The Pop’s Rhinoceros (96 page)

And no one knew what to do. Not the Uzama-men of Oba Esigie of the Bini, now picking their way like storks in their white robes along the bank of the River. Not the counselors of the Alafin of Oyo, nodding wisely to one another a little way ahead of them. Not the Aworo of the Esie, closeted with the petrified images of half a hundred of his ancestors in the elaborately constructed
ju-ju
shrine that his retainers had raised behind the ridge and that they would disassemble and carry away when the palaver ended. (When would they all lose patience? Namoke wondered. A week? a month?) Not Tsoede, the Eze-Nupe, who had arrived on a litter as tall as a cottonwood carried by sixty slaves and had yet to descend from it. Not the Achadu of the Attah of Idah, permanently veiled by a brimmed hat whose hangings reached to his ankles, nor the Oni of Ife, who had sent his eldest and youngest sons. Not the delegates of the Mani Kongo, one of whom claimed to have been carried to the house of the White-men’s King but would say nothing of it except that it was cold, nor those of Ngola Ndongo, who allowed them to trade from the mouth of the Dande. Not the Odum of the Awome Calabaris, who was permanently drunk. Not the Aro-people, nor the Uratta-people, nor the Ekwerre-people, nor the Etche-people, nor the Asapeople, nor the Ndokinor-people, nor the Awka-people, some of whom were already drifting back to their villages a mere three or four days away. Not the Anam-people across the River at Asaba, nor the Ndi Mili Nnu, who had waited for the sand-island that appeared in midstream at this time of year to rise slowly above the surface before suddenly materializing upon it one morning, Ijaws and Nembe camped peaceably together—a miracle of sorts. And not the Ozo-people, whose village this was, or had been before the word sent out from Nri had gathered more than a thousand men from some three dozen peoples within a camp that spilled along the bank of the River almost to the bend where the broad flood was joined by the Anambra. None of them knew, any more than they knew where the rain came from or went or why the yams would grow one year and fail the next. So they had turned to Nri, and Nri-men had gathered them for the palaver that had turned Onitsha from a, village into a transitory city.

The ground rose slightly at both ends of the encampment to form gently humped ridges of rain-smoothed, sun-hardened red mud that ran out of the forest and broke off abruptly at the River’s edge. From his vantage point Namoke looked down on a sprawl of makeshift huts, shelters, and shrines roofed with raffia mats or thatched with the long grasses that grew in abundance after the recession of the floodwaters. The men moving among the homes of this flimsy city
were counselors, headmen, priests, princes, title-holders, their numbers swollen further by retinues of servants and slaves. All of them, in one way or another, had wanted this palaver. Now, a mere twelve days after its commencement, they were growing impatient. Those who already had trade relations and treaties with the White-men had broken them off in deference to those who believed the strangers were no better than rats in a hen coop. None of them agreed on anything, except a desire that Nri should answer the questions arising out of their disquiet. … They wanted the Eze-Nri to appear in a thundercloud and tell them what to do, which was very foolish, for Nri-people had never told anyone what to do. Nri was the condition of their meeting, no more than that.

Namoke’s sandaled feet scuffed the new shoots of grass forcing their way out of the baked laterite earth. Pirogues were hauled up on the shelving mud-bank below him, two scores of them, at least. On the bank behind them stood the
obiri,
its roof raised high off the ground on thick
abara-wood
poles, open at the sides, its floor covered with raffia mats. A few Ikwerre-men were already sitting there, waiting for that day’s palaver to begin. His
ofo
-staff, a collection of sticks bound around a short branch, was balanced on a small, elaborately carved stool at the far end of the
obiri
. It seemed innocuous, sitting there on its stool—a little bundle of kindling wood or a ramshackle bird nest—yet if he were to advance through the encampment with it raised above his head, if he were to plant it in soft earth, then rip it up again by its root and scatter the soil as though it were seed, then they would take to their heels and flee in terror, every last one of them. They would flee it as they would their own deaths. … Tempting.

