by Okezie Nwoka
Ọfọdile glanced at the dịbịa, his face bright with anger as he raised his hands and pushed his mouth forward to speak.
“We would have fought,” Igbokwe said. “The gods did not show us our enemies when Ijeọma had lost her voice, because they knew that we would have fought. And if we had fought, we would have lost.”
“Give me their name!” Ọfọdile barked.
“It is the people of Amalike who have cursed your daughter and our village. I have tried to stop this curse with my divinations and I cannot. The gods have told me that the curse can only be broken by the medicine of Amalike’s people.”
“No! No! How can the people of Amalike still have the power of medicine! Did they not join the god of the white one!”
“Chukwu alone can answer such a question.”
Ọfọdile stared helplessly at the corner farthest from him, watching ants gathering within it, pulling his bag forward to snatch his containers of snuff, thinking that, at the age of twenty-nine, enemies were fighting a war against him. And as he looked past the ants clustering within their tangled ball, he deeply resented the hopeful promise of his youth: that once he was a graceful dancer who could shift the muscles in his arms and legs and buttocks in ways that obeyed the pleasures of the drum, who could jump toward the heavens and flip backward over and again until he found the earth once more, who could tap his feet and clap his hands together more swiftly than a feather afloat—possessed by the spirits of dance. He was an extraordinary hunter and an attractive bachelor, and was told that he chased meat and beauties as if chasing nothing at all; and his age-mates gave him the name Ekwueme, because everything he said, he did; everything he wished for, he worked to obtain. And after rejecting the advances of several women from several lands, he chose to marry Nnenna, the one for whom his heart refused reticence, and together they gave birth to a child who lost the gift of speech.
Ọfọdile spoke hopefully then—speaking for healing to enter the one called his daughter; speaking for the ones called his gods to show his family mercy; speaking so that the village would hear his words and know that he would not be defeated. And as he spoke, he did: offering sacrifices until Nnenna said they could no longer afford to eat, consulting Igbokwe until the village complained that they too required consult, then wearing pride on behalf of the newborn child until that pride had waned and his child became to him regrettable, as he no longer did those things he had been doing for her. His desire to love Ijeọma had become quieter than the gossip he had overheard: that his daughter was abominable, and should have been sent to die in the Evil Forest like other abominable children.
He was angry at his self-declared defeat years before Igbokwe’s visit, and his spirit had been broken years before he heard Amalike’s name. And as a thread of raffia fell from his highly domed roof, landing gently on his legs, his mind revolved toward loathsome yesterdays and unmet promises, as he took a heavy snort from his now-empty container of snuff.
* * *
AMID THE SCURRY GENERATED by the pending storm, Igbokwe sent eight very young men to the town of Amalike, bearing the responsibility of informing its king that Ichulu wanted their curse to be broken. He gave them twigs to wear around their wrists so that they would be divinely protected, but tremors were curling beneath their throats as they walked atop the road toward Amalike. Eight very young men were keeping silent fears, and no one dared expose the truth dwelling within them; and Ụzọdị, the one called Ọfọdile’s kin, nervously swung his machete with his skinny right arm, scratching the orange surface of the earth.
“Who is the most beautiful girl in Ichulu?” Ụzọdị said.
“It is Nnọnye,” said Nwabụeze, “Have you not seen her breasts!”
“I have seen them, and they are ripe,” said one of the other eight. “She has been licking too much ọgbọnọ soup!”
Laughter erupted among them, and it lingered for much longer than they knew it was supposed to linger, as they were not saying those things which dwelt within them—an act they were told was an act for women. Still, those things dwelling within them were screaming, screaming, calling it unfair to be sent because they were eight very young men. So they continued speaking aimlessly—protectively—of other things: things like the breasts of very young women.
