Who Fears Death (50 page)

She leaned her head back against the wall and closed her eyes in the sunshine. The world became red. They were coming. Any moment now. She knew. She’d seen it. Years ago, she’d seen it.

Someone grabbed her with such roughness that she grunted. Her eyes flew open, bitter rage flooding her body and spirit. Bright red in the hot sunshine. She’d cured everything, yet in doing so her friends had died, her Mwita . . . oh, her beloved Mwita, her life, her death. The fury filled her. She could hear her daughter raging, too. Her daughter had the roar of a lion.

Six thick-armed young men crowded her cell to take her. Three of them had machetes. Maybe the other three were so arrogant that they didn’t think they’d need weapons to handle her. Maybe they all thought the evil sorceress named Onyesonwu was resigned to her fate. She could understand why they’d made this mistake. She understood well.

Nevertheless, what could any of them do as a strange force shoved them all back? Three of them fell out of the cell. They all sat, lay, and stood watching, slack-jawed and horrified as Onyesonwu threw off her awful dress and . . . changed. She shifted, sprouted, enveloped, stretched, and grew her body. Onyesonwu was expert. She was Eshu. She became a
Kponyungo
, a firespitter.

FOOOOOM!
She blasted out a ball of flames so intense that the sand around her melted to glass. The three remaining men in her cell were painfully scorched raw as if they’d been lying in the desert sun for days waiting to die. Then she blew into the sky like a shooting star ready to return home.

No, she was
not
a sacrifice to be made for the good of men and women, Okeke and Nuru alike. She was Onyesonwu. She had rewritten the Great Book. All was done. And she could never ever let her baby, the one part of Mwita that still lived, die.
Ifunanya
. He’d spoken those ancient mystical words to her, words that were truer and purer than love. What they shared was enough to shift fate.

She thought of the Palm Wine Drunkard in the Great Book. All he lived for was to drink his sweet frothy palm wine. When one day his expert palm wine tapper fell from a tree and died, he was distraught. But then he realized if his tapper was dead and gone, then he must be somewhere else. And so the Drunkard’s quest began.

Onyesonwu considered this as she thought about her Mwita. Suddenly, she knew where she would find him. He would be in a place that was so full of life that death would flee it . . . for a while. The green place her mother had shown her. Beyond the desert, where the land was blanketed with leafy trees, bushes, plants, and the creatures that lived in them. He would be waiting at the iroko tree. She almost screamed with joy as she flew faster. Can
Kponyungo
shed real tears? This one could.

But what of Binta and Luyu
, she wondered with a flicker of hope
. Would they be there, too?
Ah, but fate was cold and brittle.

The three of us, Sola, Aro, and Najeeba smiled. We (mentor, teacher, and mother) saw it all in the way that sorcerers, experienced and in training, often see things deeply connected to them. We wonder if we will ever see her again. What will she become? When she and Mwita unite, and they will, what will become of their daughter who laughed so gleefully inside Onyesonwu’s belly on the way to the green place?

If Onyesonwu had taken one last look below, to the south, with her keen
Kponyungo
eyes she’d have seen Nuru, Okeke, and two
Ewu
children in school uniforms playing in a schoolyard. To the east, stretching into the distance, she’d have seen black paved roads populated by men and women, Okeke and Nuru, riding scooters and carts pulled by camels. In downtown Durfa, she’d have spotted a flying woman discreetly meeting up with a flying man on the roof of the tallest building.

But the wave of change was yet to sweep by directly below. There, thousands of Nuru still waited for Onyesonwu, all of them screaming, yelling, shouting, laughing, glaring . . . waiting to wet their tongues with Onyesonwu’s blood. Let them wait
.
They will be waiting for a long long time.

To the ancestors, spirits and that place so often called “Africa.” To my father, whose passing caused me to ask, “Who fears death?” To my mother. To my daughter Anyaugo, nephew Onyedika, and niece Obioma for cheering me up when I was writing the parts of this novel that got me down. To my siblings (Ife, Ngozi, and Emezie) for their constant support. To my extended family, always my foundation. To Pat Rothfuss for reading and critiquing
Who Fears Death
in its infancy back in 2004. To Jennifer Stevenson for having nightmares spawned from this novel. To my agent Don Maass for his vision and guidance. To my editor Betsy Wollheim for thinking, seeing and being outside the box. To David Anthony Durham, Amaka Mbanugo, Tara Krubsack, and professor Gene Wildman for their excellent feedback along the way. And to the 2004 AP news story by Emily Wax titled, “We want to make a light baby.” This article about weaponized rape in the Sudan created the passageway through which Onyesonwu slipped into my world.