“Oh,” I said.
“That’s Chief Usson’s wife.” She pointed to a plump woman sitting with some other women. We sat down and unrolled our food. Mwita was already eating. He seemed to have picked up the way of the Vah when it came to eating because he was shoveling food into his mouth with his hands and eating with his mouth open. I unrolled my cloth and looked at what Ting had gathered. Everything was mixed together and the sight of it made me lose my appetite. I’ve never liked my food to mix. I picked at a piece of fried lizard egg as I pushed a slice of green cactus aside with my finger.
“So where is . . . your Master? Doesn’t he eat?” I asked after a while.
“Do you eat?” she said, looking at my still full cloth.
“I’m not very hungry.”
“Mwita seems comfortable.”
We both looked at him. He’d finished everything in his cloth and was getting up for more. He met my eyes. “Do you want me to get you something?” he asked.
I shook my head. Eyess came and plopped herself beside me. She grinned and unrolled her meal and started eating ravenously.
“So is it true?” Ting asked.
“What?”
“Mwita won’t tell me anything. He says to ask you,” she said. “Rumor had it that you blanketed a town in a black mist after they tried to harm you. That you turned their water to bile. And you’re really a ghost sent to the lands to wash away our evils.”
I laughed, “Where did you hear all this?”
“Travelers,” she said. “In towns some of us visit for supplies. On the wind.”
“Everyone knows,” Eyess added.
“What do you think, Ting?” I asked.
“I think it’s nonsense . . . most of it.” She winked.
“Ting, why can’t people touch me here?” I smiled. “Other than you and Eyess?”
“Don’t take offense,” she said, looking away.
I continued looking at her, waiting for her to say more. When she didn’t, I just shrugged. I wasn’t offended. Not really. “What are those?” I asked to change the subject. I pointed at the markings on her biceps and the swells of her breasts. The ones on her breasts were circles with a series of loops and swirls inside them. On her left bicep was what looked like the shadow of some sort of bird of prey. On the right was a cross surrounded by tiny circles and squares.
“Can’t you read Vai, Bassa, Menda, and Nsibidi?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I know of Nsibidi. A building in Jwahir is decorated with it.”
“The House of Osugbo,” she said, nodding. “Ssaiku told me of it. Those aren’t decorations. You’d know if you’d been apprenticed longer.”
“Well, that couldn’t be helped, could it?” I said, annoyed.
“Guess not,” she said. “I gave these markings to myself. Writing scripts are my center.”
“Center?”
“What I’m most gifted at,” she said. “It becomes clearest around when you hit thirty. I can’t tell you exactly what my markings mean, not in words. They changed my life, each in their own needed way. This one here is a vulture, I can tell you that.” She met my eyes as she gnawed on a rabbit bone.
I decided to change the subject. “So how long have you been in training?”
The band started playing a song that Eyess apparently loved. She jumped up and ran to the musicians, weaving around people with that gazellelike nimbleness. When she got to the band, she started gleefully dancing. Ting and I watched for a moment, smiling.
“Since I was eight years old,” Ting said turning to me.
“You passed your initiation that young?” I asked
She nodded.
“So you know how you . . .”
“I’ll die an old satisfied woman, not far from here,” she said.
Envy is a painful emotion.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t mean to gloat.”
“I know,” I said, my voice strained.
“Fate is cold and cruel.”
I nodded.
“Your fate is in the West, I know. Ssaiku knows more,” she said. “He usually doesn’t come to the feast. I’ll take you to him when you and Mwita are finished.”
Mwita returned carrying three cloths. He handed me one. I unrolled it. In it was roasted rabbit. He handed me another full of cactus candy. I smiled at him.
“Always,” he said, sitting down beside me, his shoulder touching mine.
“Ah, you are strange,” Ting said, when I began to eat.
“You haven’t seen anything yet,” I said, my mouth full.
She looked from me to Mwita and then narrowed her eyes. “So you haven’t completed training?”
I shook my head, refusing to meet her eyes.
“Don’t worry about your camp,” Mwita finally said.
“How can I be sure?” she asked. “Ssaiku won’t even allow me to be alone with a man. You both must know about the woman who . . .”
“We know,” we both said.
