The ofiliganga stopped moving. They had passed through the long winding path made by the bodies in the nest and entered a clearing. In this circle, the arrangements of the giantess’ bodies had become even more ordered and clean. There was an orange fire going dim.dim, dim.dim, being passed among a gang of five ofiliganga who sat right in the center of the clearing, all with skin black as coal. The giantesses were hugging and kissing the fire that they held in their hands as if it was a bouquet of flame lilies, then handing it over to the next in circle. They were twice the size of the ofiliganga that Akanbi had followed, and their bodies seemed to be firmer and softer at the same time. Their skin didn’t pucker or freckle or crease; it was just perfectly smooth and hairless. The ofiliganga that brought Akanbi walked into the center.
“What you need, small sister? You know better than to break a circle during Warmth,” one of the assembled ofiliganga asked.
“I have bring boy, from up.”
“Where is he?”
The younger ofiliganga pushed Akanbi to the center of the clearing where the skin of the giantesses gleamed as they continued to pass around the fire. “Come closer.”
He moved closer until he could see the fire in their eyes.
“Sleeping boy,” said the elderly ofiligiganga, examining Akanbi. “Your father waits inside the earth. Go in and seek him. Use our body.” The fire vanished between lips; the sound of biting and moaning passed around: the ofiligangas were eating fire.
Akanbi moved forward, pulled by something he couldn’t see, until he was between two hips, tall as huts. A small cave of blackness opened where they leaned against each other. Akanbi knelt down and crawled into the emptiness.
The ofiliganga continued to eat their fire. And Akanbi fell into a hole.
IV
THE MUTE THIEF
The black boneship slipped out of thoughtspeed into an infinite ocean. The ocean was still and white as purest sap. The boneship ceased to move with any precision and began to drift and spin slowly. Nothing moved in the whiteness. There was no sound.
At the center of the white ocean hung a circle of eleven bodies made of rough serrated bones that ended in crowns where the heads should be, like dead trees ending abruptly without branches. They had no faces. Instead, they wore beneath their crowns hemispheres crafted from long spikes. Inside these hemispheres pulsed bright violet light. Small blinding suns sat where their chests should be, their light also of ultraviolet hue. Their arms and legs dangled uselessly, covered in big bony plates and a proliferation of spikes and scales.
These were the Mute Thieves and the white ocean was their mindscape.
The boneship drifted for eternity before it finally got pulled into the only motion under the ocean, a spiral that circled the Thieves. It swam around the thorny towers of the Thieves’ bodies, an eighth the size of their heads, before it slipped into their center where the eye of the ocean rested. It was suddenly riveted and became still as an image.
The vertical hemispheres of the Thieves’ faces began to flash rapidly, each Thief creating its own pattern of blips and longs flashes. They were speaking to themselves and to the boneship. The boneship’s skin freckled with glowing symbols and glinted in response to its owners’ queries.
The faces of the Thieves stopped flashing and the boneship broke into eleven pieces. The eggs in which the human beings of Osupa rested in catatonia slipped into the milk of the ocean. The pieces of the boneship drifted off in eleven directions, each slipping where a mouth should be in a Thief ’s face.
In the ocean, the fifty-one eggs gathered around themselves, sticking one to the other like magnets to metal, forming a cluster. The Mute Thieves began flashing their faces again and thin beams of pure light shot out of their chests and covered the eggs in a final fire.
The eggs broke open. The human beings slipped out, still in a cluster, floating boneless and naked as newborns. Their eyes remained shut. Gbemisola Olohun drifted out of the human cluster towards one of the suns that burned at the hearts of the Thieves. She grew smaller and smaller as she drifted closer to the sun, until she was but a grain, and then she disappeared, swallowed in the ultraviolet.
