ÙLÌ

City

    The City is the place the four men come from clad in scarlet turbans and flowing robes that tremble in the evening breeze. The glow of the golden sunset, ruddy upon their tan skin, makes it difficult to tell if they are truly our tribesmen, but Mama is sure they come from the City. She does not need to stare too long—like me, at the four cowries strung on to chords around their thick necks, or the Igbo hieroglyphics woven along the hem of their akwete fabrics.

   "They are noblemen," she says after they've left.

   Mama knows things. She may not be oddly gifted with the knowledge of damp stones like me, but she has travelled throughout the entire East-West provinces and beyond the southern forests. She sells damp stones to our tribes' people, foreigners, Yoruba healers, merchants from Kumasi—sometimes to Congolese artisans in the City who now use them to make more durable aero shuttles. She speaks and understands all five provincial languages; indeed, she can easily tell.

    Mama does not sit with us at the table tonight, her portion of the oil-bean and breadfruit porridge sits atop the extreme left flank of the dinner table beside Papa and grows cold. She is out alone in the patio sitting by a dying fire with a chaplet rung around her wrist, and her lips trembling in fervent prayers, most probably to the Son. She hardly says prayers in the open that way, and she knows she is not meant to—it's in the Decrees. Papa does not speak to her until morning, while she walks him off to his car as he leaves for an important ceremony at Square.

   Having closely watched her since the visit of the men from the City, I curiously follow her and though I cannot fully grasp the frenetic native dialect she uses only when addressing Papa or our neighbour Ure, I see her facial features go taut as she frequently repeats phrases with familiar words, egwu, and onwu—fear and death.

A firm chill slithers down my belly, the ground stirs under my feet. Were these men desert warriors from the northern uplands? I had grown up imagining these warriors as the most dreadful people on earth, aside from the demons Mama tells me about who torment dishonest children in Hell. Desert warriors were the reason Papa lost his big job at City—if not, who knows, we would have lived in the City, in the powerful capital of the most revered province among the three provinces: the East, the West, and the North, famous for fremd technological advancements, where you didn't have to work so hard until your palms hurt because there were xenobots and heavy-duty starpluckers to do house chores; there were more bright yellow aerowagons than land vehicles; there were biracial kids from families that settled from across the Great Seas after the Second Civil War and 2050 Reform—kids that have light velvety skin, less kinky hair, and coloured eyes (how I dreamt of making friends with them).

    Our tribespeople always debated how surprising it was for everyone that the East could survive the scourge of the Second Civil War whose tremor and fatality spread like cancer from the tip of the coastlines to the very edge of the Sahara, tearing what used to be a continental giant into risible shreds. She alone could, perhaps a bit too gracefully, emerge from the debris with the verve of a young butterfly trying out its newly discovered wings after breaking free from its cocoon. Some say that the East, right from the onset, had been ready for doomsday—the war, the inevitable fragmentation—just everything, but why not? After living through the darkness of the late sixties and having learnt many painful lessons, why wouldn't she be the most resilient, the most likely to survive? Now the economies of the surrounding regions heavily rely on her for their reinvigoration, and for special lessons on her secret dance, the dance of a phoenix.

    Papa said he had worked as a bio-engineer in the City during the first wave of the warriors' invasion. He described them as vicious and impudent. These militants trampled over provinces, defiled regional decrees, and pressed down south towards the tribes of the Niger-Delta—but he devised a solution under the compulsion of the Great Chief of City, and managed to clone fierce warriors of Abam descent that could combat even a lion without weapons. Of course, there was no need to involve the provincial military, the population was still recuperating. Perhaps Papa's solution then was not as brilliant as he had imagined. Perhaps they were all guilty of expecting too much from their lab-made warriors. Perhaps cloned organisms in general were not reliable because they were never humans. They never knew how it felt to lose something or someone. They felt nothing at all. This made them a bit too brutal. The havoc they wreaked on the City even before the desert warriors arrived like enraged termites was enormous. The city would then suffer violent attacks from the clones several moons later.

   It would take strict stay-at-home orders, curfews, and recruitment of military starpluckers to control these cloned Abam warriors. The Great Chief would get furious and ban Papa from practising in the East, sending him out of the City to be in the homelands.

Gecko

   Papa is a Gecko whose back never touches the ground. An Agu-ulo in the ancient dialect—which means, 'household tiger'. He prowls about—limpingly, within the thresholds of our homestead most days, either listening to podcasts on his wireless silver slates or mumbling about how tasteless Mama's meals have become in recent days and how loud she prays at night. His glory mounts the entire house, like a wild beast in the savannahs of the northern province. Like Eloka, my elder brother, he is short and hairy—but rather slim and with an albino complexion.

