Who Fears Death (43 page)

“This place is haunted,” Luyu whispered.

“Exactly,” Mwita said.

There was nothing I could say. We were in a tomb of humans, machines, and ideas while a deadly storm raged outside.

“How did you find this place?” I asked. “How’d you end up here?”

“And how did you remember the way so well?” Luyu added.

He went over to the swinging bodies. Luyu and I joined him. “Look up there,” he said, pointing at the copper rings. “Who would drive those into stone like that?” He sighed. “I’ll never know what happened or who these people were. When I came, it must have been just after they were hung. They still had . . . flesh. I’d say they were about the age we are now.”

“Okeke or Nuru?” Luyu asked. I noted how she didn’t consider the fact that they could have been Ewu or Red People.

“Nuru,” he said. He looked at the bodies. “I can’t believe they’re still here . . . but then again, I can.”

After a moment he said, “I came across this cave days after I escaped the Okeke rebels, after they’d left me for dead.” He pointed to his left. “I sat against that wall and ate my medicinal plants and prayed to Ani that they would work.”

Luyu looked like she was dying to know Mwita’s story of what he meant by left for dead. Thankfully, she had the tact not to ask. The best way to deal with a moody Mwita was to let him talk.

“I was half out of my mind, really,” he continued. He reached out and actually touched the leg of the dead man. I shuddered. “I’d lost the only family I knew. I’d lost my Master, terrible person though he was. I’d seen terrible things while forced to fight for the Okeke, done terrible things. I was
Ewu
. And I was only eleven years old.

“I had supplies. Food and water. I wasn’t starving or dying of thirst and I knew how to find food. It was the heat that drove me in here. They were both very dead but they didn’t smell . . .” He stepped over to the woman. “She was covered with white crablike spiders, except for her face and hands,” he continued. “They were climbing over each other but if you stared long enough, which I did, you could see that they were following a pattern around her body. I remember the fingertips of her hands were blue. Like she’d dipped them in indigo.”

He paused, again. “Even back then, I understood that the spiders were protecting her. The pattern they moved in reminded me of one of the few Nsibidi symbols Daib taught me. The symbol for ownership. I think I stood there for about twenty minutes just staring. All I could think of were my parents, whom I’d never known. They hadn’t been hung but they’d been executed . . . for creating me. As I stood there, slowly, the spiders began to drop off her and move to the sides of the cave. When they’d all dropped off, they just remained there. Like they were waiting for me to do something.

“I tried everything. I tried to yank the bodies down. I tried to cut the rope. I tried burning it. Burning their bodies by making a huge fire under them. I even tried using juju. When nothing worked, I just walked past them, sat with my back to the computers and wept. After a while, the spiders . . . they crawled back on her. I stayed there two days pretending I didn’t see the bodies and the spiders on the woman. I got stronger, got better, and then I left.”

“What about the man?” Luyu asked. “Was there anything peculiar about him?”

Mwita shook his head, his hand still on the dusty leg of the dead man. “You don’t need to know about all that.”

Silence. I wanted to ask and I’m sure Luyu did too. Know all about what?

“So you think they were sorcerers?” she asked.

He nodded. “And their killers obviously were, too” He paused, frowning. “Now they are just bones.” He suddenly grabbed the man’s leg and gave a great yank. The rope groaned and dust puffed from the corpse, but that was it. The near-skeleton stayed intact. I wondered where the woman’s spiders had gone.

A blanket of doom, sadness and despair settled on me that night, getting heavier the more the rain and lightning soaked and blasted the land. Luyu chose a spot on the other side of the cave as far from the bodies and the computers as possible. Mwita had built her a small rock fire. I wasn’t sure if she wanted privacy or she wanted to give us privacy, but it worked either way.

Mwita and I lay on our mat underneath his rapa, our clothes folded beside us. The rock fire provided more than enough warmth but it wasn’t warmth or intercourse that I needed. For once, I didn’t mind how tightly he grasped me as he slept. I didn’t like being in that cave. I could hear the heavy spatter of rain outside, the boom of thunder, the creaking of the bodies as they swung in the storm’s wind.

Both Mwita and Luyu slept, despite it all. We were all exhausted. I didn’t sleep a wink, though I had my eyes closed. Even with Mwita’s and the large rock fire’s warmth, I shivered. The facts flew about my mind like bats: There was no way that I could take down my father. I was going to get the three of us killed.
He was waiting for me,
I thought, remembering his turned back when I went after him.

“Onyesonwu,” I heard Mwita say.

I didn’t feel like responding. I didn’t want to open my mouth or my eyes. I didn’t want to breathe air or speak. I just wanted to wallow in my misery.

“Onyesonwu,” he softly repeated, his arm tightening. “Open your eyes. But don’t move.”

His words sent a shock of adrenaline through me. My mind focused. My body stopped shivering. I opened my eyes. Maybe it was my misery or a need to prove myself but when I looked into the many eyes of the hundreds of white spiders crowded before me, along with a deep fear, I felt . . . ready. One of the spiders in front slowly raised a leg and kept it there.

“So they
are
still here,” I said, not moving.

We were both quiet, seeming to read each other’s minds. We were listening to see if Luyu was awake. But the storm was too noisy.

“They’re all over me,” he said, his voice wavered just a little. “My back, legs, back of my neck . . .” Every part of him that was not touching me.

“Mwita,” I said softly. “What was it about the man that you didn’t tell us?”

He didn’t answer immediately. I started to feel very very afraid. “He was covered with spider bites,” Mwita said. “His face was twisted with pain.” I wondered if they had started biting the man before the man’s murderers had strung him up.

My cheek was pressed to the mat. The spider still had its leg raised. A thousand things flew through my mind. I suspected that they wanted Mwita. I would
never
let them have him. The spider with its leg up was waiting. Well, I was waiting, too.

