Who Fears Death (16 page)

Mwita met me at the cactus gate. Before I could speak, he gathered me into his arms. “Welcome,” he said. He hugged me until I relaxed and hugged him back.

“See,” a voice said from behind us. We jumped away from each other. Aro stood behind the cactus gate, his arms crossed over his chest. He wore a long black caftan made of a light material. It fluttered around his bare feet in the cool morning breeze. “This is why you can’t live here.”

“I’m sorry,” Mwita said.

“Sorry for what? You’re a man and this woman is yours.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, looking at my feet, knowing that this was what he expected.

“You should be,” he said. “Once we start, you’re to keep him off of you. If you became pregnant while still learning, you could get us all killed.”

“Yes,
Oga
,” I said.

“You endure pain well, I gather,” Aro said.

I nodded.

“That at least is good,” he said. “Come through the gate.”

As I passed through, one of the cactuses scratched my leg. I hissed with annoyance, jumping away. Aro chuckled. Mwita passed through behind me untouched. He headed for his hut. I followed Aro to his. Inside were a chair and a raffia sleeping mat. Other than a small scratched up calculator wordpad and a lizard on the wall, that was all there was. We walked through the back door to where the desert opened before us.

“Sit,” he said, motioning to the raffia mats on the ground. He did the same.

We sat there looking at each other for a moment.

“You have tiger eyes,” he said. “And those have been extinct for decades.”

“You have old man’s eyes,” I said. “And old men don’t have very long to live.”

“I
am
old,” he said, getting up. He went into his hut and returned with a cactus thorn between his teeth. He sat back down. Then he utterly shocked me.

“Onyesonwu, I’m sorry.”

I blinked.

“I have been arrogant. I have been insecure. I have been a fool.”

I said nothing. I wholly agreed.

“I was shocked that I was given a girl, a woman,” he said. “But you’ll be tall, so there is that. What do you know of the Great Mystic Points?”

“Nothing,
Oga
,” I said. “Mwita couldn’t tell me much because . . .
you
wouldn’t teach him.” I couldn’t keep the anger from my voice. If he was admitting mistakes, I wanted him to admit all of them
.
Men like Aro will only admit wrongs once.

“I wouldn’t teach Mwita because he didn’t pass initiation,” Aro said firmly. “Yes, he’s
Ewu
and I was put off by that. You
Ewu
come to this world with soiled souls.”

“No!” I said, pointing my finger in his face. “You can say that about me, but you can’t say it about him. Didn’t you bother to ask him about his life? His story?”

“Lower your finger, child,” Aro said, his body going straight and stiff. “You’re undisciplined, that’s apparent. Do you want to learn discipline today? I can teach it well.”

With effort, I calmed myself.

“I know his story,” Aro said.

“Then you know he was made from love.”

Aro’s nostrils flared. “Regardless, I saw past his . . . mixed blood. I let him attempt initiation. You ask him what happened. All I will say is that, like all the others, he failed.”

“Mwita said you wouldn’t allow him to go through the initiation,” I said.

“He lied,” Aro said. “Ask him.”

“I will,” I said.

“There are few true sorcerers in these lands,” he said. “And it’s not by their choice that they become so. That’s why we are plagued by death, pain, and rage. First, there is great grief, then someone who loves us demands that we become who we must become. Your mother most likely was the one who set you on this path. There is much to her,
sha.
” He paused, seeming to consider this. “She must have demanded it the day you were conceived. Her demands obviously trumped your birth father’s. If you had been a boy, he’d have had an ally instead of an enemy.

“The Great Mystic Points are a means to an end. Each sorcerer has his own end. But I can’t teach you unless you pass initiation. Tomorrow. No child who’s come to me has passed. They return home beaten, broken, ailing, sick.”

“What happens during . . . initiation?” I asked.

“Your very being is tested. To learn the Points, you have to be the right person, that’s all I can tell you. Have you thrown that diamond away?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been cut,” he said. “That may be a problem. But it can’t be helped now.” He got up. “After the sun sets, no eating or drinking anything but water. Your monthly cycle is in two days. That may be a problem.”

