Who Fears Death (38 page)

“Wear this,” he said. “And . . .” He found a blue rapa. “And this.”

I pushed myself up, the cover falling off me. As the cool air touched my body, awareness flooded over me. I wanted to sob. I wrapped the blue rapa around myself. He handed me the water. “Be strong,” he said. “Get up.”

When I stepped out, I was shocked to see Diti, Luyu, and Fanasi sitting there, fully dressed, and eating fresh bread. The smell of the bread made my stomach growl. “We were beginning to think you two were too . . . exhausted to go,” Luyu said with a wink.

“You mean you were in camp to hear it?” I asked.

Fanasi bitterly laughed. Diti looked away.

“I got in late but yes,” Luyu said with a smirk.

By the time I’d washed and dressed, the group of women was walking out. They moved slowly. It was easy to catch up with them. No one seemed to mind Mwita and Fanasi, who were the only men in the group. Ting was there, too. “To represent Ssaiku,” she said. I noticed a quick look pass between her and Mwita.

It wasn’t a long walk to the edge of the dust storm on the west side, about a mile and a half. But we walked at such a slow pace that it took nearly an hour. We sang songs to Ani, some that I knew, many that I didn’t. By the time we stopped, I was dizzy from hunger and glad to sit down. It was windy, noisy, and a little scary. You could see where the wind turned to storm, only a few yards away.

“Let her hair go,” Ting told Mwita. He took the twine of palm fiber off my hair and it blew about. Everyone was quiet now. Praying. Many knelt, their heads to the sand. Diti, Luyu, and Fanasi remained standing, staring at the dust storm. Luyu and Diti came from families that only occasionally prayed to Ani. Their mothers had never gone on retreats and neither had they. I couldn’t keep my mind off my own mother and how it all happened to her, how she’d been praying like these women when the scooters came. Ting was behind me. I felt her do something to my neck. I was too weak to stop her. “What are you doing?” I asked.

She leaned close to my ear. “It’s a mixture of palm oil, the tears of a dying old woman, the tears of an infant, menstrual blood, the milk of a man, the skin from the foot of a tortoise, and sand.”

I shivered, repulsed.

“You don’t know Nsibidi,” she said. “It is a written juju. To mark anything with it is to enact change; it speaks directly with the spirit. I’ve marked you with a symbol of the crossroads where all your selves will meet. Kneel forward. Ask it of Ani. She’ll give it.”

“I don’t believe in Ani,” I said.

“Kneel and pray anyway,” she said, pushing me forward.

I pressed my forehead to the sand, the sound of the wind in my ears. Minutes passed.
I’m so hungry,
I thought. I began to feel something holding me down. I turned my head and stared into the sky. I saw the sun set, come back up and then set again. A long time passed, that’s what matters.

Suddenly, I dropped into the sand. It swallowed me like the mouth of a beast. The last thing I remember before the world exploded was a girl saying, “It’s okay, Mwita. She’s releasing. We’ve been waiting for this since she got here.”

 

Every part of me that was me. My tall
Ewu
body. My short temper. My impulsive mind. My memories. My past. My future. My death. My life. My spirit. My fate. My failure. All of me was destroyed. I was dead, broken, scattered, and absorbed. It was a thousand times worse than when I first changed into a bird. I remember nothing because I was nothing.

Then I was something.

I could feel it. I was being put back together, bit by bit. What was doing this? No, it was not Ani. It was not a goddess. It was cold, if it could be cold. And brittle, if it could be brittle. Logical. Controlled. Dare I say that it was the Creator? It Who Cannot Be Touched? Who doesn’t
care
to be touched? The fourth point that no sorcerer could ever consider? No, I can’t say that because that is the deepest blasphemy. Or at least that’s what Aro would say.

But my spirit and body were utterly completely obliterated . . . was this not what Aro said would happen to any creature who encountered the Creator? As It reassembled me, It arranged me in a new order. An order that made more sense. I remember the moment the last piece of me was returned.

“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” I breathed. Relief, my first emotion. Again, I am reminded of that time in the iroko tree. When my head was like a house. Back then it was as if some of that house’s doors were cracking open—doors of steel, wood, stone. This time all of those doors
and
windows were blown out.

