Arrow of God (17 page)

The two men shook hands and Ezeulu took his rolled goatskin from under his arm, spread it on the floor and sat down. Akuebue asked him about his family and for a while continued to work on his yams.

‘They are well,’ replied Ezeulu. ‘And the people of your compound?’

‘They are quiet.’

‘Those are very large and healthy seed-yams. Do they come from your own barn or from the market?’

‘Do you not know that my portion of the Anietiti land…? Yes. They were harvested there.’

‘It is a great land,’ said Ezeulu, nodding his head a few times. ‘Such a land makes lazy people look like master farmers.’

Akuebue smiled. ‘You want to draw me out, but you won’t.’ He put down the knife and raised his voice to call his son, Obielue, who answered from the inner compound and soon came in, sweating.

‘Ezeulu!’ he saluted.

‘My son.’

He turned to his father to take his message.

‘Tell your mother that Ezeulu is greeting her. If she has kolanut let her bring it.’ Obielue returned to the inner compound.

‘Although I ate no kolanut the last time I went to the house of my friend.’ Akuebue said this as though he talked to himself.

Ezeulu laughed. ‘What do we say happens to the man who eats and then makes his mouth as if it has never seen food?’

‘How should I know?’

‘It makes his anus dry up. Did your mother not tell you that?’

Akuebue rose to his feet very slowly because of the pain in his waist.

‘Old age is a disease,’ he said, struggling to unbend himself with one hand on the hip. When he was three-quarters erect he gave up. ‘Whenever I sit for any length of time I have to practise again to walk, like an infant.’ He smiled as he toddled to the low entrance wall of his
obi
, took from it a wooden bowl with a lump of chalk in it and offered it to his guest. Ezeulu picked up the chalk and drew five lines with it on the floor – three uprights, a flat one across the top and another below them. Then he painted one of his big toes and dubbed a thin coat of white around his left eye.

Only one of Akuebue’s two wives was at home and she soon came into the
obi
to salute Ezeulu and to say that the senior wife had gone to inspect her palm trees for ripe fruit. Obielue returned with a kolanut. He took the wooden bowl from his father, blew into it to remove dust and offered the kolanut in it to Ezeulu.

‘Thank you,’ said Ezeulu. ‘Take it to your father to break.’

‘No,’ said Akuebue. ‘I ask you to break it.’

‘That cannot be. We do not by-pass a man and enter his compound.’

‘I know that,’ said Akuebue, ‘but you see that my hands are full and I am asking you to perform the office for me.’

‘A man cannot be too busy to break the first kolanut of the day in his own house. So put the yam down; it will not run away.’

‘But this is not the first kolanut of the day. I have broken several already.’

‘That may be so, but you did not break them in my presence. The time a man wakes up is his morning.’

‘All right,’ said Akuebue. ‘I shall break it if you say so.’

‘Indeed I say so. We do not apply an ear-pick to the eye.’

Akuebue took the kolanut in his hand and said: ‘We shall both live,’ and broke it.

Two gunshots had sounded in the neighbourhood since Ezeulu came in. Now a third went off.

‘What is happening there?’ he asked. ‘Are men leaving the forest now to hunt in the compounds?’

‘Oh. You have not heard? Ogbuefi Amalu is very sick.’

‘True? And it has reached the point of shooting guns?’

‘Yes.’ Akuebue lowered his voice out of respect for the bad story. ‘What day was yesterday?’

‘Eke,’ replied Ezeulu.

‘Yes, it was on the other Eke that it happened. He was returning home from the farmland he had gone to clear when it struck him down. Before he reached home he was trembling with cold in the noonday heat. He could no longer hold his matchet because his fingers were set like crooks.’

‘What do they say it is?’

‘From what I saw this morning and yesterday I think it is
aru-mmo
.’

‘Please do not repeat it.’

‘But I am not telling you that Nwokonkwo or Nwokafo told me. This is what I saw with my own eyes.’

Ezeulu began to gnash his teeth.

‘I went to see him this morning. His breath seemed to be scraping his sides with a blunt razor.’