    After he was exiled from the City, he married Mama here in the suburbs of the eastern province, and they both had Eloka, myself, and then another girl who died from cold as an infant. He taught me the nsibidi; he would make me sit on a carved chair behind the house and read the glowing characters he scribbled on an eco screen. If I made mistakes in my vowel sounds, he would shove me into an ice bath—letting me quiver in the painful chill for scores of minutes until Mama prostrated at his feet pleading in tears.

   “Child, how is it that you have become overly stubborn?" His eyes would glimmer as he lamented, “Can't you see Eloka your elder brother has become perfect in the native dialects and can write very legible nsibidi?"

    "Please, don't be hard on the girl," Mama’s raspy voice would calmly interject.

    “Oh, can you stop being silly! As a girl from a middle-class family, being as dark-skinned as she is, she needs qualities that would make her stand out—she does!"

    Mama had always cowered like an insect around Papa. When I was younger, she warned me against going into his room. There was hardly a thing that even encouraged anyone to venture into the small dark room, especially the grim-looking carvings that hung from its walls. Their eyes, hollow and slant, sit in the depth of their elegant faces, and their lips purse as if frozen in the task of making forbidden utterances—one once stirred and called my name in my dream. Fortunately enough, today, with the help of Papa's lectures, I know the story behind almost all of them. I am aware that the polished wooden carving that stands a couple of feet away from his bedside table is an Ikenga, the others are just similar alusis charged with special duties I might not fully comprehend, at least for now.

    Papa used to be devout like Mama before praying to the Son became abolished, but Mama would neither dispose of the books nor the beads and because of that, Papa steals the chance to hit her whenever he sees them lying about in the Obi. He claims he is avoiding the problem of the local police, or anything that would further worsen his reputation.

    One day, Mama dreamt of the Son descending from the sky. She was so disturbed in the morning that she prompted Eloka and me to go without food until sunset. She called it fasting.

     “Like—like lightning, he stood in the firmaments calling on the faithful from all the earth,” she muttered as she went about her chores.

     Papa, on returning from one of his occasional trips to his lab in the western province, got so furious that he pulled her by her hair into our front yard and kept hitting her with an umbrella until she bled and crawled aimlessly on the lawn.

   As I watched from the door, I thought that our Mama would die. She cried "Please… Please" until her voice became painfully inaudible. I thought the blood dripping from her bruised lips and nostrils would continue until life completely drained from her frail frame—but suddenly the fear that throbbed in my gut and held me rooted to a spot as I watched waned, letting me dash out of the verandah to hold my Mama, whilst—unknowingly clenching at a piece of damp stone I had been playing with. I still find it hard to believe that the little push I gave Papa had twisted his limbs, and torn his abdomen open, rendering him bedridden for the next eight moons.

    Papa did not tell the umunna the true cause of the injury when they visited. He told them he was in a fatal accident with his wife—laboratory accident; chemical spill, broken glassware—nonsense. Of course, he did not want to tell them what Mama did, he knew what he would be risking if he did. It was not like the time he handed Eloka over to the local police to torture for getting a Fulani maidservant pregnant—a girl who even had to lie that he wasn't responsible, to save Eloka from the brutal hands of the local police.

    I didn't know yet what exactly those stones were. Before then, they were just any other pebble you could pick from the dirt roads or anywhere along the banks of the Otammiri River. Before then, they were mere damp stones.

Damp stones

    During thunderstorms, brown pebbles burst out from lightning bolts to litter streets and compounds. This happens only on this side of the province—dusky brownstones with luminous amber markings falling from the sky. No one ever cared to know what they were either. Papa took two pieces to the Wazobia Conference after the incident. The Board for New Age Science, after its research, concluded it was just another new-age mineral—another amorphous allotrope of Vibranium. But Papa knew, just as well as Mama and perhaps anyone who was at home on the day of the incident, that the stones were more than just minerals.

     As days speedily pirouetted by, as moons went from looking like pale thin hooks to large white saucers, and as the weather became less damp and colder, facts would finally bare themselves open to our eyes.

    The harmattan nights would come when the air becomes dry and crisp with dust when I start seeing strangers in my room at night, mostly tribes people—some vengeful-looking and pale—some peaceful and calm, speaking to me in hushed tones. Mama would dab my burning head with a moist towel, and whisper words of prayer. Papa would spend days in his room, hardly touching his food, rattling around with his wooden companions, until he became sure that the damp stones Mama left by my door were the true culprits. He would take the stones to the barn and strictly warn me against tightly clenching my hands over them.

    The souls locked in them may be dangerous enough to kill: he said with his eyes moist, perhaps realising for the first time that his influence and strength as a gecko, a terror to household insects, was surmountable after all and that Mama would start making a lot of money for herself by selling these damp stones when their use became known and the demand among our local engineers and designers, who made fireproof land vehicles with them, grew.