✦✦✦
Gbemisola Olohun sat on a cube that floated in a blue sky. There was nothing below, just aquamarine all around. She remained naked, but she cared very little about that. Her eyes were fixed on the flow of an approaching cloud. It was a thin, long cloud that seemed to dance like a snake as it approached. Every time she blinked it was closer, until finally it was before her and its clean mist was washing over her being. She shut her eyes and felt every cell and nerve in her body sing with bliss. When she opened her eyes, it was as though she was staring into a mirror.
“Where do you think you are?” Gbemisola asked herself. Her voice was quiet and her gaze serene. Gbemisola knew she looked more tired and older than she saw. “Last I remember I was dreaming. Then I woke up and the sky opened and ate me. Is this another dream?”
“You are in Canetis Nix,” a voice said to her. “We are Canetix Nix. We require use of your bodies and that is why we have brought you here.”
“What does that mean? Brought you here? Is this not a dream?”
“You are far from home, youngling,” the voice answered. “We require your throats for what you call sound, for we are unable to create this sound ourselves.”
“Let me go,” Gbemisola said. She tried to move her body but could not. “I need to understand what is happening please.”
“Much has happened before now and much will happen after. We chose you for the power of your song. We tried to get you to see, through a dreamstate, what we required you to do, but we were obstructed by the presence of a radiant entity indigenous to your world.”
“Akanbi?” Gbemisola realized she could still remember the dream that had kept her hostage for all those days. She could remember the boy she shared them with. Things started to get blurry when she attempted to cast her mind back to what had happened before, she began dreaming. A place called Osupa. Had she always been dreaming? How did she even come to be in a body?
She watched the mouth of the Canetis Nix move again in the sky where there was no sun but the light was clear as day.
“He is of that entity, yes. The entity chose to make physical contact with him at the very moment we attempted to do the same with you.”
“Why?”
“Voices. We require your voices. We have found a peculiar world, perfect to store our menagerie. But it is formless and full of only dust. Only this sound can make it find form again.”
“Voices?”
“Other members of your species are present. We require more than one tone to reshape this world.”
“If we help you, will we ever return home? Or are we your slaves now?” “What a strange word. Canetis Nix do not operate under such laws. Think of your work as that of an organ borrowed. You will be returned when said work is done.”
“So you have taken us against our will and desire to use us as you please.”
“We have taken you because you are a leader in convergence, and where your voice goes the rest will follow.”
Gbemisola Olohun felt a knot of emotions tangle up in her chest. Her face remained placid as that of the thing before her, mirroring her. They both sat with legs hanging off the edge of the cube, hands covering breasts placed on hearts. Their backs were stiff and their eyes wide; one with confusion, the other with cold intelligence.
“Please, let us go. We do not want to be here. Please—”
“How do you know where you want to be? You haven’t seen it yet. You haven’t felt the power in this sound of yours. We are giving your young species a chance at purpose beyond the dreams of your creators. We are creating with you and your fellow human beings, a new form of architect.”
The reflected Gbemisola Olohun stood on her cube.
The voice said, “Come with us and know glory.” The Canetis Nix fell backwards and took the
blue of the sky with her.
V
THE ORISA’S GIFT
Akanbi crawled down a cold, mud-sticky tunnel which he opened with his hands. In the lightlessness, his fingertips were numb as they sank into the tenderness of the subterranean ground and ripped it apart. He could see the perfectly fat ofiliganga talking his destiny over his head as they passed around the flame, their round cheeks announcing that he had to save the people taken from Osupa. They told him to go deeper into the earth’s belly if he wanted to survive, if he wanted to begin the rescue mission. They laughed mischievously after they talked about the impossibility of humans ever doing anything right.
He stopped, out of breath. His lower body was covered in the sokoto which he had been wearing the night of the storm at Osupa. His abeti aja was gone. He found himself dozing yet digging, dozing, digging, and soon he was breathing in rhythm.
