Who Fears Death (14 page)

I found a tunnel made by the tree’s roots. I leaned against one of them, frustrated. I cursed and slapped at the root. “This place is a bizarre labyrinth,” I grumbled. I was wondering how I was going to find the exit when two young men with long black braided beards came up to me.

“Here she is, Kona,” one of them said. He had a bag of dates. He popped one in his mouth. The other one laughed and leaned against the root next to me. They both might have been in their early twenties, though their beards made them look older.

“What are you doing here, Onyesonwu?” the one with the dates asked. He offered me one and I took it. I was starving.

“Why do you know my name?” I asked.

“Only Kona is allowed to answer questions with questions,” he said. “I’m Titi. Apprentice to Dika the Seer. Kona is apprentice to Oyo the Ponderer. And you are lost.” He handed me another date. They stood there watching me eat it.

“He’s right,” Titi said to Kona. Kona nodded.

“How long, do you think?” Kona asked.

“I’m not good enough to see that yet,” Titi said. “I’ll ask
Oga
Dika.”

“Won’t Mwita be angry with her, too?” Kona asked with a laugh.

I looked up, my attention caught. “Eh?”

“Nothing you won’t know,” Titi said.

“Is Mwita here?” I asked.

“Do you see him here?” Kona asked me.

“No,” Titi said. “Not today, he isn’t. Go and find Nana the Wise.” He gave me another date.

“Can you show me where she is?” I asked.

“No,” Titi said.

“Are you sure that’s what you’re here for?” Kona asked.

“We have to go,” Titi said. “Don’t worry, you won’t be lost in here forever, beautiful
Ewu
girl.” He handed me his bag of dates.

“You
are
welcome here,” Kona said. It was the first nonquestion he’d said to me.

Then, as quickly as they came, they were on their way down the tunnel of roots. I ate a few dates and moved on. An hour later, I was still lost. I trudged down a hallway with windows too high for me to see out of. I didn’t remember seeing windows from outside. I came to a stairway. It wound up in a stone spiral.

“Finally!” I said aloud. The stairway was very narrow and as I went up, I hoped I wouldn’t meet anyone. I counted fifty-two steps and still no second floor. It was stuffy and hot. The lights on the wall were dim and orange. Ten stairs later, I heard footsteps and voices. I looked down. It was pointless to go back.

The voices grew louder. I saw their shadows and held my breath. Then I was face to face with Aro. I gasped and looked down, flattening against the wall. He said nothing to me as he squeezed by. His body was forced to press against mine. He smelled of smoke and flowers. He stamped on my foot as he passed. There were three men following him. None of them said “Excuse me.” When they were gone, I sat down on the steps and wept. Titi was wrong. I wasn’t welcome here at all, unless welcome meant being made a fool of. I wiped my hands on my dress, pulled myself up, and moved on.

The stairs finally ended at the start of another hallway. The first room I peeked into was Nana the Wise’s. “Good, ah, afternoon,” I said.

“Good afternoon,” she said, leaning back in her wicker chair, a cup of tea in hand.

I took a cautious step back but my backside met a closed door. I turned around confused. When had I walked into the room?

“It’s the way of the House,” she said, peering at me with her one good eye.

“I think I hate this place,” I mumbled.

“People hate what they don’t understand,” she said. “I was about to go out to the market for lunch but then my apprentice brought me this.” She held up a container of pepper soup. She peeled off the top and put it on the wicker table beside her. “So here I am. I should have known to expect a visitor.”

She motioned for me to sit on the floor and for a minute, I watched her eat her soup. It smelled wonderful. My stomach rumbled.

“How are your parents?” she asked.

“They’re well,” I said.

“Why have you come here?”

“I-I wanted to ask . . .” I tapered off.

She waited and ate.

“The . . . the Great Mystic Points,” I finally said. “Please . . . you remember what happened to me at my Eleventh Rite,
Ada-m
.” I searched her face but she only looked at me waiting for me to finish. “You’re wise,” I continued. “Wise as Aro, if not wiser.”

“Don’t compare us,” she said gravely. “We’re both old.”

“I’m sorry,” I quickly said. “But you know so much. You must know how much I need to know the Great Mystic Points.”

“The work of mad men and women,” she spat.

