I was drawn right to that book. I knelt beside it. The cover was thin but tough, made of a durable material I couldn’t name. It reminded me of the black cover of the electronic book I found in that cave. There was no title or design on it. I reached out but then hesitated. What is . . . No, I’d come too far to ask that.
When I touched the book, it was warm. Feverish. I rested my hand on the hard cover. It was rough, like sandpaper. I wanted to consider this but I knew I had no time. I dragged it into my lap and opened it. Immediately, I felt as if someone had hit me hard about the head causing my vision to go wrong. I could barely look at the writing on the pages, it bothered my eyes and head so much. I was focused, by now. I was there for only one purpose, a purpose that had been prophesied in that very hut.
I flipped the book’s pages and stopped on a page that felt hotter than the rest. I lay my left hand on it. It didn’t make any sense to me but I was inclined to do it, so sick the book felt. I paused. No, I thought. I switched hands, remembering Ting’s words about my hand, “We don’t know what the consequence will be.” This book was full of hate and that was what caused its sickness. My right hand was full of Daib’s hate.
“I don’t hate you,” I whispered. “I’d rather die.” Then I began to sing. I sang the song that I had made up when I was four years old and living with my mother in the desert. During the happiest time of my life. I had sung this song to the desert when it was content, at peace, settled. I sang it now to the mysterious book in my lap.
My hand grew hot and I saw the symbols on my right hand split. The duplicates dribbled down into the book where they settled between the other symbols into a script I still couldn’t read. I could feel the book sucking from me, as a child does from its mother’s breast. Taking and taking. I felt something click within my womb. I stopped singing. As I watched, the book grew dimmer and dimmer. But not so dim that I could not see it. It hid there in the corner as the men burst in and found me.
CHAPTER 60
Who Fears Death?
CHANGE TAKES TIME AND I’D RUN OUT OF IT.
The moment I finished with that book, something began to happen. As it happened, I got up to run and realized I was caught. What I can tell you is that the book and all that it touched and then all that touched what it touched and so on, everything in that small sandstone hut began to shift. Not to the wilderness, that wouldn’t have scared me. Someplace else. I dare say a pocket in time, a slit in time and space. To a place where all was gray, white, and black. I would have loved to stand and watch. But by then they were dragging me by my hair past what remained of Luyu’s body, onto one of the boats. They were too blind to see what had begun to happen.
I sit here. They will come and take me. I have no reason to resist. No purpose in living. Mwita, Luyu, and Binta are dead. My mother is too far away. No, she won’t come to see me. She knows better. She knows fate must play out. The child in me, the child of Mwita and me is doomed. But to live even for three days is to live. She’ll understand. I shouldn’t have made her. I was selfish. But she will understand. Her time will come again as mine will when the time is right. But this place that you know, this kingdom, it will change after today. Read it in your Great Book. You won’t notice that it has been rewritten. Not yet. But it has. Everything has. The curse of the Okeke is lifted. It never existed, sha.
Epilogue
I SAT WITH HER ALL THOSE HOURS, typing and listening, mostly listening. Onyesonwu. She looked at her symboled hands and then brought them to her face. Finally, she wept. “It’s done,” she sobbed. “Leave me now.”
At first I refused but then I saw her face change. I saw it become like a tiger’s face, stripes and fur and sharp teeth. I ran out of there clutching my laptop. I didn’t sleep that night. She haunted me. She could’ve escaped, flown away, made herself invisible, moved herself into the astral world and run off, or “glided” off as she liked to say. But she wouldn’t do any of that. Because of what she’d seen during her initiation. She was like a character locked in a story. It was truly awful.
The next time I saw her was as they dragged her to that hole in the ground and buried her to her neck. They’d chopped off her long bushy hair and what was left stood on end, as defiant as she was. I stood in the crowd of men and few women. Everyone was shouting for blood and revenge. “Kill the Ewu!” “Tear her apart, o!” “Ewu demon!” People laughed and jeered. “The Okeke Savior is uglier than the Okeke!” “Sorceress indeed, she is capable of nothing but hurting our eyes,” “Ewu murderer!”
I noticed a tall bearded man with a partially burned face, what looked like a severely mangled leg, and only one arm. He was near the front leaning on a staff. Like everyone else, he was Nuru. Unlike everyone else he was calm, observant. I’d never seen Daib but Onyesonwu had described him clearly. I’m sure this was him.
What happened when those rocks hit her head? I’m still asking that. There was light that flowed from her, a mixture of blue and green. The sand surrounding her buried body began to melt. More happened, but I dare not mention it all. Those things are only for those of us who were there, the witnesses.
