How the End Begins | Gabrielle Emem Harry

PART I: FOREST

Ayanti knew from the first time she saw a white owl drop out of the sky and into her newly sprouted waterleaf patch, wings wet with morning dew and lifeblood, that her grandmother was a witch. She didn’t need the gossiping girls at the stream to tell her. It was a comforting thing, having someone with power watching over her. It was better than having no one. Before Ekaeka found her, she’d had no one.

Ayanti had woken up one morning to find Ekaeka standing over her, bald-headed with a mole above her upper lip and an indigo wrapper around her waist. Human, and foreign to the forest. The ground shook at the intrusion.      

Coconuts crashed against each other and palm nuts clattered to the ground. The forest was Ayanti’s home, the monkeys her companions and enemies. Snails slithering up her arms and snakes curling around her ankles were the only affection she had ever known.

And so, when the old woman straightened Ayanti’s left arm and touched the black birthmark in the crook of her elbow, rubbing it as if it was a stain that could be wiped away, Ayanti did not pull away. A warm touch is an impossible thing to refuse, even from a rough hand.

When the woman nodded grimly and said “Take.” giving her a piece of roasted wateryam to eat.

Ayanti took it.

When the woman said, “I am your mother’s mother.” Ayanti knew it to be true because how can an elder lie to a child?

When Ekaeka said, “From today, your name is Ayanti.” Ayanti swallowed the name with the wateryam and felt it settle, solid, in her stomach.

When Ekaeka pulled Ayanti’s hand and started walking until they reached a path, Ayanti held onto her hand and walked by her, because you do not refuse a meal or a hand, or a name given to you freely when all you have had before are scales and slime against your skin and sharp stones digging into your feet.

#

Ayanti knew from the first time she bled that her grandmother did not love her. She had slept those five nights, blood running down the unfamiliar path of her skinny mosquito-bitten legs after it had soaked through the one thin rag Ekaeka had given her to place between her thighs, waiting.

She had slept each night, expecting to wake up elsewhere. She’d hoped she’d peel her eyelids back and the skin of the world she knew would be peeled back as well, letting her fall into the place Ekaeka went on those nights when grey owls slept, and white owls flew.

Ayanti forgot more each day about her time in the forest, but in the silence her grandmother left her to wallow in, memories pinched her, the smell of rotting mangoes, the sweet oily taste of hardened coconut…a place she would go sometimes, and how she’d felt when she was there, a lightness, like flying on white wings.

Ete Eyo had a mango tree that rained rotting fruit every year because he wouldn’t let anyone pluck from it since it had killed his son with the help of heavy rain and childish impatience, and Eka Iye sold coconut in the market along with every type of oil and every type of fish and every type of anything that anyone could ever want, but what Ayanti wanted was that old place and that feeling. Back in the forest, she would go to that place, not by herself, not by her power or by any power she could remember. There was so much she could not remember.

Ekaeka had taught her the sharp, simple trade language the people of Ikot Arak and other river towns spoke, but the words never quite lay flat on her tongue. She spoke it like she was treading a stony path, like the path to the stream where the girls mocked her, calling her a witch like her grandmother.

Not many villagers would allow her to work their land. No one wanted a witch’s spawn digging in the earth that fed them. Who knew what she would reap from them? Who knew what she would bury?

The plot of land Ayanti worked on most often belonged to Nse, a childless widow who wore her hair unplaited and matted, with patches rusted by the sun. Nse was mad, but not in a wandering way. She would sit and watch Ayanti work, sometimes standing up suddenly to join her in weeding, then sitting down again just as abruptly.

Ayanti liked working on Nse’s farm because on good days, she got more than the usual meals and tubers. She got stories.

After their work was done for the day, as the daylight bled out and died, Ayanti would sit under the moon, listening.

Nse told every story like it had happened to her. She wrung her face and clutched her smooth, unscarred chest, describing the feeling of a spear piercing through skin and sinew and spirit. She stroked her flat unstretched stomach and detailed the small joys that motherhood sequestered within the deep constant fear of loss. She spoke of loves she could never have known and wars she could never have fought, lives she could never have taken, or lived.

A younger Ayanti had believed the first of Nse’s stories and had stumbled over her still-new words to tell them to the girls at the stream. They had laughed at her and told her that Nse had grown up in the village, married there and lost her mind, along with her husband.

