Daughters of Nri

by Reni K Amayo

  ‘I—’ Sinai started. What could she say? I’ve been floating? Also I need you to help me disfigure one of the most beloved noblewomen in the palace? It all sounded strange and peculiar in the light of day; her floating episodes seemed more like an ailment caused by her own mental state than anything Meekulu might have given her. Sinai did not want Meekulu to be put off by her before she had even got to the real crux of what she wanted.

  ‘Okay, fine. That was not the only reason,’ Sinai tried to explain. ‘But still, it’s … I don’t want revenge, not really. I want protection. Perhaps you don’t understand: Ina tried to kill me—for no reason. She tried to kill me and she will try again. I need protection and I think that you can help. I think you can do things that most people cannot do. You healed me, for example.’

  Meekulu smiled curiously.

  ‘I’m not even going to hurt her,’ Sinai continued. ‘Not really—just a threat. You see, I want to disfigure her—not fully, just a slight patch on her arm or leg, and I want to be able to make that disfigurement spread at my whim. So that she knows that if she tries to kill me again, well, I could … I could fight back.’ Sinai searched Meekulu’s face for a reaction. The old woman raised one brow. ‘I know it sounds … far-fetched,’ Sinai added. Please don’t think I am crazy, she thought, silently thanking the gods that she hadn’t told the old woman about her floating episodes.

  ‘Mmm,’ Meekulu murmured, with a smile playing on her lips. ‘Sinaikuku, you are an interesting young woman.’

  ‘Sinaiku—what?’ Sinai interrupted.

  ‘Look, I’ll help you with what you need. I don’t need to know the ins and outs of your request; the only thing I need in return is another request of sorts. When the time comes, you will also do something for me—something to help me.’

  ‘A request? Like helping out in the kitchen?’ Sinai asked.

  ‘Perhaps. Or perhaps it will be something far more … taxing. I can’t say,’ the old woman said, her eyes roaming over Sinai’s face, reading every movement like a book.

  ‘Okay,’ Sinai replied cautiously, ‘so you can’t give me some kind of clue … or indication?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, my dear. Not right now anyway, but I will know one day, and on that day you must accept the request, just as I have accepted yours. The choice, my dear, is entirely yours.’

  Sinai closed her eyes and slowed her breathing. Something about this did not seem smart. Her heart pounded with excitement, she could taste her freedom at the tip of her tongue, biting like Meekulu’s famous pepper soup. Meekulu could help protect her from Ina forever. Sinai would never have to worry about Ina’s snide remarks or her more recent attempts on her life.

  Sinai wanted nothing more than to claw closer to that thought, embrace it fully and bathe in the satisfaction of knowing that Ina would never be able to cross her again. Sinai took a step closer to Meekulu, but wait—a slowly forming, but loud, voice, echoed in her mind—is it wise to agree to such a thing? The old woman was strong, respectable, and seemed to genuinely care for people, taking real pride in filling their stomachs and healing their wounds. However, behind her greying eyes, Sinai could sense a strong and brewing power. Sinai had never met a powerful person that wasn’t cruel. Sinai sighed and stepped back again, noticing a dull ache in her hip. It wasn’t a terrible pain, but it was a reminder. Sinai could hear Ina’s sneer once again. She could feel Ina’s slipper press against her hand. Sinai could see the blood lust in Ina’s eyes and she knew without a shadow of a doubt that Ina would not stop until Sinai was dead.

  ‘I accept,’ Sinai replied.

  THE SURVIVORS

  Furuefu Forest

  ‘SHE IS WAKING up too slowly, if she doesn’t drink some water soon, she’ll die.’

  ‘Look at her eyes … they are twitching—and her fingers.’

  ‘She hasn’t done that before … what does that mean, Eni?’

  ‘She is dying.’

  ‘Aii!’

  ‘Eni, are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. She needs to wake up, her body needs water.’

  ‘She’s moving more than before.’

  ‘She’s waking up’

  ‘Too slowly!’

  Naala gasped as she woke to the shock of water slapping her face. She let out another harsh gasp when the water trickled up her nostrils, sending needles of pain through her face. She sprang up hastily, but a wave of disorientation hit her suddenly and she settled back down.