And when the trees became sparse and the earth became a gray-colored brown, the eight knew that they had arrived at Amalike. They began asking a small child, whom they had seen running, to take them to the palace of Obi Iroatụ, the town’s fifth descended king, and they were led by the child to the gates of a white-coated palace that bore the kind of stoutness of a towering hill; and the eight believed that its pillars were too audacious, reaching for the bowels of Igwe, the god of the sky, and laughing at the threshold of Amalike’s birds. There was no honor, they said within themselves, there was no reason, building up what Chineke could whisper down, and with great discordance the eight of them approached the king’s barred gates, quietly waiting for Amalike to speak.
“Weytin you want?” said the approaching gateman, wiping his oily nose with a shirt.
The eight of them looked about with confusion.
“Why does he not speak our language?” asked Nwabụeze.
“Because he does not come from where we come,” Ụzọdị said.
“Ụzọdị, speak to him,” said Nwabụeze. “Is it not the good word that you can speak like him?”
Ụzọdị recoiled, not wanting to speak a language that he had been instructed never to speak again, remembering the instruction of the one called his mother as he moved backward, away from the gateman.
“Go on, speak!” said one of the eight.
“If you can speak, speak, so that we can return to our home!” said another.
“Do not be like a woman!” Nwabụeze said.
“Close your mouth!” Ụzọdị said, quickly moving forward and looking below the gateman’s eyes.
“We … c-come …” Ụzọdị began in English. “We … come … to see … king.”
“Fro wee you don come?” the gateman said.
“… Ichulu,” Ụzọdị said.
“Wait hiyah make I go tell dee king.”
The gateman turned and ran toward the palace with his slippers clapping against the cement as he went; and he quickly returned—unlocking the gate for the eight emissaries, then leading them into the palace—directing them through large doors and up carpeted stairs—and, finally, ushering them inside a glimmering room at the center of Obi Iroatụ’s palace. And the eight of them saw twenty men of guns standing along the room’s four walls, their heavy artillery borrowing light from the chandeliers protruding forth from the floral wallpaper, which bore the same design as the king’s gold jewelry, which he wore as he sat atop his ivory throne—smiling at eight very young men.
“Young men, young men,” said Obi Iroatụ in Igbo, “it is beautiful that you are here. But I cannot welcome you well without first breaking kola nut.”
The king was given kola by one of the men of guns before praying over it. And after small portions had been divided, he watched the eight eat it slowly.
“Now, young men,” said Obi Iroatụ, “why have you come?”
“Iroatụ,” Ụzọdị began, “we are here to give you a message from the people of Ichulu. Someone from Amalike has cursed our village, and has also cursed the daughter of a man named Ọfọdile, the son of Nwankwọ. We want—”
“Wait,” Obi Iroatụ said. “You boys have journeyed from the village of Ichulu to speak of what—a curse?”
“Yes,” Ụzọdị said.
There was silence—and the king’s terrible laughter broke it. He looked past the young men, searching for their collateral and for their weaponry. Finding nothing except myths and machetes, he continued laughing wildly upon their faces.
“Is this the good word? You think this is like the ancient days, when we dealt with idle gods and foolish medicine. Eh? Do you think my town concerns itself with somet
hing as foolish as a curse?”
Ụzọdị considered the questions and heard in his memory faint echoes of the one called his father, reciting stories of old wars and battles. He knew that the strength of those ancient warriors meant Ichulu rarely lost or surrendered to any fight, since he could hear the voice of the one called his father humming the trance induced by the ikpirikpi ọgụ dance and telling him of the ways it strengthened the dancing warriors by summoning the spirit of Ikenga: “IKENGA, IKENGA, the god of our wars, would snatch their shoulders and spine, and their whole body would be like the sacred python … and the cantor would sing:”
Silence over slain enemies.
Silence over slain enemies.
Our children have been reborn!
May our kin never worry death.
“Goats! You people have betrayed your gods!” shouted Nwabụeze from the center of the room, ending Ụzọdị’s thoughts.
“You have abandoned your gods and ancestors like wild animals!” Nwabụeze said, grasping the medicine tied around his wrist.
