Who Fears Death

by Nnedi Okorafor

  “We don’t care what you want,” Mwita said.

  The woman looked down and continued to beg. “Please. Onyesonwu is respected here. Go to the house on the hill. They can heal her wounds and . . .”

  “I can heal her wounds,” Mwita said.

  “On the hill?” I asked, looking toward it.

  The woman’s face brightened. “Yes, at the top. They’ll be so glad to see you.”

  CHAPTER 33

  “WE DON’T HAVE TO DO THIS,” Diti said.

  “Shut up,” I snapped. As far as I was concerned, what happened to me was as much her and Binta’s fault as it was those men’s.

  We returned to the market. It was nearly one a.m. and people were finally starting to pack up their wares. Thankfully, a woman selling rapas was still open. News of what had happened traveled fast. By the time we got to the market, everyone knew who I was and what I’d done to the men who’d tried to “proposition” me for “entertainment.”

  The woman selling the rapas gave me a thick lovely multicolored rapa that was treated with weather gel so that it would remain cool in the heat. She refused my money, insisting she didn’t want any trouble. She also gave me a matching top made from the same material. I put on the grand outfit and threw away my torn clothes. As was the style in Banza, both items fit closely, accentuating my breasts and hips.

  How did these people know that I could bring things back to life? Diti, Luyu, and Binta may have guessed I had the potential to do so but they didn’t know the details. I hadn’t even told Mwita about that day I’d brought the goat back to life. Nor did I tell him about how Aro had me bring back a recently dead camel.

  Afterward, Aro carried me into Mwita’s hut. I was in a partial coma. The camel had been dead for an hour which meant I had a long way to chase and bring back its spirit. Mwita never told me what he said to Aro after he saw me or what he did to bring me back. But after I recovered, Mwita wouldn’t speak to Aro for a month.

  Since then, I’d brought a mouse, two birds, and one dog back to life. Each time was easier. With any of these instances, someone could have seen me, especially with the dog. I’d found it lying on the road. A little thing with brown fur. It was still warm, so there was no time to take it to a private place. I healed it right there. It got up, licked my hand, and ran, I presume, home. Then I went home and threw up dog hair and blood.

  By the time we made it to the top of the highest hill, we were exhausted. The two-story house was large and plain. As we approached it, I smelled incense and heard someone singing.

  “Holy people,” Fanasi said.

  Fanasi knocked on the door. The singing inside stopped and there were footsteps. The door opened. I remembered where I’d heard the name Banza as soon as I saw his face. Luyu, Binta, and Diti must have realized it as well for they gasped.

  He was tall and dark-skinned, just like the Ada. This was half of the Ada’s darkest secret. “They’ve never come to see me,” she’d said.

  “Fanta,” I said. Oh, yes, I still remembered the Ada’s twins’ names. “Where’s your sister Nuumu?”

  He stared at me for a long moment. “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name is Onyesonwu,” I said.

  His eyes grew wide and without hesitation, he took my hand and pulled me in and said, “She’s this way.”

  The woman who’d told us to go to the house on the hill was a selfish she-goat. She didn’t direct us there out of compassion. As you know, twins bring good luck. Banza was small and flawed but it was relatively happy and prosperous. But now one of its twins was sick. Fanta led us through the main room that smelled like sweet bread and the children who’d eaten it here.

  “We teach children here,” Fanta said, briskly. “They love this place, but they love my sister more.” He led us up a flight of stairs and down a hallway, stopping in front of a closed door painted with trees. A dense mythical forest. It was beautiful. Among the trees were eyes, some small, large, blue, brown, yellow. “Just her,” he said to Mwita.

  Mwita nodded. “We’ll wait out here.”

  “There’s a room down the hall,” Fanta said. “See the one with the light on?”

  Fanta and I watched them walk into the room. Mwita paused for a moment and met my eyes. I nodded. “Don’t worry,” I said.

  “I’m not,” Mwita said. “Fanta, come get me if you need to.”

  Entering the Ada’s house was like walking into the bottom of a lake. Walking into the Ada’s daughter’s room was like entering a forest—a place I’d never seen even in my visions. Like the door, the walls were painted from ceiling to floor with trees, bushes, and plants. I frowned as I approached her bed. Something wasn’t right with the way she was lying. I could hear her breathing: shallow, harsh, difficult.

