Changer's Daughter (28 page)

The Changer listens, commenting appropriately, approving of the complexity of the design, far too aware that he is attracted to this woman. He’s going to need to do something about that, perhaps change his shape to one less warm-blooded.

Yet he regrets the necessity, even as he resigns himself to it. He has been lonely, very lonely since Shahrazad’s mother was killed. Here, he senses, could be an end to that loneliness. He wonders, as Vera’s eyes—still grey though everything else about her has changed—sparkle with the pleasure of having someone to talk with, if his attentions would be completely unwelcome...

Probably they would be, he decides reluctantly, for she has forsworn sexual relations, and he cannot imagine an intimate relationship without them.

Oh, well. If only she didn’t look so lovely and keep smiling at him that way!

Late in the morning of the fifth day since Aduke’s family had moved to their refuge, Oya comes to where the younger woman has just finished writing a letter to Taiwo.

“Walk with me,” Oya suggests after asking after all the family. “We can stop by the post office so you can mail that.”

Aduke nods. Her sisters are tending their market stall. Taiwo’s mother can watch the little children. Kehinde is shut in his private study, supposedly working. Cynically, Aduke wonders if he gets any more work done now that he has his much desired quiet. Certainly, she hasn’t seen any difference.

In any case, she is very eager to spend more time with Oya. During the four days that they have lived under the same roof, the other woman’s mystery has grown, not diminished.

Lying on her pallet in the room she shares with old Malomo and Kehinde, lulled by the sound of their breathing into almost forgetting her own aloneness, Aduke has heard strange sounds from the floor above. The little children, giggling nervously in their nursery, insist that ghosts are the source of those sounds, that theirs are the muted voices or the fragmented notes of disjointed music. Aduke is less certain, and she wonders what Oya might be doing all alone in the vastness of the third floor.

Once she had tried to bring up the matter with Taiwo’s mother, but the older woman refuses to be curious about Oya. To her, Oya is someone sent by the ancestors to help her family in their time of need. If Oya isn’t the goddess whose name she bears, then she is at least her representative.

Questioning her actions is pointless. Those touched by the
orisha
always did strange things, strange, that is, to those who do not understand their secrets. When one does understand, then those same actions become completely comprehensible.

So, since Aduke is left with no one she can talk to about Oya, the best thing she can do is spend more time with the woman who might or might not be an
orisha
and learn what she can about her.

After asking Malomo what errands need to be done, Aduke follows Oya down the factory stairs into the warehouse and then outside. They depart the building through a small door that opens into an unused side yard to avoid drawing attention to themselves. Some of their neighbors would not approve of people who live in a haunted building. For the same reason, they don’t hang their laundry outside, but string it instead in the vast cafeteria-lounge that has become their common room.

Outside, the air is hot and, for Nigeria, dry. The humidity is perhaps fifty percent. Aduke has read about places where the humidity drops to as low as five percent. She finds that difficult to imagine. Air is, in its own way, a substantial element, felt in the
harmattan
wind, bearing the rains, and laden with odors suspended in latent moisture.

“I can’t imagine a desert,” Aduke says aloud. “It must be very strange.”

Oya glances at her, but with the vast reserve of composure she maintains, like oil floating to the top of a soup kettle, she doesn’t comment on the strangeness of Aduke’s words, just responds as if it is all part of a long, ongoing conversation.

“It is different,” she says. “There are weeks without rain, and the air is so dry that your lips crack and the top of your skin flakes away as if your body is returning to dust.”

Aduke imitates Oya’s composure, though she is surprised. In her colorful head wrap and bright print wrapper, her skin shining with oil and sweat, Oya seems an incarnation of West Africa. Imagining her elsewhere is as much of a challenge as imagining a desert.

Oya glances over at Aduke, her brown eyes laughing.

“I have,” she says, “done some traveling in my misspent life.”

They arrive at the post office, then go from there to drop a package at the home of a friend of Malomo, from there to the market to deliver a note to Yetunde, then Oya turns their feet toward the shrines to the old gods.

Aduke walks with her, albeit somewhat unwillingly. As hard as she has tried, she has not been able to forget the ominous pronouncements of the
babalawo
, nor the fear she felt when they were evicted and it seemed as if those pronouncements were coming true. Lately, she has tried hard to believe that the
orisha
accepted their sacrifices, that the plate of dog was enough to feed Ogun, that Shango liked the chicken and the yam porridge, that Oshun is wearing the bracelet made from twisted brass wire, that Eshu has been happy with his combination plate made from small portions of everyone else’s sacrifice, that...

She shakes her head, trying hard to put these crazy superstitions from her, but here in the Grove, surrounded by the altars and the desperate intensity of the people praying, dancing, singing, making offerings, kneeling in the dirt before the diviners, here it is hard to dismiss such faith as mere superstition.

Oya has gone over to the shrine to the
orisha
whose name she bears, her posture not that of a supplicant, but of a housewife checking her mail. The guardians of the shrines do not interrupt her as she fingers the offerings, not even when she unrolls the slips of paper on which petitions have been written and reads the contents. Aduke wonders if they, like Iya Taiwo, believe her specially blessed by the goddess.

Aduke occupies herself by wandering from shrine to shrine, shying away from Shopona’s—hardly recognizable beneath its heaps of placating offerings—and from the shelter where the old
babalawo
is counseling a man with the first twistings of grey in his beard.

