Jackal, Jackal, page 19
Papa turned to Dele, his face a mask of disbelief. “I told you to cloak yourself, not the both of us!”
But Dele had no ear for his papa. His will, the very substance of his soul was focused on holding that bubble of light, on keeping the prowling Wise Men out and away. His drumming hand was a blur of light and shadow. His vision swam. Blood, hot and sticky, trickled out of his nose, and he heard a high keening sound in his head. He was only vaguely aware of his papa before him, on his knees, his face a mask of terror and anguish, begging, begging him to stop, to let go—
But Dele would not let go. He would hold that bubble of light for as long as he could. Even if it killed him.
The creatures screamed with rage, pressing themselves against the ball of light, and each time they touched the bubble Dele could hear them, smell them, feel them. And it took everything to keep on drumming, but he kept at it even as he tired, even as his lungs turned to air, even as the ball of light grew smaller and smaller and the Wise Men clustered around like hounds at a feast. The bubble would not hold much longer; there was only one thing to do. Dele threw himself into the rhythms and searched for the gate.
Papa must have realized what Dele was about to do, for he reached for his own drum and struck up a counter rhythm.
“No—NO!” Dele felt the power wrenched from his hands; his drumming stuttered to a stop and the bubble popped out of existence. The Wise Men swarmed forward and were caught in the webbing of his Papa’s rhythms. They froze, flies in a web, shrieking abominably. Dele was on his hands and knees, tears streaming down his cheeks, watching his Papa drum and dance, and drum and dance. His Papa caught his eyes and grinned—a wholesome grin which crinkled the corners of his eyes—and in it was everything that went unspoken, every thought and promise that mere words could not quantify.
And then they began to fade. Their very image broke in the ripples of a disturbed river, washing them away and out of this world.
It took Dele a long time to find his way out of the plantation. It took him longer still to traipse back home. With dawn came the twittering of birds and a warm, golden sun. There were no mists, there was no desiccating cold; harmattan was gone. It never should have come in the first place.
Dele met his mother and the town huntsman conversing in worried tones at the front of the house. She looked disheveled, like she hadn’t slept. When her eyes fell on him, she swept towards him, fury etched across her features.
“Where have you been, you this boy?”
Dele opened his mouth to speak, then burst into tears. The anger melted from his mother’s face and she dropped to her knees and swept him into a crushing hug.
“It’s ok, my boy,” she crooned. “You’re here, now. I was so worried. I can’t—I can’t bear to lose you too.”
And Dele held her tightly. Hadn’t he always yearned for this? For her to see him and love him? If only she knew how close he had come to being lost. And maybe she knew. She was his mother and perhaps she would always know. But now that he was here, in the safe confines of her embrace, he could handle the fact that Papa was no longer with them.
He, Dele, would be the drummer. He would keep his mother and sister protected from the malice of the Wise Men. And maybe one day, when he was old and strong enough, he would reopen the gates and fetch his father.
DEEP IN THE GARDENER’S BARROW
The trees were old, old things. They wore the mark of their years in the girth of their trunks, in the reach of their limbs, in the twist of their roots snaking across the forest floor in an ancient lattice-work. Iná could not make out the sky; the leaves choked it, obscuring it from view, so that she could scarcely tell day from night, nor count the days they had spent fleeing in the forest. And that, perhaps, was the worst of all. The loss of time; the way one day bled into the other, unmooring her from reality.
Next to her, Tofi whimpered. “I’m tired. When do we rest?”
“Soon.”
She cast back over her shoulders, half-expecting to see an ululating rider charge out of the gloom of twisted trees to strike her down at last. Kill her like they’d killed all the others. But no such rider appeared. In fact, it had been a while since she’d heard the guttural grunts of the raiders, the sound of hooves churning the forest floor as they raced after her and Tofi. She stopped. Come to think of it, it had been a while since she heard anything—
“Can we rest?” asked Tofi, “I’m tired.”
“Quiet,” she hissed.
“But—”
“Quiet!”
Iná listened. There was no sound. The chirping of birds, the hoot of owls, the croak of frogs and chirp of crickets, the whisper of the wind through the leaves, the groans of old trunks, the gurgle of a running stream—all the sounds of a forest alive was gone, leaving in its wake a cloak of silence that bore heavily down on her shoulders.
Iná felt the back of her neck prickle.
It seemed the trees had shuffled closer, which was ridiculous, because trees could not move. It seemed they were watching her, which was ridiculous, because trees had no eyes. The earth itself seemed to heave, almost as though the forest were breathing. Which was ridiculous—
“Because the earth has no lungs.” She breathed through parched lips.
“What?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. She was exhausted, nerves frayed from the pursuit and loss she’d endured. She was seeing things; her mind had come unhinged. “I think we can rest now.”
If growing things live long enough, they gain sentience.
It’s why you should prune your garden and trim your hedges,
lest they grow to hate you, and seep through your windows,
and crawl through your floorboards, to strangle you in your sleep.
Iná watched silently as Tofi slept nestled in the yawning bough of a long dead tree. He clutched their mother’s book to his chest, a shield against the world and all the evils in it, and she envied him his childish faith.