  “This is Onyesonwu the sorceress from the East, sister,” Fanta said.

  Her eyes widened and her breathing grew more labored.

  “It’s late,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  Nuumu waved a shaking hand. “My name,” she wheezed.” . . . is Nuumu.”

  I stepped closer. She looked as much like the Ada as her brother did. But something was very wrong with her. She looked as if she were in one place and her hips in another. She smiled at my scrutiny, wheezing loudly. “Come.”

  I understood when I got closer. Her spine was twisted. Twisted like a snake in midstride. She couldn’t breathe well because her lungs were being crushed by the aggressive curvature of her spine.

  “I. . . .wasn’t always . . . like this,” Nuumu said.

  “Go and get Mwita,” I told Fanta.

  “Why?”

  “He’s a better healer than I,” I snapped.

  I turned to Nuumu after he had left. “We came to your town hours ago. We were looking for two of our companions. We found them in a tavern where four men tried to rape me because I am Ewu. A woman begged us to come here. We hoped for food, rest, and apologetic treatment. I didn’t come to heal you.”

  “Did . . . I ask . . . you to heal me?”

  “Not in so many words,” I said. I rubbed my forehead. This was all mixed up. I was all mixed up.

  “I . . . I’m sorr . . . y,” Nuumu said. “We . . . all are born . . . with burdens. S . . . some of us . . . more than . . . others.”

  Mwita and Fanta came in. Mwita looked at the walls and then at Nuumu.

  “This is Mwita,” I said.

  “May I?” Mwita asked Nuumu. She nodded. He helped her carefully sit up, listened to her chest, and looked at her back. “Can you feel your feet?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long have you been like this?” he asked.

  “Since . . . thirteen,” she said. “But it has . . . gotten worse . . . with time.”

  “She’s always had to walk with a cane,” Fanta said. “People know her to be bent but only recently has she been confined to a bed.”

  “Scoliosis,” Mwita said. “Curvature of the spine. It’s hereditary, but that doesn’t always explain it. Most common in girls, but boys get it, too. Nuumu, Have you always been slim?”

  “Yes,” she said

  “It tends to affect the slimmer figured more severely,” he said. “You breathe the way you do because your lungs are compressed.”

  I looked at Mwita and knew all I needed to know. She would die. Soon.

  “I want to talk to Onyesonwu,” he said, taking my hand and leading me out.

  Once in the hallway, he softly told me, “She’s doomed.”

  “Unless . . .”

  “You don’t know what the consequences will be,” he said. “And who are these people anyway?” We stood there for a moment.

  “You’re the one always telling me to have faith,” I said after a while. “You don’t think we’ve been led here? Those are the Ada’s children.”

  Mwita frowned and shook his head. “She never had any children with Aro.”

  I scoffed. “What do your eyes tell you? They look just like her. And she did have children. When she was fifteen, s
ome stupid boy got her pregnant. She told me about it. Her parents sent her to Banza to have them. Twins.”

  I walked back in.

  “Fanta, we have to bring her outside for this,” I said.

  He frowned at me. “What are you . . .”

  “You know who I am,” I said. “Don’t ask questions. I can only do it outside.”

  Mwita and Fanasi helped, while Diti, Luyu, and Binta followed, afraid to ask what was happening. The sight of the twisted woman was enough to keep them quiet.

  “Lay her here,” I said, motioning next to a palm tree. “Right on the ground.”

  She groaned as they laid her down. I knelt beside her. I could feel it already.

  “Step back,” I said to everyone. To Nuumu I said, “This may hurt.”

  I began to pull it in, all the energy around me. It was good to have the others so close and so afraid. It was good to have her brother so concerned and full of love. It was good to have Mwita there, locked in on only my well-being. I took from all this. I gathered what I could from the sleeping town. There were brothers arguing nearby. There were five couples making love, one of them two women who loved and hated each other. There was an infant who’d just woken up hungry and whiny. Can I do this? I wondered. I must.