“Eh?”

She spooned out a large chunk of meat from her soup and ate it. “No, Onyesonwu, this is between you and Aro.”

“But can’t you . . .”

“No.”

“Please?” I begged. “Please!”

“Even
if
I knew the Points, I wouldn’t get between two spirits like yourselves.”

I slumped back to the floor.

“Listen,
Ewu
girl,” she said.

I looked up. “Please,
Ada-m
, don’t call me that.”

“And why not? Isn’t that what you are?”

“I hate that word.”

“
Ewu
or girl?”

“
Ewu
, of course.”

“Is that not what you are?”

“No,” I said. “Not in the way the word means.”

She looked at her empty bowl and folded her hands. Her nails were short and thin, the tips of her index finger and thumb yellow. Nana the Wise was a smoker. “Some advice: Leave Aro alone, I beg. He’s beyond you and he is stubborn.”

I pursed my lips. Aro wasn’t the only one who was stubborn.

“There may be another way to learn what you seek,” she said. “The House is full of books. No one’s read them all, so who knows what could be in them, eh?”

“But the people here don’t . . .”

“We’re old and wise. We can be stupid, too. Remember Titi’s words.” When my eyebrows rose with surprise, she said. “The walls are thin here. Come.”

The room down the hall was small, but the walls were stacked with smelly, cracked, old books. “You’re free to look here or in other rooms with books. Only the Osugbo elders have personal chambers. The rest of the House is everybody’s. When you’re ready to leave, you can.”

She patted me on the head and left me there. I searched for two hours, going from room to room. There were books on birds who lived in places that didn’t exist, how to have a good marriage with two wives who hated each other, the living habits of female termites, the biology of mythical giant flying lizards called
Kponyungo
, the herbs women should eat to enlarge their breasts, the uses of palm oil. Intensified by my grumbling stomach, my anger grew with each useless book I pulled out. The annoyed, and often fearful, looks of elders didn’t help.

The House was mocking me again. I could almost hear it laughing as it showed me stupid book after stupid book. When I pulled out a book full of provocatively posed naked women, I threw it to the floor and went looking for an exit. It took me an hour to find it. The door leading outside was plain and narrow, nothing like the elaborate entrances I saw from outside. I stumbled into the late afternoon sun and turned around. The entrance was one of the grand doors that I’d been seeing since I was six.

I spat and shook a fist at the House of Osugbo, not caring who saw. “Aggravating, pestilent, stupid, idiotic, horrible place,” I shouted. “I will
never
set foot in you again!”

REJECTION.

Such things will quietly creep up on a person. Then one day, she finds herself ready to destroy everything. I lived with the threat of my biological father for five years. For three years, Aro rejected me, refused to help me. Twice to my face and numerous times to Mwita, maybe even to the Ada and Nana the Wise. I knew Aro was the only one who could answer my questions. This is why I didn’t leave Jwahir after my experience in the House of Osugbo. Where would I have gone?

The previous day, Papa had been brought home on his brother’s camel, complaining of chest pains. The healer was called. It had been a long night. This was why I’d cried all night. I kept thinking that if Aro had been teaching me, I could have made Papa well. Papa was too young and healthy to have heart problems.

My head felt squeezed. Everything sounded muffled. I dressed and snuck out of the house. I had only one plan: To get my way. I left the main road and stepped onto the path leading to Aro’s hut. I heard the flap of wings. Above my head in a palm tree, a black vulture glowered down at me with probing eyes. I frowned and then froze with realization. I looked away, hoping to hide my thoughts. That vulture wasn’t a vulture, as it hadn’t been five years ago when I saw it. Oh, how Aro could not have known that I knew every aspect of him, as I knew every aspect of any creature I’d changed into. What a mistake that feather falling from his body had been for him.

This was why I felt such a rush of power whenever I changed into a vulture. I’d been changing into
Aro as a vulture
. Was this why it was so easy to learn from Mwita? But I already had the gift of the Eshu. I probed my mind for the Great Mystic Points. I could grasp at nothing. No matter. The vulture flew off.
Here I come,
I thought.

