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The Carving Of War

By Somto Ihezue

 

Odili was a child when Nkeala, her grandmother, died. All she remembered of her were her braids, a tangle of clouds that reached for the floor. She remembered her eyes, how they swallowed her face. To look into them was to be lost in a vastness. It was to find eyes — owl eyes, bold eyes, brown eyes — staring back at you. Most of all, she remembered her kindness, an unending sea.

Nkeala had been dìbìā — keeper, to Idemili; the roaring python, they who drowned oceans, mother of mothers. At the birth of time, Idemili, like beads dancing on a fragile waist, had wound herself around the clans of Obosi. Out of her mouth, the Eke River poured, its brooks and streamlets giving sustenance to the corn in the farmlands, the antelopes of the wild and the Irokos that split the sky. Odili’s family was bound in perpetuity to Idemili. With her grandmother’s passing, the fanged staff fell to her mother, Adaugo. In the past, a few keepers had met their fate with defiance. Odili’s great-great grandfather, Agbadike, had refused the staff when it passed to him. Setting the shrine of Idemili ablaze, he invoked the ritual of blood in a bid to sever the bond that tethered his life to the deity. Three days after, a breadfruit fell from a tree and split his skull in half.

Like moth to fire, Adaugo embraced the mantle of keeper. Before her twelfth birthday, she could already perform the passage rites of ancestors. Beneath the glow of a horned moon, she’d slay a ram, its body thrashing beneath her knee. Immersed in its blood, she’d wade into the Eke, bridging the fold between the living and the dead. Ancestors past would come walking through her, blessing and cursing the ones they left behind. When she was heavy with Odili, Adaugo ventured into Idemili’s mouth and emerged unscathed, spirit water coursing through her veins. One of the dwindling few, Adaugo knew the words to the eternal utterances and the anchors that held them. The clans of Obosi had revered Nkeala; Adaugo, they feared. She was power unbridled, her dedication to Idemili undying. Like her mother and keepers before her, Adaugo stayed unwed.

“We are the rage of Idemili, unburdened by the constraints of love and companionship,” she’d remind Odili, “We are fire and water, we are rain and lightning, our bodies are nothing but vessels.”

Still, keepers were mandated to bear offspring and preserve their line. Without a present father, a mother who in all entirety was of another realm, Odili roamed the village unchecked, her python familiar slithering beside her. More than a companion, it had become a parent, regurgitating rabbits and bush rats for her to roast and eat.

When the first missionaries came to their village, Odili was drawn in by their flaky bread and the trinkets that hung from their neck, how they shimmered in the light. At the rooster’s crow, she’d run into the village, into the shack that doubled as a chapel, to watch the priests bless communion, to watch Edward. Edward was a mass server and Edward was beautiful. With her eyes, she’d follow him and when he caught her stare, she’d hold it till he flushed red and looked away. He intrigued her, the sapphire of his eyes, his hair; the burning of dawn, the way he said her name, like a song lived in the walls of his lips. When first he kissed her — a gentle kiss, his nose brushing against hers, he had closed his eyes. Odili kept hers a door, ajar.

When the priests baptized her in the Eke, Odili didn’t feel new, born again, like Edward had said she would. And when she received communion, the blood of Christ sweet on her tongue, only then did her mother come raging like a flood, her screams claps of thunder.

“I curse you, I curse you all!” Her outstretched finger trembled under her voice. “You touched a seed of Idemili, you defiled her waters.” She paced around them, leopard to prey. “Come, come and see how you fall.”

That night, the chapel burned to the ground and Edward with it. When the last of the missionaries left Obosi, they took Odili with them. She was sixteen. Her mother, far off in the spirit wilds, had not been there to stop them.

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Odili cupped the scream falling from her lips. It had been twenty years since last she saw it. There it was, in her bedroom, coiled under her child’s head. Walking, then running, then stumbling, she made for the kitchen. From behind the pot cabinet, she drew a cutlass, the one for splitting the coconuts. Darting back to the room, her breath steel in her chest, she inched towards her child’s cot. She reached into it, her fingers clattering against each other, and picked him up in one swoop. Setting him in his chair, far at the end of the room, she took the cutlass and hacked everything to pieces. The cot, the mattress, her árùsí — familiar; bright gold pyramids trailing down its body, she hacked at it all, wood, foam, and skin scattering across the room. She did not stop until her child began to cry.

The rest of the night met Odili awake. She kept turning in bed every time the crickets buried in the walls broke into their high-chirped songs. Checking on him for the fourth time, she found her child silent with opened eyes. In his little face, Odili saw her grandmother. She lifted him, pressing his temple to her lips and pulling away when she felt warm liquid seeping into her clothes.

“Naughty, naughty boy,” she sighed.

She nuzzled her nose on his and he smiled, his incisors specks of white. Changing his urine-stained clothes and putting him back to sleep, she headed for the bathroom and met her mother at the door.

“Gods!” Odili cowered to the floor.

“Foolish child, what have you done?” Her mother’s voice was a battle waiting to begin.

“Ma — Mama?”

Odili had not set eyes on her mother, not in years. With the markings of the old faith etched on her face, cowries from the Eke River clasped around her neck, her hair silvered milk, her mother was starting to look very much like her grandmother.

“You took all I sowed in you, and you left it to the crows!”

On the floor, hands wrapped around her body, Odili sat noiseless. With her mother came the memories, the ones she locked behind walls. Now, the walls came tumbling down and the memories poured in, drowning her.