“Little witch, so you cannot tell a lie from the truth? Has your grandmother sacrificed your senses to her coven?” laughed Iye, who had recently started rubbing her whole body with coconut oil twice a day even though she wouldn’t be entering the fattening room for many seasons to come.

Ayanti, with her sudden appearance and slow measured words and beseeching eyes, made the back of Iye’s neck itch, and Iye was the type of girl to scratch an itch until it bled, the type of girl who would take a broomstick and burst a boil in her own armpit to squeeze the pus out of it to punish it for daring to swell in the first place. Her parents were rich. Her father had many wives, and so did her mother. Her mother’s wives tilled her land and sold her foodstuff in the market and cooked food for all of Iye’s younger siblings, so Iye didn’t have to.

This left Iye with a lot of time to do as she pleased, making coconut oil for her mother’s wives to sell, and thinking beyond marriage and market, beyond Ikot Arak. One of the things Iye thought about was Ayanti. She wondered where the strange girl had come from and why she reminded her of the feeling that enshrouded her when she went deep into the forest to collect coconuts. A feeling that she was venturing further than the forest close to the village; Possibility, that brew of hazard and hope. The prospect that she could go elsewhere.

#

Ayanti bled alone in that quiet hut, hoping to be transported and transformed in her sleep. Hoping that Ekaeka would take her hand again in a way that was more and less real than the first time ,but she slept undisturbed and woke uninitiated.

Burning her bloody rag with no witness but the rising sun and the dew on the waterleaf and afang and atama she had painstakingly nurtured for her grandmother’s soups, Ayanti began to accept for the first time that she was truly unloved. She had no friends amongst the village girls. Only Iye spoke to her, to insult her. As for Nse, the stories she told were more for herself than for Ayanti.

She could have perhaps accepted Ekaeka’s rejection, if that was all it was. But it was dangerous to be an unloved relative of a witch. Witches used family as fuel, serving them to their coven sisters and consuming their flesh and spirit. Ayanti could live without love, but she would not die on her grandmother’s terms.

She inhaled the scent of her burning blood, and it smelled like severance to her. She went into the hut and tied a deep blue wrapper under her armpits instead of at her waist, since she was a woman now. She left all her other wrappers behind. She would not need them anymore. She passed Ekaeka sitting on her bench under the shade of the bent coconut tree, chewing her morning bitter kola. She did not ask if she had risen well, and did not get a word of reproach. Ayanti’s heart heaved at the dismissal, and she realised she should have known long ago that there was no love here for her. Most elders would never let a child pass without greeting them, but Ekaeka did not even care enough to rebuke her. She had allowed Ayanti to grow untamed, like wild sugarcane. And now Ayanti would allow herself to be chewed up and spit out.

Ayanti took slow steps, but her grandmother did not call her back.

She continued steadily to her destination, contemplating the last hours of a familiar hollow life, the way one assesses a calabash about to be broken in offering.

When Ayanti arrived at Ndia River, she stood for a while staring at the clear water. She walked into the river, feeling smooth stones under her feet, and lay in the water. She thought once more of her grandmother’s face, the mole above her lip and her eyes, always averted.

And then she inhaled, water flowing into her and burning all her thoughts away to darkness.

#

“Sister,” the woman said, “come.”

Ayanti scrambled up and walked ankle-deep into the river, heart crashing into her ribs, because she had never been called “sister”.

The woman held a periwinkle shell in her hand, and she gave it to Ayanti.

“Take, suck it and swallow.”

And Ayanti took it, sucked, and swallowed the periwinkle. It was raw, but sweet.

The woman smiled. “Keep that shell. Do not lose it.”

Ayanti nodded.

“My name is Iso. I am your sister now. All of us are. Come, let me show you to the rest.”

Iso stretched out her hand, and Ayanti took it. Because you do not refuse an outstretched hand and a smile and sweetness.

Iso dragged Ayanti down into the water, and the river swallowed her scream.

#

Everyone seemed to have forgotten the little witch.

Everyone except Iye.

Iye did not realise that she watched the path each day for Ayanti’s approach until Ayanti stopped coming to the stream. After she disappeared, it dawned on Iye that she had never had any reason to come to the stream at all, since her younger siblings and her mother’s wives fetched enough water for each day.

