I take the first road heading north and walk right though the house of a woman too shocked to shout. Her house lead me to the back of another, which I walk around, then back onto a new lane leading me to a clearing with man, horse, donkey, and mule resting. I skip past them and take to my heels down a wide road with trade houses on either side. You going to have to turn south soon, say the voice that sound like me, the first I hear her on this trip. I turn south, but turn and dip west again, following a line of trees, and still looking above me. Only then I join this main road, which take me to this vast space of dirt and dust, more than I did expect for a city as famous as Omororo. I could see it in the distance, the great central closure, the walls higher than the highest trees, with ramparts every few paces and guards patrolling. The temple and palace beyond it rising higher, the gate between two towers being the only way out or in. But I didn’t have no business there. I turn south back to the sea.
Popele wrong. I find the Asakin, and their village was right there skirting the sea, but no boy of the Aesi’s age live among them. A good thing it was then that this griot speak their tongue since this was too different from Marabangan, which I barely understand even after all these years. He tell a man chewing a stalk that me and him were grandparents who want to leave something for their grandson. They know it is forbidden to come in contact with them as they become men, but even the gods know better than to deny a grandmother. The man shake his head and laugh, as if he and this griot have the same woman trouble. Yes, the boys leave for initiation near a moon ago, but no they not in the village. They not even on the land. All boy must die, and all man must be born on the Wakeda, the island right off the sea. Why this bitch and her fish didn’t just take us there? I say quiet, hoping the griot didn’t hear.
We steal a canoe with a hole in it. Yes, we. I didn’t push off that canoe by myself, and is not my heel that plug the hole. All Popele tell me about the initiation was to look for boys in white. But as soon as we land, and as soon as I scale up a tree for a wider view, one thing become clear. Every single boy was white. Below me a branch snap, the griot, clumsy with climbing. I tell him to find a good branch and stay there. As for the white boys, they cover the whole bodies in ash and their hair with a paste, maybe a mix of same ash and cream, or clay. It make them look like statues until they move. See the alabaster boys move, four in a circle and sitting in the dirt, drinking from one small gourd. See two more crouch down by embers still smoking, one of them all white save for his face, the other with two clumps of ash in his hands that he bury his face in. See more boys, four, five, six with beaded belt around the waist, and staffs like stick fighters as they march off into the bush. More boys sit and drink from a larger gourd. For boys not yet men but they look like men even now, chest done broad, hips done thin, buttocks done big and strong, balls and cock done heavy with seed to create more warriors. This was it about boys, how sometimes they just look ready—for a fight or a fuck make no difference. They look like men even now. Popele’s word was no use. Every single one was a boy in white and I couldn’t tell one from the other, much less what a young Aesi would look like. Three bites from flies and I see why the ash make sense. I wait for them all to leave before jumping into it and covering myself. Only then do the insects stop biting and the air grow cool. In the gourds, I smell the last of the durra porridge.
I don’t need her voice to tell me that any moment the Aesi can become what he is to become. But I hear Popele anyway, the annoying childlike bleat in it. I starting to realize that I don’t like this water sprite at all. Here I was back in a tree, waiting to end the life of he who is not to be born yet is still alive and walking below me. She figure that my revenge was all I would need to feed on, and she figure right. As for how letting this man live would change the world, I don’t know the world, and what little I know I long stop caring for. I care that my children move through it alive and unharmed, in any way they see fit, and I would kill all who stand in the way of that. It is something that feel like the damnation of the gods, the moment when you realize that not only would you die for your children, but you would kill as well. When the boys come back it was too dark, and soon there was nothing but shapes and shadows by the fire. Two of them, one in full ash and the other with two stripes running from face down to knee, stood by the clay sleeping hut, playing the lyre and singing.
Morning. I have to grab the sleeping griot before he fall to the ground, and drag him to a different tree when he just whip it out to piss. Nobody below expecting a golden shower, I whisper to him as I slap his face. Bow and arrow both lost with the ship. The only weapons that come with me was what I keep on me, the dagger, the machete, and the stick. When it come to killing this boy I will have to do it up close. Not kill, I have to remember, though that language was for the water sprite, not me. I don’t need to hide behind any cleverness. But he is just a boy, say the voice that sound like me. Is just a boy. A boy is not a boy, a boy is never a boy. A boy is potential. So I look up to the sky for where the birds circle, and a shudder run through me, for their eyes are the Sangomin’s eyes. Watching for something, yes, but watching over something too. Watching with all their focus, tightening their attention until they are so close together that they form a black cloud. The boys were climbing out of the hut entrance. They reach for ash to cover what night sweat clean away, and soon the whole yard is thick with white dust. But they all the same. They look the same, sound the same, laugh the same, squat the same, even piss the same.