Awojobi and Fatona were undressing. They took off strings of charms and singular object-potencies from their waists and underarms, washed their mouths, armpits and faces with saltwater and wrapped their bodies in spotless white wrappers. They completed their armor by wrapping their heads and shoulders in shawls of knitted white aso-oke.
Fagbeja was already prepared and draped, his face covered completely in a mask of liquid chalk as he stirred his distillate of dream. Awojobi painted a circle around his left eye. Fatona drew twin lines from the center of his head to his jaw, slipping two fingers over his nose. They both stood by Fagbeja who put his hand into the red coals, picked up the pot and placed it gently on the floor.
“This is the strongest one I’ve made yet,” Fagbeja said. “One large gulp and the spirit will forever be trapped outside the body, suspended in many dreams. We must take only six drops each. Enough to get us to them and not too much that we all can’t return home to our bodies.”
Awojobi, the oldest, was the weaver of light and the one who lived in constant trance already. He went first and lay on the bare ground opposite the fire, put his hands atop one another on his stomach and shut his eyes. He opened his mouth and Fagbeja placed six drops on his tongue. The distillate was terrible in its bitterness and the old priest’s face crumpled as the liquid seemed to turn his tongue and throat black and sticky, then his face relaxed. His stomach filled with warmth and his tongue began to leak spittle sweeter than honey. He drifted to sleep.
Fatona, the healer whose body was sensitive as spider’s web, lay down to the right of Awojobi and took the drops on his tongue. Bitterness darkened his insides, and in his sleep, sweetness bloomed.
Fagbeja went last, lying down and placing the pot next to his waist before taking the six drops onto his own tongue. His chalk-whitened face wrinkled, and he too went to sleep at the taste of sweetness.
✦✦✦
Midnight crept by on long hushed toes. In the shrine, five bodies lay prone. The boy and the girl, covered in lengths of warm adire, lay to the right, three days asleep. Next to them, coals burned in a shallow pit, casting a glow of tender sunset across the dreaming bodies. The babalawos lay to the left of the pit, stiff as three logs on the bare earth.
Everyone in Osupa was asleep as if by some transference. Even Gbolahan Olohun slept beside the door where he had stood all day waiting for his sister to awaken.
In the sky above, three owls circled under the smile of a new moon.
II
IN EXHUMED NIGHTMARE
Awojobi, who went to sleep first, woke in the shared dream last. He found himself and his brother babalawo standing on an endless plain of lustrous grass that seemed to flow in perfectly timed waves away from a mass that towered in the sky up ahead, at the focal center of the dream. Light sparkled around them, seeming to fall like dust from the cloudless blue sky above. No birds called and no wind blew.
Fatona was already walking up ahead towards the thing at the center. It was an immense blight, black and slick, blotting out the bright fabric of the dream, throwing thrashing shadows. It grew from deep in the earth, spreading as it made its way up towards the heavens. Right at its mouth stood Akanbi and Gbemisola Olohun, dwarfed into insignificance.
Fagbeja was close behind Fatona, an owl on his shoulder. They all wore fine heavy agbadas of white aso-oke shot through with silver thread. Awojobi followed his brothers, swaying through the grass towards where the two dreaming Akanbi and Gbemisola stood like ants before the black thing writhing and splitting reality. He tried to remember if he had ever seen anything like it in his sixty years of trance but could not.
Fatona followed the waves of the plain, his owl-eye gleaming as the blight grew in size, polluting the blue above. As healer, he could sense that it was both wound and womb, a doorway from a distant place. Something began to push against the chaos of the blight. Its body flashed violet as it sluggishly began to distend the membrane of the dream through the blight.
Awojobi leapt and flew above the dream. He had gotten the wings of the owl. They flapped at their normal size a few breaths above the back of his agbada and helped him soar ahead of Fatona and Fagbeja to land behind Akanbi and Gbemisola.
Akanbi and Gbemisola’s heads were turned towards the blight, their necks bolted in place. Their toes were sunken into the soil and from the bones of their legs sprouted buds and leaves. Their eyes were black as pools of ink. Awojobi moved to touch them.