Iye had all the ingredients for happiness. Her family was well-off, her father’s ancestors were generous and her mother’s gods were merciful. Her younger siblings respected her, and the young men admired her. When she left the fattening room, she would have her pick of them. As the first daughter, she would inherit her mother’s wealth and wives, and she could marry more for labour or love if she wanted.

She could have put all these things together and made a sweet, satisfying life for herself, but she had feet made to wander.

And she wondered about Ayanti. She wondered through seven dry seasons and seven rainy ones. She wondered when her father listed names of suitable suitors and while her mother taught her the difference between good and bad copper, moldy and well-dried fish, loyal and troublesome customers. She wondered if Ayanti had finally gone elsewhere.

She wondered each season she refused to enter the fattening room until her mother finally agreed to let her leave the village to buy goods in Kuwo with one of her trusted wives.

Iye had never been to the city. She had never even left Ikot Arak. She had only seen twenty-four dry seasons and twenty-three rainy ones when she left for Kuwo. Her father and her siblings cried as they held her, but her mother only sighed, tallying the loss of a firstborn daughter. Maybe her father’s fathers or her mother’s gods had told them even then that they would never see her again.

#

The River Ndia has seven legs carrying her through seven lands. From Nka to Isino to Dianku to Ubok Akan to Ikot Arak to Ikot Mbut to Amana, people knew not to take from Ndia, not to drink from her or dirty her or enter her, unless they wanted to become hers.

Across these lands, elders told the young, “If you leave the River alone, the River will leave you alone.”

This was a lie, of course, because Ndia’s legs were long, but her throat was longer. She was insatiable. She craved beauty and pride and sorrow and sweetness and dissatisfaction, the very spirit of humanity, distilled by ephemerality.

That was why she loved her daughters, and blessed them. Like any good child, they fed their mother.

The first time Iso took her to the bottom of Ndia, Ayanti found two sisters there, one bald with yellow skin, a body straight from the fattening room, sharpening her teeth with what looked like a grinding stone.

The other one’s hair reached her shoulders, left to lock into ropes, like Nse the recluse’s hair, but smaller and smoother. She was dark and slender and tearing at her hair.

“Mmedi, I told you not to worry. Iso has brought our offering for this market week,” the bald one said with amusement. “She’s saved us. Once again.”

Mmedi’s hands left her hair and she turned and flung herself at Iso, bubbles floating from her mouth as she spoke.

“Iso! You who will never let me be ashamed! Misfortune will be far from you! I have only you in this world,” she said, placing her hand over her chest and eyeing the bald woman pointedly as she said the last part.

The bald one hissed and set the stone down. “Iso, you’ve come?” she welcomed, licking her sharpened teeth.

“Ndiyo, I’ve come,” she replied, “And this is not an offering. She’s our new sister,” she said, gesturing at Ayanti.

“Hm,” Mmedi said, face falling again.

“We don’t need a new sister,” Mmedi sulked. “Can’t we just use her as an offering?”

“No,” Iso snapped. “Mother specifically wanted this one.”

“She’s been very…forceful lately,” Ndiyo observed lazily.

“Yes,” Mmedi agreed. “It’s like there’s something in the water.”

“And in the air, too,” Iso said quietly, “But we’ll be fine as long as we don’t disobey her. Ayanti, have you heard?”

Ayanti only nodded, still afraid to open her mouth underwater.

Ndiyo looked at Ayanti, and smiled a sharp, sad smile.

And so, for seven dry seasons and seven wet ones, Ayanti discovered the cost of a mother’s love.

PART III: MARKET

Iye watched as the white-clothed priestess held the skinned cow head, red and white and dripping blood from its blackened horns. The woman would carry it round the perimeter of the market to soothe the gods of trade as they grew restless at the Turning of the season.

A cow sacrifice would usually only be done as the dry season began, but the Ikanto priestesses sent a crier through Kuwo to announce that the gods were uneasy for reasons known only to them and needed to be quelled.

Iye had heard the seasonal traders who brought hot yellow pepper from Amana and smoked stingray from Ikot Mbut hiss and say that the Ikanto chief priestess was tired of eating fish in her soup and must be craving beef.

The Kuwo traders disagreed. They had seen five market fires in three moons and lost a healthy market chief, not even greying yet, to a sudden sickness. The first could have been blamed on carelessness or market rivalries, and the second on jealousy armed with witchcraft, but both of them together in such a short time? The gods had to be displeased.

