War god.
Where iron lives.
War god.
Amúnáwá.
War god.
Firebringer.
The lightning strikes me on the bridge of my nose, snaps the cartilage in two, flows down to my cheekbones, into my skull, down my neck, down my spine, the whole of my skeleton, every piece of flesh, every tissue, is on fire.
But I am the fire. And what burns does not burn again.
I let go.
My esper sinks, into the murkiness, burrowing deeper and deeper into the darkness built from every fear, every attempt to bury the divinity within myself, every struggle to plaster it over with a search for more humanness. I give in to the murkiness, death by every mound heaped over my true self, every brick laid over my divinity.
I sink, sink, burn, burn.
Like a phoenix, David. You know what those are?
Yes, mother, yes. I know what those are now.
SINK. COLD. FLOAT. Pain. Fear.
Pain. Fear.
Fear.
Fear.
Fire.
MY ESPER CRACKLES, ignites, a fount of divinity, a gathering of flames, a raging beast too big to be contained. The heat of life and warmth and godessence sweeps through me, and suddenly I am no longer dead to myself. I am no longer David Mogo, no longer half of anything.
I am the one who brings the fire. I am Amúnáwá.
I rise, slowly. There is no pain in my body, no sensation, because everything burns within. My clothes hang off of me like tattered flags.
Sango is walking away, his back to me. He stops and turns. I can’t help but catch the slight twitch in his expression. He raises his axe. Thunder rumbles overhead. Lightning tears through the clouds and makes right for me.
I draw on my godessence, will it into my hand, reach up and catch the lightning bolt mid-air.
Sango’s jaw goes slack.
“Surprise,” I say.
Then I push the power in my bones, my teeth, my flesh, into my fist, and hurl it, all together with the lightning, at Sango.
He doesn’t move. I’m not sure if it’s surprise or disbelief or pride. But he stands his ground as lightning and fire burn through the air between us and smack him in the middle of his belly.
Sango moves four, five feet, levitates for an instant, before dropping back to the ground in a crouch. He raises his head and looks at me, furious.
He throws his axe.
The thunderstone cuts through air, whining like wind through a whispering pine.
I have just enough time to swerve, so that the axe nudges me on the shoulder as it flies past and knocks me to the ground. I rise quickly, just in time to see the thing spin around in a tight arc and come back for me like a boomerang.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
I reach out and grab it just when it’s a hair’s breadth from my face, but it doesn’t stop, swinging around and pulling me along the tarmac, my soles scraping the runway. Silver fire sears my hands, burning with an intensity greater than I could imagine. I grit my teeth and hold on, the axe pulling me forward, into the waiting arms of Sango…
...who leans back and plants his foot in my chest.
I fall flat on my back, coughing, struggling to pass air into my lungs. Sango catches the axe and brings it down. I turn, and the thing sinks deep into the tarmac. He pulls it out and strikes again. I swivel. The axe buries in the road.
I push myself off the ground with my hands, reach out, grab his neck, and ram my head against his. The orisha staggers, giving me time to plant myself between him and his fallen axe.
I should’ve thought of this sooner. Same way I‘m little to nothing without my daggers, this guy is likely not much to contend with unpaired from that axe. If I can keep it that way…
He comes for it immediately, and I duck under his punch and ram a fiery one, all my godessence in it, into his side. He doubles back and comes again. Same pattern. Shuffle feet, block, duck, punch, punch, punch. He grasps his sides, snorting mist, his face a contortion.
He charges, and I grab his shoulders and push him back away from the axe. He strains against me, and I’m pushed along the tarmac again, my soles struggling to gain purchase as he leans his weight against mine. I’m moving, sliding back, and the axe is right there behind me. I’m doomed if he gets to it.
His face is screwed up in complete focus and purpose. He will not stop until I or him or everyone else is dead.
Well, so be it.
I let go and sink.
