Mortality | Chisom Umeh

Nicholas arrived at the heart of the continent, hopeful. He wasn’t sure his reason for coming all this way was valid. But at least he could try. He might just be lucky.

His horses protested when he crossed the long, brackish river and stood at the outskirts of the village. He had ridden these beasts for centuries. There was no part of the world that they wouldn’t touch for him. He used to believe they’d walk into the underworld for him if he charged them so. But for the first time, he pulled their reins and they wouldn’t yield.

A thousand insects thrilled in the nameless trees that stretched over the edges of the river. The sun had begun to march back to its home in the heavens, as though even it disapproved of his coming. Was he sure about this? Was this not the right time to turn back and return to his Castle? To the safety of the known?

Nicholas turned around and glanced at his caravan. His men wouldn’t grumble. Not in front of him at least. But there was a stiffness about them that made it obvious they were shouting in their heads.

He paid them no mind. They were in his employ and not the other way around.

Nicholas went to his horse and raised a hand to pat her, but the animal recoiled once more, a protesting sound escaping her lips.

“Is it really that bad?” Nicholas asked. But he wasn’t getting any answers here.

He walked up to his men who had mostly dismounted and were investigating the area. “Araya,” he called to a balding man with youth in his eyes. “Load as much goods as we can carry into sacks. We go the rest of the way on foot.”

***

The sky had darkened completely when they got to the residence of the District Officer. Nicholas knew the British representative had a son. A seven-year-old boy full of dreams and imagination. Nicholas was going to bless his gentle colonial heart with a gift of figurine soldiers and wooden horses like he had always wanted.

The compound was spacious, with the main building sitting in the center and a smaller servants’ quarter standing independently to the far edge. Soldiers with guns stood at different ends, eyeing Nicholas and his group as they passed.

Just as he arrived on the front porch, the door flung open, and the DO came rushing out, his wife and servants in tow.

“Oh, what a pleasure,” he said repeatedly, rushing to shake Nicholas with both hands. “I’d never have believed that a Blessed One like you would choose to grace my home this Christmas Eve. Surely, I am of all men most fortunate.”

In the light streaming from the lamp hanging from a beam, he looked quite young to be a district officer. He was clean-shaven and nearly tall enough to look Nicholas – who was a hulking figure himself – straight in the eyes.

“I’m Briar Coleridge,” he said, “District Officer. But I’m sure you already know that.”

“Indeed.”

“When my men told me they had seen someone like you dock at the river-bank, I could have sworn they were making things up.”

“Well, they weren’t,” Nicholas said. His attention was more drawn to the boy holding onto the pleats of his mother’s skirt behind Coleridge, not nearly as animated as his father. “Come, Leroy,” Nicholas said, opening his hands. The boy looked up at his mother and the maid, who both nodded their agreement.

When he came, Nicholas whisked him in the air, drawing a gentle laugh from his lips. “That’s my boy,” Nicholas said.

“They say you’re immortal,” the kid said.

Nicholas stiffened. “I like to think of it as good health.”

“Well come on in, you all,” Coleridge said. “Come away from the night and have dinner with us.”

The house seemed a bit cooler on the inside than outside. The English flag hung from one end of the wall, and books were stacked on shelves. They were led to a long table packed with vegetables, roasted full chickens, and wine. Neither Nicholas nor his men needed the meal and could do very well without it, but they wanted to indulge their host.

Halfway through the meal, Nicholas eyed Leroy lying on his belly in a corner of the living room, flipping through a book.

“He should be asleep by now,” he said.

Coleridge, without lifting his eyes from his plate, replied, “Well, all of us are staying awake tonight.”

“Why’s that?”

He took a sip of his wine, dabbed the corners of his lips with a napkin, and then looked at Nicholas from across the table. Nicholas could feel it then. That morbid fear rising from him like a stench. As though he shat himself.

“Those damned locals. They’re very diabolical, I tell you. They have this thing, Ubunu-something. The name is a mouthful but we call it Long Juju. Very powerful black magic. They used it to enter into our sleep. Used our nightmares against us. It gets worse on days like these because it seems Christmas coincides with one of their fetish activities. They use it to fight us.”

