The Watchers (27 page)
“There's no use torturing the young man,” Okoye had said simply, to no one in particular.
Meanwhile, Abby had cleaned not one but two platefuls of the dish served her, feeling grateful for finally chasing away those hunger pangs.
It was now time to talk.
The second host was a woman named Motumbe, middle-aged, who bore a bright red scar along her left cheek and who turned out to be the group's designated historian.
After the food and drink were all gone and the table meticulously cleaned, Motumbe sat down before Abby like someone who had prepared something to say for a very long time. Sister Okoye had retired to a wicker rocking chair in the corner and sat with her eyes closed, her task for the day duly completed. Abby had no doubt that she was not simply dozing, however. Everyone in the room seemed to be listening as Motumbe began speaking.
“Iya Agba, you see, is an old Yoruba word that means
Respected Mother
or
Elder Woman Who Sees
. There are not so many of us as there once were. Our Sisterhood once numbered in the tens of thousands across all of Africa.”
“Over the whole continent?” Abby asked in amazement.
“Yes. In fact, it is the oldest strain of Christianity in all Africa. Most of today's Nigerian believers are spiritually descended from the European missionaries who came here in the nineteenth century. But we Iya Agbas represent something far older and deeper. Exactly what, or where it came from, has become lost over time. But we know that an ancient heritage made its way across Africa over a thousand years ago.”
“The first missionaries who came were actually intimidated by our presence,” Sister Okoye added without opening her eyes. “They did not understand how a bunch of African women could know the truth. And so many of them feared us. They thought we might be some kind of soothsayers, some kind of occult knowledge. They urged us to forget about the Sisterhood and just blend into the emerging church.”
“But there are others in other countries?”
“By different names, yes,” Motumbe replied. “Clearly we all possess the same gift, but warfare and mistrust between nations have cut us off from each other.”
“Do most of the other nations use a name meaning
Respected Mother
?”
“I believe some do. It is usually also a name referring to how we can see beyond the veil that separates the carnal realm, or that of the flesh, from that of the Spirit. Of course we see more than that as well. We not only see the state of spiritual matters all around us, but we seem to be connected with each other, somehow, in a way that none of us fully understand. We sense when another is sick or endangered. It wakes us up in the middle of the night or in the heat of the day, often when we least expect it. Or at least, it used to. We Iya Agbas have dwindled of late. Our bonds have weakened, and our influence has waned dramatically.”
“And the Sisterhood is completely unorganized? No leadership, no hierarchy?”
“Some people call me the âMummy Iya Agba,' ” said Sister Okoye, “because I seem to have a gift of leadership, and because I have studied at several universities. But that is a completely local title.”
“I can't believe this . . .” muttered Abby admiringly.
“We have heard rumors that somewhere, in a place we do not know, there exists some sort of matriarch, a living heart of the Sisterhood. A leader, if you will. It is merely something we have sensed for a very long time, and many believe it quite strongly. And now our sense of her has declined quite dramatically as well. We fear that this person may be diminished in the same way that the Sisterhood has been. But it is not the only weakness. We have been weakened by division among believers. By the disbelief brought in Western modernism. By a lack of proper teaching among our young women. By old wounds that have never healed. And to be honest, we have been decimated by the Scythians' systematic murders.”
“Did you know that there was an attempt on my life?” asked Abby suddenly. “That's the reason I was sickâat least until I was healed. I was supposed to have only a few weeks to live.”
“Did the assassin come at your throat? With a scythe?”
“No, it was some bizarre, untraceable poison. However, my housekeeper was murdered that night, and they said her throat had been cut by a curved blade!”
Their eyes brightened, then darkened again as everyone realized the somber nature of their discovery.
“How awful to think that the Scythians might be at work in America too,” Sister Okoye said from her chair.
“Do your gifts develop,” Abby asked, “after a strange dream about the prophetess Anna at the Temple, meeting Jesus?”