After eating, we left Diti, Luyu, and Fanasi behind. They didn’t notice. Ssaiku’s tent was large and airy. It was made from a material that was black but let the breeze right in. He sat on a wicker chair, a tiny book in his hands. “Ting, bring them palm wine,” he said, putting his book down. “Mwita, wasn’t I right?” he asked, motioning for us to sit.
“Very,” he replied, going to the tent’s corner and getting two round sitting mats. “It was indeed the most delicious meal I’ve ever had.”
I looked at Mwita and frowned, sitting on the mat Mwita set down for me.
“You’ll sleep well tonight,” Ssaiku said.
“We thank you for your hospitality,” Mwita said.
“As I already told you, it’s the least we can do.”
Ting returned managing glasses of palm wine on a tray. She handed the first to Ssaiku, then to Mwita and then to me. She only touched the glasses with her right hand. I almost laughed. Ting was the last person I’d have taken to be so traditional. But then again, Ssaiku was her Master and if he was anything like Aro, he expected this. She sat beside me, a small smile on her face as if anticipating an interesting discussion.
“Look at me, Onyesonwu,” he said. “I want a good look at your face.”
“Why?” I asked, but I looked at him. He didn’t answer. I withstood his inspection.
“You usually braid your hair?” he asked.
I nodded.
“Stop,” he said. “Tie it with a piece of palm fiber or string, but no more braiding from this point on.” He sat back. “You’re both so strange to look at. I know Nuru and I know Okeke. The
Ewu
-born make no sense to my eyes. Eh, Ani is testing me again.”
Ting snickered, and Ssaiku gave her a sharp look.
“I’m sorry,
Ogasse,
” she said, still smiling. “You’re doing it again.”
Ssaiku looked very annoyed. Ting wasn’t frightened by this. As I’ve said, one’s Master has a closer relationship to an apprentice than the apprentice’s father. If there is no push and pull, no testing of nerves on both sides, it wouldn’t be a true apprenticeship.
“You told me to tell you whenever you do it,
Ogasse
,” Ting continued.
Ssaiku took a deep breath. “My student is right,” he finally said. “Understand, I never believed the one I was to teach would be this long-legged . . . girl. But it was written. Since then I promised to taper my assumptions. There’s never been an
Ewu
sorcerer. But it has been asked. So it’s not because Ani is testing us that it’s so, it is merely so.”
“Well said,” Ting said, pleased.
“What makes sense is no longer necessarily what should be,” Mwita said, finishing his palm wine and looking at me. I fought hard not to roll my eyes.
“Right. Mwita, you understand me best here,” Ssaiku said. “Now, it’s no accident that you’re here. I was told to find and take you in. I’m a sorcerer who’s much much older than he looks. I come from a long line of chosen keepers, the keepers of this moving village, Ssolu. I maintain the dust storm that protects it.”
“You’re maintaining it right now?” I asked.
“It’s simply juju for me, as it will be for Ting,” he said. “Now, as I said, I was told to find you. There’s a part of your training that you must complete. You’ll need help.”
I frowned. “Who . . . who told you to find me?”
“Sola,” he said.
My eyes widened. Sola, the white-skinned man in black whom I’d met twice in the dust storm. I could still hear his words that first time we met for my initiation, “I must have
you
killed.” Then he’d shown me my death.
I shuddered. “You
know
him?” I asked.
“Of course.”
It had never occurred to me that they were all connected. All the old ones. I thought about how the last time I’d met with Sola, just before leaving Jwahir, Aro sat beside him instead of me, as if Sola were his brother and I, Aro’s daughter. “What about Aro?” I asked.
“I know Aro well. Have known him a long, long time.”
“Did he speak of me?” I asked. My heart quickened.
“No. He didn’t mention you. He is your Master?”
“Yes,” I said, disappointed. I hadn’t realized how much I missed Aro.
“Ah, it becomes clear now,” he said, nodding. “I was having trouble putting my finger on what it was.” He looked at Mwita. Ting looked at Mwita too, as if trying to see what her Master had just realized. “And
you
are his other child,” Ssaiku said.
“I guess you can say that,” Mwita said. “But I was apprenticed to another before.”
“Aro didn’t ask anything about us? Say anything?” I asked, confused.