Finally, I arrived at Aro’s hut. I felt a pang of hunger and the world around me grew vibrant. Clusters of bright light danced at the top of the hut and in the air. The monster came at me when I got to the cactus gate. A masquerade was guarding Aro’s hut, a
real
one. It seemed this day Aro felt he needed protection. Masquerades commonly appear at celebrations. In these cases, they’re just men dressed in elaborate raffia and cloth costumes dancing to the beat of a drum.

Tock tock tock
went a small drum as the real masquerade rushed at me, spraying a wake of sand as tall as my house and wide as three camels. It shook its dusty colorful cloth and raffia skirts. Its wooden face was curled into a sneer. It danced violently, jabbing itself at me and then pulling back. I stood my ground, even as it slashed its needle-fingered hands an inch from my face.

When I didn’t run, the spirit stopped and stood very still. We looked at each other, my head tilted up, its head tilted down. My angry eyes staring into its wooden ones. It made a clicking sound that resonated deep in my bones. I winced but didn’t move. Three times it did this. On the third I felt something give inside of me, like a cracked knuckle. The masquerade turned and led me to Aro’s hut. As it moved, it slowly faded away.

Aro stood on his hut’s threshold giving me the kind of look a man would give a pregnant woman if he accidentally walked in on her in the bathroom defecating.

“
Oga
Aro,” I said. “I’ve come to ask you to take me on as your student.”

His nostrils flared as if he smelled something putrid.

“Please. I’m sixteen years old. You won’t be sorry.”

Still he didn’t speak. My cheeks flushed and my eyes felt as if someone had poked a finger in them. “Aro,” I said in a low voice. “You will teach me.” Still he said nothing. “You
WILL
teach . . .” My diamond flew from my mouth. I shouted as loudly as I could, “TEACH ME! WHY WON’T YOU TEACH ME? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? WHAT IS WRONG WITH
EVERYONE?
”

The desert quickly absorbed my yelling and that was it. I dropped to my knees. Simultaneously, I dropped into that place I’d been when I was circumcised. I did it without a thought. From far away I heard myself screaming, but this was of no concern to me. In this spirit place, I was the predator. On instinct, I flew at Aro. I knew how and where to attack him because I knew
him
. I was searing light determined to burn his very soul from inside out. I felt his shock.

I forgot my purpose in coming. I was tearing and clawing and burning. The smell of smoldering hair. The satisfying grunt of Aro in pain. And then I felt a hard kick in the chest. I opened my eyes. I was back in my physical body, flying backward. I landed hard, sliding back several more feet. The sand grated the skin from the palms of my hands and the backs of my ankles. My rapa untied, exposing my legs.

I lay on my back looking at the sky. For a moment, I had a vision that I couldn’t have had. I was my mother, a hundred miles West, seventeen years ago. On my back. Waiting to die. My body, her body, was a knot of pain. Full of semen. But alive.

Then I was back in the sand. Nearby, one of his goats baaed, a chicken clucked. I was alive.
Protecting myself is a useless endeavor,
I thought. I had to somehow find the man who harmed my mother, the man who hunted me. I had to hunt him.
And when I find him,
I thought.
I’ll kill him
. I sat up. Aro lay on the ground in front of his hut.

“I understand now,” I said loudly. Somehow I saw my diamond. I picked it up and, without thinking or wiping off the sand, slipped it under my tongue. “You . . . you won’t teach girls or women because you’re
afraid
of us! Y-y-you fear our emotions.” I giggled hysterically and then grew serious. “That is
not
a good enough reason!”

I stood up. Aro only groaned. Even half dead, he wouldn’t speak to me.

“Damn your mother! Damn your entire bloodline!” I said. I turned to the side and spat. It was red with blood. “I’ll die before I let you teach me!”

Suddenly, I felt a painful hitch in my throat. I winced. Guilt had arrived. I hadn’t wanted to kill him. I wanted him to teach me. Now the bridge was burned. I retied my rapa and walked home.

Mwita found him an hour later still lying where I’d left him. Mwita had run to the House of Osugbo to bring the elders. Because of the House’s “thin walls,” within hours news of what I’d done to Aro was all over Jwahir. My parents were in their room when I heard the knock on the door. I knew it was Mwita. I hesitated to open it. When I let him in, he grabbed my hand and pulled me to the back of the house. “What did you do, woman?” he hissed.