Nnedi Okorafor - Who Fears Death

I sat there with Mwita’s body, in the dust and debris, hoping something would fall on me and end my life. But nothing did. Soon all began to settle. Only the staircase remained intact. I could hear screams and shouts in the streets and buildings. All higher pitched voices. Female voices. I shuddered.

“Wake up!” some woman screamed. “Wake up!”

“Ani kill me too, o! ” another woman cried.

I thought of the female apprentice Sanchi, who’d obliterated an entire town when she conceived as a student. I thought of Aro’s reservations about training girls and women. And in my arms, I held Mwita. Dead. I wanted to throw my head back and scream with laughter. Was it the thought of our child in my belly? Maybe. The sinking shock I felt for the consequences of what I’d just done? Possibly. The clarity of mind brought by too little food and rest and too much distress? Maybe. Whatever it was, the clouds in my mind cleared to bring me to my dream about Mwita. The island.

Someone was running up the stairs.

“Onye!” Luyu shouted, leaping over a chunk of sandstone and a case of books that had fallen on Daib. “Onye, what happened? Oh praise Ani, you’re all right.”

“I know what we have to do,” I said flatly.

“What?” Luyu said.

“Find the Seer,” I said. “The one who made the prophecy about me.” I blinked as it came to me. “Rana, his name is Rana.”

Sola had spoken of Rana just before we left Jwahir. “This Seer, Rana, he is the guardian of a precious document. This must be why he was given the prophecy,” Sola had said.

From outside, women continued to scream and wail. “Then… then say good-bye and let’s go,” Luyu said, putting her hand on my shoulder. “He’s gone.”

I looked at her. Then I looked at Mwita.

“Stand up,” Luyu said. “We have to go.”

I kissed his lovely lips one last time. I looked at Daib’s naked quivering body and sneered. I had no saliva left in my mouth or I’d have spit on him. I did not kill him. I left him there, too. Mwita would have been proud of me.

You think that sand brick can’t burn hot? It can. I would never have left Mwita’s body there to be found and desecrated. Never. All things can burn, for all things must return to dust. I made the General’s building blaze bright. Was it my fault that Daib was still in there? I doubt Mwita would have been angry at me for burning down the building while Daib happened to lie helplessly inside.

General Daib’s building wouldn’t stop burning until it was ash. Still, as we stood before it, I saw a large bat laboriously fly out the blaze like a piece of charred debris. It flew a few yards, dropped several feet, caught itself and then flew on. My father was crippled but he still lived. I didn’t care. If I succeeded in what I had to do, he would be dealt with in his own time.

We walked quickly down the street as women ran amok. No one looked twice at us. We made our way toward the lake with no name.

“ I feel strange,” Luyu said. Then she ran to the edge of the river and vomited for the second time this day.

I stood with my face exposed waiting for Luyu to finish. No one cared about me. People may have heard things about a crazy Ewu woman but what was happening in the town of Durfa had usurped that. For the moment.

Every single male human in the central town of Durfa capable of impregnating a woman was dead. My actions had killed them. The armies I had seen, every single one of those men had instantly died. As we’d walked to the river, we saw male bodies in the street, heard cries from houses, walked past shocked children and women. I shuddered again, helplessly thinking about Daib… He is my father and I am his child, I thought. We both leave bodies in our wake. Fields of bodies.

“Are you finished?” I asked. My face felt hot and I too felt like I was going to vomit.

She grunted, slowly standing up. “My belly feels… I don’t know.”

“You’re pregnant,” I said.

“What?”

“So am I.”

She stared at me. “Did you…”

“I made myself conceive. Something happened because of it. Something… terrible,” I looked at my hands. “Sola said my greatest problem would be a lack of control.”

Luyu wiped her mouth with the back of her hands and touched her belly. “So… not just me, then. All the women.”

“I don’t know how far it went. I don’t think it touched the other towns. But where there are dead men, there are pregnant women.”

“W-what happened? Why are the men dead?” she asked.

I shook my head and looked at the river. It was better for her not to know. A woman screamed from nearby. I wanted to scream, too. “My Mwita,” I whispered. My eyes burned. I didn’t want to look up and see bereaved women running amok in the streets.

“He died well,” Luyu said.

“A son kills his father,” I said. But Daib isn’t dead , I thought.

“Apprentice kills his Master,” Luyu said tiredly. “Daib hated you, Mwita loved you. Mwita and Daib, one can’t thrive without the other, maybe.”

“You speak like a sorcerer,” I grumbled.

“I’ve been around enough of them,” Luyu said.

“My Mwita,” I whispered again. Then I remembered and reached into the folds of my rapa. I hoped it wasn’t there. It was. I held the tiny metal disk up. “Luyu, do you still have your portable?” Inside a building across the road, a woman screamed until her voice cracked. Luyu winced.

“Yeah,” she said. She squinted. “Where’d you get the disk?”

I stepped closer as she carefully slipped the disk in. My heart was beating so fast that I clutched my chest. Luyu frowned and held me close to her. There was a soft whirring sound as a tiny screen rose up from the bottom. Luyu flipped it over.

My mother was looking right at us as she lay in the sand. My father stabbed the silver knife into the sand beside her head. I noticed that its hilt was decorated with symbols very much like the ones etched into my hands. Ting would have known what they meant. He pulled my mother’s legs apart and then came the grunting, panting, and singing, and the snarled words between the singing. But this time I was watching a recording, not a vision from my mother. I was hearing his Nuru words outside of my mother’s perspective. I could understand.

“I’ve found you. You’re the one. Sorceress. Sorceress! ” He sang a song. “You’ll bear my son. He’ll be magnificent.” Another song. “I’ll raise him up and he will be the greatest thing this land will ever see.” He burst into song. “It is written! I’ve seen it!”

Something made of glass flew out the window of the house across the road. It crashed to the ground. The sound of a sobbing child followed. I was numb to it all; the images of my mother raped by a Nuru sorcerer scorched into my eyes and my thoughts grew dark. I thought of the pained women, children, old men around me, wailing hurting, and sobbing; they had allowed this to happen to my mother. They wouldn’t have helped her.

What would have happened if my mother had been the sorceress her father had asked her to be when Daib attacked her that day? There would have been such a battle. Instead all she had to protect her was her Alusi side.

“Enough,” Luyu finally said, snatching the portable from me.

People were filling the streets. They ran, dragged themselves, walked up and down, to the side of that road, going to places that I didn’t care about. Ghosts of their former selves, their lives changed forever. I stood there, my eyes unfocusing. My father actually prized this disk enough to keep it for twenty years .