroves, only to see a gap open up at the last possible moment. A trail of water appeared.
"Shortcut," said Nnamdi.
Their young Ogoni pilot, chin down, white shirt billowing, looked tense as they left the main channel and entered Ijaw territory. The Ogoni people and the Ijaw might have formed a tentative alliance in the Down Below slums of Portako, but out here, in the spiderweb of the Delta creeks, loyalties were less fixed. If this Ijaw boy and his captive—Hausa from the looks of it—were to turn on him, where would he flee, what would he do? Was he steering the boat into an ambush? The Turk had assured him otherwise, but in a swamp, assurances were as uncertain as allies.
They were now wending their way into the waterlogged heart of the Delta. Tidal estuaries. Brackish inlets. The sheen of oil on water, iridescent and beautiful. Like an insect's wing, Amina thought.
The mangroves pushed in on either side; the trees themselves seemed to be wading through the water, roots twisting their way out of the mud below. Low-hanging branches dragged across the boat, thumping the tarp and forcing the pilot to duck.
"If you see a vine moving," Nnamdi told Amina, "it's best you do too."
Storks took flight, wings leaving perfect circles along the water.
On an overhead branch, a sudden shriek—and Amina scrambled backward.
Nnamdi said, "A monkey, nothing more." He could see the girl's shoulders shaking, thin and birdlike. "The monkeys out here have long tails, white throats. Always causing trouble. There is one monkey—a red one, with skinny arms, long hair. Very rare.
Professors from Lagos University have come here trying to catch it, and they have always failed. They even offered a reward! For a monkey! I have lived my life in this delta, and never have I seen such a monkey. But... maybe today is that day. So, child, keep your eyes wide. If you see such a creature, we must capture it at once. We will sell it to a zoo, then buy a big house and be rich."
She smiled, so faintly he almost missed it.
"Do you know how to catch a monkey?"
She shook her head.
"By being clever. If you put a pinch of salt between a monkey's eyes, he will go cross-eyed and not see you coming. A pinch of salt, between the eyes, and you will have him." Nnamdi imitated the cross-eyed fellow, staggering one way, then another. She had to hold a hand across her mouth and look away to keep from laughing.
Nnamdi passed her the canteen he'd filled back in Portako. "I think maybe you should smile more," he said. "It suits your face."
A rumble of thunder, and they made it through into the next channel. Thousands of dead fish were floating on the water, in among the mangrove roots, coated in oil. A charred forest.
Blackened trees, charcoal vines. Sabotage? A gas leak, ignited unawares? A bunkering operation gone wrong? "I don't know," said Nnamdi when the Ogoni pilot asked. Anything would burn if you use enough fuel, even rivers. Nnamdi knew this firsthand.
Dusk on the Delta. The pilot leaned on the throttle, hoping to make Nnamdi's village before nightfall. He would sleep on his boat, then return in the morning. That was the plan.
But then Nnamdi looked behind them. "Something's coming," he said.
Another boat had entered the channel, in from the rear, moving fast. A speedboat, crowded with men, rifles raised.
The Ogoni pilot leaned harder on the throttle, and the
Himar
began to chop across the waves, almost taking flight at times, even with the cargo weighing it down.
"Can we outrun them?" Nnamdi asked.
The pilot looked back at the speedboat that was even now cutting across their wake. "We have twin outboard motors!" he shouted. "Forty horsepower. And we are heavy with goods. They have seventy-five horsepower. Maybe more. Can we outrun them?
No, we cannot."
So the pilot spun hard, pointed the boat at one of the secondary creeks. "Perhaps we can lose them instead," he said. "Cat-and-mouse it among the creeks. Wait till nightfall, try to slip away."
"No," said Nnamdi. Running would only anger their pursuers.
"Cut the motor, come around. We will see what they want."
"We know what they want! Blood!"
"Cut the motor," said Nnamdi. "It's our only chance."
The pilot killed the motor, turned the boat to face his fate.
"Is good you didn't run!" called the man standing along the speedboat s prow. "We would have gone shot you out of de water, used ya skulls for soup bowls."