‘Who have they hired to make medicine for him?’ asked Ezeulu.

‘A man called Nwodika from Umuofia. I told them this morning that had I been there when they took the decision I would have told them to go straight to Aninta. There is a doctor there who nips off sickness between his thumb and finger.’

‘But if it is the sickness of the Spirits, as you say, there is no medicine for it – except camwood and fire.’

‘That is so,’ said Akuebue, ‘but we cannot put our hands between our laps and watch a sick man for twelve days. We must grope about until what must happen does happen. That is why I spoke of this medicine-man from Aninta.’

‘I think you speak of Aghadike whom they call Anyanafummo.’

‘You know him. That is the very man.’

‘I know many people throughout Olu and Igbo. Aghadike is a great doctor and diviner. But even he cannot carry a battle to the compound of the great god.’

‘No man can do that.’

The gun sounded again.

‘This gun-shooting is no more than a foolish groping about,’ said Ezeulu. ‘How can we frighten Spirits away with the noise of a gun? If it were so easy any man who had enough money to buy a keg of gunpowder would live and live until mushrooms sprouted from his head. If I am sick and they bring me a medicine-man who knows more about hunting than herbs I shall send him away and look for another.’

The two men sat for a little while in silence. Then Akuebue said:

‘From what I saw this morning we may hear something before another dawn.’

Ezeulu moved his head up and down many times. ‘It is a story of great sorrow, but we cannot set fire to the world.’

Akuebue who had stopped working on his yams went back to them now with the proverbial excuse that greeting in the cold harmattan is taken from the fireside.

‘That is what our people say,’ replied Ezeulu. ‘And they also say that a man who visits a craftsman at work finds a sullen host.’

The gun sounded yet again. It seemed to make Ezeulu irritable.

‘I shall go over and tell the man that if he has no medicine to give to the sick man he should at least spare the gunpowder they will use for his funeral.’

‘Perhaps he thinks that gunpowder is as cheap as wood ash,’ said Akuebue, and then more seriously: ‘If you go there on your way home say nothing that might make them think you wish their kinsman evil. They may say: What is gunpowder to a man’s life?’

Ezeulu did not need two looks at the sick man to see that he could not pass the twelve days which the Spirits gave a man stricken with this disease. If, as Akuebue had said, nothing was heard by tomorrow it would be a thing to tell.

The man’s trunk was encased in a thick coat of camwood ointment which had caked and cracked in countless places. A big log fire burned beside the bamboo bed on which he lay and a strong whiff of burning herbs was in the air. His breathing was like the splitting of hard wood. He did not recognize Ezeulu who on entering had greeted those in the room with his eyes alone and made straight for the bedside where he stood for a long time looking down on the sick man in silence. After that he went and sat down with the small crowd of relations talking in very low voices,

‘What has a man done to merit this?’ he asked.

‘That is what we all have been asking,’ replied one of the men. ‘We were not told to expect it. We woke up one morning to find our shinbone deformed.’

The herbalist sat a little apart from the group, and took no part in the conversation. Ezeulu looked around the room and saw how the man had fortified it against the entry of the Spirits. From the roof hung down three long gourds corked with wads of dry banana leaf. A fourth gourd was the big-bellied type which was often used for carrying palm wine. It hung directly over the sick man. On its neck was a string of cowries, and a bunch of parrots’ feathers danced inside it with only their upper half showing. It looked as if something boiled about their feet forcing them to gyrate around the mouth of the gourd. Two freshly sacrificed chicks dangled head downwards on either side of it.

The sick man who had been silent except for his breathing began quite suddenly to groan. Everyone stopped talking. The medicine-man, a ring of white chalk dubbed round one eye and a large leather-covered amulet on his left wrist, rose up and went outside. His flint-gun lay at the threshold, its base on the ground and the barrel pointing into the hut. He picked it up and began to load. The gunpowder was contained in a four-cornered bottle which had once carried the white man’s hot drink called Nje-nje. When he had loaded the gun he went to the back of the house and let it off. All the cocks and hens in the neighbourhood immediately set up an alarm as if they had seen a wild animal.

