What you have. You not blowing a man against a wall, you pushing him.
Woman or man makes no difference, for you all are still strange to me, even after watching you for age upon age. I turn both my hands into blades sharper than any knife and you don’t even budge, but my saying that I see that you will kill yourself before you let another one die makes you fall to your knees as if going to bawl. But you don’t. Ten years gone and the day as fresh as yesterday, you say. The worst is that it feel like something long gone, and something soon coming. Like it is something going happen tomorrow, but I can’t stop it. You ever feel that? you ask and I want to say no, but you continue, that every morning it is as though he is not dead but about to die and you cannot stop it. Here is truth, you perplex me, for I could see that you waiting years to ask somebody that question and yet I was not the one to answer. When I say that I come to you on other business, you look relieved and that is no lie.
You ask what I want and I say there is no time to waste. There is a man who used to shadow the King so much that they call the two of them one spider. Don’t lose valuable time telling me you don’t know what I am talking about, because ten and one men and the Aesi entered your house and no man leave. That was years ago, and they was just robbers, you say. Listen, we don’t have time for this game, I say louder and step out of the river. You make from pitch or tar? you ask but I don’t answer you. Where can we go, for I have news that going sit heavy with you, I say and we go to your grain keep. People above sky and under land all see when you kill the Aesi, and some of them were not happy, I say to you and you say that you would kill him again if he came for another of your children. When I say that was good, you both perplexed and insulted.
I don’t mean for harm to come to your children, but you just voice why I come here. We need to make haste, for the time glass already flip and it running out.
Stop talking in riddles, whatever you be, and tell me what you come for, you say and I almost laugh at your toughness. You already said what I come for. The Aesi you kill? Death you certainly bring to him, but this is the world, these are the times, and gods will be gods.
And he who you kill get born again.
“Wait. I kill this Aesi before?”
“Yes.”
“You remember how your son Ehede die?”
“Bandits, robbers, somebody thinking he was a wild lion.”
“You really don’t know?”
“Me getting tired of you talking to me like I some ignorant fool.”
“The Aesi and his men ambush you in your own house. They kill Ehede and you kill him. The second ever that the Aesi didn’t die from his own hand.”
“Poachers kill my son. I know because their corpses all buried in the backyard.”
“Those were soldiers, not poachers.”
“And this Aesi? His body in my backyard too?”
“No. You set off your gift inside him and he explode into mist.”
“Continue your story.”
Popele continue.
I knew to stop because the news was like a tree falling, quiet at first, with only the crackle of leaves tearing, and twigs breaking, and then the whole thing tumble down, smash onto the ground and rock like thunder. You look at me stunned, like you unaware somebody is slapping you. But we don’t have time to waste, so I say, He you must again kill. How you mean he born again, you ask and I don’t want to answer because that is a long answer, which can be told on the way. So I say right now he is not at court, he’s not even a man. And still you say, weak like a hurt child, How you mean he is still alive? He really come back from the dead? You ask if I was sure. And even when I say yes, you ask again. I thought you was going to cry. Your face thought it was going to cry until your will stop it. It chose anger instead. What kind of nasty trick is this, and if not from you then what god playing with such fuckery? This is why nobody worship the gods anymore other than fetish priest. How is it that he living again? He going come for me? How he living again? You ask and ask until I say to you that I misspeak. It is not that you going to kill him. He lives, that is sure, but you not going to kill him, you going to make sure he never born.
Hear this now. It don’t matter how he die, but the Aesi is the kind that return to the otherworld along with all whose spirit is restless, and then eight summers later he is born again. Most of those spirits are born to the same woman and die young, and born again to again die, leaving that woman know nothing but heartbreak. But the Aesi is born to a different woman every time and the gods choose no favorites between North and South, though in all the times I know he only serve the North. That is why we reaching to you now, for one born always to a different mother is one difficult to find. But this story running too fast and your head spinning. I say it unto you again, that eight years after you kill him when Moki was still King, he was born again. When you twenty and nine. The Aesi is not even his name, for nobody know his real name except for what his mother call him. So eight years after he die, the Aesi born again in Omororo, to a woman in the Asakin tribe out in the wild bush between the city and the sea. Kwash Moki die the same year he turn eight. It take up to ten years to find him, and five moons to find you, and now we near out of time.
How you know all this? you ask.
One day we finally get wise and start to follow they who follow him, I answer.
Sangomin?
Sangomin. A Sangoma and her wretched children killers, they been watching over the boy from afar, and it didn’t look like he know. He don’t know anything, for to himself he is just a boy wanting boy things and having boy wants. You ask me how I know which woman, and I tell you that I don’t. Only that if he was born, then surely he born to a woman, and this also, the gray-and-yellow pigeon, the eyes of the Sangomin been flying low over that tribe for years now. No way to come in close without them catching that spying is afoot. Which woman is the mother and which boy is the son? We don’t know, for the Asakin tribe have their peculiar ways, which mean that one boy is never born alone, but when seven, eight, or even ten are born within the same moon that count as one birth. One boy not more special than the other, for they call all woman Mother and all man Father. They born as a group, raised as a group, learn as a group. When one show bravery all get reward, and when one commit sin, all get punished.