She is making her second round when Oya comes up to her.

“Thanks for waiting, little sister. Can I buy you something to eat?”

Aduke smiles. “I
am
getting hungry, and Iya Taiwo won’t know to make lunch for us.”

They go to a small restaurant, a quiet place, most of whose customers crowd by the bar where there is a small television set tuned to a British football game. Oya takes a table in a shady corner and, after they have placed their orders and the waitress has torn herself away from the television set long enough to bring them iced sodas, Oya looks at Aduke, seriousness in every line of her round face.

“I want your help,” she says, “to raise a wind.”

Aduke looks at her in astonishment, certain she has heard wrong. Then she laughs.

“A wind?” Outside the
harmattan
is pushing dust, paper, and bits of broken palm frond down the street. “We have wind and enough, surely!”

“Wind, yes,” Oya says firmly, “but not enough. I want to raise a wind sufficient to seal Monamona from the world outside, to cut us off from the surrounding countryside.”

Aduke decides to humor her. She had been wanting to learn more about Oya and incredible pronouncement seem to be as much a part of her as her motherly bearing and talent for cooking
fufu
.

“A wind to seal Monamona from the world,” she repeats.

“Yes,” Oya falls silent until the waitress sets down their plates of
moi-moi
and vegetables and returns to the bar. “If it were another time of the year, I might try to use the rains to make the roads impassible. However, this time of year it must be the wind, and that is a good thing.”

Aduke hazards a guess, “Because the wind belongs to Oya as the lightning belongs to Shango?”

Oya smiles, pleased. “Yes. And don’t forget, Oya stole a bit of the lightning from Shango. It isn’t for nothing that she is called ‘The wife who is more dangerous than her husband.’”

“You’re serious,” Aduke says. “You don’t really think that you’re Oya, do you?”

Oya shrugs. “Does it matter what I think? Shopona again marks the strong and slays the weak, yet the World Health Organization claims that he has been conquered.”

Despite the educated
onikaba
mind-set that she has been trying to maintain, Aduke shudders when Oya so openly names the
orisha
who brings smallpox. Oya notices.

“You believe in him,” she says. “Why not believe in Oya?”

“I don’t believe in him,” Aduke says, not quite truthfully, “but I do know that smallpox has returned to Monamona.”

“And it will soon spread to other cities,” Oya says firmly, “if it has not already.”

“I know,” Aduke says. “The city government has set up checkpoints, but some people will slip through. I wish we had a way to make everyone stay put until medicine can be brought.”

Oya looks triumphant. “But we do! We must raise a wind to seal off the city.”

“You mean that!” Aduke exclaims. “You really mean that!”

“I do,” Oya says firmly, “with all my heart, but I cannot summon the wind alone. I need help. I trust you, Aduke, and I sense great potential in you. Will you help me?”

Aduke eats silently until her plate is empty. She should leave, but how can she avoid Oya when her family is living in Oya’s house? She could phone Taiwo, but there is no guarantee that he would listen to her. He has been so busy lately, and so often away from his phone. She cannot speak with Iya Taiwo or her sisters. The husbands are useless. Kehinde would probably think Oya’s words a wonderful folklore project, but otherwise nonsense.

Oya scrapes the last
moi-moi
from her plate and licks her fingers. Then she gazes at Aduke until Aduke must meet her eyes.

“Will you help me raise a wind?”

Aduke shrugs. Certainly nothing will come from this, but she owes Oya something for all her help.

“Why not?” she says. “After all, ill blows the wind that does no one good.”

Oya smiles. “And even if our wind blows no good, it should trap the ill. Right?”

Aduke giggles, helpless in the face of such confident insanity. Outside the
harmattan
wind blows more strongly, as if with their very decision the wind has already begun to rise.

Shahrazad’s nightmares did not return the first night she slept on Frank’s bed, nor the next, so the young coyote joins the motley group of animals that crowd around their guardian.

Oddly, once she is freed from the nightmare, the compulsion to open the forbidden door fades. The young coyote still trots by the door at least once a day to give it a quick sniff, but she feels no desire to push it open.

Without her father, always her first choice as a playmate, Shahrazad begins to make friends with the other animals on the ranch. She hasn’t lost her respect for the unicorns and still gives Stinky Joe and his cohort a wide berth, but she stops trying to outrun the jackalopes.

To her delight, Hip and Hop prove to be lots of fun to play with. They are as fast or faster than she is when running, able to jump farther and dig faster. They lack her endurance, however, and if she is patient and clever, she can trap them.

She also discovers that they can’t climb trees. She takes to creeping out of the ranch house early in the morning, climbing one of the trees that shelter the ranch house, then jumping down when her chaperons come looking for her.

Far from being resentful, the jackalopes teach her one of their games—a elaborate version of hide-and-seek in which she is required to track, locate, and then chase down one of the pair, despite whatever distractions the other might offer. When she gets too good at this, Hip and Hop recruit a few of their fellow jackalopes and an athanor jackrabbit or two to add to Shahrazad’s confusion.

Shahrazad, in turn, recruits the help of a couple of the crows by leaving them a share of her kills. They take to following her about, cawing directions excitedly when her “prey” works a trade with another lepus or goes to earth.