Who Fears Death (23 page)

I stayed in the wilderness for a few more minutes. Then the goat that I had saved walked up and bit me. I felt like I dropped several feet and I hit the ground. Dazed, I walked back to Aro’s hut where I found him waiting for me with a grand meal.

“Eat,” was all he said.

Mwita and I left camp. The others watched us go without asking where we were going. About a third of a mile out, we sat down. It had only been a day and a half of fasting, yet the world around me had already shifted to that strange level of clarity.

“It’s the traveling, I think,” Mwita said.

“Have you done this before?” I asked.

“A long time ago,” he said. “When . . . I was a boy. Just after I escaped from those Okeke soldiers.”

“Oh. You starved?”

“For days.”

I wanted to ask him what he saw but it wasn’t the time. I looked out at the dry desert. Not a patch of grass. Aro told me that long ago, the land hadn’t been like this. “Don’t completely discount the Great Book,” he said. “Something did happen to bring it all down. To change green to sand. These lands used to look a lot more like the wilderness.”

Still, the Great Book, in my opinion, was mainly crafty lies and riddles. I shivered and the world shivered around me.

“You see that?” Mwita asked.

I nodded. “Any minute,” I said, not really knowing what I was talking about but sure of it anyway. “Let me guide it.”

“What else can I do?” Mwita said with a smile. “I have no idea how to guide a vision, lady sorceress in training.”

“Just call me sorcerer,” I said. “There’s only one kind, man or woman. And we are always training.” Then the world shivered again and I grabbed on. “Hurry, take it Mwita.”

He looked at me confused and then did what it sounded like I wanted him to do. He took hold. “What . . . what is . . .”

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was as if the air beneath us solidified. Swift and strong, it took us at an impossible speed to a destination that only it knew. We moved far but we were also still. We were in two places at once or maybe in neither. As Aro always told me, you can’t have all your questions answered. Who knows what Luyu, Binta, Fanasi, or Diti would have seen had they looked our way. According to the location of the sun, the vision moved mainly west, sometimes meandering northwest and then southwest in a manner that I can only describe as playful. Below, the desert flew by. Suddenly, I felt a terrible sense of foreboding. I’d once had a dream like this. It had shown me my biological father.

“We’re in the towns now,” Mwita said after a while. He sounded calm but he probably wasn’t.

We moved too quickly over the bordering towns and villages for me to see much. But there was a smell of roasting meat and fire still in my nostrils.

“It’s still happening,” I said. Mwita nodded.

We rounded southwest where sandstone buildings were built close together, two sometimes three stories high. I didn’t see one Okeke person. This was Nuru territory. If there were Okekes here, they were trusted slaves. The useful ones.

The roads were flat and paved. Palm trees, bushes, and other vegetation thrived here. It was not like Jwahir, where you had vegetation and trees that, though they lived, were dry and grew upward instead of outward. There was sand here but there were also patches of a strange darker-colored ground. Then I saw why. I’d never seen so much water. It was shaped like a giant dark blue snake. Hundreds of people could swim in it and it wouldn’t matter.

“That’s one of the Seven Rivers,” Mwita said. “Maybe the third or fourth.”

We slowed as we moved over it. I could see white fish swimming near the surface. I reached down and ran my hand in the water. It was cool. I held my hand to my lips. It tasted almost sweet, like rainwater. This wasn’t capture station water forcibly pulled from the sky nor was it water from underground. This vision was truly something new. Mwita and I were both
here
. We could see each other. We could taste and feel. As we approached the other side of the river, Mwita looked worried.

“Onye,” he said. “I’ve never . . . can people see us?”

“I don’t know.”

We passed some people in floating vehicles. Boats. No one seemed to see us though one woman looked around as if she felt something. Once over land, we picked up speed and flew up high over small villages until we reached a large town. It sat at the end of the river and the beginning of a huge body of water. Just beyond the buildings, I glimpsed . . . a field of green plants?

“You see that?” I asked.

“The body of water over there? That’s the lake with no name.”

“No, not that,” I said.