Nicholas exchanged glances with his men sitting around the table who had been indulging their food but were now paying attention. “Well, you are foreigners trying to occupy their land,” Nicholas said. “You don’t expect them to not fight back any way they know how.”

The room fell silent, both the Coleridges and Nicholas’s men eyeing him unbelievably. Why was he defending these people after hearing terrible things like these?

Later, Nicholas and his men were shown to rooms to pass the night. But, despite trying to fall asleep, he found that he couldn’t, his mind heavy with worry.

In a bid to distract himself, he took out his leather-bound journal, sat at the table, and began to write. The privilege of unending life sadly didn’t come with unfailing memory. As time expanded, his precious memories began to spread thin. As he added new experiences over the years, so did the older ones struggle to keep pace.

At this point, Nicholas didn’t care so much about many things.

Just two things were really worth holding on to. One of them, Elizabeth.

He wrote about the contours of her eyes and the shock of white in her hair. He wrote every day to keep her alive in his mind. The previous things he had written weren’t as evocative as the new ones he conjured. One scene always came back to him, from long before he became a Blessed One. The very first day they met in the market, she charmed him with her kindness. It had been raining heavily and no one from the other stalls would open to sell to him.

“You’re that priest who gives gifts to children,” Elizabeth said under the rain.

“Aye,” he said, drenched and cold already.

“Here,” she said, handing him a bag of tomatoes. “Don’t bother about payment.”

He felt so moved he wanted to hug her, but then someone was tugging at his cloak from behind. He turned around to find a child looking up at him, the rain pouring over his face which blurred like images on a disturbed pond. At first, Nicholas thought it was another kid who had come to him for help. Then he looked closely and saw a flash of something sharp in the boy’s grasp. He flinched, fell backward, and clattered over a table.

“What… what have I done?” Nicholas stuttered.

“They say you can’t die. Let’s find out.”

He turned around to search for Elizabeth, but into the wind she had gone. Then the boy pounced on him, pinning him to the mud.

“Die, Blessed One!”

***

Nicholas woke immediately, still at the table, having slept on his journal. Something had begun to change in his body, and he knew it.

***

The next morning, after Nicholas had dropped off his gifts for Leroy and his parents, he was ready to move into the village.

John Okafor, a huge man from one of the villages, was summoned to guide Nicholas and his group. He bore one of those faces that always seemed on the edge of laughter, as though something about the world was perpetually amusing. He seemed like a simple man; wore khaki shorts and a rumpled shirt with a sad imitation of a tie hanging from his neck.

“So, John will act as your translator and mostly go-between when you transact with the locals,” Coleridge told Nicholas as he got ready to go. “Stay close to him at all times, please. He’s one of the first men who understood what would happen to his people if they didn’t cooperate and cause us to enforce the full might of His Majesty.”

“You speak English?” Nicholas turned to the man and asked.

“I try,” John said, then showed his entire yellowed dentition.

“Okay. Then lead the way.”

“You know you mustn’t do this, right?” Coleridge said in a small voice, holding Nicholas back. “It’s of no use. The world has better need of your time.” There were bags under his eyes, and his hair was a mess, as though he, too, had fought his way through the night.

“Merry Christmas,” Nicholas said, then looked behind Coleridge and beckoned his men who didn’t seem any more enthusiastic.

The walk took the better part of the morning, at least three hours between Nicholas’s departure and arrival in the hinterland. John was chattering in his English approximation all the way, his sentences a straw man sewn from English and his native tongue.

Nicholas never had trouble understanding people. He looked beneath their words and knew the stories they were telling and the ones they weren’t. Sometimes, they didn’t even need to utter a word for their history to undress before him.

Until he met John Okafor. Something seemed to be cloaking the local man. Try as Nicholas did, he couldn’t read John.

His men most likely felt it too, given that some of the powers that sustained Nicholas resided in them as well. But of their concerns, they had said nothing.