When he returned to the hut he found the sick man even more restless, saying meaningless things.

‘Bring me his
ofo
,’ he said.

The sick man’s brother took the short wooden staff from the house-shrine held by ropes to a rafter. The medicine-man who was now crouching by the bed took it from him and opening the sick man’s right hand put it there.

‘Hold it!’ he commanded pressing the dry fingers round the staff. ‘Grasp it, and say no to them! Do you hear me? Say no!’

The meaning of his command seemed at last to seep through many clogged filters to the sick man’s mind and the fingers began to close, like claws, slowly round the staff.

‘That’s right,’ said the medicine-man beginning to remove his own hand and to leave the
ofo
in Amalu’s grasp. ‘Say no to them!’

But as soon as he took his hand completely away Amalu’s fingers jerked open and the
ofo
fell down on the floor. The little crowd in the hut exchanged meaningful glances but no words.

Soon after Ezeulu rose to go. ‘Take good care of him,’ he said.

‘Go well,’ replied the others.

When Obika’s bride arrived with her people and he looked upon her again it surprised him greatly that he had been able to let her go untouched during her last visit. He knew that few other young men of his age would have shown the same restraint which ancient custom demanded. But what was right was right. Obika began to admire this new image of himself as an upholder of custom – like the lizard who fell down from the high iroko tree he felt entitled to praise himself if nobody else did.

The bride was accompanied by her mother who was just coming out of an illness, many girls of her own age and her mother’s women friends. Most of the women carried small head-loads of the bride’s dowry to which they had all contributed – cooking-pots, wooden bowls, brooms, mortar, pestle, baskets, mats, ladles, pots of palm oil, baskets of cocoyam, smoked fish, fermented cassava, locust beans, heads of salt and pepper. There were also two lengths of cloth, two plates and an iron pot. These last were products of the white man and had been bought at the new trading post at Okperi.

The three compounds of Ezeulu and his sons were already full of relatives and friends before the bride and her people arrived. The twenty or so young maidens attending her were all fully decorated. But the bride stood out among them. It was not only that she was taller than any of them, she was altogether more striking in her looks and carriage. She wore a different coiffure befitting her imminent transition to full womanhood – a plait rather than regular patterns made with a razor.

The girls sang a song called
Ifeoma
. Goodly Thing had come, they said, so let everyone who had good things bring them before her as offering. They made a circle round her and she danced to their song. As she danced her husband-to-be and other members of Ezeulu’s family broke through the circle one or two at a time and stuck money on her forehead. She smiled and let the present fall at her feet from where one of the girls picked it up and put it in a bowl.

The bride’s name was Okuata. In tallness she took after her father who came of a race of giants. Her face was finely cut and some people already called her Oyilidie because she resembled her husband in comeliness. Her full breasts had a very slight upward curve which would save them from falling and sagging too soon.

Her hair was done in the new
otimili
fashion. There were eight closely woven ridges of hair running in perfect lines from the nape to the front of the head and ending in short upright tufts like a garland of thick bristles worn on the hair-line from ear to ear. She wore as many as fifteen strings of
jigida
on her waist. Most of them were blood-coloured but two or three were black, and some of the blood-coloured strings had been made up with a few black discs thrown in. Tomorrow she would tie a loincloth like a full-grown woman and henceforth her body would be concealed from the public gaze. The strings of
jigida
clinked as she danced. Behind they covered all her waist and the upper part of her buttocks. In front they lay string upon string from under her navel to her genitals, covering the greater part and providing a dark shade for the rest. The other girls were dressed in the same way except that most of them wore fewer strings of
jigida
.

The feasting which followed lasted till sunset. There were pots of yam pottage, foofoo, bitter-leaf soup and
egusi
soup, two boiled legs of goat, two large bowls of cooked
asa
fish taken out whole from the soup and kegs of sweet wine tapped from the raffia palm.

Whenever a particularly impressive item of food was set before the women their song-leader raised the old chant of thanks:

Kwo-kwo-kwo-kwo-kwo!

Kwo-o-o-oh!

We are going to eat again as we are wont to do!

Who provides?