My godessence dips, like a match into fuel, then bursts out, ferocious. My pores ignite, flames pouring out of every hole in my skin, every pore a snorting dragon, my body a gas cooker.
I grab Sango in an embrace and take him down with me, my fingers interlocked at his back.
We burn together, the high god screaming atop me, slamming my face repeatedly with his fist until I can taste my teeth and the metal of blood from my nose and cut tongue, but I do not lose my grip. I clamp my legs behind him, locked at the ankles, and give in to the fire, burning, burning. My skin starts to give way in patches, first like a fever, then like the faintly sweet smell of roasting meat.
I do not let go.
Slowly, unlike the flash I get when I touch human skin, an impression washes over me. It’s similar to that which I saw with Ajala, but after a moment, I realise it’s from a different perspective. I’m back in the formless place of divinity, bubbling with spiritual energy but still formless. I am arguing with another god whose voice is like a loudspeaker and whose face is too bright so I cannot see it, and I am defending someone by my side. Before the vision fades away, I look beside me and realise I have seen the face before: Aganju’s.
Then we are back at war, fighting, burning, falling, and then I’m in a darkness, alone, unable to find my centre, my way back. Then someone, Aganju, is pulling me out of the void, welcoming me back, telling me that we do not need to find our centres because we do not need to go back at all. We must make new home here, where we will make the rules for what we want, and indeed I agree. But first we must rid it of these infestations that if given the chance will treat us the exact same way we were treated, bullied and cast out of Orun. Better to strike first, yes?
A shift, and I am leading scores and scores of the shadow horde, claiming one piece of this place after another. And with every place claimed, Aganju pulls another god from the void and places them there, and if we continue this way, we will make this place home in a way Orun never was, yes?
And then the vision vanishes, and I’m left with the raw, unfiltered emotion of the impression: an agonizing pain, but underneath it sadness, the sadness of never getting to see the end, of never knowing what one has built. This regret washes over me, so that I am suddenly too late, too late, and my heart is too heavy, so heavy.
The impression fades. I open my eyes, and atop me is nothing but ash and embers and the metallic smell of burning stone.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I LIE FOR a while, watching the stars twinkle silver-blue, as if they are made of lightning too. If this is where all things divine come from, are the stars divine too? I think about all the things I’ve never allowed myself to think before: where do gods come from? Where are they when they’re not down here causing havoc?
Then the pain in my body brings me back down to earth. Every inch of skin and bone feels like it’s been rammed and torched and I’m not sure if I do not want to move or if I am simply unable to. The burns on my back press into the tarmac beneath me. I lie there, unmoving, until a flurry of footsteps reaches me, before I remember I left the group back at the airport entrance.
I push myself into a sitting position, slowly, carefully. The figures running toward me are more than the three I expect, so for a moment I worry they’re being pursued by the shadows, or that my eyes are no longer working properly and my brain must’ve doubled them for some reason; but then they arrive and I realise I’m looking at Papa Udi and Shonuga and Fati in front, calling my na
me as they arrive, and behind them are a group dressed in the blue LASPAC uniform. Leading this group is Femi Onipede, dressed in the same uniform.
“David,” Papa Udi says when they arrive, then kneels to check my arms, my legs, my clothes, my body. “You don burn!”
Fati is smiling, nodding. “You did it,” Ibeji say, a chorus of voices.
I can’t open my mouth to make any words. I just look at them and struggle to breathe.
“They finished many shadows until the rest went back,” Shonuga says, answering my unasked question. She points to Femi Onipede and her band. “They saved us.”
Femi Onipede steps forward. She has lost some weight, so her deepset tribal marks rest below sharper cheekbones. She no longer wears her spectacles, and I’m not quite sure if she can see me properly. She nods in my direction.
“Good to see you’re still pushing,” she says. “We were worried about you.”
I look from face to face in the group above me. In their eyes I see reverence, respect, a look of awe. They seem to all be waiting for something. For me to lead them.