“Yes! Yes!” Motumbe looked like she might jump onto the table from sheer delight at the disclosure. “Oh my. It is beyond doubt now that Iya Agba truly did cross the Atlantic.”
“You see, Abby,” said Sister Okoye, “one of the great unhealed wounds of Nigeria is that our harbors served as the launching point for the American slave trade. Many, many of our people enriched themselves and indulged their old tribal hatreds by selling each other into slavery, just a few miles from where we sit. We know from our prayers that a great wound was inflicted on our body when this happened. We know that territorial spirits have jealously guarded their holds over parts of our land and its people. We know that a number of Iya Agba women were sold and taken away. And we have never been able to sense their bond, or even know whether their gifting survived into the New World.”
“ âHeal the breach,' ” Abby said in a strangely breathy voice.
“What?” said Motumbe.
“ âHeal the breach.' It's the main command Jesus gave me to carry out.”
“If there is a breach, a wound here, it concerns that subject. Our lost sisters in America, and the horrible sin that led to their being taken from us.”
“Yesâexcept that I have no African blood in me whatsoever. That is the greatest question in my own mystery. The women who responded to me by the thousands were African-American. Women who had an awareness of something they called the Sight, but no idea where it originally came from.”
“The Sight,” sighed Sister Okoye, savoring the words. She now sat at the table, having completely abandoned her pretense of sleeping in the chair. Her eyes were filled with tears and her voice had grown husky. “So even the name survived somehow. Our sisters knew their name, but they did not know their heritage.”
“It sounds like we are healthy in numbers,” Abby said. “But it seems we are being destroyed by our isolation.”
“Yes,” agreed Motumbe. “It's as though the old sins and offenses continue to fester after all these years, keeping us separate and weak.”
“That's my mission,” Abby said with a new resolve in her voice. “To heal this breach. I see it now, clearer than ever.”
“Oh, if you could,” said the third woman, who up until now had been silent. “If you could only help revive us! Do you know how many good things these sisters have done through the years? We once functioned like what they called, in your American West,
scouts
. Literally scouting the spirit realm for attacks on our people, our children.”
“Iya Agba leaders,” added Sister Okoye, “often warned kings and generals of upcoming attacks, either from enemy nations or from within their own people. We saved thousands. We prevented wars, helped clear up misunderstandings between tribes. We were considered indispensable at the court of every sovereign in all Africa, whether they believed in Christ or not.”
“Can you imagine how much good we could accomplish today across Africa?” Okoye said. “There is so much darkness to be dispelled. In Darfur, in Uganda. If only we could have had an influence in Rwanda, warned the poor Tutsis there of what was to come.”
“They wouldn't have believed us,” said Motumbe. “No one wants to believe in the purest forms of evil.”
“If that's true,” Abby interjected, “then why didn't anyone predict the attack on the Gathering today?”
The other women faced each other with blank expressions. Sister Okoye closed her eyes for a moment. She opened them again and said, “I think several reasons. First, I think the idea came from somewhere beyond our land, beyond our influence. It was hatched and conceived by the American side of the Brotherhood, whom we never even knew existed, and yet now it seems is far stronger than our own contingent. That means the spiritual currents around the plot were beyond our detection. Second, we were so completely wrapped up in your appearance and all the media madness that surrounded it, we were distracted. I myself was so intensely engaged in prayer for you that a bomb could have gone off and I would have hardly noticed.”
“One practically did,” pointed out Motumbe.
“Indeed. And last, I hate to say this, but again it shows how far we've fallen from our former days of usefulness and relevance. Our enemies have grown strong. We've become scattered. Our gifts have become diffused and weak.”
“Tell me,” asked Abby, “how do these gifts transmit themselves? What are their means of traveling from one believer to another?”
Motumbe shook her head. “That is one of the great remaining mysteries. Here, all we know is that only women receive the Sight, and that all harbor this ancient strain of the faith.”