The membrane broke and a titanic object floated out, twisted, burnt black and heavy as old bone. The sparkling light and the lush green fields disappeared in its shadow. The broken membrane sizzled like fat in fire and from the point of the blight, the entire sky boiled into starless night.
Awojobi went blind. Fagbeja stopped moving; the owl on his shoulder was simply a tether and advisor on how things were on the other side, where they lay in Osupa. Fatona saw clear as day with his owl eye, but he was still too far from where the two dreamers stood. He began to run.
Akanbi and Gbemisola opened their mouths at the same time. Akanbi began to speak incantations he didn’t know and Gbemisola sang wordless from the bottom of her gut. Their voices reverberated, dissonant, through the air of the dream.
Turning his neck to follow the drift of the boneship, Fatona saw with his owl eye a living language, crawling and burning violet in the void of the night it had made.
Awojobi followed the sounds of Akanbi and Gbemisola to reach them, then he held onto their shoulders to keep them still till Fagbeja and the tether arrived. Awojobi immediately began to ululate and call to the boneship in an unknown tongue.
As the babalawos ran towards their patients and the boneship drifted imperceptibly to the center of the dream, camouflaged against the darkened sky, night against night, a guttural screaming began, random as birdsong, echoing from spots distant and near. Each voice allowed a scream to finish before the next rose with hair-raising pitch. They seemed to be screaming against the boneship, yelling as if they were each about to be devoured in the slimy jaws of a great beast.
Fagbeja ran faster, the prayers whispered under his breath carving open a path through the grass. The owl on his shoulder now flew low before his face, revealing the way to Awojobi.
The first snatch occurred. A scream was cut short by a blaze of violet fire, as the screaming body exploded into the air, burning a trail thin as thread from the distant plain into the gut of the boneship. The next scream was cut off as well, and nearer where the babalawo ran, a body ripped out of the earth, burning up as it shot into the boneship.
As Fatona and Fagbeja ran, aided by the earth beneath their feet, the black sky in which the boneship now hung static exploded with violet missiles. Bodies that seemed buried deep in the earth of the dream screamed and went mute as they were ripped out of the soil into the sky.
Fatona reached where Awojobi, Akanbi and Gbemisola stood making strange rippling sounds with their tongues, eyes blind and riveted to the boneship. With his owl-eye, he saw violet streams rushing out of their lips up towards the boneship, along with the burning missiles of the stolen bodies. They were reading the living language.
He pulled a lodestone out of his agbada. It was a perfect cube of white rock. Fagbeja and the tethering owl arrived. He nodded to Fatona and Fatona threw
the cube up and placed a hand on Awojobi’s shoulder. The lodestone burst into white light and hung still as sun but flashed as though it was full of shadows of rippling water. Fagbeja put one hand on Fatona’s back and the other around the owl’s feet.
The tether flew, lifting them up as if they were dry leaves. It took them out of the dream into the lodestone.
In their absence, the nightmare continued, and the earth was pillaged for her bounty of soul.
✦✦✦
The cube of the lodestone opened up inside the shrine at Osupa. Serpentine forms, aglow with shifting light, slipped out of the blinding brightness of the lodestone, casting shadows against the walls
as they moved about weightlessly, swimming through the air and slipping into the mouths of the five sleepers.
The lodestone collapsed into a sparkling point of light so bright it lasted in the air for the several breaths that Gbolahan Olohun took as he woke up. He peeped into the shrine and watched the babalawos as they woke up, each vigorously rubbing their eyes and back and ears as if to remove impurities. The sparkle vanished. A white owl flew out of the shrine.
Gbemisola Olohun and Akanbi stirred and moaned as they returned into the heaviness of their bodies. When they opened their eyes, their pupils were clouded silver with sleep, and when they opened their mouths, nothing came out.
