Nnedi Okorafor - Who Fears Death

“I was half out of my mind, really,” he continued. He reached out and actually touched the leg of the dead man. I shuddered. “I’d lost the only family I knew. I’d lost my Master, terrible person though he was. I’d seen terrible things while forced to fight for the Okeke, done terrible things. I was Ewu . And I was only eleven years old.

“I had supplies. Food and water. I wasn’t starving or dying of thirst and I knew how to find food. It was the heat that drove me in here. They were both very dead but they didn’t smell…” He stepped over to the woman. “She was covered with white crablike spiders, except for her face and hands,” he continued. “They were climbing over each other but if you stared long enough, which I did, you could see that they were following a pattern around her body. I remember the fingertips of her hands were blue. Like she’d dipped them in indigo.”

He paused, again. “Even back then, I understood that the spiders were protecting her. The pattern they moved in reminded me of one of the few Nsibidi symbols Daib taught me. The symbol for ownership. I think I stood there for about twenty minutes just staring. All I could think of were my parents, whom I’d never known. They hadn’t been hung but they’d been executed… for creating me. As I stood there, slowly, the spiders began to drop off her and move to the sides of the cave. When they’d all dropped off, they just remained there. Like they were waiting for me to do something.

“I tried everything. I tried to yank the bodies down. I tried to cut the rope. I tried burning it. Burning their bodies by making a huge fire under them. I even tried using juju. When nothing worked, I just walked past them, sat with my back to the computers and wept. After a while, the spiders… they crawled back on her. I stayed there two days pretending I didn’t see the bodies and the spiders on the woman. I got stronger, got better, and then I left.”

“What about the man?” Luyu asked. “Was there anything peculiar about him?”

Mwita shook his head, his hand still on the dusty leg of the dead man. “You don’t need to know about all that.”

Silence. I wanted to ask and I’m sure Luyu did too. Know all about what?

“So you think they were sorcerers?” she asked.

He nodded. “And their killers obviously were, too” He paused, frowning. “Now they are just bones.” He suddenly grabbed the man’s leg and gave a great yank. The rope groaned and dust puffed from the corpse, but that was it. The near-skeleton stayed intact. I wondered where the woman’s spiders had gone.

A blanket of doom, sadness and despair settled on me that night, getting heavier the more the rain and lightning soaked and blasted the land. Luyu chose a spot on the other side of the cave as far from the bodies and the computers as possible. Mwita had built her a small rock fire. I wasn’t sure if she wanted privacy or she wanted to give us privacy, but it worked either way.

Mwita and I lay on our mat underneath his rapa, our clothes folded beside us. The rock fire provided more than enough warmth but it wasn’t warmth or intercourse that I needed. For once, I didn’t mind how tightly he grasped me as he slept. I didn’t like being in that cave. I could hear the heavy spatter of rain outside, the boom of thunder, the creaking of the bodies as they swung in the storm’s wind.

Both Mwita and Luyu slept, despite it all. We were all exhausted. I didn’t sleep a wink, though I had my eyes closed. Even with Mwita’s and the large rock fire’s warmth, I shivered. The facts flew about my mind like bats: There was no way that I could take down my father. I was going to get the three of us killed. He was waiting for me, I thought, remembering his turned back when I went after him.

“Onyesonwu,” I heard Mwita say.

I didn’t feel like responding. I didn’t want to open my mouth or my eyes. I didn’t want to breathe air or speak. I just wanted to wallow in my misery.

“Onyesonwu,” he softly repeated, his arm tightening. “Open your eyes. But don’t move.”

His words sent a shock of adrenaline through me. My mind focused. My body stopped shivering. I opened my eyes. Maybe it was my misery or a need to prove myself but when I looked into the many eyes of the hundreds of white spiders crowded before me, along with a deep fear, I felt… ready. One of the spiders in front slowly raised a leg and kept it there.

“So they are still here,” I said, not moving.

We were both quiet, seeming to read each other’s minds. We were listening to see if Luyu was awake. But the storm was too noisy.

“They’re all over me,” he said, his voice wavered just a little. “My back, legs, back of my neck…” Every part of him that was not touching me.

“Mwita,” I said softly. “What was it about the man that you didn’t tell us?”

He didn’t answer immediately. I started to feel very very afraid. “He was covered with spider bites,” Mwita said. “His face was twisted with pain.” I wondered if they had started biting the man before the man’s murderers had strung him up.

My cheek was pressed to the mat. The spider still had its leg raised. A thousand things flew through my mind. I suspected that they wanted Mwita. I would never let them have him. The spider with its leg up was waiting. Well, I was waiting, too.

It brought its leg down. I felt them behind me, rushing over Mwita. I saw them coming at me from the front. I could smell them, a fermented odor, like strong palm wine. Even with the storm’s noise, I could clearly hear the tap of their many legs. Since when did spider legs on sand sound so loud? Like metal clacking on metal? That was all I needed to know. For the first time, I used my new control of my abilities and pulled the wilderness around me and leaped up.

In the wilderness and the physical world, they looked like spiders, but in the wilderness they were much larger and made of white smoke. They passed through each other as they tried to crowd my blue form. I did to them what I did to Aro the day that he refused to teach me one too many times. I scratched, ripped, shredded, dismembered. I became a beast. I tore those creatures apart.

I slammed a foot back in the physical world, crushing a bunch of fleeing spiders, and caught Mwita’s wide eyes. He was still on the mat, naked and covered with defiant white spiders. Around him, hundreds of spider corpses littered the cave floor. If even one bit him, I would seek out and kill every single one of these creatures and then hunt them down in the spirit world and destroy them again. Every single one.

I glanced in Luyu’s direction. She was standing up, on the other side of her fire. I shook my head, she nodded. Good. Outside, lightning flashed. My state of mind was so sharp now. I was not the Onyesonwu you sit here speaking with. I cannot imagine what I must have looked like in the fire light, stark naked, angry, wild, the one I loved, threatened. They think I’d let them take Mwita rather than risking Mwita’s death , I thought. I grinned evilly.

Lightning flashed again, the thunder came a second later. It rained harder. The smell of ozone was strong. You could feel the charge in the air. I waited, I willed it, as I repeated my name in my mind like a mantra. The lightning crashed down right outside the cave with a great BOOM! A blast of flame pounded the ground. I leaped at Mwita, grabbed his leg, and pulled up what the storm threw down. I sent it into Mwita. Every spider on him popped like a palm kernel in a fire. The smell of burning feathers filled the cave.

The spiders that lived skittered into the flame at the entrance of the cave. I will never know if this was a mass suicide or a decision to return to whence they came. I had retreated from the wilderness entirely the moment that lightning struck, so I did not see if they’d returned there.