As he speaks, shadows drift out of every nook and crevice—from the trees, from the smoke, from the rubble, as if they’ve been within the walls, waiting. Fuck, why do these things have no goddamn signatures?
“So the question here today, really, is who gets to be more evil than the other?” The Eyos walk with him, and the shadows flow around our flanks, encircling us. “And the one who is most ready to sacrifice everything to keep their house is the one who gets to stay.”
“This is not your home,” I say.
“And neither is it yours, orisha ’daji.” There’s extra bite in that last word. “But here you are, destroying everything in the name of saving it.”
“Everything was fine until you came along,” I say.
“Everything was fine for me until you came along,” Aganju retorts.
The shadows have circled us proper. Their faces are full of hunger, the thrumming life in us all like a vicious thirst on a scorching day, their lips dripping with the anticipation of sucking the life out of us.
“If you leave now,” I say, the chain in my hand turning red, “more blood will not have to be shed.”
“Ha. And who has done the more shedding? Who has destroyed more lives?” He points to the building, the fire—burning highest near the back of the building—now encroaching on the front, now visible through the windows and in the smoke billowing up to the sky.
“He is trying to get into your head,” my mother whispers. “Don’t let him.”
“And you aren’t?” Aganju says to her. “Aren’t you all fakes?” His eyes sweep across us, then stop at Eshu. “And you; I thought I had an ally in you.”
“Ah, well,” Eshu says, smiling like a bashful child. “You know I only serve my own interests, Aganju.”
Aganju shakes his head and clicks his tongue. “Well, it seems you have all chosen death.” He shrugs. “So be it.”
The shadows take that as their cue. They screech, shriek, howl like monkeys. I put myself between the Makoko group and the shadows, the burning State House behind us.
“Eshu,” I say, “take every human in this place to the airport.” I look Ogun in the eye when I say: “Us gods started this. Let’s finish it.”
Ogun nods.
Eshu splits into a number of iterations and six line up behind me, fencing the Makoko group off proper. Ogun steps up beside me with her shield and machete ready. Kehinde follows, holding her side, but with her jaw set, ready.
Fati, Taiwo, Papa Udi, Shonuga and Femi stand right there with us, saying nothing, but making no moves to leave. I’m this close to asking them to go back to the airport with the others, whom Eshu’s iterations are busy swiping off, but I stop myself. Osun knows where they’re going already. If we fall here, they will not be safe anyway.
I look at them and nod. Femi pulls out a revolver—she must’ve swiped it from a guard here at the house—opens the chamber, shakes out all the bullets and hands them to Papa Udi to douse in ebo.
I step forward.
The shadows respond to Aganju’s wave and charge, the Eyos breaking apart, all heading for us. Femi opens fire, Shonuga, Fati and Papa Udi charging with her, Eshu’s iterations right behind them. Taiwo and Kehinde head for the first Eyo together—Oya, who springs into the air and rains potshots down at them. Olokun raises a wave and brings down Oba, who responds in kind, the pair of them turning the water fountain into a hurricane. Ogun slings one fire bolt against the last Eyo—Osun—who flings half-formed shadow creatures in response. Ogun checks one after the other with her shield, swipes with her machete and sends the creatures back to black dust.
For a third time, I find myself face-to-face with Aganju.
I breathe, reach for my godessence. The heat stirs in my belly, a gathering of flames hungry to lick the life out of anything my iron touches. There is excitement in my teeth, in my bones, in my flesh.
Aganju takes one step, two, and then disappears into thin air.
I shut my eyes, pushing my esper, trying to sense him, smell him. I smell his ash, feel the heat of his magma, the sting of his smoke, the rock-solid feel of his muscle, of his fist and swords.
When I feel the heat right on my face, I step aside and swing my chain, fire whining through air. Aganju appears just at the last minute and bats it off with his sword.
“Ah, figured it out.” Cowries bounce on his plaited hair as he nods.