What remained of her mother in her mind were snatches of memory, the vague impression of a face, and the lingering scent of freshly turned earth after a rainfall. Iná had woken up on her seventh birthday to find her mother gone, leaving nothing of herself but a book. A book which Iná had read diligently as a child, savouring each word, threading them in her heart, knitting them into her consciousness, clinging desperately to this last piece of a mother who had abandoned them. Abandoned her.
She still remembered the heat of the fire lapping at her skin yet not burning her. She still remembered the look on her mother’s face at the sight of those flames. Iná had turned that look over and over in her mind over the years. Had it been fear? Pride? Worry? In the end it didn’t matter. She couldn’t shake the feeling that her mother had left because of her, because of her condition; fled from the daughter who burst into flames. Iná’s yearning had curdled into resentment, and resentment had bloomed into exasperation, and in a fit of rage she’d tossed the book into a river and forgotten all about it.
Such was her shock, then, when one day on returning home from scrubbing floors and washing plates and doing whatever a young woman could do to keep the hunger at bay, she found Tofi reading the book.
“Where did you get this?” she asked him.
“Mama gave me.”
“What?”
“Mama gave me.”
She grabbed him. “Where? When?”
“By the river where me and Ojo were—”
But Iná was already hustling him out of the house, ears ringing, heart thrashing in her chest, chasing what was now to her a phantom. Mother was back. When Tofi’s little feet wouldn’t keep up, she scooped him into her arms and sprinted the whole way, wincing at the sharp stitch in her side. To catch a spirit, the Crones say, you lure it with its belongings. Had the book lured her mother out from where she’d been? Had the river borne the book to her? If Iná jumped into the river, would the book also bear her to her mother?
They reached the river by dusk, at which time the sun had expired beneath the horizon and the moon had claimed its place, bathing the scene with a pale light. The river was a silver ribbon sheathed in fog as it wound almost lethargically out of the brooding forest. Iná shuddered—from the chill or excitement; perhaps a combination of both—as she cast about looking for her mother. A breath of wind stirred the fog, and she saw a shadow not thirty paces to her right.
“Mother!” Iná ran, mud sucking at her legs, still clutching Tofi to her breast. She hadn’t known what to expect but definitely not this swell of elation at the sight of—
A sculpture. A thing of mud and twigs and rotten leaves made into the likeness of a woman. It was ingenious, really, the childish attention to detail: the careful way the leaves had been pasted on the body as clothes; the tendrils hanging from the head, making a curtain of hair. Even the twig arms extended as if in supplication.
Tofi squirmed out of Iná’s arms and touched the sculpture. “Mother,” he said.
Iná laughed, a mad sound that bubbled up in the pit of her belly. She’d laughed long and hard, and when it hurt to laugh, she’d cried. Hope was a cruel thing.
“Come, Tofi,” she’d said. “Let’s go home.”
Days passed, and still they fled. Not that Iná could tell from the dense darkness of the forest. She marked them by her fitful sleep cycles and the hunger that gnawed insidiously at her insides, eating her strength until she could not even carry Tofi anymore—Tofi, who had long stopped complaining and fallen silent, his breathing weak and laboured. Whenever they settled to rest, Iná would fold him into her embrace and tell him stories to take their minds off their fatigue, stories her mother had told her what seemed like a lifetime ago. And when it came time to go on, Iná would rise, and carry Tofi, and stumble on into the dark forest. It wasn’t until Tofi fell into a deep sleep, the kind brought on by hunger and exhaustion, the kind Iná feared he might never wake from, that she decided it was time to turn around. She hadn’t heard the raiders in a long time, and they couldn’t have followed so deep into the forest. They had to have given up their chase long ago.
She would retrace their steps back to the village, where there was food and water and shelter. And if the raiders were lying in wait in the ruins of the village, just waiting for them to come back...she shook the thought from her head.
Iná gathered the last of her strength and hoisted Tofi’s motionless form. The book fell out of his clutches, and she tucked it into her waistband, then began shambling back in the direction they had come.
The forest was dark, but she was now a creature of the dark. She could see the trees. She stumbled towards a nearby grove, inspecting their trunks. There were no paths in the forest, so she had made marks, surreptitious things to help them find their way back: a chipped bark, a broken branch, carefully disturbed leaves; little signs to point her in the right direction.
The signs were gone.
How was this possible? Iná spun on the spot, breathing hard. Perhaps she was at the wrong tree. Perhaps she hadn’t looked carefully. She shifted Tofi to her other shoulder and ran from tree to tree, looking for the one she’d marked. She didn’t find it.
Without those markings they couldn’t find their way back. Without them they were lost.
All around rose identical trees, ancient brooding oaks keeping their own counsel and indifferent to her plight. And if they had any secrets to give, they did not yield them; simply regarded Iná as she spiralled down into despair.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Tofi after hours of fruitless searching. She sank to the forest floor, staring off into the distance but not truly seeing anything, numb mind slowly absorbing the fact that they were lost. “I’m so sorry.”
She had failed him. She was meant to be his protector; had saved him from the raiders only to have him starve in the unkind heart of the forest.