For the first time in ages, Nicholas seemed to be heading into truly uncharted waters. He needed little convincing now that the things he had heard about this place were true.

***

The village chief’s abode was a wide compound that had several mud huts standing a few meters from each other with the biggest one right in the middle. The walls of the huts were beautified with native chalk drawings of intricate patterns. Scattered across the compound were several sculptures ranging from life-sized to a few inches tall. Many had fearsome, hideous looks that gnawed at something inside Nicholas and forced him to look away.

The chief had received word of their arrival and sat with four other elderly men in a semicircle. They speared Nicholas and his men with their gaze, cutting a path into his resolve. Nicholas probed each of their minds but found nothing. Nothing about their demeanour or composure gave away anything of use to him.

“I greet you all,” he said, eyeing John by the side of the chief. “I’m Nicholas, and these here are my men; Araya, Memphis, Gladstone, Antonio, and Gable.”

“Nicholas?” John said, laughter bubbling up his throat, “Like the Saint Nicholas your missionary people talk about?” Then he caught himself and said, “Forgive me, forgive me. I joke.”

Nicholas let the comment pass. John spoke to the seated men, then turned around and reported what they told him.

“We hear you wan’ give us gifts,” he said. “Hope you don’t want our people for exchange? Cus if that why you come, you better take your gift and return.”

“No, no,” Nicholas protested, looking from one man to the other. “I come in peace. I’m not that kind of person.”

John relayed this to them and then replied, “Then what kind man you be?”

“I don’t believe humans should be sold like merchandise.”

“But it is inside your Holy Book,” they said. “You not man of faith?”

Nicholas paused for a moment, then replied, “You may find, someday, that very little about me has to do with the Holy Book.”

After they had handed the gifts to the chief and his kinsmen — alcoholic drinks, pocket watches, bales of cloth, notebooks, and quills — John Okafor informed Nicholas that the chief had permitted them to stay for as long as they wished.

At this point, Araya approached Nicholas and pulled him aside, the other four standing just close behind. “Boss, what’s going on? Don’t tell me we’re really staying here?”

Nicholas beheld Araya’s distraught face and saw his palpable fear. “Relax, Araya. We’ve spent time with lots of people we’ve gone to give gifts to in the past. We enjoy the new country and landscape for a while. Why can’t we do so here?”

“Nicholas, don’t tell me you don’t feel it. Don’t tell me you don’t realize that our powers are gone.”

“I’m not sure why that is happening and if anything, it has heightened my curiosity. What exactly are they doing to achieve that?”

“This is insane!” Araya was visibly shaken. How many years had it been since Nicholas found him? 200? 300? And yet the man was still so afraid of dying. Nicholas had been ignoring it all the while, but he could see now that his men had begun to unravel. Something about the village was reaching into them and taking them apart.

“Every other place in the world I’ve visited at least twice,” Nicholas said in a chastising tone. “I’ve lived so long that nothing interests me anymore. This is new, and there’s no way I’m running away from it like a coward. And neither will you or the others.” He looked away from Araya and planted his gaze on the other men, who gave eyes to the ground.

They were shown to small huts in separate compounds not far from the chief’s, and Nicholas was amused when he had to bend almost halfway down to enter the structure. He wasn’t surprised that the inside felt chilly, given that it was constructed from clay.

On the threadbare mat later that night, Nicholas returned to his dreams. This time, the child wasn’t Leroy. They had become someone he was much more familiar with. A girl he watched grow, nursed, and taught to read the scriptures. His daughter, Antoinette. The second thing he most cared for in all the world.

In the dream, he watched her watch her mother die. She was alone in this watching because Nicholas was away. Because he couldn’t bear to see his wife go. He was in some strange land gifting things to strangers who laughed and jumped and called him Blessed One.

But now the dream forced him to see, and he was begging to look away.

“No, no, no,” he writhed on the mat, tears rolling down the corners of his eyes, begging to be let go of.

Antoinette was aged in the dream too, but she held her mother’s hand as Elizabeth slept with the Lord, as a disease ravaged her body.