I swing the fiery chain at him, and he parries. I swing again. Parry. We do this dance a couple of times. I catch a glimpse of the human-and-Eshu gang striking down a line of shadows out the corner of my eye. At the same time, Olokun wraps Oba’s head in water, trapping her.
That lapse in concentration is enough for Aganju to parry again and come at me with the other sword. He’s so fast, both swords flashing, that I have to block, block, block, until one blade smacks my hand and my machete flies away. I’m suddenly on the ground, my butt bone slamming the pavement with a painful thud. Aganju is over me in an instant, glowing swords raised. He squeezes his hand, and my side—I’d almost forgotten about it—burns again, so that I curl up on the ground, liquid pain shooting from my side into my brain.
“I don’t even know why I show you any respect,” he says. “I should’ve ended you a long time ago.”
He raises his sword.
Then something weird happens. He stops and turns around.
All around us, the shadows are crumbling into black dust, wailing long and hollow, pleading for help, for home. Aganju’s gaze shifts, as does mine, and there at the east end of the tarmac is the reason.
Ogun has arms wrapped around Osun, her fingers locked together behind the Eyo’s agbada. They’re both burning, a halo of fire about them. Osun is a foot off the ground, her scream rending the air as she burns.
Shadows everywhere crumble with her, and the humans and Eshus plough through them.
Aganju turns from me and flies towards my mother.
I collect myself and swing my chain at his back, catching him in the shoulder blade. He staggers, but does not fall. I follow him, the pain in my side stabbing with every step, but I press on. He is a step or two from my mother, who is completely oblivious and is gritting her teeth, trying to survive the heat, as I did with Sango back at the airport.
I fling the chain and catch him about the neck just as he raises his swords, and I wrap my end around my elbow and hold him there. He strains, but I wind the chain under my armpit and over my shoulder and pull back, like a plough. He scrapes across the tarmac, gritting his teeth, grasping at the iron tight around his neck.
He he doesn’t need to breathe, technically. But if I can hold him there…
The last of the shadows drops into dust as the àshẹ in Osun gives way, fading into nothing. The god droops limp, and like Sango fades slowly into ash and embers, leaving behind the stench of a midwife’s bathwater.
Aganju’s rage builds—I can sense power in him growing, growing, and then he drops a sword, reaches behind him with one hand, grabs my chain and yanks.
The chain breaks.
I hit the ground. Aganju hacks ferociously at my mother. She has enough time to raise her shield, but she has no machete, nothing. She fires one blast, two at him. They smack his chest, but do nothing. I rise and reach for my own machete, but Aganju turns then and thrusts his hand out at me. The shard in my side ignites and moves. I double over to my knees, the machete clattering to the ground. Blood pours into my palm as I grip my belly tight.
Then Ogun checks into Aganju with her shield, and he staggers. My insides are melting, but as he thrashes at her, clattering against the shield, she pushes forward. He steps backward, and again, closer to me, closer.
I lunge for my machete. Aganju turns, lifts his sword. I ignore it and swing my blade up under his guard. He sees it coming, drops the sword into his left hand, and buries it in my chest just as my machete severs his right arm.
Pain like liquid iron engulfs my chest like so that I can’t breathe, the glowing sword searing my organs as it
drives through my chest, coming out under my shoulder blade. I scream, as does Aganju, a black void where his right arm should’ve been, spraying a clear, viscous fluid. We’re right in each other’s faces, eyes to eyes. I reach for my godessence, but it is depleted, too strained to pull out fire without harming me, because I am too weak, too contaminated by Aganju’s power in me.
Then the chain around his neck tightens, and Ogun is behind him, twisting, twisting. She lights up the chain, so that embers rise from his neck, forming a blackened ring on his skin. Aganju grits his teeth, yanks his sword from under my shoulder, reverses it and makes to stab behind him.
With great effort, I lift my machete again and knock the short sword off. He clenches his fist in response, and the shard in me moves again, cutting, cutting. My eyes tear up, blurring my vision, and I feel the wet warmth flowing down my belly.