She would weep, but that required effort, and she was oh so exhausted. Her heart beat in her ears, loud and sluggish. Her eyelids grew heavy and started to droop close. She would sleep. Just for a little bit—
Something moved in the corner of her eye. She turned to see the trees part like kindling before a fire; blinding light sheared through the darkness.
Iná cried out at the sudden brightness, putting up a hand to shield her eyes. Still the light shone, an unnatural radiance so brilliant that Iná feared she would go blind. As she peered out, she saw a woman step into the light. The light seemed to drape her, an ethereal piece of clothing.
Iná looked and looked and looked. She closed her eyes. Opened them again. There was the woman now squatting before her, a kindly smile on her face. It was—
“M—mother,” she gasped.
“There, there, my sweet children,” she said. “You’re safe now.”
At the very dawn of time, man was gifted a Garden by the gods,
and they appointed for themselves a keeper, to tend the orchard.
So did the Gardener, for years and years.
But tending the Garden was a terribly lonely task,
and soon the Gardener took to venturing beyond into the realms
of men, where much revelry and company came easy.
And in the Gardener’s absence, the Garden grew unpruned, untended.
The trees lived: a hundred, two hundred, a thousand years,
and none could say when the shackles of sleep fell off and they gained sentience.
But gain sentience they did, such that they dug deep into the earth,
and linked their roots in communion.
And they thought, and thought.
For what else is there for trees to do but think? And in their thinking, they grew wily.
And sowed the seed of corruption, which festered and bloomed, until a blanket of
darkness cloaked the forest.
So prune your garden, little ones, lest it become a forest and grow to hate you, and
strangle you in your sleep.
Iná awoke to find herself in a dark room. For a moment she thought she was back home in the village, in her own bed and rising early to prepare for another long day of backbreaking work. But then she saw the unfamiliar grey stone walls, the dried vines hanging from a black ceiling, the strange wide bed in which she lay naked, and everything came rushing back.
She sat up, nearly blacked out by the sudden movement.
“Tofi!” she called, casting about the room. “Tofi!” But for the crude mannequin in the corner wearing her washed clothes, there was nothing and no one else in the room.
Iná leapt out of bed, yanked her clothes off the mannequin, and dressed. Then she stumbled from the room and down a narrow corridor that opened into a wide chamber. She found Tofi sitting behind a long table, tucking into a magnificent feast of yam porridge and roast guinea fowl, baked apples and fried plantain.
“Iná!” he cried when he saw her, then flitted across the long hall, feet pattering on the stone floor, boyish face alight with joy. Iná dropped to her knees and caught him in an embrace, holding him tightly, crushing him into her person as if to make him one with her, as if to reassure herself that he really, truly, was here.
“Thank the stars,” she breathed into his hair. “Oh, thank the stars—I was so scared, I thought I would never...” never see you again.
Tofi pulled back from the embrace and beamed up at her, cheeks oily from the feast.
“Where is Mother?” she asked.
In her first examination of the room, she hadn’t seen the woman sitting at the head of the table attending her own meal. But now Iná saw her, and she was, very clearly, not her mother.
“You’re not her,” she blurted.
The woman smiled. It was a beautiful smile, and she was a beautiful woman. “It is not uncommon to see things when you’re so close to death,” she said. “Your spirit is half-departed from the land of the living, and you begin to glimpse things that do not readily reveal themselves to mortal eyes. I’m afraid it is only me you saw, simple woman that I am. I am indeed not your mother.”
Iná remained on her knees, still holding Tofi, trying to parse what she had just heard. She had seen the trees part, seen her mother...or had she? “There was a...magical light...”
The woman laughed. A musical sound which brought to Iná’s mind the thought of windchimes. “Sunlight,” she said. “But yes, I imagine after so long in the dark forest, the light of the sun must seem magical.” She waved her hand. “You must be famished! Come! Sit! Eat!”
“Come eat,” said Tofi, pulling Iná to her feet.
She was famished: she tore into the meal, shuddering with pleasure as she wolfed it down. By the stars, food had never tasted so good. She shovelled down spoonful after spoonful, eating like a starved animal. The wine burst on her tongue in a delicious combination of sweet and sour. Tofi was just as ravenous, stuffing his mouth. Iná started to tell him to pace himself when her stomach cramped, then gave a vicious spasm. The food rushed back up her throat and flooded her mouth. Hot and spicy and surprisingly bitter, it took everything in her not to throw up all over the table. She clapped a hand to her mouth and forced herself to swallow the slush.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“No, no,” said the woman, eyes twinkling with laughter. “Hunger is a dreadful thing, and you’ve been without food for quite some time. Just don’t choke eh? Go on, eat. Eat.”
Iná started to scoop another spoonful but then stopped, frowning. It really was a feast, the table bursting with delicacies fit for a king.
“Who are you?” she asked. “And where are we?”
“Of course, where are my manners? My name is Tatuba, and you are in my home.”
Iná looked about, taking in the long sparse hall with phosphorescent globes glowing in their sconces. There were no windows in the hall. Come to think of it, there had been no windows in her room either, or in the passageway.