A kingfisher whirred over the boats in a blur of green. Namoke turned to look downriver. Two days had gone by since Gbujo, Apia, and Onugu had got word from the Ijaws that their sister was traveling through the mangrove-swamp and had set off downriver to meet her. But there was nothing on the River now except some fishing canoes and the pirogues setting out from the island bearing the chiefs of the Ndi Mili Nnu, crossing over for the palaver. He turned and walked down to the
obiri,
watched by the Ekwerre, and the strutting Bini, and the delegates from the Mani, and those from Ngola, and the Awka-men, and the Nupe-men, and the eldest and youngest sons of the Oni of Ife together with their (separate) retinues of servants. … They were waiting for him, and waiting for the palaver, and waiting for the words of the Eze-Nri.

The soft white glow of the harmattan sky intensified to a harsh glare. As the hours went by, men gathered slowly, speaking softly at first, but then more emphatically, clustering in little groups, which quickly became factions, knots of disagreement and argument, until Namoke overlooked a forest of waving arms and pointing fingers and the noise was an angry din of grievances, resentments, obscure insults, pleas falling on skeptical ears, rejected lines of reasoning, rivalry, pigheadedness. … How, he wondered, moving calmly among the squabblers, will agreement come of this? He looked toward the River again, his view partly obscured by three Nupe-men browbeating a hapless Calabari, who was protesting
that three men from his village had been killed by White-men, or at least had set out one morning to trade fish and had never come back. The River was very broad here, the long paddle over to Asaba broken only by the sand-island where the Ndi Mili Nnu were camped. Usually a large market was held there. Namoke contemplated its annual appearance in the midst of the River’s turbid waters, hard ground rising out of mud-choked floodwater, where the traders could meet in amity to buy and barter. Perhaps agreement would come like that? Then he remembered the phenomenon that the Idah-people called
yangbe:
a brief swelling of the River that was due in a week or two and raised the water level the height of a man’s knee. The
yangbe
lasted only a few days, just long enough to wash the island away.

The afternoon wore on and the debates in the
obiri
grew sullen and ill-tempered. An Awka-man called Jiofo was arguing fiercely with a tall Bini who stood impassively in front of him, his long arms folded inside his robes.

“They want gold and slaves, Enyi-tusks, pepper. Very well. …” Jiofo was waving a finger in the air. “That is only today. What about tomorrow? What do they want then? More of them come each year—you say as much yourself—and the Bini give them land to live on, protect them even when they have stolen from the people on the coast. …”

“Oba Esigie has banished them for the time of the palaver, just as he promised. Besides, they are very weak and most of them die of fevers,” the Bini interjected.

“Yes!” Jiofo shouted. “Even the air hates them, and nothing grows in the earth that they touch. The land they touch is stained! Dead!”

Namoke looked from one to the other, the Bini man shaking his head in exasperation, Jiofo still shouting at him. Similar confrontations were breaking out throughout the palaver, and the racket sounded to him like angry hornets. What good would come of this?

“Just wait,” Jiofo finished up, turning now to Namoke. “When the Eze-Nri makes his judgment, you’ll see!”

“When the Eze-Nri speaks,” the Bini man said as though speaking to himself, “everything will be clear. Your head, too, perhaps.” He stalked off contemptuously.

Deprived of an opponent, Jiofo redirected his complaint to Namoke.

“These Bini people think they are so much better than everyone else, eh? All they do is sit around and twiddle their lovely long fingers, and what good is that? Look at these.” He held up his own hands, whose fingers were short and thick. “These hands have smithed a hundred blades since last harvest, and before that I lose count. Bini people, huh!” He made as if to spit on the ground, which was taboo in the
obiri,
and then resumed his complaint while Namoke nodded calmly and waited for a chance to slip away. But Jiofo droned on and on, his voice boring into Namoke’s head like arrow-worm, and there were so many voices trapped in there already, twisting and gnawing away at him. When the Eze-Nri speaks …
Where was that voice? The voice they all awaited with the dwindling patience that fueled Jiofo’s vehemence now, still hammering away, repeating himself, the man’s bitterness growing out of the same anxiety that had brought them all here, and the anxiety out of ignorance.
The iron is broken
. … A smith should relish that particular turn of phrase, Namoke reflected grimly, though not the fact it concealed:
And no one knows what to do
. A little oil to help the dry words down. He realized with grateful surprise that the man had at last fallen silent. There was a group of Idah-men talking amongst themselves. As he watched, they fell silent, too. An eerie hush was gathering and swelling behind him, an unsoothing silence as of rivals catching sight of each other through the jabber of the marketplace and breaking off in midsentence to stare at one another, the corridor of their attention growing quiet and thickening until it silences the whole assembly. So mouths closed, or hung slackly open, and seconds later the whole
obiri
was silenced, everyone peering forward to the very spot where he had stood earlier. He sensed her presence then. “So,” Namoke murmured as he turned with the rest of them, “she is back.”