“How do you know when my . . . when it is?”

He only laughed. “It can’t be helped. Tonight, before you sleep, meditate for an hour. Don’t talk to your mother after sunset. But you may talk to Fadil, your father. Come here at five a.m. Make sure you bathe well and wear dark clothing.”

I stared at him. How was I going to remember all those instructions?

“Go talk to Mwita. He’ll repeat my directions if you need to hear them again.”

 

I smelled burning sage as I approached Mwita’s hut. He was sitting quietly on a wide mat meditating, his back to me. I stood in the doorway and looked around. So this was where he lived. Woven items hung on the walls and were piled around his hut. Baskets, mats, platters, and even a half-done wicker chair.

“Sit down,” he said, without turning around.

I sat on the mat next to him, facing the hut’s entrance.

“You never told me that you could weave,” I said.

“Not important,” he said.

“I would have liked to learn,” I said.

He pulled his knees to his chest but said nothing.

“You haven’t told me everything,” I said.

“Do you expect me to?”

“When it’s important.”

“Important to whom?”

Mwita got up, stretched and leaned himself on the wall. “Have you eaten?”

“No.”

“It’s best if you eat heavily before the sun sets.”

“What do you know about this initiation?”

“Why would I tell you about the greatest failure of my life?”

“That’s not fair,” I said, standing up. “I’m not asking you to humiliate yourself. Telling me what you went through was crucial.”

“Why?” he said. “What good would it have done you?”

“It doesn’t matter! You
lied
to me. There should be no secrets between us.”

As he looked at me, I knew that Mwita was running through our relationship. He was searching for a truth or secret he could demand of me. He must have realized that I held nothing from him for he next said, “It’ll only scare you.”

I shook my head. “I’m more afraid of what I don’t know.”

“Fine. I almost died. I did . . . no, almost. The closer you come to completing the initiation, the closer you come to death. To be initiated is to die. I came . . . very close.”

“What ha. . . .”

“It’s different for everyone,” he said. “There’s pain, horror—absolute. I don’t know why Aro even allows any of these local boys to try. That’s his malicious side.”

“When did you . . .”

“Not long after I came here,” he said. He took a deep breath, looked hard at me and then shook his head. “No.”

“Why? I’m to do this tomorrow, I want to know!”

“No,” was all he said and that was the end of it. Mwita could walk through the palm tree farms in the dead of night. He’d done this several times after spending hours with me. Once when we were sitting in my mother’s garden, a tarantula crept near my leg. He crushed it with his bare hand. But now, at the mention of his failed initiation, he looked utterly terrified.

Before I went home, Mwita reviewed my initiation requirements with me. I grew annoyed and asked him to write them down instead.

 

I knelt down beside my mother. She was in the garden, churning the soil around the plants with her hands. “How was it?” she asked.

“As much as I can expect from that crazy man,” I said.

“You and Aro are too much alike.” my mother said. She paused for a moment. “I talked to Nana the Wise today. She spoke of an initiation . . .” she trailed off as she searched my face. She saw what she needed to see. “When?”

“Tomorrow morning.” I brought out the list. “There are all these things I have to do to prepare.”

She read it and then said, “I’ll make you a large early dinner. Chicken curry and cactus candy?”

I smiled broadly.

I took a long hot bath and for a while I was calm. But as the night wore on, my fear of the unknown returned. By midnight, the delicious meal I’d eaten was gurgling uneasily in my belly.
If I die during the initiation, Mama will be alone,
I thought.
Poor Mama.

I didn’t sleep. But for the first time since I was eleven years old, I wasn’t afraid of seeing the red eye. The cocks started crowing around three a.m. I bathed again and dressed in a long maroon dress. I wasn’t hungry and I felt a dull throb in my abdomen, both sure signs that my monthly was near. I didn’t wake my mother before I left. She was probably already awake.

“PAPA, PLEASE GUIDE ME,” I said as I walked. “Because I need guidance.”

To be honest, I didn’t think he was there. I had always believed that when people died, their spirits stayed close or sometimes came to visit. I still believed this, for it was this way with Papa’s first wife, Njeri. I felt her often in the house. But I didn’t feel Papa around me now. Only the cool breeze and the sounds of the crickets were with me.