Six others began making exclamations in support of Nwabụeze: one crying that the obi was nothing more than the white one’s shit, another calling him a fool, all of them, except Ụzọdị, who was quietly mouthing the words of the song being sung within him; he saw the king saying nothing, and looked upward to watch Obi Iroatụ stare at them with hateful eyes as though fire had consumed the blood running through his veins. He moved backward when the obi seized his staff and sped toward him; the obi was looking into his eyes—then swiftly moved across the bodies of the other seven.
“Do you know who I am? Eat shit! I said, do you know who I am? I will show you who I am. Bush animals. You think you can speak to me like I am one of your bastard fathers, grooming and licking the devil’s anus. This is not Ichulu; my land will never be defiled by you animals! You! Go and get Madụka!”
One of the men of guns left the room and soon returned with Madụka, the obi’s aide.
“Madụka, gather these animals and take them to that old obi outside. Men of guns, follow them.”
They all obeyed: because they were all to obey. Twenty men of guns gathered eight very young men—pointing their guns to eight backs—leading them out of the palace to an old, crumbling obi—then pushing them against the obi’s gray walls. And Madụka commenced what the king had wanted, collecting some ingredients from a box in the obi: alligator pepper, congealed blood from a bull, cassava root, and a selection of bitter herbs. He began mixing them inside a metal bowl, and told the obi that he would begin with a gentle nod of his head.
“Lie down!” Obi Iroatụ said.
The eight very young men obeyed and quickly buried their faces in the earth, fearing the men of guns, knowing their machetes could not withstand their power as they began whispering prayers to the ancestors and to the gods—then screaming-screaming—believing that nothing could stop the obi standing above them—who was scratching their backs open with a seized machete.
“If this were in the days of our forefathers I would have killed you with this blade. You come into my town … and this one,” he said, lifting the machete and pointing it to Ụzọdị, “If you ever fail to address me by my title of Obi, I will force your mother’s clitoris into your mouth. Senseless bastard. I will teach you a lesson today. Madụka!”
Madụka stepped forward and began engraving a circle around the eight with a short branch from a tree. Then he put the branch beneath his arms and poured palm wine within the groove he had made, waiting for the white liquid to settle in the earth, lifting the metal bowl, the bowl which held the medicine thought necessary to enslave one to a god, dipping his finger into its blood and roots, and writing on their backs in spurious symbols as he recited incantations in an Igbo the eight found difficult to understand.
“I am finished,” they heard him say.
“It is good, Madụka,” said Obi Iroatụ. “Today, Ichulu will have eight osu to call its own.”
The eight jumped.
“Did he say osu? Did he say osu?” Nwabụeze asked.
“Were you not minding your ears! I said you are now osu. Now, leave from here! Leave from my town, before I break your skulls.”
The obi was laughing; he was laughing with his men of guns and with Madụka—all of them jeering and laughing as the boys began running, jeering at them, calling them osu, laughing as the men of guns shot bullets against eight backs—watching six very young men dropping to the earth, then choking on the pressing blood, rising to their lips, no longer shaking once their bodies stopped coughing and pleading and hoping—once their breaths, panting beneath the evening light, had drifted openly toward the moon.
Ụzọdị and Nwabụeze were not touched by the king’s bullets, but bled from their backs by the machete’s blade, having spun past the laughter of Obi Iroatụ and his men. They hurried down a narrow road leading out of Amalike, and once they reached a distance far enough from the obi’s palace, Nwabụeze fell to his knees as Ụzọdị stood quietly, Nwabụeze screaming and punching the earth with denial—weeping—failure—failure—from his family’s expectations. They slowly returned to Ichulu with their insides charred by melancholy, youth’s hope becoming a formless ash: future dying without a corpse to bury; and so could they; entertaining suicide; petitioning their deaths; tempted by the call of the river god’s basin; one not looking at the other, not his eyes nor his shadow; not looking for any sign that what had happened had happened.
And the smaller boys wondered why they would not listen to the song they had composed for them, becoming silent the moment Ụzọdị’s red gaze struck them, as many urged them to eat what was placed in their midst, with others wanting to know why; and they were told that the ones called their sons would never marry daughters of the soil, would never carry a chieftaincy title, that they were either an osu living or an osu dead. “Two are alive bearing that disgust within them,” some people said. “Six are dead on a road in Amalike.”