Usse stood at the very edge of the
obiri
. The sunlight fell on her there, and to the eyes fixed upon her, grown used to the shade, her hair was a headdress of bright scarlet and her face a mask of ebony slashed with blue. The line of the ridge cut her in two, the red sun-baked earth and the white sky set above it. She took a single step forward, and those nearest fell back as though she exerted a physical force upon them. Still no one spoke. Namoke began to move forward through the silenced crowd. Her eyes widened as he broke through the bodies that were pressed together in their efforts to keep a protective distance between themselves and her, a living
ju-ju
that confronted and dazzled them. He sensed the force of her through them, how she lay coiled inside the painted body, strong and untouchable like a python’s muscle. Her breath filled their lungs, pumping them full so that if she were to hiss and suck, they would collapse, fall to the ground as sucked-out skins, Nri taking back their spirits. … She was more powerful now, Namoke realized. She stepped forward again, raised and extended an arm, the movement carving her own shape out of the stony air. Her fingers corked their straining ears, and she had only to pull them out for the words to flood their heads and come pouring out of their mouths. They were caged apart from one another and bound together only by the snaking arm that reached out of her and gripped them, each one held singly—she was pivoting, her limbs motionless, as though her spine were a stake stabbing deep into the earth, where Ala grasped and twirled it slowly between the strong white pads of her fingers. So she turned slowly between the River to her left and the forest to her right and had she spoken an instant sooner, Namoke reflected later, they would have formed the shape of her compulsion, falling beneath her shadow in exact congruence with it; her image casting a hard island of darkness into the bright soft soil of the palaver, where they were all sinking, the Eze-Ada’s redoubt. … And yet.

They were lucky, Namoke thought later that night, when she sat before him
as only Usse. She was the child of his brother and recognizable as his own flesh, a little girl who had chattered and made up stories of meeting Iguedo in the forest. He could recognize her now. In the
obiri
she had been a stranger, too changed for him to see her beneath the apparition who had addressed the assembled men. They were lucky not to have been torn limb from limb. Or perhaps the Alusi had reached down from the sky and firmed the crumbling walls that held the men there before the specter of the Eze-Ada, just long enough for her brothers to arrive and drag away the three intruders. For an instant he had thought that the one she called “the Soldier” would draw the blade that he wore in a long metal pouch at his side. His hand had wavered there, but she had seen and hissed at him in his own language. Gbujo had gripped the man by the shoulder. He had suffered himself to be turned about in that manner, and the other two, the Giant and the one she called “the Thief,” had fled.

“You were to keep them with the pirogue,” she scolded her brothers contemptuously now. “Fools, all three of you. Nothing has changed.” Her glare challenged them to deny it. The three of them scowled and said nothing.

It had happened very quickly. The ragged clothes had confounded the men in the
obiri,
and for a moment they had simply not understood what their eyes told them was before them. Then they had looked up to their faces and comprehension came. Namoke recalled the sound in the men’s throats, a gasp that came from their stomachs. Three White-men had walked into the
obiri,
and the Soldier had stepped between the Eze-Ada and her audience and begun speaking in his own tongue, sounding as though his mouth were full of earth. He had seemed to be addressing … himself. Namoke.

The other two had hung back, sensing the hostility that was gathering in the faces that stared at their own, recognition rippling back through the press of bodies, a horrible amazement. Gbujo and his brothers appeared, panting, flustered, and it was that which seemed to trigger the men. They had moved forward, and Usse had turned. Then it was his own turn to be amazed, outraged, shocked out of a trance. She had snatched up his
ofo
-staff and brandished it like a weapon while her brothers pulled the intruders back. How long before the crest of the men’s anger toppled and broke, raining down fists on their swaddled bodies and their baffled red faces? And how long before they might have been pulled to safety? A heartbeat? Two? He had lost his head, Namoke admitted to himself. He had acted without thinking.