The traders took a collection and bought a fat white cow as an offering, hoping it would be enough.

It wasn’t. This was the sixth white cow to be skinned in five moons, and the twelfth market fire of the wet season had started on the same day that the mourning house of the third out of the five head traders of Kuwo had opened.

Iye did not know these market gods by name or face or feeling, so she was not afraid of them. She knew them only by allegations, and she was not sure who or what was responsible for the fires and the deaths; Ananta, her mother’s wife and Iye’s guardian, did not particularly care as long as the fires stayed out of the foodstuff section and the smoked foods row where they sold fish. So far, they had burnt only the textile, pottery and jewellery sections.

Iye, however, was wondering.

She did not pay homage to her mother’s gods or her father’s ancestors, but she knew they watched over her. Her mother had always told her that children were godmakers. Her mother’s gods had once been foremothers, before history had polished and perfected them, reducing them to shining cores of virtue, bestowing them the power to shape the lives of their children, even as their children shaped their afterlives. Her father’s ancestors would also become gods in time, if their children found the right balance of remembrance and forgetfulness.

The gods in Kuwo were older, and the wells of their power ran deeper. They did not draw from their own blood and belief, but from need and necessity. The essences of life: trade, food, birth and death, were their domains. They were distant. They did not cradle their worshippers like the lineage gods did. They demanded sacrifice. The more costly the better.

Ananta found them fearful and unworthy of worship, but Iye was intrigued. These gods, who would demand six skinned cows and counting, and kill and destroy if they did not get their way, seemed petty to her, and childish. It is a known thing that children spit pure truth like chaff, if you know what questions to ask. And Iye had questions.

#

There was an Ikanto priestess in each quarter of the market. In seasons past, their shrines were mostly ignored, acknowledged as one of the many market sights, and bored priestesses could be found chewing alligator pepper seeds and pretending not to listen to gossip wafting from nearby stalls, halfheartedly scrubbing off the market mud or palm oil from a meal staining their white wrappers.

These days, the Ikanto shrines were blocked by lines of traders, hawking their pleas and petitions to the god of trade and journeys. As Iye moved forward on the line, she saw that the wrapper of the priestess was an intimidating white from armpit to ankles. The woman looked many seasons older than her but many seasons younger than her mother, but Iye thought it was possible that her bald head made her look younger.

Iye finally reached the front of the shrine and handed the large smoked catfish she had brought as an offering to the young attendant before turning to the priestess.

“What do you have to trade?” the priestess asked perfunctorily.

“I have nothing of worth to Ikanto.” Iye recited the words she had learned from another trader.

The priestess nodded, “Give a gift then, and take Ikanto’s blessing.”

The attendant showed the fish to the priestess and she waved it away.

“How do you want Ikanto to bless you?” the priestess asked, sounding weary of the question.

“I have… a question that I want answered.”

“Ikanto will not tell your fate or future.”

“No… I know that. That’s not what I want to know. Ikanto is the god of journeys. I want to go on a journey, and I need directions.”

“You can hire a guide or pay one to sell you a song that will lead you anywhere you want in the city. Next.” the priestess said, irritated now.

“The place I want to go is not in Kuwo. It’s not anywhere I know or know of. It’s… somewhere else. Another kind of place completely.” Iye was leaning forward now, insistent. This woman convened with gods. She knew that life went beyond. Beyond solid things like smoked fish and cloth and the coconut oil and camwood powder of the fattening room, beyond bodies. Not all that can be felt can be touched. Iye knew this. She just needed directions to the place beyond.

The priestess sighed and shook her head, seeing that Iye would not be satisfied with simple haunting warnings and hollow reassurances, then she stood up and pushed aside the thick indigo cloth hanging from a rope as a demarcation between them and the inner sanctum of the shrine and stepped in.

Iye waited impatiently as the sun started to set, drenching the market in reddish light, like palm oil melting on hot yam.

The priestess emerged from the sanctum, eyes red and breath strained, bathed in the light of day’s death.

She stood still and pointed at Iye, still struggling for breath.

“Ikanto will guide you on your journey.”

Iye smiled and started to ask how, when the woman continued, “But you must remember one thing.”

“What?” Iye asked eagerly.