A decade and a half later, it was Antoinette’s turn to pass on, and Nicholas wasn’t there either. How could he, when he was in his forties and she, his daughter, was 72?

It was a paradoxical situation; a middle-aged father watching his child die from old age. Nicholas didn’t see that Antoinette couldn’t see anymore. She had gone blind a year before and had needed help from her husband and children to get around. On her deathbed though, she imagined her father standing beside her, the immortal Blessed ushering her into the next life.

Nicholas beheld all these in the dream, shaking and crying, his resolve for what he wanted to do calcifying. “Almost there,” he whispered. “Almost there.”

***

The next morning Nicholas met John Okafor as he emerged from the hut, just outside his door.

“You sleep well, sir?” John asked, his lips fighting to not arc into a smile.

Nicholas, disheveled, stared at him. “Come, John.” He made the translator walk with him. “I hear there’s this thing called Long Juju your people worship.”

“It name Ibini Ukpabi, and my father is chief priest.”

“Oh,” Nicholas exclaimed. “What exactly does it do?”

“It an ancient deity living among my people for thousand years. It protect us from outsider using charms. Any magic they carry, if they come close to us or our land, it stop working.”

“So, this place is like a haven against malfeasant powers?”

“I don’t know what big English mean,” John said, stopping his walk. “But I tell you it’s work already.”

“That’s intriguing.”

“But why you ask, Nicholas? You know this already. You know it before you come here.”

Just then, a villager ran up to both men, a lanky boy of around fifteen with a wrapper tied around his waist.

“Uzo,” John said.

The boy, in between breaths, spoke something in their native tongue and John turned to Nicholas, concern in his eyes. “We need to go with boy.”

At the compound where his men were housed, a few locals stood outside watching. Some giggled as Nicholas came, pushed past them, and went into one of the huts. The small room was illuminated by a burning torch hanging on the wall.

Nicholas’s eyes adjusted to the light and a figure materialized on the mat. It was a shriveled, twisted, dried-up body. Its hair was entirely gone, eyes were sunken, cheeks caved in, and skin leathery.

For a moment, Nicholas almost jumped as he feared that his dreams had chased him to reality and his wife’s body had been dug up from the past and magically planted on that mat. But then he looked closely and saw the familiar cloak and boots of his men. There was a sheet of paper beside the man, and Nicholas picked it up with shaky hands.

Master, the words on the paper read in Araya’s handwriting. We woke this morning to find our brother, Antonio, like this. Completely drained of his energies. I warned you that this place was no good. Me and the others have taken off to find safety before the same fate befalls us. We can do anything for you, Nicholas, but we can’t sit still and watch ourselves meet certain death in this haunted place

Araya

Nicholas remembered finding Araya. The memory had been sandpapered by time, but he could still picture the forlorn, battle-broken soldier he found at a pub drinking himself sick. Nicholas made him a disciple then, touching him with a glimpse of his powers.

Now Araya had deserted him along with his other men.

***

Later that day, upon hearing of the death, the village chief sent word to Nicholas.

“He say he no want to be held responsible for your men or you,” John relayed. “So, he want you to leave early tomorrow morning. Join your men. Go back home. This place no good for you.”

They were in John’s house that bright afternoon, sitting in the front yard, watching his children chase goats and chickens around the compound. Nicholas stayed silent for an age, staring into space, until John broke the silence again.

“But I understand you no come all this way to run away. You no coward. So, I help you.” John put a hand on his shoulder, forcing Nicholas to turn and look at him. “I help you finish what you come here for, old man.” The smirk returned to John’s face, and soon he was laughing hysterically.

***

That night, asleep, Nicholas dreamed once more.

It was the night of his supposed blessing, which had much later turned into a curse. He had been secretly helping a man pay off his debts so that his daughters wouldn’t be taken as prostitutes. When he heard of the man’s plight, he imagined Antoinette being used as a sex slave because he owed money. So, for three consecutive nights, he threw a bag of coins from the window and stole away into the dark. On the third day, after Nicholas deposited the last bag, he made to walk away but a hand held him back.