So the heavy water, and the dreadful erosion that followed it, became things the village named as vanity. Ichulu mourned the storm’s destruction with apathetic eyes, and when it came, many saw the belly of the river pouring its contents over the village, then like a ruminant, swallowing them down again; they saw it beginning: Idemili flowing thinly through the irrigation channels, then filling each one, and spilling outward, growing wider and wider, sweeping through the village, seeing his muddy water rumbling through red-clay homes, unfurling its brown and white when it reached the surfaces of trees and stones, finding other things to push and eat, crashing and breaking the bodies of what Ichulu had grown and built, signaling no pause of any kind but bringing more water, more rumblings, and the shine of teeth from hungry alligators; then they saw the water suddenly rise—and felt their hearts trembling at the realization that high earth was not high enough, and surrendered themselves to the god who began taking them into the depths of his river.
Though as they were carried off, flowing along the waters of Idemili, those dying victims pitied the eight osu more than they pitied themselves, for they believed they would be forever known in Ichulu as freeborn. Their bodies were buried quickly: Anị had to be appeased; there were as many gunshots fired as there were mounds of earth; the collective grave; keeners wailed the names of entombed women; men boasted of the names of inhumed men, as the ancestors were invited—emerging from their holy anthills adorned in masquerade, dancing their dance, a dance of war and a dance of peace—speaking their good word through muffled groans, blessing the names of the fallen children, watching the village hear and not understand, hearing Ichulu curse the name of their enemies—tempted even to include the name of their greatest god—since Ichulu’s anger found its root not in having their dead live among the ancestors, or their crops destroyed for the upcoming year—for their dead were still alive, and their barns were safe and full. They nearly cursed the name of Chukwu, of Chineke, and of each chi, for what they knew would be the fate of the very young
men cursed by the obi of Amalike.
A few days after the storm, the male elders convened a village meeting to decide whether the six murdered emissaries would be buried, and if Ụzọdị and Nwabụeze would remain in Ichulu. Two hundred men came to the meeting, with their colored rappas, and their wooden stools, and their bare chests painted in uli. Many of them had their hair twisted in loose locks, or domed and plaited in styles which came forth through the hands of their brothers; some of them were bald; some of them were wearing bright feathers, plucked from many large eagles; and it was those two hundred men who decided together that Ụzọkwesịlị, the eldest elder among them, would lead them in their village meeting.
“Ichulu, kwenu!” said Ụzọkwesịlị.
“Yah!” chorused the men.
“Ichulu, kwenu!” Ụzọkwesịlị said.
“Yah!” the men chorused.
“Ichulu, kwenu!”
“Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhh,” the men sang.
“Children of my mother,” Ụzọkwesịlị said, “we all know what has brought us here today. Those animals from Amalike poisoned the bodies of eight of our sons, killing six. Six! All eight of them are now osu. They are now the slaves of gods. Children of my mother, it is not time to brood in anger. As our people say, let the morning take away evil; the one who asks for another person’s death, let him go to sleep before the fowl. We must let the gods avenge on our behalf. Until then, we must remember the words of our fathers: ‘No man enslaved to a god can live amongst the free.’ The time has come for us to decide if we will bury those who became outcasts moments before their death … and if the two surviving will remain with us here in Ichulu.”
Many of the men congregated were nodding in agreement.
“Ụzọkwesịlị’s words are good!” said Okoye, a large, bearded man who sprang to his feet the moment the elder sat down. “We all know the tradition of this land. We cannot go to Amalike to bury the bodies of those six osu. It is an abomination to our goddess Anị. Let their bodies lie there for Amalike to bury. And the two osu that remain … they must be removed from this village immediately. If I told you why they cannot stay, I would be wasting my words. All of you know that the gods must be obeyed. Or have you forgotten what is sacred? Let us not waste time. We must do what our tradition tells us to do. If we do not, something worse than the flood our enemies have sent will find us.”
