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As the group walked in the dark they passed a few people but only recognized them from their voice when they spoke a greeting. The weak light of the oil lamp seemed to deepen the darkness around them making it difficult for them to see others as easily as they themselves were seen.
There was a soft but constant clatter coming from the big skin bag slung on Aniegboka’s shoulder. The bride had a bowl of fired clay in one hand and a hen in the other. Now and again the hen squawked the way hens do when their pen is disturbed by an intruder at night. As she walked in the middle of the file Okuata suffered the struggle of happiness and fear in her thoughts. Obika and Edogo who led the way held their matchets. They spoke now and again but Obika’s mind was not in what they said. His ear strained to catch the gentlest clinking together of his bride’s jigida. He could even isolate her footsteps from all the others behind him. He too was anxious. When he took his wife to his hut after the sacrifice, would he find her at home – as the saying was – or would he learn with angry humiliation that another had broken in and gone off with his prize? That could not be. Everyone who knew her witnessed to her good behaviour. Obika had already chosen an enormous goat as a present for his mother-in-law should his wife prove to be a virgin. He did not know exactly what he would do if he found that he could not take it to her after all.
On his left hand Obika held a very small pot of water by the neck. His half-brother had a bunch of tender palm frond cut from the pinnacle of the tree.
Before long they reached the junction of their highway and another leading to the bride’s village along which she had come that very day. They walked a short distance on this road and stopped. The medicine-man chose a spot in the middle of the way and asked Obika to dig a hole there.
‘Put down the lamp here,’ he told Obika’s mother. She did so and Obika crouched down and began to dig.
‘Make it wider,’ said the medicine-man. ‘Yes, like that.’
The three men were all in a crouching position; the women knelt on both knees with the trunk erect. The light of the oil lamp burnt with vigour now.
‘Do not dig any more,’ said the medicine-man. ‘It is now deep enough. Bring out all the loose soil.’
While Obika was scooping out the red earth with both hands the medicine-man began to bring out the sacrificial objects from his bag. First he brought out four small yams, then four pieces of white chalk and the flower of the wild lily.
‘Give me the omu.’ Edogo passed the tender palm leaves to him. He tore out four leaflets and put away the rest. Then he turned to Obika’s mother.
‘Let me have ego nano.’ She untied a bunch of cowries from a corner of her cloth and gave them to him. He counted them carefully on the ground as a woman would before she bought or sold in the market, in groups of six. There were four groups and he nodded his head.
He rose to his feet and positioned Okuata beside the hole so that she faced the direction of her village, kneeling on both knees. Then he took his position opposite her on the other side of the hole, with the sacrificial objects ranged on his right. The others stood a little back.
He took one of the yams and gave it to Okuata. She waved it round her head and put it inside the hole. The medicine-man put in the other three. Then he gave her one of the pieces of white chalk and she did as for the yam. Then came the palm leaves and the flower of the wild lily and last of all he gave her one group of six cowries which she closed in her palm and did as for the others. After this he pron
ounced the absolution:
‘Any evil which you might have seen with your eyes, or spoken with your mouth, or heard with your ears or trodden with your feet; whatever your father might have brought upon you or your mother brought upon you, I cover them all here.’
As he spoke the last words he took the bowl of fired clay and placed it face downwards over the objects in the hole. Then he began to put back the loose earth. Twice he eased up the bowl slightly so that when he finished its curved back showed a little above the surface of the road.
‘Where is the water?’ he asked.
Obika’s mother produced the small pot of water. The bride who had now risen to her feet bent down at the waist and tipping the water into her palm began to wash her face, her hands and arms and her feet and legs up to the knee.
‘Do not forget,’ said the diviner when she had finished, ‘that you are not to pass this way until morning even if the warriors of Abam were to strike this night and you were fleeing for your life.’
‘The great god will not let her run for her life, neither today nor tomorrow,’ said her mother-in-law.
‘We know she will not,’ said Aniegboka, ‘but we must still do things as they were laid down.’ Then turning to Obika he said: ‘I have done as you asked me to do. Your wife will bear you nine sons.’
‘We thank you,’ said Obika and Edogo together.
‘This hen will follow me home,’ he said as he slung his bag on one shoulder and picked up the hen by the legs tied together with banana rope. He must have noticed how their eyes went again and again to the fowl. ‘I alone will eat its flesh. Let none of you pay me a visit in the morning because I shall not share it.’ He laughed very loud, like a drunken man. ‘Even diviners ought to be rewarded now and again.’ He laughed once more. ‘Do we not say that the flute player must sometimes stop to wipe his nose?’
‘That is what we say,’ replied Edogo.
All the way back the medicine-man was full of loud talk. He boasted about the high regard in which, he said, he was held in distant clans. The others listened with one ear and put in a word now and again. The only person who did not open her mouth was Okuata.
When they got to Ilo Agbasioso the diviner parted with them and took a turning to the right. As soon as he was out of earshot Obika asked if it was the custom for the diviner to take the hen home.
‘I have heard that some of them do,’ said his mother. ‘But I have never seen it until today. My own hen was buried with the rest of the sacrifice.’
‘I have never heard of it,’ said Edogo. ‘It seems to me that the man does not get enough custom and is grabbing whatever he sees.’
‘Our part was to provide the hen,’ said Obika’s mother, ‘and we have done it.’
‘I wanted to put a question to him.’
