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Meanwhile Ezeulu had pursued again his thoughts on the coming struggle and began to probe with the sensitiveness of a snail’s horns the possibility of reconciliation or, if that was too much, of narrowing down the area of conflict. Behind his thinking was of course the knowledge that the fight would not begin until the time of harvest, after three moons more. So there was plenty of time. Perhaps it was this knowledge that there was no hurry which gave him confidence to play with alternatives – to dissolve his resolution and at the right time form it again. Why should a man be in a hurry to lick his fingers; was he going to put them away in the rafter? Or perhaps the thoughts of reconciliation were from a true source. But whatever it was, Ezeulu was not to be allowed to remain in two minds much longer.
‘Ta! Nwanu!’ barked Ulu in his ear, as a spirit would in the ear of an impertinent human child. ‘Who told you that this was your own fight?’
Ezeulu trembled and said nothing, his gaze lowered to the floor.
‘I say who told you that this was your own fight to arrange the way it suits you? You want to save your friends who brought you palm wine he-he-he-he-he!’ Only the insane could sometimes approach the menace and mockery in the laughter of deities – a dry, skeletal laugh. ‘Beware you do not come between me and my victim or you may receive blows not meant for you! Do you not know wh
at happens when two elephants fight? Go home and sleep and leave me to settle my quarrel with Idemili, whose envy seeks to destroy me that his python may again come to power. Now you tell me how it concerns you. I say go home and sleep. As for me and Idemili we shall fight to the finish; and whoever throws the other down will strip him of his anklet!’
After that there was no more to be said. Who was Ezeulu to tell his deity how to fight the jealous cult of the sacred python? It was a fight of the gods. He was no more than an arrow in the bow of his god. This thought intoxicated Ezeulu like palm wine. New thoughts tumbled over themselves and past events took on new, exciting significance. Why had Oduche imprisoned a python in his box? It had been blamed on the white man’s religion; but was that the true cause? What if the boy was also an arrow in the hand of Ulu?
And what about the white man’s religion and even the white man himself? This was close on profanity but Ezeulu was now in a mood to follow things through. Yes, what about the white man himself? After all he had once taken sides with Ezeulu and, in a way, had taken sides with him again lately by exiling him, thus giving him a weapon with which to fight his enemies.
If Ulu had spotted the white man as an ally from the very beginning, it would explain many things. It would explain Ezeulu’s decision to send Oduche to learn the ways of the white man. It was true Ezeulu had given other explanations for his decision but those were the thoughts that had come into his head at the time. One half of him was man and the other half mmo – the half that was painted over with white chalk at important religious moments. And half of the things he ever did were done by this spirit side.
Chapter Seventeen
The people of Umuaro had a saying that the noise even of the loudest events must begin to die down by the second market week. It was so with Ezeulu’s exile and return. For a while people talked about nothing else; but gradually it became just another story in the life of the six villages, or so they imagined.
Even in Ezeulu’s compound the daily rounds established themselves again. Obika’s new wife had become pregnant; Ugoye and Matefi carried on like any two jealous wives; Edogo went back to his carving which he had put aside at the height of the planting season; Oduche made more progress in his new faith and in his reading and writing; Obika, after a short break, returned to palm wine in full force. His temporary restraint had been largely due to the knowledge that too much palm wine was harmful to a man going in to his wife – it made him pant on top of her like a lizard fallen from an iroko tree – and reduced him in her esteem. But now that Okuata had become pregnant he no longer went in to her.
Even Ezeulu himself seemed to have put away all his grievance. No hint of it came into his daily offering of kolanut and palm wine to his fathers or into the simple ritual he performed at every new moon. It was also time for his younger wife to be pregnant again having rested for over a year since the death of her last child. So she began to answer his call to sleep some nights in his hut. This did not improve her relations with Matefi who was past child-bearing.
The minor feasts and festivals of the year took place in their proper season. Some of them were observed by all six villages together and some belonged to individual ones. Umuagu celebrated their Mgba Agbogho or the Wrestling of the Maidens; Umunneora observed their annual feast in honour of Idemili, Owner of the python. Together the six villages held the quiet retreat called Oso Nwanadi to placate the resentful spirits of kinsmen killed in war or in other ways made to suffer death in the cause of Umuaro.
The heavy rains stopped as usual for a spell of dry weather without which yams could not produce big tubers despite luxuriant leaves. In short, life went on as though nothing had happened or was ever going to happen.
There was one minor feast which Ezeulu’s village, Umuachala, celebrated towards the end of the wet season and before the big festival of the year – the New Yam Feast. This minor celebration was called Akwu Nro. It had little ritual and was no more than a memorial offering by widows to their departed husbands. Every widow in Umuachala prepared foofoo and palm-nut soup on the night of Akwu Nro and put it outside her hut. In the morning the bowls were empty because her husband had come up from Ani-Mmo and eaten the food.
This year’s Akwu Nro was to have an added interest because Obika’s age group would present a new ancestral Mask to the village. The coming of a new Mask was always an important occasion especially when as now it was a Mask of high rank. In the last few days there had been a lot of coming and going among members of the Otakagu age group. Those of them who had leading roles to play at the ceremony would naturally be targets of malevolence and envy and must therefore he ‘hardboiled’ in protective magic. But even the others had to have some defensive preparation rubbed into shallow cuts on the arm.