  She tried to focus her thoughts, but every attempt was met with a fog that misted over her mind. Moments passed and it slowly dawned on her that she was not alone. She was in a small dim room surrounded by dark figures. Eerie shadows shifted around her, illuminated by pale misty moonlight. The air was dusted with tiny glowing insects, floating weightlessly.

  Naala held her breath to stifle a scream. Her mind was moving so slowly that it was hard for her to form a thought, let alone decide on her best course of action. Her eyes darted around the room erratically, but she slowly began to pick out useful details. Empty hands, wide range of ages, nine—no—eight people, women and men; some were smaller than her, no weapons. Where am I?

  ‘She hasn’t screamed,’ a girl from across the room said, sounding worried. ‘Is that good? Maybe she’s damaged.’

  ‘Or stupid,’ another voice added in the distance.

  The boy who had thrown the water at her bent down to examine her. His face was sharp and angular and his jaw was so strong that Naala was certain that he was clenching it. Naala’s attention slowly drew back towards his eyes. They were blacker than anything she had ever seen; even with the cloak of night, they still stood out dramatically. She thought she could fall into them forever, but his gaze was so focused and unrelenting that Naala’s intrigue quickly transformed into unease.

  Naala shifted uncomfortably and turned to the other faces in the room. Anxiety crept up her spine; she did not like how little she understood about her current situation.

  ‘You’re not—not—’ Naala croaked; she could feel the word at the tip of her tongue but she couldn’t find it, but then she exhaled sharply— ‘s-soldiers, so who are you? What am I doing here?’

  ‘We found you in the forest, alone with an injury to your head, and brought you here. You’ve been out for two days.’ The man with the piercing eyes pressed a wooden iko filled with water to her mouth. Naala hesitated and he leaned closer.

  ‘You need to drink water; you’ve gone too long without hydration. You won’t survive without it,’ he said softly, lifting the iko.

  Naala closed her eyes; she needed a moment to think. She felt drops of cold water against her lips and was suddenly aware of the dry scratches inside her parched throat. She opened her mouth and allowed the contents of the iko to pour down her throat.

  ‘The village …?’ she murmured, before she was hit with a jolt of memories: the wedding, the soldiers, the death, the earthquake, everything cascaded over her. She lifted her hand to her head in despair. ‘My village, did you see anyone? My cousin … he is small and innocent … you must have seen him. Oh, Gini! She’s small too, so beautiful and caring—’ Naala attempted to get up, but lost her balance almost immediately. She would have fallen, if the large woman beside her hadn’t supported her.

  ‘Please don’t try to get up,’ the dark-eyed man said. ‘We suspect you hit your head before you entered your deep sleep. You need time to settle down.’

  ‘More time?’ a deep voice from one of the hidden figures said in frustration. ‘Eni, we’ve waited long enough; you said if we moved the girl too much she would not have woken up. We built this hut to protect her from the forest and we’ve watched her ever since. Now that she has woken, we must go; it’s not safe to stay here any longer.’

  ‘I agree,’ another voice boomed.

  ‘This girl is a survivor, just like us,’ Eni said quietly, yet his words carried effortlessly throughout the room. ‘We owe her as much time as we would give to anyone here. Just because they have forgotten th
eir humanity does not mean that we should do the same.’

  Naala did not understand what was going on; the words and emotions floated around her head, but she had no energy left to grab them. No one had answered her questions about her village people.

  ‘My village … please, did you bring anyone else here?’ Naala asked.

  No one said a word, but Eni’s eyes softened with sympathy.

  ‘Tersely,’ he said. ‘We have seen footprints that have led us to believe that some of your people were lucky enough to escape—I’m sure the earthquake created a distraction—but the majority died at the hands of the Eze’s soldiers. You made it out.’

  Naala caught her breath and sank lower into the pile of leaves that formed a makeshift nest.

  ‘Among the dead, did you see a—’ Naala started, before another faceless voice interjected.

  ‘They … they are often hard to recognise … those that are left behind.’

  Naala’s head spun. Black clouds swirled at the corner of her eyes. She felt herself falling backwards, but Eni swiftly caught her and gently held her head.

  ‘She needs food,’ he murmured, as he held her in his arms, but Naala pushed him away before he could get a morsel of food into her mouth. She didn’t need food; she needed answers.