To lead them where?
Papa Udi rips what is left of my clothes, to get a better look at my burns, which are beginning to stink of rotting meat. The LASPAC group reconvenes, Shonuga joining them, standing next to Femi Onipede like a second general. The two women look at each other, and I’m unsure if it’s smiles I see exchanged there.
Then, the hot-ice, searing signature of a high god flashes about. Ibeji and I feel it at the same time, because Fati/Ibeji whips about, alert, head jerking like a dog smelling the air. I put up a hand and grab Papa Udi’s arm.
“Someone is coming.”
All heads turn to me, then to the direction I’m looking.
Down the runway a lone figure arrives, dressed in long, red robes, with a lengthy cloak wrapped about its head and flowing down its neck to below the waist. I put out my esper, which is weakened but functional enough, and it prods, searches. I get an image of a palm tree swaying, its fronds in the evening breeze. Then a dog barks, and suddenly there is blood, gore, the smells of intestines and death. The sounds of swords and spears clanging one against another.
I rise, slowly, and the group repositions with me, behind me, an army. They stand poised, ready, intent brimming in their eyes.
The high god stops a few yards from us all, then raises its head and lets the cloak fall.
She wears the form of a woman in her forties or fifties, eyes grey like iron. Her head is bald and without speck of hair. Now that I think of it, the red dress and cloak are like an Indian sari. She is a warrior, she is a bosom, she is home.
I don’t need to ask who she is.
“David,” she says, and her voice is like the wind.
“Mother,” I reply, and the word is honey on my tongue.
Chapter Twenty-Five
I’M IN LOVE with the darkness.
Not the dark, not the simple absence of illumination. I’m talking the darkness, the older brother to the after-hours. Something sentient, something that moves, something that lives under your bed. A gaping hole where other things should be, an emptiness in your chest where a heart should be beating. It changes, it grows, it builds; something that takes away and stuffs nothingness into the spaces left behind. It’s black, but also shining in its own way. It feeds the night. It is the night.
I love it so much that I have locked myself in a coffin. As a child growing up in the only occupied house in an abandoned neighbourhood in Lagos Island—with a foster-grandfather-wizard who was always away and disinterested in parental care outside the traditional African quad of feed-clothe-shelter-educate—I’ve had a lot of practice cramming myself into small dark spaces for long periods and sliding into the rabbit hole of tangled thoughts. It’s left me neither claustrophobic nor afraid of the dark, making me enjoy what most people consider agony.
It’s technically not a coffin. It’s the overhead baggage compartment of an airplane. A big one, a massive international carrier. It’s my first time in a plane, which is sad, considering it’s abandoned, left to rust in the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Ikeja, Lagos. I found it parked in one of the abandoned hangars in the abandoned airport in a technically abandoned Lagos.
I hear footsteps. Tentative at first, as if testing the ground, but then I realise they’re finding footing in the dark. Then the sound of bare feet on the metal floor, first loud, then again tentative, as if realising they are making too much noise. The footsteps grow louder along the aisle of the plane and stop outside my compartment. That my esper cannot pick up anything says I’m dealing with a full-blown human here and not a god of any sort, so I’m not surprised when there’s a soft knock on the overhead luggage cover before it is opened.
The inside of the plane is just as dark and I can’t see jack, but I already know who it is, because there’s only one person who knows the exact luggage compartment I usually crawl into.
“Yes?”
There’s some hesitation, then Fatoumata says: “Your mummy say I should call you.”
I WILL NEED to back this up a bit.
Fatoumata can talk, yes. She speaks only Yoruba and very broken English, yes. The twin gods, Ibeji, are no longer in residence within her, no. She has not died from the force of their exit, no.
Two words: my mother.