We were taken between sandstone buildings where Nuru hawkers sold goods along the road. We passed over a small open restaurant. I smelled peppers, dried fish, rice, incense. An infant wailed from somewhere. A man and a woman argued. People bartered. I saw a few dark faces here—all were burdened with items and all of them walked quickly with purpose. Slaves.

The Nurus here weren’t the wealthiest, but they weren’t the poorest either. We came to a road blocked by a crowd standing before a wooden stage with orange flags hanging over the front. The vision took us to the front of the stage and set us down. It felt odd. First it was as if we sat on the ground, amid people’s legs and feet. They absentmindedly moved aside for us, their attention focused on the people onstage. Then something raised us to a standing position. We looked around, terrified of being seen. Mwita pulled me close, slipping his arm firmly around my waist.

I looked right into the face of the Nuru man beside me. He looked into mine. We stared at each other. Standing inches shorter than Mwita and me, he looked about twenty, maybe a little older. He narrowed his eyes. Thankfully, the man onstage grabbed his attention.

“Who are you going to believe?” the man onstage shouted. Then he smiled and laughed, lowering his voice. “We’re doing what must be done. We’re following the Book. We have always been a pious loyal people. But what next?”

“Tell us! You know the answer!” someone shouted.

“When we’ve wiped them out,
what next?
We make the Great Book proud! We make Ani proud. We build an empire that is the most good of good!”

I felt sick. I knew who this was, just as you knew from the moment this vision took me. Slowly, I brought my eyes to his eyes, first taking in his tall broad-shouldered stature, the black beard that hung down his chest. I didn’t want to look. But I did. He saw me. His eyes grew wide. They flashed red for a second. He strode toward me.

“You!” Mwita shouted as he leaped onstage.

My biological father was still looking at me in shock when Mwita plowed into him. They went falling back and people in the crowd shouted and surged forward.

“Mwita!” I yelled. “What are you doing?”

Two guards were about to grab Mwita. They blocked my way. I scrambled onto the stage. I could have sworn I heard laughter. But before I could see, we were being pulled back. Mwita flew back to me right through the two men. My biological father pushed them aside. “When you’re ready, Mwita, come find me. We’ll finish this,” he said. His nose bled but he was grinning. His eyes met mine. He pointed at me with a long narrow finger. “And you, girl, your days are numbered.”

The crowd below us was in chaos, several fights breaking out. People pushed and shoved, rocking the stage on its foundation. Several men in yellow jumped onto the stage from the sides. They brutally kicked people off the stage. No one other than my biological father seemed to see us. He stood there a moment longer and then looked to his crowd and held up his hands smiling. Everyone immediately calmed. It was eerie.

We were moving backward fast. So fast that I couldn’t speak or turn my head toward Mwita. We flew over the town, the river, another town. Everything was a blur until we were near camp. It was like a giant hand set us down right there in the sand. We sat there for several minutes breathing heavily. I glanced at Mwita. He had a large bruise rising on the side of his face.

“Mwita,” I said, reaching to touch it.

He slapped my hand away and stood up, rage in his eyes. I moved away, suddenly very afraid of him.

“Be afraid,” he said. There were tears in his eyes but his face was hard. He went back to camp. I watched him go into our tent and then I just sat there. There was a mild burst of pain in my forehead. My headache still lingered.

How did he know my biological father?
I wondered. I couldn’t understand it.
I
didn’t look much like him.
And why was he about to beat me?
The thought hurt more than the question. Of all the people in the world, my mother and Mwita were the two that I could fully trust to never ever hurt me. Now I had left my mother and Mwita . . . something in his brain had gone mad.

And then there was the question of what had literally happened. We’d
been
there. Mwita had delivered a blow and been delivered one in return. The people could see us, but what did they see? I scooped up a handful of sand and threw it.

MWITA AND I KEPT OUR PROBLEMS QUIET. It was easy to do, for the next day Mwita took Fanasi with him to look for lizard eggs.

“The bread is getting stale. Ugh,” Binta complained as she bit into a piece of the yellow flatbread. “I need some
real
food.”

“Don’t be such a princess,” I said.

“I can’t wait to reach a village,” Binta said.