  When I had enough, I used it to help me dig as much energy from the land as I could. There was always more to replace what I took. I felt the warmth rise into my body, into my hands. I placed them on Nuumu’s chest. She screamed and I grunted, biting down on my lower lip, as I fought to keep my hands still. Her body began to slowly shift. I could feel her pain in my own spine. My eyes watered. Hold on! I thought. Until it is done! I felt my spine curve this way and that. My breath left me. And in that moment, a revelation came to me. I know exactly how to break Diti, Luyu, and Binta’s Eleventh Rite juju! I shelved the knowledge in the back of my mind.

  “Hold,” I whispered to myself. If I removed my hands, a shock wave would burst from me and her spine would remain curved. My hands cooled. It was time to remove them. I was about to. Then Nuumu spoke to me. Not in voice. We didn’t need that. We were connected as one body. It took great courage to admit what she admitted to herself, to me. I looked down at her. Her lips were dry, cracking, her eyes were bloodshot, her dark skin had lost its shine.

  “I don’t know how,” I said, tears wetting my face. But I did. If I knew how to give life, I knew how to take it. I held her eyes a moment longer. And then I did it. I used my spirit hands to reach into her instead of the earth. Green green green green! was all I thought as I pulled the greenness from her. Green!

  “What’s she doing?” I heard Nuumu’s brother scream. But he didn’t come near us. I don’t know what would have happened if he had. I pulled harder until I felt something snap and something else begin to tear. Her spirit finally gave. It shot from my hands into the air with a high-pitched scream of glee. Fanta started screaming again. This time he came running.

  The sky was a swirl of colors, mostly green. The wilderness. Nuumu’s spirit traveled straight up. I wondered when she would return. Sometimes they came back and sometimes they didn’t. My father had left my mother and me for weeks before he returned to guide me during my initiation. Even then he didn’t stay long. Without moving, I willed myself out of the wilderness back into the physical world just in time for Fanta’s fist to connect with my chest, knocking me back. Mwita pulled Fanta back. My hand ripped from Nuumu’s chest, leaving a dried mucusy hand print.

  “You killed her!” Fanta screamed. He looked at Nuumu’s body and sobbed so hard that I thought my body would shatter. Diti, Binta, and Luyu helped me sit back up.

  “I could have healed her,” I said, sobbing and shaking. “I could have.”

  “Then why didn’t you!” Fanta shouted, tearing his arm away from Mwita.

  “I am nothing,” I cried. “I don’t care what it would have done to me. What other purpose do I serve? I could have healed her!” My temples throbbed as phantom stones battered my head. Only my friends kept me from wallowing in the dirt, like the low thing I felt I was. Low like the gray beetles of disease and death in the Great Book that came for the young children of those who’d done terrible wrong.

  “Then why didn’t you?” Fanta asked again. He’d tired himself out and Mwita let him go. He draped himself over his limp and cooling sister.

  “She wouldn’t . . . she wouldn’t let me,” I whispered, rubbing my chest. “I should have healed her anyway but she didn’t allow me to think to do it. It was her choice. That’s all.” My actions were an abomination to the natural order of things, though I understand now, weeks later, that this was for the best. The immediate consequence of my actions for me was an almost unbearable cloak of sorrow. I felt like scratching at my skin, gouging my eyes out, killing myself. I sobbed and sobbed, ashamed of my mother, disgusted with myself, wishing my biological father would finally erase my body, memory, and spirit. When it passed, it was like a black thick foul smelling veil lifted.

  We all just sat there for several minutes, Fanta weeping over his sister, Mwita patting Fanta’s shoulder, me lying spent in the dirt, and the rest staring. Slowly, Fanta lifted his head and looked at me with swollen eyes. “You are evil,” he said. “May Ani curse all that you hold dear.”

  He did not ask us to leave. And though we didn’t discuss it among ourselves, we decided to stay for one night. Mwita and Fanasi helped Fanta bring the body inside. Fanta started sobbing again when he saw that her spine was straight. All she’d had to do was let me let go. She’d have lived. I stayed as far from Fanta as possible. I also refused to go into the house. I’d rather sleep under the stars.

  “No,” I told Luyu, who’d wanted to sleep outside with me. “I need to be alone.”