I was dropping again. I hit the ground hard. Wind on my skin. I was freezing. I was wet.
Who am I?
I wondered. I didn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t remember how to. Something hit my head. And something else. Instinctively, I opened my eyes. I was in a tent.

“How can she be dead?” Diti was screaming. “What happened?”

Then it all slammed into me. Who I was, why I was, how I was, when I was. I shut my eyes.

“Don’t touch her,” Ssaiku said. “Mwita, speak to her. She’s coming back. Help her complete her journey.”

A pause. “Onyesonwu.” His voice sounded strange. “Come back. You were gone for seven days. Then you fell from the sky, like one of Ani’s missing children in the Great Book. If you live again
,
open your eyes, woman.”

I opened my eyes. I was lying on my back. My body hurt. He took my hand. I grasped his. More came in that moment. More of who I now was. I smiled, and then I laughed.

This was a moment of madness and arrogance that I cannot say was only my fault. The power and ability that I realized was a part of me now was overwhelming. I was stronger and more in control than I ever imagined I could be. And so as soon as I returned, I was off again. I hadn’t eaten in seven days. My mind was clear. I was so so strong. I thought of where I wanted to go. I went there. One minute I was on that mat in the tent, the next I was flying, as myself, as my blue spirit.

I was going after my father.

I flew right through the sandstorm. I felt its stinging touch. I burst through its wall into the hot sun. Morning. I flew over miles of sand, villages, dunes, a town, dry trees, and more dunes. I flew over a small field of green, but I was too focused to care. Into Durfa. Straight to a large house with a blue door. Through the door and up to a room that smelled of flowers, incense, and dusty books.

He was at a desk, his back to me. I dropped deeper into the wilderness. I had done it to Aro when he’d refused me one too many times. And I’d done it to the witch doctor in Papa Shee. This time I was even stronger. I knew where to tear and bite and destroy, where to attack. Layered over his turned back, I could see his spirit. It was a deep blue, like mine. This startled me for a moment, but it didn’t stop me.

I pounced the way a starved tiger must have long ago when it found its prey. I was too eager to realize that though his back was turned, his spirit wasn’t. He had been waiting. Aro had never told me how it felt when I’d attacked him. The witch doctor in Papa Shee had simply died, no physical markings on him when he fell over. Now, in this moment with my father, I learned what it was like.

It was the kind of pain that death wouldn’t stop. My father put it to me in full force. He sang as he tore, gorged, stabbed, and twisted at parts of me that I didn’t know were there. He sat at his desk, his back turned. He sang in Nuru but I couldn’t hear the words. I am like my mother, but not completely. I cannot hear and remember as I suffer.

Something in me kicked in. A survival instinct, a responsibility and a memory.
This isn’t how I end,
I thought. Immediately, I pulled what remained of me away. As I retreated, my father stood and turned around. He looked into what were my eyes and grabbed what was my arm. I tried to pull away. He was too strong. He turned the palm of my right hand over and dug his thumbnail into it, etching some sort of symbol there. He let go and said, “Go back and die in the sands you arose from.”

I traveled backward for what felt like forever, sobbing, pained, fading. As I approached the wall of dust, the world grew bright with spirits and the desert sprouted those strange colorful wilderness trees. I faded completely and remember nothing.

 

Mwita later told me that I died a second time. That I turned transparent and then completely disappeared. When I reappeared in the same place, I was flesh again, my body bleeding all over, my garments soaked with blood. He couldn’t wake me. For three minutes, I had no pulse. He blew air into my chest and used kind juju. When none of this worked, he sat there, waiting.

During the third minute, I started breathing. Mwita shooed everyone out of the tent and asked two girls walking by to bring him a bucket of warmed water. He bathed me from head to toe, rinsing away the blood, bandaging wounds, rubbing circulation into my flesh and sending me good thoughts. “We have to talk,” he’d said over and over. “Wake up.”

I awoke two days later to see Mwita sitting beside me humming to himself as he wove a basket. I slowly sat up. I looked at Mwita and couldn’t recall who he was.
I like him,
I thought.
What is he?
My body ached. I groaned. My stomach rumbled.

“You wouldn’t eat,” Mwita said, putting his basket down. “But you would drink. Otherwise, you’d be dead . . . again.”

