“From how Bunshi tell it, you is the one who do this,” Nsaka say when we pass the crater, but I remember it through the sound of Bunshi’s voice, not as memory. My mind have a different memory of those days, of being in the service of Mistress Komwono until she present me as a gift to the prince of Fasisi, who become Kwash Moki. Emini is a name in a scroll, not a face I put a name to. But now, on the way to Mantha, some parts of memory come for me whether I want them to or no. So Nsaka point out the crater and my mind hear boom.
Mantha. Seven nights west of Fasisi and climbing the whole time. The thing about Mantha is that for most there is no such place, even for travelers who journey past it nine times, if not ten. For they journey past a mountain, strange-looking but a mountain nonetheless, all around it flat and bare, less like a hill with a peak and more like a giant rock shooting straight up out of the ground, as wide as high. No tree or green until the very top and at the top many trees, and between rock and trees, no sign that any soul live there. For some of the way we travel by horse, yet by the time morning turn to afternoon, we have to go by foot. It is evening before we get to the stairs on the far side of the mount, cut from the rock, eight hundred and eight of them. At the top of the stairs, the rock go from being steep to straight, and we have to grab on to shrubs, roots, and spaces between stone to pull ourselves up. This place quit being a fortress seven hundred years ago. It go from somewhere to look out for foes to somewhere to hide them, especially if that foe was in your own royal house. Now it is where nuns in service to Ishpali, the goddess of childbirth and fertility, call home. That news was from Nsaka, not the nuns, some of whom act like they never even heard of any goddess. It is there that we would meet her, and there that we would set the plan afoot.
A new plan, for the Aesi is not a demon, but a god. More than a demigod but less than the gods of sky and earth, and each time he is reborn, the less like them he become. He come back quicker after death but he come back weaker, Bunshi say, but when I say that must mean that more than ever we kill him, she rebuke the remark like I was some girl. I could slap her then, I really could, but firing three arrows into her maybe was enough. Things I learn about this new Aesi, that he can control countless bodies to do what they don’t wish to do, but not so much their minds, which might be bad for him but worse for the man who now witness his own hand and feet work against him. He mess with minds and make women disappear, but now people remember they are gone even if the vanishing come with a new and fishy reason, and nobody know where to find the body. Crows are still under his command, as some pigeons are for the Sangomin. As for the mind games, he come to you in dreams and play in them, even control them, and he can still cast power over you, when you are slightly awake. Before, all he did need was his own power, but now he also need cunning. Bunshi say this also to Nsaka, when they thinking I was asleep, that the Aesi find a way to take strength from the gods, and that might be why more and more people losing faith, and since the gods in turn draw from faith they grow even weaker. All the more reason to kill him, then, I resolve in my mind. All the more reason to kill him. And this time I know that to kill him good is to kill him twice. And I will do it too. Explode him now, then wait. There. Decided.
“You have to join the divine sisterhood to get in,” Nsaka say.
“I don’t join nothing,” I say.
“How great-great-grandfather ever tame you?” she say.
“That lion never tame me. Not once.”
“Something did.”
“No thought is wise just because you have it, girl.”
She about to reply but then we come upon a narrow path with nothing but the drop to the right of us, so narrow at one point that we had to pass by with a shuffle, our backs scraping against the rock. Nsaka shuffle on stone. It break loose. She slip and fall and before I could use my wind (not wind)—she wave a hand and everything reverse itself, she leap backways to the rock wall, the loose stone jump back and lodge itself, and she lift her foot off it. This time she view the stone and shuffle over it, and I do the same.
“What is that gift, girl?”
“Gift? Is gift you call it? When boys jump you in the street just out of fun for that is what little boys do, but you send them back—that’s what I call it, a send-back—so yes when you reverse them and they walk back right into squadron of galloping riders that trample them to nothing. And an old woman see the whole thing and come to my mother’s house to warn her that her little girl is a necromancer who is already causing death, just like some of the other women in your family, and this King don’t decide yet his ruling on witches, so don’t be surprised if we come one day and burn your house down with all of you in it. So don’t think I am too much of a bitch when I say fuck you and your gifts.”
“None of that was an answer, girl.”
“You for real?” she say and laugh out loud. “Anything that happen, most anything that happen to me, if I see and catch it in the quick, I can reverse it. Most things. That first time it was nothing but a wish that my friends get off me. That first time I didn’t even believe it was me who do it, not matter what that old woman say.”
“I did think—”
“That another woman would be just like you? Great-Grandmother, yes, but I don’t hear of anyone else. Would make things easier if we knew what to expect, to tell truth. It is fine, I come to terms. It don’t make me happy, if that is what you asking. But I not unhappy about it.”
“Never once think about that, I think.”
“Think what?”
“If it ever make me sad or happy. It just is.”
“You must be one of them women who was always old,” she say, and point to a stack of rocks that look like giant steps, with shrubs poking through. “Watch your step, old woman.”
This is how you know you are at the mouth of Mantha. You don’t. A wall of rock is a wall of rock is a wall of rock, but then you stop by a side with the marking of three red circles and wait. Then in the middle of this wait, two leather straps drop down and before you can ask, What in all the fucks is this shittery? Nsaka start climbing, and you remember that she call you old woman, which is not false but still deserving of a slap, and you grab the second strap and pull yourself up, and try to ignore that twice you realize that this is just straps tied together, which mean it must did burst with someone once. And when you climb to the top and pull yourself through a chamber that look like a tomb, you come to wide-open lands with sky and mountains surrounding you. And an archway cut from stone, and the fortress I was first supposed to see over one hundred years ago.
“It look like a Kwash palace,” I say.