They were taut-torsoed men, shirtless for the most part and streaming with sweat. One of them wore an orange Shell jumpsuit, unzipped to the waist and stained with something resembling rust.
Three or four of them sported fresh scars across their chests, slits cut to insert protective potions under their skin. White tatters of cloth flew from their gun barrels. Egbesu boys, immune to bullets.
Vaccinated against death.
"Noao!"
Nnamdi said.
"Noao,
" they replied, as their boat drifted up alongside. "We dey NDLA," shouted their leader. "What is your mission?"
"Going home, only that."
Their expressions reminded Nnamdi of the glazed stare of goat heads hanging in a butchers market.
Glassy eyes, rimmed with red: hashish and gin, perhaps a little heroin to leaven the mix. One of the Egbesu boys pushed his way to the front of the speedboat, laughed, full-throated and loud. "I know dis one!" he said, pointing at Nnamdi.
It was his old friend, the boy from Bonny Island, the one Nnamdi had first taught how to break into a manifold. The young man had graduated from tapping pipelines, it would seem. An AK-47 rested in the crook of his arm and a leather belt of bullets was slung across his chest. A rocket-powered grenade launcher behind him leaned to one side. There was an oily sheen on everything: the men, the weapons, the boat. Nnamdi had seen such weapons on sale in the Down Below streets. A much improved arsenal, and a far cry from the single-bolt rifles of earlier days.
The rebels had cut their motor, and Nnamdi heard something small and afraid whimpering from below the other boat's tarpaulin.
"That?" said the boy from Bonny Island when he saw Nnamdi's expression. "Just this."
The boy pulled back the covering, and below was a woman, hair-plastered with sweat, eyes terrified. An
oyibo
in khaki clothes.
They hadn't bothered to bind her wrists. In a swamp like this, where could she possibly run?
"All the oil companies, all is under lockdown. Armed guards everywhere. So we raided a French facility, next creek over. Aid workers, is what they said—when they was dying. Workin' for oil either way. The men she was with, all died in de tussle. Found her hidin' under a bed. A handsome ransom for dis one, I think."
Amina looked at the pale creature, the frightened
batauri
cowering at the feet of her captors, saw herself in those washed-out eyes.
The boy from Bonny laughed. "I see you caught a woman of ya own. I would trade wit' you, but I thinkin' ours is worth a lot more."
Nnamdi forced a smile. "So be, so be. Not worth much, mine.
Cost more to feed than to keep."
The pale woman looked at Amina.
"De I'eau,
" she whispered.
"S'il vous plait. De I'eau.
"
Amina handed her canteen across—the boys in the speedboat didn't seem to care—and the pale woman drank down the Portako tap water, gulping hard as Amina watched. After a minute, the men pulled the canteen away, tossed it back to Amina.
The woman kept her eyes on Amina as the men talked large and laughed loud.
"Aidez-moi,
''she whispered.
"
Je ne peux pas,"
Amina whispered back.
"De femme à femme. Aidez-moi."
She was holding back a sob.
"De femme à femme. ""Je ne peux pas . . . "
The men in the speedboat were demanding payment from the Ogoni pilot, a fee for the privilege of passing through their territory. "Coke, we want coke." At first Nnamdi thought they were demanding drugs, but no. They were eyeing the goods visible under the tarp. They were thirsty. "Give us Coke."
"Fanta?" Nnamdi asked, pulling back the covering. One of the Egbesu boys stepped aboard to claim it. "Wait," said Nnamdi.
"The ones below are colder." He shifted a crate and dragged out a lower box, and with this simple gesture he unknowingly saved their lives: his, the girl's, the pilot's.
"A good man," they said, pressing the cold bottles against their temples.
The Egbesu boys started their motor up, and the two boats slipped apart like reflections separating. Amina and the
batauri
woman stared into each other as the distance between them grew.
The
Himar
moved again across the murky waters of the Delta.
Nnamdi stayed silent. Finally, without looking at Amina, he said,
"There was nothing I could do. I couldn't help her."