Vulgar Child

    The day I was born, our neighbour's cats died. Six of them were all stretched out in the centre of the miry street and dried stiff like rats killed with kill-and-dry poison. Mama said all the while before my birth she suspected the cats were humans. She was certain that the cats were the reason for the many stillbirths she had suffered before I was eventually born.

    “Those demonic things always camped and meowed by my window netting only when I was at the peak of my labour,” she said.

     Maybe that would explain why Ure ignored my greeting anytime she came over to pluck Mama's bitter leaves. Once while I played paper ball with Eloka in our yard I kicked it so hard that it bounced over the fence into one of the medicine pots she leaves open in her compound. She swore and called me a vulgar child.

     I am a vulgar child. I knew this long before the grumpy medicine woman knew to rebuke me. There had never been a time I was comfortable with whatever the rules were or should be. At barely one year, I would complain about how terrible the pap Mama fed me tasted. I would refuse to leave the obi, as a toddler, whenever the umunna were holding their meetings there. I would laugh at their jokes and cut in with my questions on why they could easily chew the alligator peppers like they were candies.

      Nnemdi was the name Papa wanted to call me because I had the same large birthmark his mother had on my neck but Mama insisted on Uli. His mother had died fighting as a military commander in the war, a position seriously eyed by powerful men of her time. Against the wish of her superiors, she established divisions consisting of just women—women just as zealous, temerarious, and open-eyed as she was, to fight along with her in the army. I won't say that the urge to overstep bounds intoxicated my senses with the strength of alcohol. But I cannot at the same time say that I don't have traces of her either.

Before the incident with the damp stone, I found it strange that I could tell exactly when it would rain, even as early as a week prior. Mama had taken to teasing me, and asking me whether or not it would rain any day she would go to the market so she wouldn't bother going with an umbrella. I had been keeping a collection of damp stones from the thunderstorms under my pillow, and after the incident, I would pester Mama with these questions:

“Do you think the Father is giving back the souls to be of use to us on earth?”

“How do the vengeful ones manage to be reincarnated in the stones when they're not meant to?” (In eastern folklore, people who died painfully don't get reincarnated)

“Why can't we search for my sister who died as an infant?”

    These were questions no one could answer; including the pale forms that leap out from the stones when I slowly rub them with my thumbs to gaze at me with eyes awash with cluelessness—men, women, infants, old, and young.

    If Mama makes an attempt, it's always the same: “It's appointed unto man to die once and after that follows judgement.”

Death

    Death is like a snuff bottle, and like the classical nga, it confines a soul only for a limited time. Death is an insatiably obese python. It takes up its victim into its unpacifiable belly now and regurgitates it later. A popular belief here in the East holds death as a door that leads to another life, like a semi-infinite loop that opens to the dawn of fresh starts which may as well stretch from one to two or three or even eight cycles. Mama says the only person she knows who defied it once was the Son.

     Days after the noblemen from the City came, as Mama braids my hair into tight cornrows under the rustling shed of a kola nut tree not far from our house, she tells me that the daughter of the Great Chief had died and that they needed me in the City, to use my knowledge of the damp stone to transport her soul into a new container—a clone, and indeed the clone won't be like Papa's destructive clone. She would still have her non-physical substance, her emotions, and her sentience intact. Who would have told the Great Chief about the stones if not Papa? It appeared Papa found a way to crawl back into the City after all. The thought of it seems to perpetuate the furrows inhabiting Mama's face.

     She says: “I don't want you to go. I never wanted you involved in any of these dark things your Papa does, for the book says, "But the cowardly, unbelieving, abominable, murderers, sexually immoral, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars shall have their part in the lake which burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.'"

    I cringe at the mention of a second death which I know nothing about. Still, I can't help but feel a bit of pride visualising the hope that has been found in my ability to unlock the damp stones. We could bring back my sister who died from a cold if we wanted, and also do good for other people. No one would painfully have to wait for their loved one to pass another cycle of reincarnation. But I know that Mama would not listen if I tell her, and the Son certainly would not want me to do it.

    I have longed to be in the City and daydreamed of how enthralling its ambiance would be; the brightly dressed City guards patrolling with their laser spears, nwa-aka-nshi dwarfs going about their royal duties, the noble ladies dressed in gossamery-looking waxes—their elegant necks adorned with kalari beads, and the forest houses that light up like colourful torches at night. I wish to meet a prince there, like in native folktales, someone tall, biracial with a pointy nose and tousled hair that falls over his face.