  ‘Who are you people?’ she asked, her voice thick with emotion.

  ‘We are all survivors of the Eze’s attack,’ Eni said soberly, as he knelt to face her. ‘We no longer have our families or homes. We can’t even leave the kingdom because the borders are so well guarded by those eager to snap our necks in order to let the army’s crimes die with the dead. So we move from place to place, sleeping in the trees to avoid the men who stole our lives. But we have each other and we have a common enemy.’

  ‘We don’t even know who she is and already you are blabbing about us,’ another unknown voice muttered.

  ‘Relax, Uncle Azu,’ a girl, not much older than Naala, said. ‘Like it or not, she is now one of us. She is a survivor. My name is Kora,’ she added, as she turned to smile brightly at Naala.

  Naala did not smile back. All this time her village had thought the attacks were mere rumours.

  ‘Why didn’t you warn us?’ she sobbed.

  The room was silent and thick with guilt.

  ‘We cannot read their minds!’ the man called Azu said loudly, as he paced. ‘We don’t know when the next attack is going to occur – even so, what if we wandered into your village seconds before the soldiers arrived and got caught in that mess again? Don’t you dare blame us!’

  ‘Uncle Azu … give her a second. Let her grieve,’ Kora murmured softly. She could see the fresh pain in Naala’s wild eyes and it stirred up memories that Kora had kept locked away for months.

  Kora struggled to supress the screams of her own family. When the thick huge men, holding deathly abaras, had rounded up her family and neighbours into the middle of their village, her father had held her tightly. He had begun to shake violently with what she thought was fear, so much so that the two of them had slipped backwards, out of the range of the bloodthirsty soldiers’ gaze. Kora had thought she was comforting her father by securely holding onto him; it was only when her father pushed her without warning into the village toilet hole that Kora discovered her father was the greatest person she would ever know. The shock of the fall and the brute stench of the human waste in the hole was nothing compared to the shrill screams and thuds that followed, as her father paid the price for protecting his child.

  ‘Let her grieve,’ Kora muttered, as a tear fell down her cheek.

  ỌNYE NYOCHA

  CITY OF NRI

  ‘SO,’ Sinai asked carefully, as she dug the sharp daga into the ripe plantain. ‘Are you ready to tell me the request?’ She was back in the stone kitchen, after days spent away. The sticky soft texture of the raw fruit stuck to the palm of her hands, and the steam from the yams boiling in the corner wafted around her. Sinai felt strangely comforted by the large messy kitchen, or perhaps it was the presence of Meekulu that stilled her.

  Meekulu was both erratic and calm, eerie and comforting, and as strange as this dynamic was, Sinai had grown to enjoy her brief moments with the old woman. She would show up, several days in a row, eager to get everything started, only to have the old woman say that she was not yet ready. Eventually, Meekulu was forced to tell her not to come back until she was sent for.

  ‘Listen, girl, I better not find you sniffing around here like a lost puppy,’ Meekulu had warned just before Sinai turned to head back to the palace. ‘You hanging around the kitchen these last days has already begun to garner unwanted attention.’

  ‘What questions? Why should anyone even care where I spend my time?’ Sinai had asked as she’d lingered by the door, just as the soldier had done days before. Her trips to the kitchen were far more interesting than her days spent trapped alone in her quarters, and she hated the idea of them stopping.

  ‘You’d be surprised how many people do care. To keep the world we live in running, requires a lot of people with a vested interest in those that step outside the norms. Run along, little one. I will fetch you once I am ready with my request.’ Meekulu smiled warmly, before shooing her away and turning back to her cooking.

  Sinai had been seconds away from protesting, but she’d bitten her tongue as she’d walked away. The thought of having to wait days, or perhaps even weeks, without a definite answer created tight knots in her stomach, but she could not risk an even bigger setback. Sinai was brutally aware of the fact that Meekulu could pull out of their deal on a whim. If she was ever going to pull this off, Sinai needed to be patient.

  LUCKILY SHE DID NOT HAVE to wait too long. After two days, Chisi, the kitchen girl, who was now much less shy, came to collect her.

  ‘You must be important,’ the girl hummed as they walked to the kitchen quarters.