I wait for Fatoumata to climb down the rope we tied to the exit door and then climb down myself, fearing the same thing I do every time—that the thing will snap and I’ll crash to the ground. None of that happens, though. I get down and follow the soft footfalls of bare feet on concrete flooring in the darkness, and once at the smaller exit from the hangar, walk into the blistering June afternoon sun glistening off the tarmac of Murtala Muhammad International Airport’s Terminal 2.
Things have changed in the ten days since we first arrived at the airport to battle Orun’s fiercest lightning god. More people have heard the tale about a community of gods and wizards who were able to defeat the deadly Sango and his horde; some have braved the move from whatever hole they’d previously been hiding in and taken up residence in various parts of the airport. Terminal 2 was filled with refugees on that first day, but most have drifted into various crannies of the airport now, quickly claiming territories and marking them their own.
The airport no longer has that creepy, abandoned feel; now it’s full of bodies and the things they bring with them—a lost slipper, a piece of clothing spread on a line in the middle of nowhere, a fresh mound of human faeces. A woman and a little child, both dirty with dust and mud and black smudges from some kind of journey, pass by and greet us in Yoruba. The woman genuflects, and I wince.
Around the corner of the hangars is a small walkway taking us through the back door and into the main building via a small exit. The air in here is cooler but just as humid. The singlet I’m wearing is plastered to my back, chest and under my armpits. From here, I can hear voices in the main halls, where the largest body of refugees have settled near the booking desks, immigrations, customs and departures. We do not go that way, though, but turn off into a succession of narrow corridors up to the first floor, take the back stairs and a few more turns, landing us in front of an old open office that once housed the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria.
Since our arrival at the airport, the workstations have been taken out of the FAAN open office, leaving us with a large room with a few desks and partitions, and open spaces now given over to bedding. We kept the chairs too, creating a collection of small living spaces arranged according to taste. Papa Udi, who has never had much use for privacy, is one of the few who don’t bother to cordon off their mini-quarters. He has a bed made of bundles of fabric from ratty curtains and clothing all around the airport, all wrapped around a wooden door without hinges. All his other belongings, which are few, are stacked around the door-bed in a horseshoe-shaped cocoon. The man himself is seated on the bed, working on a ritual, twisting pieces of thatch around his fingers over and over, a deep frown on
his forehead. Ever since Sango’s death, he’s been obsessed with keeping us, the airport, hidden from Sango’s brother, Aganju. He’s made countless wards and rituals to keep us in and keep god-like powers out. He will never stop until we’re hidden from the whole world.
Onipede and Shonuga own two spaces beside each other, kept very minimalist, very barracks-like: a hard surface for a bed, with everything they own wrapped up and used as a pillow. They aren’t here now, since, along with Ibeji, they help coordinate the refugees’ affairs and keep all fracases from blowing up. Fati’s own space is a sprawling mass of odds and ends, as if she just learned the freedom to own property and is scavenging for everything and anything she can own. Save for Papa Udi’s corner, they’re all congregated around my mother’s space.
Papa Udi and my mother look up as we enter.
I have had countless visions about my mother, and none of them have prepared me for the form she’s chosen to wear since she’s arrived. This form is much less powerful, so much that it is too jarring, too much to take. The hair I’m used to seeing as wild and free, spread out in the wind, is not even there—just a bald, shaven head. Her face is unnaturally smooth, without pimple or wrinkle, but lacks sheen, so that it looks like plywood left to the mercies of the sun and rain and wind. The fat of her arms droops, languid. She has very small hands and feet.
I cannot believe this is the almighty Ogun, the almighty god of iron and fire and blood and war that everyone speaks of with so much trembling; the almighty Ogun, who many fake wizards at the Sura Divineries pretended to invoke and got people scrambling; the almighty Ogun, worshipped from here to the ends of the earth. There she sits, silent and contemplative, like an old woman counting down to the days of her death.
That thing about never meeting your heroes? I get it.
Her piercing eyes of iron, grey and unrelenting, watch me as I approach. They are the only things that have remained from the visions.
David Mogo Godhunter Page 18