All the arrangements were made secretly in keeping with the mystery of ancestral spirits. In recent years new thinking had gone into the need for strengthening the defences around this mystery in Umuaro. It had become clear to the elders that although no woman dared speak openly when she saw a Mask it was not too difficult for her to guess the man behind it. All that was necessary was to look at all the people around the Mask and see who was absent. To overcome this difficulty the elders had recently ruled that whenever a group or a village wished to bring out a Mask they must go outside their group or village for their man. So the Otakagu age group in Umuachala had gone all the way to Umuogwugwu to select the man to wear the mask. The man they chose was called Amumegbu; he was in Umuachala during all the preparations but his presence was kept very secret.
Both Edogo and Obika were intimately concerned with the Mask that was to come. It belonged to Obika’s age group, but more than that he had been selected as one of the two people to slaughter rams in its presence. Edogo came into it because he had carved the mask.
It was a little past midday. Obika sat on the floor of his hut, his feet astride the stone on which he sharpened his matchet. Trickles of sweat ran down his face and he held his lower lip with the upper teeth as he worked. He had already used a whole head of salt to give greater edge to the stone; and now and again he squeezed a little lime juice on to the blade. Two emptied fruits lay near the stone with three or four uncut ones. Obika had been working on his new matchet at intervals during the past three days and it was now sharp enough to shave the hair. He rose and went outside to see it well in the light. He held it up before him and by twisting his wrist made it flash like a mirror in the sun. He seemed satisfied, went back into his hut and put it away. Then he passed through to the inner compound and saw his wife turning water from the big pot outside the hut into a bowl. She stood up wearily and spat as she always did nowadays.
‘Old woman,’ Obika teased her.
‘I have said if you know what you did to me you should come and undo it,’ she said, smiling.
Not very long after that the first sounds of the coming event were heard in the village. Half a dozen young men ran up and down the different quarters beating their ogene and searching for the Mask; for no one knew which of the million ant holes in Umuachala it would come through. They kept up their search for a very long time and the sound of their metal gong and of their feet when they were near kept the whole village on edge. As soon as the sun’s heat began to soften the village emptied itself on to the ilo.
The ilo of Umuachala was among the biggest in Umuaro and the best kept. It was sometimes called Ilo Agbasioso because its length cowed even the best runners. At one of its four corners stood the okwolo house from where those initiated into the mystery of ancestral spirits watched the display on the ilo. The okwolo was a tall, unusual hut having only two side and back walls. Looking at it from the open front one saw tiers of steps running the whole breath of the hut and rising from the ground almost to the roof. The elders of the village sat on the lowest rungs which had the best view and the others sat on the back and higher rungs. Behind the okwolo stood a big udala tree which like all udala trees in Umuaro was sacred to ancestral spirits. Even now many children were pl
aying under it waiting for the occasional fall of a ripe, light-brown fruit – the prize for the fastest runner or the luckiest child nearest whom it fell. The tree was full of the tempting fruit but no one, young or old, was allowed to pick from the tree. If anyone broke this rule he would be visited by all the Masked spirits in Umuaro and he would have to wipe off their footsteps with heavy fines and sacrifice.
Although Ezeulu and Akuebue were early there were already immense crowds on the ilo when they arrived. Everybody in Umuachala seemed to be either there or on his way, and many people came from all the other villages of Umuaro. Women and girls, young men and boys had already formed a big ring on the ilo; as more and more people poured in from every quarter the ring became thicker and the noise greater. There were no young men with whips trying to keep the crowd clear of the centre; this would take care of itself as soon as the Mask arrived.
A big stir and commotion developed in one part of the crowd and spread right round. People asked those nearest them what it was and they pointed at something. Thousands of fingers were soon pointed in the same direction. There, in a fairly quiet corner of the ilo, sat Otakekpeli. This man was known throughout Umuaro as a wicked medicine-man. More than twice he had had to take kolanut from the palm of a dead man to swear he had no hand in the death. Of course he had survived each oath which could mean he was innocent. But people did not believe it; they said he had immediately rushed home and drunk powerful, counteracting potions.
From what was known of him and by the way he sat away from other people it was clear he had not come merely to watch a new Mask. An occasion such as this was often used by wicked men to try out the potency of their magic or to match their power against that of others. There were stories of Masks which had come out unprepared and been transfixed to a spot for days or even felled to the ground.
Perhaps the most suspicious thing about Otakekpeli was his posture. He sat like a lame man with legs folded under him. They said it was the fighting posture of a boar when a leopard was about: it dug a shallow hole in the earth, sat with its testicles hidden away in it and waited with standing bristles on its head of iron. As a rule, the leopard would go its way, in search of goats and sheep.
The crowd watched Otakekpeli with disapproval; but no one challenged him because it was dangerous to do so but even more because most people in their hearts looked forward to the spectacle of two potent forces grappling with each other. If the Otakagu age group chose to bring out a new Mask without first boiling themselves hard it was their own fault. In fact most of these encounters produced no visible results at all because the powers were equally matched or the target was stronger than the assailant.