Mwita and Aro were waiting for me in the back of Aro’s hut. Aro handed me a cup of tea to drink. It was lukewarm and tasted like flowers. After drinking it, the mild crampiness that I’d been feeling disappeared.

“What happens now?” I asked.

“Walk into the desert,” Aro said, wrapping his brown garments around him.

I turned to Mwita. “All that matters to you is what is ahead,” Aro said.

“Go, Onyesonwu,” Mwita mumbled.

Aro pushed me toward the desert. For the first time in my life, I was reluctant to go into it. The sun was just coming up. I started walking. Minutes passed. I began to hear my heart beat in my ears.
Something in the tea,
I thought.
A shaman’s brew, maybe
. Whenever the breeze blew, I could distinctly hear sand grains clacking over each other. I clapped my hands over my ears. I kept walking. The breeze picked up, becoming a sand and dust filled wind.

“What is this?” I screamed, working to maintain my footing.

The sun was quickly blotted out. My mother and I had lived through three big sandstorms while we were nomads. We’d dug a hole and lain in it, using the tent to protect us. We were lucky not to be blown away or buried alive. Now here I was in such a storm with nothing between it and myself but my dress.

I decided to return to Aro’s hut. But I couldn’t see anything behind me. I shielded my face with my arm as I looked around. The whipping sand was drawing blood. Soon my eyelids were encrusted with sand, granules paining my eyes. I spit sand out only for more to fill my mouth.

Suddenly, the wind changed, moving behind me. It blew me toward a small orange light. When I got closer, I saw that it was a tent made of sheer blue material. There was a small fire burning inside.

“A fire in the middle of a sandstorm!” I shouted, laughing hysterically. My face and arms stung and my legs shook as I tried not to let the wind take me away.

I threw myself inside and was slapped with silence. Not even the tent’s walls shuddered from the wind. Nothing held the tent down. The bottom of the tent was sand. I rolled to my side coughing. Through my stinging watery eyes, I saw the whitest man I’d ever seen. He wore a heavy black cloak with a hood that dropped over the top half of his face. But the bottom half I saw plainly. His wrinkly skin was white like milk.

“Onyesonwu,” the man in black said very suddenly.

I jumped. There was something repulsive about him. I half expected him to scamper around the fire toward me with the speed and agility of a spider. But he remained seated, his long legs stretched before him. His sharp nails were grooved and yellow. He leaned back on one elbow. “Is that your name?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You’re the one Aro sends,” he said, his wet pink flat lips bending into a smirk.

“Yes.”

“Who sent you?”

“Aro.”

“What are you then?”

“Excuse me?”

“What are you?”

“Human,” I said.

“Is that all?”

“Eshu also.”

“So are you human then?”

“Yes.”

He reached into his robes and brought out a small blue jar. He shook it and set it down. “Aro calls me here and a female sits before me,” he said. He flared his nostrils. “One who will bleed soon. Very very soon. This place is sacred, you know.” He looked at me as if waiting for an answer. I was relieved when he picked up the container. He shook it and slammed it down. I wanted to rub my eyes they hurt so badly. He looked up at me with such anger that my heart jumped.

“You’ve been cut!” he said. “You can’t climax! Who allowed this to happen?”

I stammered, “It was a . . . I wanted to please my. . . .I didn’t. . . .”

“Shut up,” he said. He paused and when he spoke his voice was cooler. “Maybe that can be helped,” he said more to himself. He mumbled something and then said, “You may die today. I hope you’re prepared. They won’t find your body.”

I thought of my mother and then pushed her image out of my mind.

The man in black threw the container’s contents—bones. Tiny, fine bones, maybe from a lizard or some other small beast. They were bleached white and dry, several crumbling at the tips, revealing ancient porous marrow. They flew from the container and landed as if they would never move again. As if they were sure. My eyes felt heavy as I looked at the scattered bones. My eyes were drawn to them. He stared for a long time. Then he looked at me, his mouth a surprised O. I wished I could see his eyes. Then he masked his face with a more controlled look.