“Is just a name! Is just a name.”
“If I was you, I would become an enemy of all kind of craft. Except the one you born with. But force, what you call the push, is of the world and they not of it.”
“They going torment me the rest of my days? What kind of revenge is this?”
“You the one who go through the door.”
“No. Bunshi lead me. I . . .”
The rest of it don’t come. I know I am on the floor all this time, but it feel like I just collapse to it. Bad tidings is afoot and it is crushing my neck. A voice, me this time, say, He kicks out the guard so he and the Aesi are alone. But I can’t keep doing that, just the thought of it is already exhausting. I about to cry, but then I hear cry as just a voice and don’t know if that voice is me.
“How many men you kill?”
“You think I keep accounts in my head?”
“Would do you good to know.”
“I don’t know. Why, they all coming back?”
“Only the gods know.”
“The gods always taking step with me. And every time I think I win they just change the game. What kind of fuckery is this?”
All she do is nod, which enrage me.
“Why throw all this shit down on me if I can’t lift it off?”
“You would rather think you was going mad?”
“Yes. I would rather think I was going mad. What in all the fucks do you think?”
“There is still something you can do,” she say.
* * *
—
Her first lesson was the next day, right there in the sickroom. She take a rock of chalk and make marks on the wall, a curve going up, under it a curve going down, the two of them meeting at the ends. It look like a cave drawing of a fish. When I say they look like runes she snort. Man is who write runes, and five out of every ten mean nothing, and ten out of ten do nothing. This is not runes, this is nsibidi. Some people call them the cruel letters because sibidi used to mean “out for blood.” Rumor was that this was the mark of executioners, but the truth is that the first of these marks come from the jenga in the river. Two lands, four eyes, the fish, and the King, these are the words of mystic vision. This is the power to note significant things, power that last as long as the mark. Mark it on the door, the table, the chair. Meditate on it deep until you lift off the floor and mark it on air.
“This is what I saying to you, girl. To keep spirits at bay and to send them back, you have to lock them in the words, imprison them in the marks. Is not enough to speak the invocation, though you will for sure learn it. It is not enough to write the invocation, for some marks you will need on you always. Tomorrow we will begin the scarring, marking some on your arm. Take this, for this is the ukara ngbe cloth and the pattern is nsibidi script. You will have to be on your guard for the rest of your days, woman. For there are men out there with grievance against you. And they coming.”
All this is too much for one woman to believe, so I don’t believe it. Enchantments put on you don’t leave this room, the Nnimnim woman say to me. Every day and every room, she say. Now I have to mark wherever I enter, for every door is a portal. No trouble come to my mind for two quartermoons now, which is enough to make me wonder if this nsibidi was foolishness and what happen to me was just troubles of the mind. Old age been threatening to catch up with me for a long while now. And if a man didn’t frighten me when he was living, he sure don’t frighten me when he is dead. I write each nsibidi over and over, until the room start to remind me of another’s room, a person I can’t remember but I am sure is a man. I write them because she continue to show me, but I not learning them. I not recalling anything. You don’t leave until you learn all you need to learn, she say, but I been in this room for a moon. Long enough to see that she is keeping me in here not on a promise but by fear. I am done with her and her magic, say the voice, which shake me before I see that it is mine. I will see Dolingo. I approach the door and it open without reaching for the knob. I don’t know why I do it but I step back just a few paces and door pull itself closed. But then I nudge to the door and it open again, step back, and again it close. I couldn’t tell the last time a laugh or anything close to the sort come to my face, so I do it longer than I would—nudging forward and back, as the door open and close. Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, then back and . . . back! I jump back suddensome, but the door open anyway. Ha! I shout. White science have skill, but white science not perfect, I am thinking when I leave the room.
Dolingo. This must be some place to see when you looking up from the ground, but I am up here with the birds, in what must be the highest tower. Melelek, the hall of white science. And yet when I was expecting to see clouds, what I see is leaves. Plenty people live in trees, and some build houses up in there, but I never see a whole city resting in trees, nor this—trees tall and wide as city quarter. Trees tall enough to touch the moon, tall as the world itself. It make no sense looking down, for the distance from tower to ground is too high. One can only look across, at the sky caravan coming to a dock right out the window from me, a wagon—sky caravan being my words, not theirs, big as a dhow and moving on a pulley system of ropes. Caravans taking themselves from one tree to the next—tree being my word not theirs, and each tree far off as well, so these caravans travel a great distance. A city in the tree, and another farther off, and ropes connecting the two, ropes carrying cargo, carts, and beasts in cages. My head feeling the rare air, it is spinning from seeing waterfalls far off, and aqueducts they call the floating rivers, and great pools. How? Water running in and out this citadel, with no sign of how it could reach this high. All of this is too much to just look at, so I slip out of the white science hall, make for the sky docks and take the first caravan about to pull away.