It brought its leg down. I felt them behind me, rushing over Mwita. I saw them coming at me from the front. I could smell them, a fermented odor, like strong palm wine. Even with the storm’s noise, I could clearly hear the tap of their many legs. Since when did spider legs on sand sound so loud? Like metal clacking on metal? That was all I needed to know. For the first time, I used my new control of my abilities and pulled the wilderness around me and leaped up.

In the wilderness and the physical world, they looked like spiders, but in the wilderness they were much larger and made of white smoke. They passed through each other as they tried to crowd my blue form. I did to them what I did to Aro the day that he refused to teach me one too many times. I scratched, ripped, shredded, dismembered. I became a beast. I tore those creatures apart.

I slammed a foot back in the physical world, crushing a bunch of fleeing spiders, and caught Mwita’s wide eyes. He was still on the mat, naked and covered with defiant white spiders. Around him, hundreds of spider corpses littered the cave floor. If even one bit him, I would seek out and kill every single one of these creatures and then hunt them down in the spirit world and destroy them again. Every single one.

I glanced in Luyu’s direction. She was standing up, on the other side of her fire. I shook my head, she nodded. Good. Outside, lightning flashed. My state of mind was so sharp now. I was not the Onyesonwu you sit here speaking with. I cannot imagine what I must have looked like in the fire light, stark naked, angry, wild, the one I loved, threatened.
They think I’d let them take Mwita rather than risking Mwita’s death
, I thought. I grinned evilly.

Lightning flashed again, the thunder came a second later. It rained harder. The smell of ozone was strong. You could feel the charge in the air. I waited, I willed it, as I repeated my name in my mind like a mantra. The lightning crashed down right outside the cave with a great
BOOM!
A blast of flame pounded the ground. I leaped at Mwita, grabbed his leg, and pulled up what the storm threw down. I sent it into Mwita. Every spider on him popped like a palm kernel in a fire. The smell of burning feathers filled the cave.

The spiders that lived skittered into the flame at the entrance of the cave. I will never know if this was a mass suicide or a decision to return to whence they came. I had retreated from the wilderness entirely the moment that lightning struck, so I did not see if they’d returned there.

“Mwita?” I whispered, ignoring the spider carcasses lying beside him. My body was drenched with sweat yet I shivered with cold. Luyu ran over and threw a rapa over us.

“I’m fine,” he said, caressing my cheek.

“I guided it,” I said.

“I know,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t feel a thing.”

“What were those?” Luyu asked.

“I have no idea,” I said.

Something caught Mwita’s eye. I turned in the direction he was staring. Luyu did, too. “Oh,” she said.

The bodies had fallen, the ropes holding them singed by the blast. And now the dry remains burned bright. The mysterious executed sorcerer and sorceress finally got the funeral pyre they deserved.

 

The storm was still going when morning came. The only way we knew it was morning was by checking the time on Luyu’s portable. While Luyu boiled some rice to mix with some dried goat meat and spices, Mwita used a pan to dig a grave on the side of the cave. He insisted on doing it alone.

I walked over to the electronics at the back of the cave. We’d avoided these items more than the corpses. They were the old devices of a doomed people. After what had happened last night, I was in the mood to look doom in the face.

“What are you doing?” Luyu asked, as she turned the rice. “Haven’t you had enough . . .”

“Leave her,” Mwita said, pausing in his digging. “One of us should look.”

Luyu shrugged. “Okay. I know I’m not going near that cursed junk.”

I chuckled to myself. I understood her sentiment and I think Mwita probably felt the same way. But me, well, this was a page right out of the Great Book. If I was going to somehow rewrite it then it made sense for me to look.

The tinny smell of old wiring and dead motherboards was stronger up close. There were scattered keys from keyboards and pieces of thin plastic in the sand from broken screens and casings. Some of the computers had designs on the outside—faded butterflies, loops and swirls, geometric shapes. Most were a uniform black.

A device that looked like a small very thin black book caught my eye. It was wedged between two computers and when I pulled it out, I was surprised to see that it had a screen when I opened it up. It looked beaten up but, unlike the other items, not old. It was about the size of the palm of my hand. The back of it was made of an extremely hard substance that looked oddly like a black leaf. The screen was unscratched.

All the buttons on the front were blank, the words rubbed off long ago. I touched a button. Nothing happened. I touched another and the thing made a sound like water. “Oh!” I exclaimed, almost dropping it.

The screen lit up showing a place of plants, trees, and bushes. I gasped softly.
Just like the place my mother showed me
, I thought.
The place of hope
. My chest swelled and I sat down right there beside the pile of decaying useless hardware from another time.

The image rolled and moved, like someone was walking and I was looking through her eyes. Through its tiny speakers came the sound of birds and insects singing and grasses, plants, and leaves being stepped on and pushed aside. Then the title slowly came up from the bottom of the screen and I understood that this was a large portable with a book on it. The book’s title was
The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide,
written by some group calling themselves The Great Explorers of Knowledge and Adventure Organization.

Suddenly the image froze and the sound stopped. I pressed more buttons but nothing helped. It switched itself off and no matter how many times I pressed the buttons, nothing more happened.

No matter. I threw it aside. I straightened up. I smiled. Hours later, the sky smiled too. The storm had finally passed. We left the cave before dawn.

 

Over the next two days of travel, the land grew hillier. The ground became a mix of sand and patches of a sort of dry grass. Here we found lizards and jackrabbits to eat, and just in time, as our dried meat was running out. We came across fat-trunked trees I couldn’t name and more and more palm trees. The climate remained cold at night and relatively warm during the day. And thankfully, we came across no more ungwa storms. Of course, there are worse things.