  ‘I’m really not,’ Sinai replied, squinting at the blistering sun; the dry season was relentless this year.

  ‘You must be! Meekulu has invited you to visit so many times now, and your room is so … so … exquisite,’ the young girl replied, as she snuck looks at Sinai from under her eyelashes.

  ‘It’s not—I’m really not … I’m just …’ Sinai trailed off, losing the energy to explain how nothing was what it seemed, especially in the palace.

  ‘WHAT IS THIS?’ Meekulu asked, as she nudged Sinai aside to inspect the plantain that she had just diced up on the rigid wooden counter. Meekulu turned to look at Sinai with a dubious look. ‘You don’t know how to cut simple plantain?’ she asked incredulously, as she drew closer to Sinai, who gulped nervously, not sure if Meekulu was about to slap her or laugh.

  ‘Well, technically, it was my first time doing…’

  ‘Gah!’ Meekulu sighed as she threw her wrinkled hands in the air. ‘What do they teach you up in the noble quarters?’ she muttered, whilst shaking her head; her long braids, which were kept secure by a small red head wrap, shook well after her head had stopped.

  ‘The art of gossiping?’ Sinai offered with a small smirk. To her surprise, Meekulu was suppressing a similar smirk. The old woman grabbed one of the fat slabs of plantain that Sinai had butchered, and suddenly her smile grew wider.

  ‘Then again, we could find something useful to do with these monstrous plantain cuts,’ she said as she fetched a narrow wooden bowl. ‘No waste in my kitchen!’

  Sinai took a step back, as Meekulu busied herself on yet another task.

  ‘So …’ Sinai said, pausing to clear her throat, ‘Chisi said that— well, I’m guessing the reason why I was called was for the request?’

  ‘Of course,’ Meekulu replied. Sinai waited briefly for another response, but Meekulu acted almost as if she had forgotten that Sinai was here.

  ‘So, what do you need me to do?’ Sinai asked. Meekulu dropped the items in her hands, and wiped any remnants of food across her wrapper. She walked to the other side of the room and collected a small white pearl box; its surface was flawed, con
taining wide crevices and deep dips, but it was beautiful. As Meekulu approached Sinai, she removed the thick lid to reveal a mound of red powder.

  ‘I will take the ọbara powder and recite an oath. Then I will blow the powder into your face and you will be bound to the task that I give you.’

  ‘Ọbara powder … is this it? Are you asking me to do a ọbara oath? Is that the request?’

  ‘Yes, exactly. I’m glad to see you are paying attention,’ Meekulu replied, with a twinkle forming in her eyes. Sinai looked at the old woman incredulously.

  ‘An ọbara oath seems quite extreme,’ she finally stated. An ọbara oath would tie Sinai’s life to a task; if she failed then the dark forces would take her life as the price.

  ‘As extreme as disfiguring Ina, daughter and first-born of Oba Yemi, King of the Oyo kingdom?’

  ‘I …’ Sinai began, but she quickly found that she did not know what to say. ‘Okay, I see what you are saying, but an ọbara oath is not necessary. Just tell me what you would like me to do and I will do it. I promise you, you can trust me; you don’t need to bargain with my life.’

  ‘Trust,’ Meekulu muttered, before chuckling lightly. She took Sinai’s hands into hers. ‘Soft like velvet,’ she said wistfully. ‘Well, small girl, I can promise you that if I told you the task, you would run away with your tail between your legs!’

  Sinai opened her mouth to protest, but Meekulu held up her wrinkled hand.

  ‘Ah, ah!’ she said. ‘You need an ọbara oath to keep you clear-minded and determined, to protect against the weak tendencies that seep into you nobles in this castle.’

  ‘I’m not weak; I came to you because I am fighting back. I am disfiguring a girl.’

  ‘A girl that you can’t simply face,’ Meekulu added, dipping her head low and letting her glasses fall to the end of her nose.

  Sinai felt a surge of warm shame, fringed with dark anger.

  ‘It is not that simple,’ she said under her breath.

  ‘Then perhaps you agree that the ọbara oath is, in fact, necessary,’ Meekulu replied. Sinai blinked away her humiliation and took a deep breath before clearing her throat.