Only one thing to do.
I look at my mother. Her eyes are focused.
Let go, I tell her.
Her narrow with understanding. She lets go.
I close my eyes, and sink.
A Phoenix, David. They rise in fire.
I sense Aganju turn as I stagger back. He swings with his remaining arm, ready to catch her, but Ogun ducks just in time.
I open my eyes, and push with my mind.
Fire comes from within, the dregs of my godessence, the deepest reserves of everything that is me. My machete ignites, blazing as ever, thirsting for blood.
I swing.
I do not miss.
The blade catches Aganju clean in the side of his neck, passes right through it, and comes out at the other end.
The head tumbles down, smacks on the tarmac and rolls away. His body stands for a moment longer, then slowly gives way, abandoning its human form and cloak and displaying the god beneath: a flowing, burning mass of magma and rock. Then it crumbles, melts, disintegrating into a pile of ash from neck to arm to body to feet, and finally Aganju is gone without a scream.
I feel the shard disintegrate within me too, as does the head a few feet away from me.
Suddenly I can see too little, breathe too little. I look around desperately, trying to grasp anything, hold on to something as life slips away from me.
As I fall to my knees, I see Taiwo and Kehinde, backed by the now liberated Eshu, holding down Oya, who is struggling in their arms. At the fountain, Olokun has Oba bound, seaweed wrapped about her agbada like a bundle of bedsheets. The rest of the humans stare at me, their mouths agape, slowly confronting the reality of their warrior, their hero, dying before their eyes.
And in front of me, as I fall, Ogun, my mother, running over, calling my name. Not David. My True Name.
Sadly, I cannot remember it, and I never will.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
I WAKE UP in a bed.
At first, I think I’m dreaming, but it is indeed a bed. On closer inquisition, a mattress, which is on the ground. But I’m outside, because I’m looking up into an evening sky, and the sun is low. A dry, hot wind blows.
I’ve never been happier to take in the smell of a coming harmattan. I breathe in a lungful of hot, deserty air. Nothing like a question mark on your mortality to remind you of how the little things matter, even if they involve a nosebleed risk.
I try to sit up. The stinging in my belly flares, and my fingers reach for it in instinct; then another sting, from my shoulder. They’re both patched, and I feel a sticky salve applied around each wound—either that, or it’s my blood. There is a dull ache underneath them both, a feeling of healing already begun.
“Easy, easy,” a voice says, then Papa Udi appears above me, a hand on my chest. There is a bag open on the ground beside me. He settles on a stool by me, tracing his fingers across my now exposed torso, along my Lichtenberg figures.
I look around and see a large pile of rubble. I figure we’re still at the State House, but then I look the other way and there it is: the guava tree that started it all, outside Cardoso House. It is no longer whittled down to a skeleton, but sports a thick crown of leaves now turned yellow by Harmattan’s unforgivable onset. There is the barren tree now fruitful, a flag of victory flying, a symbol of hope renewed.
“We won,” I say to Papa Udi.
Papa Udi’s eyes dart towards the tree, then to the debris of Cardoso House behind him. He shrugs.
I sigh, rest on my back and look around. I am under a makeshift shelter fashioned of sacking nailed across a stick frame, under a zinc roof. There is an identical bivouac next to it, and Papa Udi’s neatly-piled belongings, as well as a small firepit. I see two beds.
“Fati?” I ask.
“I am here,” a voice says, and then she is standing right there, next to Papa Udi, her frail figure unflinching. She has shaved her head, like my mother.
She smiles.
“Good to see you too, kid,” I say.
The sun is low in the evening sky. I didn’t expect it to be this blank, this bleak, the day we eventually won this war. I expected to feel joy and celebration. Instead, I feel like a heap of rubble myself, one more casualty in the ash, like it wasn’t worth it after all.