  Binta and Diti cooked a large meal in the kitchen, while Luyu swept out the entire house. Mwita and Fanasi stayed with Fanta, afraid that he might try something rash. I could hear Mwita teaching them to chant. I wasn’t sure if I heard Fanta’s voice in the chanting but one didn’t have to chant along to be affected by the chanting.

  I unrolled my sleeping mat under a dry palm tree. Two doves were nestled in the tree’s crown. They’d stared down at me with their orange eyes when I’d pointed a palm-light up the tree. Normally, I’d have been amused.

  I moved my mat over. I didn’t want to be bombarded with their feces all night. My body ached and my headache was back. Though it wasn’t full blast, it was bad enough to force my thoughts to the West. What would I be by the time we got there? In the same night, I’d spared the lives of men who’d tried to rape me and taken the life of the Ada’s daughter.

  “Sometimes the good must die and the terrible must live,” Aro had taught me. At the time, I’d scoffed at the idea and said, “Not if I can help it.”

  I rubbed my temples as a particularly hard phantom stone smashed the side of my head. I could almost hear my skull crumbling. I frowned. The crumbling sound wasn’t in my head. Sandals on sand. I turned around. Fanta was standing there. I got to my feet, ready for a fight. He sat on my mat.

  “Sit,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “Mwita?” I called loudly.

  “They know I’m out here.”

  I looked at the house. Mwita was watching from one of the upstairs windows. I sat beside Fanta. “I was telling the truth,” I said when I couldn’t take his silence anymore.

  He nodded, scooping up a handful of sand and letting it sift between his fingers. From somewhere nearby came the loud whoosh of a capture station. Fanta sucked his teeth. “That man,” he said. “People complain to him but he still acts disrespectfully. I don’t know what he needs water for at this hour.”

  “Maybe he likes the attention,” I said.

  “Maybe,” he said. We watched the thin white column extend to the sky.

  “It’s cold out here,” he said. “. . . Why don’t you come in?”

  “Because you hate me,” I said.

  “How did she ask you?”

  “She just did. No, n
ot ask. To ask implies a choice.”

  He pressed his lips together, scooped up another handful of sand, and threw it.

  “She told me once,” he said. “Months ago, after she’d become bedridden. She said that she was ready to die. She thought this would make me feel better.” He paused. “She said her body was . . .”

  “Making her spirit suffer,” I said finishing his sentence.

  He looked at me. “She told you that?”

  “It was like I was in her mind. She didn’t have to tell me anything. She didn’t feel I could cure her. She had to be free of her body.”

  “I . . . I was . . . Onye, I’m sorry. . . . For my words, my actions.” He brought his legs to his chest and looked down. He was shaking, trying to hold in his grief.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “Let it out.”

  I held him as he fell apart. When he could speak, he was breathless like his sister. “My parents are dead. We aren’t close with any relatives.” He sighed. “I’m alone now.” He looked at the sky. I thought about Nuumu’s green spirit spiriting away with glee.

  “Why didn’t you two marry anyone?” I asked. “Didn’t you want children?”

  “Twins aren’t expected to have normal lives,” he said.

  I frowned, thinking, Says who? Says tradition. Oh, how our traditions limit and outcast those of us who aren’t normal.

  “You’re not. . . . you’re not alone,” I blurted. “We recognized you the moment we saw you. We knew your face. We knew your sister’s face.”

  “Yes. How was that?” he asked, frowning.

  “We know your mother.”

  “Did you meet her? Were you here years ago? I don’t . . .”

  “Listen,” I said. I took a deep breath. “We know your mother. She’s alive.”

  Fanta shook his head. “No, she’s dead. She was bitten by a snake.”

  “Your mother was actually your great-aunt.”

  “What! But that . . . “He stopped and frowned. After a long moment, he said, “Nuumu knew. There was this tiny hole in the wall in the room we shared as children. We found a rolled up painting in there once, of a woman. On the back it said, ‘To my son and daughter, with love.’ We couldn’t read the signature. We were about eight. I didn’t care for it but Nuumu thought it meant something. She never showed it to our parents. Our mother wasn’t a painter, neither was our father. That painting is what got Nuumu interested in painting. She was very good. Her work sold for high prices at the market . . .” He trailed off a baffled look on his face.