He turned to find the man, probably twice Nicholas’s age yet with an iron grip, eyes glowing brightly in the darkness. He had been crouched in a corner, waiting patiently for Nicholas to show up. “My Lord,” he said, “for this kindness you’ve shown me and my family, silver and gold I have not to repay you. But I’ll give you something. Unending life is yours so that you can spend your days doing good to others, too.”

It had felt good at the time, for he neither fell sick nor suffered injury. Kings and emperors bestowed him with gifts to show them the secrets of immortality. A secret that he himself did not fully understand.

Until decades later when everyone he knew had passed from this world, including his wife and child and their children, and their children after that. He had tried everything he could to end his life without success, and anywhere he visited he tried to know if anyone there could break the spell.

Until recently when he heard of this place on the dark continent where they worshipped a deity so powerful it could undo every other power. It felt like a legend to him, but he hadn’t lost hope even through the ages.

The memory of his blessing had been as far from him as the North was to the South, but tonight it washed up in his dreams, forcing him to recall every detail. The look in the man’s eyes. The bloodcurdling pain he felt when the curse activated and arcane powers flowed into him.

Drenched in sweat, he awoke to someone clapping outside to alert him of their presence. It was still dark, countless crickets disturbing the night.

“Who is it?” Nicholas asked, voice groggy.

“It’s me. John. Are you ready?”

***

As both men walked away from the village under the cover of night, through a winding bush path, John said, “The dreams is side effect of Ibini Ukpabi’s power. Foreigners always feels like so. It force them to see nightmares.”

“Oh. But it doesn’t bother me so much,” Nicholas said.

“But you making noise inside your room before I knock. Why do you pretend so much? You lie to your men about why you come here. Get one of them killed for your own needs. Now you still lie to yourself.”

Nicholas thought about it for a moment, then said, “Everyone thinks I’m stupid for wanting to give up this power. So, I don’t explain myself to anyone anymore and just do whatever the hell I want. Might be selfish, but I’ve done worse.”

When they got to a clearing in the bushes, John said, “It’s here.”

A chill ran down Nicholas’s spine. It was finally going to be the day of his unmaking. The day he had been waiting for. Finally, he could be with his women again. Elizabeth and Antoinette. Hopefully, they find him worthy of forgiveness. For taking this long to return to them.

Under the silvery light of the moon, John seemed aglow. He had taken out several objects from the bags he had been carrying, including palm wine, which he poured on the ground for libation, and a chicken, which he cut open and sprinkled its blood on Nicholas.

For minutes, John uttered strings of words that Nicholas couldn’t understand. Incantations to awaken his god to speed up the aging process of Nicholas.

At some point, Nicholas felt something take him from within. That sharp, arcane power gripped him once more and he fell to the ground, writhing. Then, his life flashed before his eyes. The innumerous painful years he had walked the earth condensed into a split second and unspooled before him.

Then, John grabbed him and whispered in his ears, “The moment is come, my friend.” He helped Nicholas up, then handed him a knife. Nicholas wasn’t surprised. He always knew it would have to come to this. The man who forced this on him slit Nicholas’s neck that night after the act, and when he woke, he met the man dead too, by his own hands, one life exchanged for the other.

John pointed to this chest. “Finish the job, Nicholas. Then turn knife to your own neck. It the only way you can be sure it work.”

Nicholas’s hand trembled under the knife, even though he had taken men’s lives before. He had never been privileged to add his own life to the list, but now the opportunity presented itself and he seemed scared. “You have to know, dear John, that this power is painful and isolating. You’ll suffer alone for centuries and your god wouldn’t be able to save you because you’re not a foreigner like me.”

John laughed the same hysterical laugh Nicholas had now gotten used to. But now, under the moonlight, it bore a taint of madness.

“What if that my aim all along?” He laughed some more then added, “Might be the only way I can be strong enough to fight and keep the white man off our lands. So do it now, Nicholas. Now!”

***

After John Okafor’s body had fallen to the ground, blood pooling into the earth beneath him, the last thing Nicholas beheld in this world was the shape of the glowing moon, just before opening his own neck with the knife.