Abby fell silent for a moment, thinking intensely. Then her face brightened. “You know, there is so much talk about sisterhood among you all. And such a spirit of family. I haven't felt part of such a tight-knit family since before my mother . . . well, since before she left my family.”
“What are you trying to say?” asked Sister Okoye.
“I was just thinking back to my trip to heaven. About being greeted at the gate by a group of Iya Agba instead of family. But maybe it wasn't
instead
. Maybe they were family.”
“I'm not following,” said Motumbe.
“Earlier, you said the other Nigerian believers were spiritually descended from European missionaries. What if the bond from that kind of ancestry was more tangible than we imagined? What if it goes deeper than just the vocabulary we use to describe each other? After all, each of us have what we could call a âspiritual genealogy.' Isn't that true?”
“I suppose it's beyond debate,” mused Sister Okoye.
“What if the ancient strain really did carry the Iya Agba gifting into Nigeria, and your common spiritual ancestry distributed it to each of you? From your spiritual mother? Your grandmother in Christ? Your great-grandmother?”
“Like some kind of spiritual DNA . . .” said Motumbe.
“Exactly. I mean, think about it. Why is it we're so interested in our biological family trees, but most of us, at least in my country, couldn't follow their spiritual family tree more than two generations back? I know my mother led me to Christ and taught me about Him.
But I don't know who led her.”
“Maybe that's an important part of the answers you seek.”
Abby suddenly fell silent again. The very same thought had just occurred to her too.
Invisible in the midnight shadows, Dylan sat with his back to the small stone building and savored the first prolonged stillness he had allowed himself in a very long time. He closed his eyes and imagined that the chatter of nocturnal creatures and the dappled light of the moon were actually water, trickling cool and pure over his face. He then realized the sound of water was in fact emanating from somewhere around him. Sending out his awareness like a stealth probe around the building's edges, he finally located the source, peered forward and spotted it.
How odd
. The building itself must have been intentionally built on top of the small spring whose leftover flow spurted out of a small aperture with the rhythm of a heartbeat, down through a bed of ruddy grasses and reeds.
Returned to the pain-ignoring mindset of his special ops background, he leaned back on his haunches and willed himself not to move or register pain from thighs or ankles. Despite the localized burn, he found it indeed refreshing to sit and simply let his muscles remain motionless, no matter what position they occupied.
He tried to shift his mind away from the emotional disarray of the last few hours by pondering instead the tactical realities of their situation. In a small-numbers guerrilla scenario, the building and its elevated location would prove more than adequate. He had decent concealment, good sight lines, a solid half dozen firing solutions, multiple means of escape, and only one feasible direction of hostile approach.
The problem was, their enemies weren't likely to come at them in a simple patrol. He had a good idea of the resources available to Shadow Leader, and it didn't take a genius to compute the massive resources necessary for that day's raid on the Believers Gathering. In an afterthought, he glanced back at the building's roof to see if there was a chimney and any smoke rising from it.
Good
, he noted. They'd had the sense to keep things cold.
All he had at his disposal was a small blade and a revolver with four rounds remaining. In the coolness of retrospect, he inwardly kicked himself for having heeded the old woman's harangue and left so many weapons behind. Now it was clear how much he could have used a spare machine gun or two, stashed at strategic points around the perimeter. If only he'd had his old Delta Force mission pack, complete with claymore mines, grenades, booby-trap tripwires, and infrared gear. He could have made any intruder regret sneaking up on this place, that's for sure. . . .
Slowly it came back to him that all these thoughts ran completely against what Sister Okoye and the Iya Agba were all about. Now, given the indignity of being refused entrance and the old woman's high-handed description of his soul, he began to question his surrender to her fuzzy worldview. What were they supposed to do now, he wondered, sit around and pray while their killers came for them? If not for him and his allegedly excessive tactics, they'd already be cooling bodies in a clearing several miles back, victims of that first gang of thugs.