Then the ground shook and people started running. I think in that moment, everyone, all of us Nuru understood where we’d gone wrong. Maybe her rewriting had finally kicked in. We were all sure that Ani had come to grind us back to dust. So much had already happened. Onyesonwu told the truth. The entire town of Durfa, all the fertile men were wiped out and all the fertile women were vomiting and pregnant.
The young children didn’t know what to do. There was chaos in the streets all over the Seven Kingdoms. Many of the remaining Okeke refused to work and that caused more chaos and violence. The Seer Rana, who had predicted something would happen, was dead. Daib’s building had burned to the ground. We were all sure it was the end.
So, we left her there. In that hole. Dead.
But my sister and I didn’t run far. We went back after fifteen minutes. My sister . . . yes, I am a twin. My sister, my twin, she uses my computer. And she has been reading Onyesonwu’s story. She came with me to the execution. And when it was all over, we were the only ones who returned.
And because my sister knew Onyesonwu’s story, and because she is my twin, she was unafraid. As twins, we’ve always felt a responsibility to do good in the world. My status as one of Chassa’s twins was why they allowed me to see her in jail. It’s what drove me to take down her story. And it is what will help me fight to publish it and keep my sister and myself safe through the backlash. My parents were two of the few Nuru who thought it was all wrong, the way we lived, behaved, the Great Book. They didn’t believe in Ani. So my sister and I grew up nonbelievers, too.
As we were walking back to Onyesonwu’s body, my sister yelped. When I looked at her, she was floating an inch off the ground. My sister can fly. We would later find out that she was not the only one. All the women, Okeke and Nuru, found that something had changed about them. Some could turn wine to fresh sweet drinking water, others glowed in the dark at night, some could hear the dead. Others remembered the past, before the Great Book. Others could peruse the spirit world and still live in the physical. Thousands of abilities. All bestowed upon women. There it was. Onye’s gift. In the death of herself and her child, Onye gave birth to us all. This place will never be the same. Slavery here is over.
We removed her body from that hole. It was not easy because all around her was melted sand, glass. We had to shatter it to get her out. My sister cried the entire time, her feet barely touching the ground. I cried, too. But we took her. My sister removed her veil and covered Onye’s broken head with it. We used a camel to help take her body out to the desert, east of here. We brought another camel with us to carry the wood. We burned Onyesonwu’s corpse on the funeral pyre she deserved and we buried her ashes near two palm trees. As we filled in the hole, a vulture landed in the tree and watched. When we finished, it flew away. We said a few words for Onyesonwu and then went home.
It was the most we could
do for the woman who saved the people of the Seven Rivers Kingdom, this place that used to be part of the Kingdom of Sudan.
CHAPTER 61
Peacock
CHAPTER 62
Sola Speaks
AH, BUT THE GREAT BOOK HAD BEEN REWRITTEN. In Nsibidi at that.
Over those first few days in Durfa, there was change. Some women began encountering the ghosts of those men wiped out by Onyewsonwu’s . . . impetuous actions. Some ghosts became living men again. No one dared ask how this was possible. Smart. Other ghosts eventually vanished. Onyesonwu might have been remotely interested in all this. But then again, she had other concerns.
Recall that the daughter of my student-gone-wrong was Eshu, a fundamental shape shifter. Onyesonwu’s very essence was change and defiance. Daib had to have known this even as he flew from his burning headquarters where the body of Onyesonwu’s dead love, Mwita, became ash. Daib, who was now crippled and could no longer see color or work the Mystic Points without suffering unheard of pain. Certainly there are things worse than death.
Indeed, Onyesonwu did die, for something must be written before it can be rewritten. But now, see the sign of the peacock. Onyesonwu left it in the dirt of her holding cell. This symbol is scribbled by a sorcerer who believes he has been wronged. Once in a while, it is scribbled by a sorceress, too. It means, “one is going to take action.” Is it not understandable that she’d want to live in the very world she helped remake? That indeed is a more logical destiny.
CHAPTER 1
Rewritten
“LET THEM COME, THEN,” Onyesonwu said, looking down at the symbol she’d scratched in the sand. The proud peacock. The symbol was complaint. Argument. Insistence. She looked down at herself and nervously rubbed her thighs. They’d put her in a long coarse white dress. It felt like another prison. They’d chopped off her hair. They’d had the nerve to chop off her hair. She stared at her hands—the circles, swirls and lines were woven into complex designs snaking up her wrists.