"I know."
"I couldn't."
I know.
In the gathering dark, they rounded a final bend in the creek to the sound of drums. The Ogoni pilot called to Nnamdi, but Nnamdi didn't know what it meant either. "Maybe a camp of some sort. It wasn't there before," he said.
Long white banners fluttered from tree branches like cotton bandages unrolled. Chanting and drums. And in a clearing, bodies painted with chalk, dancing in a grim gin-stoked frenzy, arms jerking, guns waving in the air. A round went off, and then another.
Amina felt the fear of a hundred days flood in.
Is this where it ends? Am I taking this boat to my own death?
"What madness is this?" the pilot whispered, slowing down to glide past, hoping not to be seen.
"Not madness," said Nnamdi. "Egbesu. The Ijaw God of War.
They have been inoculated, you see."
"Inoculated?"
"When you join Egbesu, bullets cannot harm you. They pass through your body like you are made of smoke. You can drink any poison, battery acid even, and not die. You are invincible."
"And if you do die?" the Ogoni demanded. "What then?"
"It means you have done something wrong, broken some commandment. If you die or are injured, the gods did not fail you.
You failed the gods."
"And what are their gods telling them?"
"To fight. To drive the
oyibo
and the oil companies from the Delta. To make this an Ijaw state. To fight."
For the first time, the Ogoni pilot and the girl from the Sahel looked at each other.
"This... is not good," said Nnamdi. "It means the time of talking has passed." There would be no more ultimatums, no more proclamations or press-conference manifestos. There would only be war.
Beyond the Egbesu camp, a familiar landscape of mangroves and small-scale cassava farms emerged. Houses floated past on shore, lit by coal oil and the occasional chest-rattling generator.
Everything was backlit by the orange glow of gas flares.
"My village!" Nnamdi cried, pointing ahead, urging the boat on. "That tree—that tree there?" He was pointing to a trunk that formed a wide curve over the water. "I swung from that tree as a child. And that—you see, up the hill? Below the cross? Two lights close together? That is my father's house. Where I grew up."
Lights were blazing along the piers, bare bulbs dangling on extension cords. A city built on stilts. That's how it looked to Amina. Not a village, a city. A renewed wave of panic overtook her.
"You said—you said seven hundred people."
"Yes," Nnamdi said. "That's my village, in front. That, over there—" He pointed to the sprawling shantytown behind.
Makeshift lean-tos and cast-off hovels. Huts made from mud instead of cement. Thatched roofs instead of tin. "That is not my village. That is the other side of the creek. Those are people from other villages that have been destroyed. Or abandoned. They come across at night sometimes, cause many kinds of mischief. But where we are going—that is my home."
To Amina, the demarcation seemed to exist primarily in Nnamdi's imagination; the two communities spilled into each other with only the faintest trickle of water between. She could see a church steeple above the crowded homes, the cross perfectly silhouetted by the gas flare beyond. A hand-painted sign near the shore read
WELCOME TO NEW JERUSALEM.
The
Himar
bumped up against a broken-backed jetty, its hull scraping over submerged mangrove roots. Nnamdi and the pilot hopped off, pulled the boat in. "The oil company built this jetty; the rebels used it, the army destroyed it. But we can still land a boat here. We are good at landing boats."
As Nnamdi and the pilot unloaded the crates, word spread quickly, and a crowd of well-wishers came hurrying down, cheering Nnamdi's return.
Bare-bellied children scrambled near. "My cousins," he explained. They were holding up a rope on a stick. Not a rope. A snake—a cobra, impaled and dangling, dead. They were laughing, giggling, clamouring for attention, and Nnamdi congratulated them on their catch.
More faces, more forearm-to-forearm clasps, more people pushing in. Everyone seemed to be a cousin, or the cousin of a cousin. "And mine is a small family," he told Amina.
As the last of the boxes were unloaded, and as volunteers began lugging them up to Nnamdi's house, a murmur ran through and the crowds parted. A woman in flowing robes, regal in deportment, rich in laughter, came striding out.