✦✦✦
Akanbi fell out of the tunnel into a large white room that had always been there since Olodumare made Ile Aye, the walls covered in bleached spines from various species of men and animals in a serpentine pattern that fooled the eye with motion. A purple mat swirling with nebulae sat at the center of the room. There was a mountain of stiff white cloth burning with holy fire. Holy fire is blue like water.
Akanbi jumped out of his nap when his skull hit the white sand that flowed across the lower part of the room in clean waves. He rose to his feet. From beneath a covering of clotted soil, cold shivers tore into his spine and belly. He took three steps towards the radiance and collapsed to the floor. A shadow swung about the room, like an arm in a single wave, and the radiance opened. Something moved inside the burning cloth, and through slats in the stiff cloth, forms passed—a sliver of black flesh, an eye, blue and gold with god, a hand trailing cloud.
“Akanbi,” a voice whispered. The fiery cloth pulsed with the deep rumble. “Wake up, Akanbi. Stand up. We have work to do.” Though low and deeper than lion’s cry, the voice remained warm.
Akanbi opened his eyes and stood again. The shivers returned. He could feel his every breath struggling to stay in his lungs. The room swirled and the spines slithered.
“Take palmwine.”
Akanbi saw Obatala’s eye and followed it to where a fizzing horn hung black in the air before the orisha. Panting, he pulled himself up to the horn and then he placed his lips on the rim and pulled till a hollow rang in the white room inside the earth.
“See.” The orisha was standing behind him. He turned to look as the palmwine surged warm as love up and down his insides.
Obatala’s hand came down and touched Akanbi’s cheek. Akanbi looked into the orisha’s face and saw himself. He saw himself on a coal-black eshinemi, galloping across a sky full of stars, streaking the air gold.
“You are to ride Ronke to the white place of our thieves. There you might break the chains of your kind.”
Akanbi nodded furiously. The orisha’s fingers on his cheek had put him into a stillness that unmoored him. He felt himself possible again. Maybe the fires of Ife had brought him here, into the presence of an aspect of Olodumare whose hand was grazing his cheek and filling him with emotions that had no sound. Akanbi asked about Ronke.
“The eshinemi? She is a being beyond your understanding. Ride her well and don’t run when she starts talking.”
“Why me?”
Obatala’s hand left his cheek and the white room with the spines and the mat and the radiance were gone. Akanbi stood in a tunnel tall enough to hold an iroko. In his palm, a statue of white stone rested, and in the far distance, fields of fire burned.
THREE
I
SONGSTRESS
Flown out of the ocean of thought in which the Mute Thieves dwelled, back into the black glitter of emptiness and stars, the fifty-one human beings from Osupa floated out of the boneship that took them from Ile Aye into the atmosphere of Canetis Nix.
They all stood dazed and naked on a circular bone that spun slowly as it descended. Around their heads grew translucent membranes, bulbs with a rainbow sheen, to help them breathe and amplify their voices.
Light on Canetis Nix was alive. The rippling mists that filled the atmosphere seemed to be sheets of pure light that drifted in circles. The bone dais stopped one foot above the ground. There on the floor, it was like being on the shores of an endless white beach that was attached to an ocean of even whiter sand. A silence pervaded the air. This silence seemed to also control the wind, for no breath moved down on the ground, though in the upper stratosphere there had been some cool and distant roaring like a wave crashing forever without ebbing.
Gbemisola Olohun alighted from the bone dais first, her body plump and her skin smooth as skinned bark. On her back, where her shoulder bones met, something like a spiked crustacean made of finest limestone was fused into her spine. Twenty-four long segmented appendages followed the flow of her ribs and hipbones, slipping stingers half an inch beneath the skin where they stopped, in a pointed oval that started at the throat and ended inside the groin. Two of the appendages pinched above the collarbone, just beneath the voice box.
As Gbemisola walked onto the powders of Canetis Nix, her feet sinking to the ankle with every step, wondering as she had since the lightning struck if all was dream, the olorin on her back tightened its grip across her body. Gbemisola staggered and held her midriff. Something was trickling into her, building inside her; the poisons that burned at the tips of the stingers inside her body were releasing their toxins.