She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes in the sunshine. The world became red. They were coming. Any moment now. She knew. She’d seen it. Years ago, she’d seen it.
Someone grabbed her with such roughness that she grunted. Her eyes flew open, bitter rage flooding her body and spirit. Bright red in the hot sunshine. She’d cured everything, yet in doing so her friends had died, her Mwita . . . oh, her beloved Mwita, her life, her death. The fury filled her. She could hear her daughter raging, too. Her daughter had the roar of a lion.
Six thick-armed young men crowded her cell to take her. Three of them had machetes. Maybe the other three were so arrogant that they didn’t think they’d need weapons to handle her. Maybe they all thought the evil sorceress named Onyesonwu was resigned to her fate. She could understand why they’d made this mistake. She understood well.
Nevertheless, what could any of them do as a strange force shoved them all back? Three of them fell out of the cell. They all sat, lay, and stood watching, slack-jawed and horrified as Onyesonwu threw off her awful dress and . . . changed. She shifted, sprouted, enveloped, stretched, and grew her body. Onyesonwu was expert. She was Eshu. She became a Kponyungo, a firespitter.
FOOOOOM! She blasted out a ball of flames so intense that the sand around her melted to glass. The three remaining men in her cell were painfully scorched raw as if they’d been lying in the desert sun for days waiting to die. Then she blew into the sky like a shooting star ready to return home.
No, she was not a sacrifice to be made for the good of men and women, Okeke and Nuru alike. She was Onyesonwu. She had rewritten the Great Book. All was done. And she could never ever let her baby, the one part of Mwita that still lived, die. Ifunanya. He’d spoken those ancient mystical words to her, words that were truer and purer than love. What they shared was enough to shift fate.
She thought of the Palm Wine Drunkard in the Great Book. All he lived for was to drink his sweet frothy palm wine. When one day his expert palm wine tapper fell from a tree and died, he was distraught. But then he realized if his tapper was dead and gone, then he must be somewhere else. And so the Drunkard’s quest began.
Onyesonwu considered this as she thought about her Mwita. Suddenly, she knew where she would find him. He would be in a place that was so full of life that death would flee it . . . for a while. The green place her mother had shown her. Beyond the desert, where the land was blanketed with leafy trees, bushes, plants, and the creatures that lived in them. He would be waiting at the iroko tree. She almost screamed with joy as she flew faster. Can Kponyungo shed real tears? This one could.
But what of Binta and Luyu, she wondered with a flicker of hope. Would they be there, too? Ah, but fate was cold and brittle.
The three of us, Sola, Aro, and Najeeba smiled. We (mentor, teacher, and mother) saw it all in the way that sorcerers, experienced and in training, often see things deeply connected to them. We wonder if we will ever see her again. What will she become? When she and Mwita unite, and they will, what will become of their daughter who laughed so gleefully inside Onyesonwu’s belly on the way to the green place?
If Onyesonwu had taken one last look below, to the south, with her keen Kponyungo eyes she’d have seen Nuru, Okeke, and two Ewu children in school uniforms playing in a schoolyard. To the east, stretching into the distance, she’d have seen black paved roads populated by men and women, Okeke and Nuru, riding scooters and carts pulled by camels. In downtown Durfa, she’d have spotted a flying woman discreetly meeting up with a flying man on the roof of the tallest building.
But the wave of change was yet to sweep by directly below. There, thousands of Nuru still waited for Onyesonwu, all of them screaming, yelling, shouting, laughing, glaring . . . waiting to wet their tongues with Onyesonwu’s blood. Let them wait. They will be waiting for a long long time.
Acknowledgments:
To the ancestors, spirits and that place so often called “Africa.” To my father, whose passing caused me to ask, “Who fears death?” To my mother. To my daughter Anyaugo, nephew Onyedika, and niece Obioma for cheering me up when I was writing the parts of this novel that got me down. To my siblings (Ife, Ngozi, and Emezie) for their constant support. To my extended family, always my foundation. To Pat Rothfuss for reading and critiquing Who Fears Death in its infancy back in 2004. To Jennifer Stevenson for having nightmares spawned from this novel. To my agent Don Maass for his vision and guidance. To my editor Betsy Wollheim for thinking, seeing and being outside the box. To David Anthony Durham, Amaka Mbanugo, Tara Krubsack, and professor Gene Wildman for their excellent feedback along the way. And to the 2004 AP news story by Emily Wax titled, “We want to make a light baby.” This article about weaponized rape in the Sudan created the passageway through which Onyesonwu slipped into my world.
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