III
HERALD THE MASONS
Three days passed before Gbemisola and Akanbi could stand up and walk around inside the shrine. They remained speechless. The Awo Meta con-sulted and divined every waking moment, taking turns at tossing opele on their oval boards and drawing lines in a circle of white sand. Ifa showed nothing, said nothing; but they continued to persist with the oracle and tend to their mute patients. Awojobi knew what was going to happen: a breach into Ile-Aye, by something from another world, something powerful and hungry and beyond human understanding. He had touched Akanbi and Gbemisola’s shoulder in the dreamscape and seen and heard through their senses. But he couldn’t remember speaking as they did. The burning violet language was a message to open—a call, a courier.
In all his life as a babalawo jumping through space-time and seeing realms above and below, Awojobi had never witnessed anything so strange. Awojobi also knew that Ifa was not speaking to the three of them, for the two voices he had selected for his use were currently muted.
Fatona and Fagbeja continued to work around Gbemisola and Akanbi until they tottered back to lie on the ground—Fagbeja with his herbal tinctures and dense aromatic submergence and Fatona with his cool hands and silent tears. Awojobi, draped in white shawls, sat in the corner and stared into the firepit at the center of the shrine, seeing violet.
✦✦✦
Gbolahan snuck into the shrine on the morning following the night through which the three Babalawos had watched over Gbemisola and Akanbi, trying to get them to explain what they had seen in the shared dream.
Was the boneship coming for the settlement of Osupa alone or the entirety of the world? Was it the war and bloodshed of Ile-Ife that would draw this hungry thing into this world?
Gbemisola only stared at them with the eyes of a newborn, a strange amused smile on her face. Akanbi returned to his bed and slept soundly, curled into a fetal position.
By sunrise, the Awo Meta were also asleep around the firepit in the center of the shrine. Gbemisola was wide awake but unable to speak. She tried to shout or say something, but all that came out was a hushed whisper. Her pupils dilated in her effort to speak.
Gbolahan woke at the first crowing of the cock and saw that the Awo Meta had drifted to sleep, leaving only Gbemisola awake. He was so overjoyed at seeing his sister alive that the babalawo had barely begun to snore before he ran into the shrine and threw his arms around her. Gbemisola was still for a while, and then she struggled out of his arms. They stood apart and stared into each other’s eyes: Gbemisola’s full of terror and Gbolahan’s loving and tired.
“Gbemi! I was…so afraid. I thought you would never come back.”
She turned away, arms wrapped around her chest. She looked at him over her shoulder. He walked over to her and tried to place a hand on her shoulder but she moved before he could touch her.
“Gbemisola? We are here and alive. Speak to me!”
She walked even deeper into the hut, closer to where her bed lay beside Akanbi, and where the Awo Meta were knocked out, catching their first sleep in days. Gbolahan stopped moving towards her and she stopped walking backwards.
Gbemisola pointed to sky through the roof of the shrine. She began to walk in a circle, then she stopped for Gbolahan, hoping that Gbolahan understood her. Gbolahan did not understand, but did what he always did when they had a fight and struggled to communicate: he kept his voice low and let a song spill out of his lips, pleading and embracing in deep warm tones.
Sister.
Tell. Where did you go?
What did you touch?
Did you see the gods all lined up
in a circle in the sky, welcoming you
into the chaos of their forever?
Sing, sister. Tell.
Gbemisola watched and listened as Gbolahan sang, modulating his voice to avoid waking the sleeping ones. Two of the sleepers stirred but continued in their sleep. Gbemisola’s eyes widened as memories flooded her mind. Their first language had been song. She turned and ran towards the billowing curtain door that led to the back of the shrine. As children, whenever they sang and it was her time to respond, she always found a way to run, to lead Gbolahan out of his safety into a space where she could shine.
The center of Osupa was full of people in morning rhythms of cooking, gossiping, cleaning, kissing and eating. A hush fell over them as Gbemisola Olohun ran out of the shrine into morning light. Roasted yam fell back into palm oil and teeth-cleansing herbs fell out of mouths. Gbemisola looked at the people around her, dressed roughly in morning wrappers, their cheeks marked, their noses bold and their eyes expectant. She held them in anticipation as she looked around, finding herself in a place both familiar and alien. She wanted most to see Ma’ami, but none of the women here was her.