“Look at us,” I say. “The survivors of Cardoso House.”
“Hmm,” Papa Udi says. He’s back to grunts and gestures and little else, a slice of normality that I welcome with an open heart.
I try to rise again, but he puts his hand on my chest and shakes his head. “Wait first,” he says. “Give am time.”
“Am I... getting better?”
“Hmm,” he says. “Maybe.”
“How long have I been unconscious?”
“Days.” He pushes me back down.
I drift off, and it is night when I open my eyes again. There are voices all around me, and a fire crackles.
“He’s awake,” someone says, and then someone lifts a light. I smell the animal fat of one of Fati’s lamps.
Faces block out the light: I can see Ogun, Kehinde, Taiwo, Femi, Shonuga. Papa Udi and Fati are by the fire.
My mother smiles, the light in her eyes dancing.
“They rise from the fire,” I say.
She nods and looks away, like she’s trying not to cry.
“Welcome back, bro,” Taiwo says, patting my shoulder. Femi and Shonuga give me nods. Kehinde looks like she wants to smile at me but doesn’t know how to work the muscles for it.
“Where are the others?” I ask.
They look at one another. “Which others?” Femi asks.
I realise I’m thinking of everyone we’ve lost; Shonekan, Aziza, the airport force; everyone who gave themselves so that even if we lived like refugees, in the rubble of our own home, we would at least be free.
“Eshu, the airport community, the Makoko people,” I lie.
“They’re good,” Taiwo says. “Everything is fine.”
“Olokun is back with the Makoko people,” Shonuga says.
“And the sisters?”
“Eshu took care of them,” she says, without turning to face me.
“Took care how?”
She turns. The àshẹ in her eyes is brighter than ever. I’m not sure if that’s how gods cry.
“Well.” She clears her throat. “Remember how there are realms between this one and others, slips in time and space? Eshu knows how to get in and out of a few of them. Let’s just say he’s mistakenly left them there.”
“And where is he now?”
They all look at one another, and end up looking at my mother. She shrugs.
Of course. What should I expect?
The stars are out, and we turn our attention to them, saying nothing. It’s been a long time since anyone saw stars in this city.
“What happens to the airport people now?” I ask.
“Well, the government—” Femi starts.
“Government ke?” Shonuga interjects. “Which government? Abegi.”
“The new government,” Femi presses on, “is a committee of experts offering the federal government headways for a new triple
-R approach: reconstruction, rehabilitation and reconciliation.”
“Wetin that one even mean?” Papa Udi asks.
“I guess they’ll rebuild what needs to be rebuilt and offer people, like the airport community, some refuge and maybe some money to start over.”
Shonuga scoffs. “Is it not this Nigerian government?” Papa Udi scoffs with her.
“Well, at least they’re doing something,” Femi says.
“And what about you people?” I say, realising too late what I’ve asked, forgetting I, too, am a part of these people.
The gods look at one another and say nothing.
“We are home,” Ogun says, standing next to the blackened skeleton that used to be Cardoso House, looking up at the stars.
Another beat passes, and Kehinde says: “Besides, Obatala doesn’t want any of us back anyway, so.”
“Is the government happy with this choice?” I ask Femi. “Considering there are a lot of... us.”
She tilts her head. “I believe the last R was reconciliation? We’ll see how they handle that part, right?”
We continue to look at the stars above the Cardoso House rubble, at everything that was, is, and will come. I sit up painfully and join their gaze.
“Home,” Ogun says again, and we all know exactly what that means.
THE END
About The Author
Suyi Davis Okungbowa is a storyteller who writes from Lagos, Nigeria. His stories have been published in Fireside, PodCastle, The Dark, StarShipSofa, Mothership Zeta, Omenana, and other places. Suyi has worked in engineering and financial audit, and now works in brand marketing, where he gets paid to tell stories. He is also associate editor at Podcastle and a charter member of the African Speculative Fiction Society.
Praise for David Mogo, Godhunter
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