The priestess sighed and dragged a hand across her eyes. “All the gods are restless and they won’t tell us why. I have a message for you. On your journey, you will see a landsnake in the river. You must leave it in the river. If you take it out of the river, it will swallow us all.”

“Alright.” Iye agreed. The poor woman must be exhausted, she thought. She wasn’t even making sense anymore.

“Good. You will go to River Ndia…”

#

The closest of Ndia’s legs to Kuwo was in Amana. Iye told Ananta she was going to try and buy fresh fish straight from the fishermen there and have them preserved by the local smokers instead of buying from the traders who brought already-smoked fish to Kuwo. Ananta was delighted at Iye’s interest in the business and gave her permission to go alone.

Iye stood in the midst of the mangroves, watching the water. She already felt it, the thinness of the air around the river. It felt like if she reached out and scratched at it, she could tear a hole in it and crawl out of it into another life.

As she walked closer to the river, the smell of blood hit her nose. She startled forward, her largest toe dipping into the river and disturbing it.

“Ah, an easy catch.”

Iye turned around and saw a figure sitting on the riverbed behind her, staring at its nails.

“Who are you?”

“Your end,” the girl said.

Cold fear ran through Iye’s veins and poured into her mouth, where it turned hot and angry.

“You must be mad! This is just the beginning of my journey.”

The girl looked up and her amused smirk fell away, revealing recognition and then a wide-eyed childish fear which was quickly washed away.

“Iye?”

“Ayanti? Is that you? The witch?”

“I’m not a witch!”

“I see. After all, you did appear from nowhere in front of a forbidden river and threaten to kill me. How could I accuse you so unjustly?” Iye spat.

“That’s not… I’m not a witch. I’m a daughter of the river.”

“How long have I been your target? Since we were young? I knew it! You were always staring at me like you wanted something,” Iye said with a strange satisfaction.

“That’s a lie! I never even looked you in the eye! I was scared of you!”

“Why would you be scared of me? I was scared of you! Who is the witch? Me or you?”

“I told you! I was not, I’m not and will never be a witch! I’m a—”

“Eh, you’re a daughter of the river. I heard you the first time. There’s no need to shout.”

“Yes. I am,” Ayanti said, her annoyance turning to fear, “And you have disturbed the river, so you now belong to her. I have to take you as an offering to my mother.”

“Offering? I don’t understand. Offering how?” Iye asked, beginning to worry.

“She’ll trap your spirit in the water and feed on it.”

“Feed on it? There’s no more fish in the river or what?”

“Look. I feel for you, but you have met your end.”

“You don’t sound like you feel for me.”

Ayanti started to walk toward Iye.

“Listen, Ayanti. I told you my journey was just beginning. Do you know where I’m going?” Iye said, standing still as Ayanti approached.

“It doesn’t matter. You can’t escape Ndia. It doesn’t matter where you go.”

“She can’t follow me there. It’s not a place like this. It’s lighter. Things are lighter there. Bodies are not a burden there.”

“How do you know this place?”

“I felt it. I stood at the doors, though I did not know them to be doors. When I was a child, in Ikot Arak.”

“In the village?” Ayanti asked, her voice breaking.

“Yes! In the forest.”

“I… I felt it too. I thought only witches could go there.”

“No, there are other ways, known only to gods. And to me.”

“How do you—”

The river began to ripple, and the mangroves shook in consternation.

“My sisters are coming. They will take you to her, no matter what you and I say.”

“So, let’s go quickly!”

“I thought you said the door was in Ikot Arak?”

“No, friend,” Iye smiled, “It’s everywhere. You just have to know who to ask for entry.”

Iye took Ayanti’s hand and began to whisper with a soft assurance, and Ayanti held on to Iye’s hand, because no one had ever called her friend.

Iye went silent, and they both looked up.

“We’re… still here,” Iye said, crestfallen. “I was wrong.”

“No,” Ayanti said, pointing down to the ground, awestruck, “Our feet aren’t touching the ground.”

Iye looked down and let out a laugh. She held on to Ayanti’s hand and they began to rise, swimming through the air. It felt, to Ayanti, like coming home.

Ayanti joined Iye, and her laughter floated through the sky and echoed into the earth, shaking stone and rousing the resting land, along with all its loathing. This is how the end begins, with joy waking rage.

END