I shrugged. I wasn’t looking forward to other villages or towns on the way. I had a scar on my forehead to show that people could be hostile. “We have to learn to live on the desert,” I said. “We have a long long way to go.”

“Yeah,” Luyu said. “But we’ll only find fresh men in the towns and villages. You and Diti may not mind staying away from them, but Binta and I have needs, too.”

Diti grumbled something. I looked at her. “What’s your problem?” I asked.

She only looked away.

“Onye,” Binta said. “You said when you were little, you used to sing and owls would come. Can you still do that?”

“Maybe,” I said. “I haven’t tried it in a long time.”

“Try it,” Luyu said, perking up.

“If you want to hear singing, turn on Binta’s musicplayer,” I said.

“The batteries are low,” Luyu said.

I chuckled. “It’s solar, isn’t it?”

“Come on. Stop being stingy,” Luyu said.

“Really,” Diti said in a low annoyed voice. “It’s not all about you.”

“I’ve never seen an owl up close,” Binta said.

“I have,” Luyu said. “My mother used to feed one every night outside her window. It was . . .” She grew quiet. We all did, thinking about our mothers.

I quickly started singing the song of the desert on a cool night. Owls are nocturnal. This was a song they’d like. As I sang, it filled me with joy, a rare emotion for me. The remnants of my headache finally left me. I stood up and raised my voice higher, spreading my arms and closing my eyes.

I heard the flap of wings. My friends gasped, giggled, and sighed. I opened my eyes and kept singing. One of the owls perched on Binta’s tent. It was dark brown with large yellow eyes. Another owl landed on Luyu’s tent. This one was tiny enough to fit into the palm of my hand. When I finished singing both owls hooted in appreciation and flew off. The large one left a dollop of feces on Binta’s tent.

“There are consequences to everything,” I laughed. Binta groaned with disgust.

That night, I lay in our tent waiting for Mwita. He was outside bathing with capture station water. He and Fanasi had returned with several lizard eggs, one tortoise—which none of us, not even Fanasi, could bring ourselves to kill and cook—and four desert hares that they’d killed in the desert. I suspected that Mwita used simple juju to catch the hares and find the lizard eggs. Mwita wasn’t speaking to me, so I didn’t know for sure.

As I lay there, my rapa tied around me, fear occupied my thoughts. I’d hoped this feeling was only temporary, a weird side-effect of the vision. I couldn’t stop shaking. I was sure that he’d beat me this night, or even kill me. When he and Fanasi returned and showed us their catch, Mwita had looked me over. He kissed me lightly on the lips. Then he’d caught my eye. The rage I saw there was frightening. But I refused to avoid him.

I knew ways of defense using the Mystic Points. I could change into an animal ten times stronger than Mwita. I could drop into the wilderness where he could barely touch me. I could attack and tear at his very spirit as I’d done to Aro when I was only sixteen. But I wasn’t going to use any of that tonight. Mwita was all I had.

The tent flap opened. Mwita paused. I felt a flutter in my chest. He’d expected me to stay with Luyu or Binta. He
wanted
me to. I sat up. He wore only his pants made of the same material as my rapa. It was dark so I couldn’t see his face clearly. He closed the tent flap and zipped it shut. I assured myself that I’d done nothing wrong.
If he kills me tonight, it won’t be my fault,
I thought.
I can live with that
. But could I? If I was the one prophesied to make things right in the West, what good was I dead?

“Mwita,” I said softly.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “Not tonight, Onyesonwu.”

“Why?” I asked, keeping my voice steady. “What’s happened that . . .”

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I see you.” He shook his head, his shoulders curling.

I hesitated but then I moved forward and took him in my arms. He tensed up. I held him tight. “What
is
it?” I whispered, not wanting the others to hear. “Tell me!”

There was a long long pause and he frowned and glared at me. I didn’t dare move.

“Lie down,” he finally said. “Take this off and lie down.”

I took off my rapa and he lay down beside me and took me in his arms. Something was so wrong with him. But I let him remember me. He ran his arms over my body, took my braids in his hands and inhaled, kissed and kissed and kissed. All this time, so many tears dropped on me that I was damp with them.