  I don't like it here in the homelands. The fumes coming from the gigarium mines smell like vomit, malnourished-looking street kids play by the mud lanes leading to the Otammiri river by daybreak and go into people's kitchens at night to snatch for themselves any pot of food they find, and incessant cholera outbreaks linger through moons until the Great Chief feels like sending a couple of Yoruba healers and a wagon full of supplies.

    At seventeen, I still don't enjoy sitting in front of Papa's eco screens learning advanced systems of calculation. Nor do I see much need for the nsibidi, and Mama's ten commandment recitations. The urge to leave my homeland and finally be separated from my simple-minded and unambitious peers ravages me the way harmattan thirstiness does. I want to glimpse the world lying beyond the eastward hills which stretch far beyond what I see as a hazy horizon when I climb the kola nut tree with Eloka. But I know deep down that the only possible means of doing this is by going to the City, which would also mean bringing back the Great Chief's daughter. As this dream flourishes and warms my belly, I see no single sign indicating that it will wither and die off anytime soon.

Love

    One of Mama's favourite quotes from the book goes, For the Father so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life. I see that strange kind of love, resonate in the way Papa holds me in a warm embrace. His coarse stubble scrapes my temple as he plants a kiss on my face. He is eager and willing to make up for his past mistakes to the Great Chief, with his gifted daughter who can harness the strength of the damp stones, unlock the trapped soul in them, and send it into a new body. I am going to become a highly respected woman in the province as he desires, even without mastering the native dialects. Who would have imagined?

    The noblemen from the City and the royal caravan wait patiently at the gate. Eloka hurriedly moves my luggage from my room to the caravan. Mama stands in the veranda, clinging to the cashmere scarf that haloes her smooth black face, to prevent it from falling off—our hug is courteous and brief. Papa walks me to the caravan, mumbling words of prayer to his chi—bidding Eke, Orie, Afor, and Nkwo to see to my safety. He stands by the kola nut tree, as I clamber into the luxurious caravan. He remains there even as the engines stir alive and the caravan ascends. He simply holds a palm over his nose to prevent himself from inhaling the dust raised by the propellers. From the window I see Mama waving at me. She is wiping her cheeks with her scarf. I stand for long, watching our homestead roll away from sight, and the Otammiri River creeping peacefully below. Gradually a lump rises from my belly and settles in my chest.

 Someone pats my shoulder and tells me with a calm voice to have a seat, to avoid getting sick. It is a boy, an attendant perhaps, sitting away from the noblemen. His startling blue eyes fix me for a moment. He doesn't look like a prince to me nor does his skin have the lightness I painted my imaginary prince with. He is as black as a kitchen hearth, like me, yet my stomach begins to bubble shamelessly with delightful sensations. I sit on the edge of a couch folded in jioji fabrics by one of the windows, where I can see the floating layers of clouds and the expanse of the province below.

   “I be Igbonacho,” he says, reaching out a strong post-pubescent hand for a handshake.

   I will ignore his hands for fear of quivering like a leaf in his hold, but say, “Uli, daughter of Agbaego.”

  I will then pretend I am not listening to his ramblings in a pidgin doused in riverine accent about the beautiful climate of the City, the harmattan that leaves no dust on roofs, the rain that tastes like fine wine from ngwo—raffia palm, and the net-zero carbon they have consistently maintained over three years with a newly discovered doming technology. I will pretend that his pointy nose, his strong jaws, and his baritone do not make me feel uneasy, all the while as I caress the bulge of the ten damp stones in the goatskin bag slung around my neck.

  The journey, sure, would uneventfully last for a few minutes before a flood of light suddenly tears through the westward skies, and sends the caravan jolting—the drivers would yell instructions and coordinates back at each other.

   I would think of the coming of the Son, and imagine Mama disappearing and leaving behind, on the floor heaped, every piece of garment she wore—all the things she told me about the coming.

   The blue-eyed boy would reach out again from the adjacent couch where he sits, but this time to squeeze my hand into his calloused palm saying, “You think say space dwellers be real? Rumours talk say them from sky send them soldiers into the Eight Great Lands of the Earth. I know say, we go fit conquer anything since we conquer those Desert warriors."

    I've heard some women who visited Mama’s maternal home talk about the humanoid space dwellers. I was sure that they were mere stories or at least I wanted them to be. That doesn’t matter now. Reaching out again to feel for the stones, I notice there are only two remaining, and the rest are missing. Somehow I am convinced that perhaps the Son has truly raptured the souls in the damp stones, but the thought doesn't bother me so much. All that matters is the fresh mundane world unfolding like a scroll before my very eyes.

      Soon one of the drivers would announce that we are just a few altitudes from the City. I would take a deep breath, secretly relieved that it is not a rapture as I had imagined, and hold on to the edge of my seat as the caravan slowly plunges downward. My heart would tingle in anticipation of unimaginable adventures that await me here, in this magical place called City.