I know him,
I thought. Then as if whispered by the winds outside I heard the word he’d spoken to me,
Ifunanya.
“Mwita?” I said.

“The one and only,” he said coming over to me. Despite my body’s pains and the restriction of bandages on my legs and torso, I threw my arms around him.

“Binta,” I said into Mwita’s shoulder. “Ah! Daib!” I clung to Mwita more tightly, clenching my eyes shut. “The man is no man! He . . .” Memories began to flood my senses. My journey to the West, seeing his face, his spirit. The
pain!
Defeat. My heart sank. I had failed.

“Shh,” he said.

“He should have killed me,” I whispered. Even after being recreated by Ani, I still couldn’t take him down.

“No,” Mwita said, taking my face in his hands. I tried to pull my shameful face away but he held me there. Then he kissed me long and full. The voice in my head that was screaming failure and defeat quieted, though it did not stop its mantra. Mwita pulled away and we stared into each other’s eyes.

“My hand,” I whispered. I held it up. The symbol was of a worm coiled around itself. It was black and crusty and hurt when I tried to close my hand into a fist.
Failure,
the voice in my head whispered.
Defeat. Death.

“Didn’t notice that,” Mwita said, frowning as he held it closer to his face. When he touched it with his index finger, he pulled his hand back, hissing.

“What?” I said weakly.

“It’s like it’s charged. Like sticking my finger into an electrical socket,” he said rubbing his hand. “My hand’s numb.”

“He put it there,” I said.

“Daib?”

I nodded. Mwita’s face darkened. “You feel all right otherwise?”

“Look at me,” I said, not wanting him to look at me at all. “How could I feel . . .”

“Why’d you do that?” he asked, unable to further contain himself.

“Because I . . .”

“You weren’t even happy to be alive. You weren’t even relieved that you would see us again! Ah, your name truly fits you,
o!
”

What could I say to that? I hadn’t thought about it. It was instinct.
And yet you failed,
the voice in my head whispered.

Ssaiku came in. He was dressed as if he’d been traveling, wearing a long caftan and pants fully draped with a long green thick cloth robe. The moment he saw that I was awake, his solemn face warmed. He spread his hands grandiosely. “Heeeeey, she awakens to grace us with her magnificence. Welcome back. We missed you.”

I tried to smile. Mwita scoffed.

“Mwita, how does she look?” Ssaiku asked. “Report.”

“She’s . . . pretty beaten up. She’s healed most of the open wounds but she can’t heal everything with her Eshu skills. Must have something to do with how they were inflicted. A lot of deep bruises. Looks like something raked at her chest. She has burns on her back . . . at least that’s what they manifest themselves as. She has a sprained ankle and wrist. No broken bones. From what she’s told me happened, I suspect it will hurt for her to breathe. And when her monthly comes, that too will be painful.”

Ssaiku nodded and Mwita continued.

“I’ve treated everything with three different salves. She should stay off the ankle and avoid the wrist for a few days. She’ll have to eat a diet of desert hare livers for a week when her monthlies begin because her blood will be very heavy. Her monthlies will come tonight, because of the trauma. I’ve already had Ting ask some women to gather the livers and make a stew.”

I noticed for the first time how utterly exhausted Mwita looked. “There’s one thing,” Mwita said. He took my right hand and turned the palm up. “This.”

Ssaiku took my hand, looking closely at the marking. He sucked his teeth, disgusted. “Ah,
he
put this on her.”

“H-how did you know it was . . . him?” I asked.

“Where else would you have gone in such a hurry?” he asked. He stood up.

“What is it?” Mwita asked.

“Ting may know,” he said. “At two years old the girl could read Okeke, Vah, and Sipo. She’ll be able to read this.” He patted Mwita on the shoulder. “I wish we had someone like you here. To be so well versed in the physical and spiritual is a rare gift.”

Mwita shook his head. “Not so knowledgeable in the spiritual,
Oga
,” he said.

Ssaiku chuckled, patting Mwita’s shoulder again. “I’ll be back,” he said. “Mwita, get some rest. She lives. Now go treat yourself as if you do, too.”

Seconds after Ssaiku left, Diti, Luyu, and Fanasi came running in. Diti screamed, planting a kiss on my forehead. Luyu burst into tears and Fanasi just stood there staring.