“No.” There was a flutter in the room as a large brown parrot flew into the tent and landed on a chair. It squawked and shook its head.
“Dizzy birds,” Ting said. “They’re always falling into Ssolu.”
“Go back to the celebration,” Ssaiku told us. “Enjoy yourselves. In ten days, the women will Hold Conversation with Ani. Onyesonwu, you will go with them.”
I almost laughed. I hadn’t Held Conversation with Ani since I was a child. I didn’t believe in Ani. I held in my cynicism, though. It really didn’t matter. When we got back to the celebration, things were just heating up. The band was playing a song that everyone knew the words to. Eyess danced for everyone as she sang loudly. I think I’d have been like her if I hadn’t been born an outcast.
“What do you think will happen?” Mwita asked me as we stood among all the singing people. I glimpsed Luyu standing on the other side of the circle with two men. Both had their arms around her waist. I didn’t see Diti or Fanasi.
“No idea,” I said. “I was about to ask you the same thing, since naturally you should know everything.”
He sighed loudly and rolled his eyes. “You don’t listen,” he said.
“Onyesonwu!” Eyess shouted. I jumped at the sound of my name. Everyone turned. “Come sing with us!”
I smiled embarrassed, shaking my head and putting up my hands. “It’s okay,” I said backing away. “I-I don’t know any of your songs.”
“Please come sing,” Eyess begged.
“Why don’t you sing one of your own songs then,” Mwita said loudly.
I glared at him and he smiled smugly.
“Yes!” Eyess exclaimed. “Sing for us!”
Everyone quieted as she led me to the circle’s center. People avoided touching me as I passed. I stood there, aware of all eyes on me.
“Sing us a song from your home,” Eyess said.
“I was raised in Jwahir,” I said, when I realized I couldn’t sneak away. “But I’m from the desert. That’s my home.” I paused. “I sing this to the land when it is content.”
I opened my mouth, closed my eyes, and sang the song that I’d learned from the desert when I was three years old. Everyone oohed and ahhed when the brown parrot I’d seen in Ssaiku’s tent came and landed on my shoulder. I kept singing. The sweet sound and vibration coming from my throat radiated through the rest of my body. It smoothed away my anxieties and sadness. For the moment. When I finished, everyone was silent.
Then people started hissing and clapping praise. The noise startled the bird on my shoulder and it flew away. Eyess threw her arms around my leg, looking up at me with admiration. Sparks flew from her arms and several people jumped back, muttering mild exclamations. The musicians started playing again, and I quickly left the center of the circle.
“Beautiful,” people said as I passed.
“I’ll sleep well tonight!”
“Ani blesses you a thousand times.”
If they touched me they experienced pain, yet they heaped praise on me like I was their chief’s long lost daughter.
“Oh!” Eyess exclaimed, hearing the band start a tune she couldn’t resist. She ran back to the circle where she wiggled a dance that made everyone laugh. Mwita put his arm around my waist. It never felt so good.
“That was . . . fun,” I said as we walked back to our tent.
“Works every time,” Mwita said. He touched my bushy hair. “This hair.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m going to use a long piece of palm fiber and loop it around all the way to the bottom. That won’t be too different from braiding it.”
“It’s not that,” he said. I waited but he didn’t say more, which was fine. He didn’t have to. I felt it, too. I’d felt it as soon as Ssaiku told me what he wanted me to do. Like I was all . . . charged up. Something was going to happen when I went on that retreat.
When we got to our camp, we found only Fanasi. He was sitting before the dwindling rock fire, staring at the glowing stone. A bottle of palm wine sat between his legs.
“Where is . . .”
“I have no idea, Onye,” he said, slurring his words. “Both have deserted me.”
Mwita patted him on the shoulder and went into our tent. I sat beside Fanasi. He reeked of palm wine. “They’ll be back, I’m sure,” I said.
“You and Mwita,” he said after a while. “You’re the true thing. I’ll never have that. Just wanted Diti, some land, babies. Look at me now. My father would spit.”
“They’ll come back,” I said, again.
“I can’t have them both,” he said. “And looks like I can’t have even one. Stupid. Shouldn’t have come here. I want to go home.”