Gbemisola looked up, her twin’s song still echoing in her ears and down into her heart. The sky was clear with trails of thin white cloud whose tips glowed with the pink of a rising sun. The black boneship hung high, small as a hawk, and cast no shadow because none could see it but her.
She opened her mouth and sang—
To the door, to the door was where they birthed us.
Two without skin: one the clarion, the other the salve.
Obatala and the other, coming thief
Held us between each other and waited
Till the thief began to reap us out of our ancient home.
Where the harvest goes, it will know no peace,
Only din, only monument, only sand, only—
Her throat went hoarse and she began to choke.
Gbolahan ran towards her and she ceased coughing and started speaking in a hoarse tongue that caused her eyes to roll back and her listeners to desire silence instead. They covered their ears. Gbolahan staggered back, covering his ears also. As she continued speaking, the earth beneath her feet began to swell and relax, like the belly of a sleeping man, lifting her up gently and setting her back down. Her blank eyes were set on the thing in the sky which only she could see. Her neck was clutched in her hands as if she wanted to stop the sound from pouring out of her.
An object-potency came flying from the direction of the shrine, shaped like a rabbit. It struck her in the shoulder and she went still and stiff. Gbolahan caught her before she hit the ground.
The Awo Meta walked towards the twins, eyes heavy with sleep. They collected the girl and carried her back into the hut, where Akanbi was still sleeping the sleep of the dead.
High up in the sky above, no one saw a blight the size of an eye close.
✦✦✦
After the incident, Gbemisola and Akanbi slept for seven days without water or food. The Awo Meta were reluctant to go into their dream again on a rescue mission. They tried with all their power, casting spells and laying hands and slipping bittersweet potions between the teeth of the sleepers, but the sleepers only jerked their limbs and mumbled. Once, still asleep, Akanbi sat up and said, “I can’t dig myself in any deeper.”
The Awo Meta switched their approach and decided that protection would be the next step to take, until their dream bond was broken. They cast a second line of aabo around the shrine, warding off all unwanted spirits, human beings and creatures. Even Gbolahan Olohun found it hard to stand inside the shroud of circling mist that surrounded the lower-half
of the shrine.
The people of Osupa were grateful that there were no more rains, so that their clothes and huts and crops became dry. The Awo Meta stayed close by while the two sleepers continued deeper in their sleep. Gbolahan spent his time alone in the branches of trees, pondering the lyrics of the song Gbemisola had sung to him, which had scared him at the time.
The Awo Meta, who only heard the tail-end of Gbemisola’s song, wondered again what they had seen in the dream they shared with Gbemisola and Akanbi. Although they were used to experiencing strange realms and objects and skies, this one made them feel uneasy, specifically when the bodies were ripped out of the earth to disappear into the boneship.
They did not speak about it among themselves, though they knew from her symptoms when she awoke that Gbemisola was a herald. Usually, heralds preceded orisha and other beings from the realms above prior to their arrival on earth. Heralds didn’t have to sleep for so long; they simply fell into trances of song or dance, and sometimes intricate handwork. They didn’t make the ground beneath their feet beat and swell when they spoke in other tongues. Nor was their sleep filled with repeated cycles of a singular nightmare.
The Awo Meta continued to ponder the boneship and Gbemisola’s song as they sat sleepless around the two sleepers. They also began to worry for the future, anxiety filling their chests in slow, gradual spikes.
Awojobi was full of guilt and regret for leading his brothers into establishing Osupa and bringing the people he had thought he was saving into a conundrum that could soon be worse than war. He contemplated the best way to escape being sucked into the corruption in the sky.
Fagbeja thought of his inability to adapt to new spiritual spaces without first breaking out into a mental rash and experiencing bouts of raw madness. He hated coming that close to chaos within and so he began to keep a pod of poison in the folds of his cloth, ready to burst it in his cheek if the real sky above his head broke open as it did in the dream.
Dominion Page 15