The trickle poured out of the olorin into her bloodstream and Gbemisola felt it flow through her, the tingles in her skin and then her bones. The collecting of that ache into a point tried to escape, to draw across all space a new thing. The toxins crested in her chest with a flush of euphoria that resonated across all her skin.
She began to sing of bliss, and the upper atmosphere of Canetis Nix was resonant. It responded to Gbemisola’s clear, loud voice and the way she pulled at the song from inside her belly instead of her throat. In the air around her body, vibrations began to collect, and when Gbemisola reached the tonal nadir of her song, the vibrations opened into the air and the remaining fifty-four people of Osupa could see tendrils of fine sand began to swirl around her, showing the outlines of the sonic sphere in which she stood, ten times taller and wider than her. The powdered white around her feet sank, forming a circle wide as the bone dais that brought them. Rising out of the low note, Gbemisola flew to the higher reaches of her register, like a bird approaching death. The particles of sand followed the hum and sound of her voice, clinging and rippling and twisting like muscles around the vibrations of the song. Gbemisola finished the song and walked forwards, back to stand before her people. It continued to echo for what seemed like an eternity. Behind her stood a spherical structure, like a hollow ball made of strings and thick muscle.
The architect remained standing. She turned and looked at the structure. The bliss in her blood made her smile, even though looking at the sphere from which she had just stepped out, she had a strong sense of being outside of herself.
The fifty-four people all understood as they watched. Sound and the matter of this place were like magnet and iron, hand and mud. The olorin in their backs squirmed and poison-ecstasy filled their bellies. They alighted from the bone dias, and it slipped away into the atmosphere with the speed of air. They walked over to Gbemisola Olohun, who was standing staring at the structure, reading of herself in the sculpted sand.
The circle formed around the convergent and the first chorus began.
II
RONKE
By the grace of the palm wine he had shared with Obatala, the fields of blue fire that led to the center of the earth did not scorch Akanbi, but he still walked through them fearfully, placing his feet on the shattered coals that covered the ground as if they would burn him. All around him the fire roared. There was nothing for miles but fire like grass, rising out of hard, black rock. Above, there was no sky or clou
d, only the returned glow of the fields below. The fire gave off no smoke.
Akanbi reached a river of molten lava and the statue in his hand buzzed. He began to follow the flow of the river, past rows and rows of hot tongues licking, seemingly planted. The river ended in a lake of fire that split off into a rash of smaller and larger pools up ahead. The lake was placid, like a spill of yellow and red soup. The earth around it was dead black, with no smolder.
This was how Akanbi saw Ronke, staring from the shore, her hooves submerged. She stood two times his height, white as fresh coconut, with one pair of snake eyes high on either side of her head. Beneath the snake eyes were two moons, sunken into the long skull. But Akanbi was riveted to what shone at the center of her head like a diamond sparkling.
Akanbi moved closer to her and she walked up from the lake and bowed her head till he could touch it. He pulled the statue out of his sokoto and placed it on her tongue. She began to crunch it as if it was sugar.
“Hop on my back,” her voice came into his head unannounced. “Let me take you to the whiteness. I can see your friends. They are building cages.”
Akanbi walked over to her middle and found that his head only reached her belly. She lay down flat, her white belly over black rock, and he climbed onto her back. She stood and Akanbi had a vantage of the fields of fire and the pools in the distance.
“Grab my neck,” the voice said.
Akanbi slid forward and grabbed as much of her long neck as he could. She was cold like a fish, with flat scales like calcified feathers across her body. Akanbi shut his eyes. He had nothing to think of or wish. He was only following instructions in which the only thing needed was his faith. As the eshimemi began to gallop into the air, flying over the night above the fields of fire, he found that he had a desire to be told of as a story.
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