“Where is its body?” her mother asked, anger sewn into the wrinkles on her face.

Like a baby learning to walk, Odili drew herself off the floor, out the back door and into the bushes behind her house. Her mother followed, like a shadow on an ill-lit street. Coming to a spot, Odili stepped aside and like an arrow, her mother’s cry pierced the night. Odili had never heard a thing like it; it was anguish given voice.

“Mother of my mothers, gouge out my eyes for I have seen the unseen,” she cried, collapsing to the ground, next to the lynched corpse of the familiar. Ash and dust was all that remained of it. “Insolent child!” She threw a glare at Odili and in her eyes, something built. “You will be the death of us.”

Odili just stood there as her mother resumed her wailing. She had never seen her cry, not once, not even when her grandmother had died.

“How did you find me?”

“You have always been a slow one.” Her mother dried her eyes, turning to her. “Did you think you could just leave?” She continued, mockery stealing into her voice. “The path before you is set in stone.”

“I didn’t leave . . . I was taken. I thought you’d come for me.”

“The way back was ahead of you, you just chose not to see it.”

“I was a child. I was lost. I waited for you.” Odili caught the tear making its way down her face. “You abandoned me!”

“And when you became a woman, what held you from returning to your duty, to your mother?!”

“Mother? You are dead to me.”

Her mother’s slap fell like a gush of cold breeze on her cheek. It would have stung more if she had been there in flesh, not projecting her spirit.

“I want you to leave,” Odili said, unfazed.

“You must come back to Obosi, you must atone for this atrocity.”

“I’d rather die a thousand deaths.”

“You think you have known suffering?” Her mother’s eyes narrowed. “Something is coming, something unlike anything you have ever seen.”

“Leave, please!”

In a blink, her mother vanished into the night.

---

Odili held a heart in her hands, red ants crawling over it. She ate it whole. Out of the hollow in her chest, she took out a rock. She watched as cracks tore across its rough exterior, like they did on her bedroom walls. Breaking open, a python, fanged and rattled, lunged at her.

Odili willed herself awake. She had not slept in days, not since her mother’s visit. Even in the heat of daylight, she kept seeing things, the bread hawker with two heads, three men with bellies like drums swinging from a guava branch, her reflection missing in the mirror.

With her sheets, she dabbed the sweat the nightmare had brought with it, looked over into her child’s new cot, and he wasn’t there. Odili panicked, tearing through the baby blankets. She spun around, dread crawling onto her face. Thinking perhaps she had left him in the living room, though she vividly remembered tucking him in, she made for the door. Hand on the knob, she stopped. She turned, towards a closed-off corner of the room, and found her child cradled in the hands of a darkness.

“He has our eyes,” it said, the echo of its voice the crackling of fire.

“Give him to me.” The dread on Odili’s face disappeared, and fury took its place. “Give him to me!” The walls shook as black veins zipped across her skin, her pupils eclipsing the white of her eyes.

The darkness faded, melting into the crevices on the floor, leaving the child behind.

---

“They came for our boy, they came for him!” Odili said, ushering Nnayeleugo into her house.

After the episode with the darkness, Odili had sent for him. They had met years ago when he ran with the ghost masquerades of Okija. When she had told him she was carrying their child and he asked her to marry him, she refused. Nnayeleugo was a river, forever on the run. He was everywhere and nowhere and Odili had no interest in being part of that. There was also the reminder at the back of her mind that she was promised to another, one clearly as testing as they were vicious. However, she and Nnayeleugo remained friends as well as parents to their child, with him swooping in from time to time, bringing wood carvings and sweets that tasted of ginger.

“Whatever it is, we must trap it and banish it,” he said, scanning the house, hands akimbo.

“Banish it?”

“Yes, banish its connection to you.”

Odili nodded. This was why she’d sent for him. She may have forsaken her belief in the old faith; Nnayeleugo had not. A boy, he had been an apprentice to a local blacksmith in a land whose name was not spoken. When stone morphed to gold in his hand, he spoke not a word of it, and when the flames from the hearth spoke to him, he spoke back.

“Bring my boy, let me hold him.” Nnayeleugo laughed his coarse laugh as he returned to his jaunty self.

Come nightfall, he took strands of hair from Odili’s head, bound it to a half moon, and when the night started to speak, he summoned the darkness.

“Biá — come, biá rùsàlà ókú ògū — come wrestle fire,” he chanted, dancing around the runes he had drawn on Odili’s bedroom floor. Odili sat in the corner, their baby resting on her shoulder.

“Biá kene, biá fúrú ógù.” Nnayeleugo’s voice pulsated. “I fú, I gbá, I fú, I gbá —” He stopped in his tracks, his eyes darting around in their sockets. “It is here.”

“Where?” Odili sprang up.

Nnayeleugo did not respond.

“Nnayeleugo?” Odili put the child down among his carvings. “Nna?”

He charged at her in scattered steps and pinned her to the wall. Drawing his dagger, he brought it to her throat. Odili, still reeling from the suddeness of it all, raised her face to his. In his face, she did not find him.

“It — something — is — something — inside — me ,. . . “ he strained, blood streaming down his ears. “Gba oso, run.”

Crawling from under him, the blade grazing her skin, Odili picked up their child, but she did not run. She turned to Nnayeleugo and she saw it, shadowed claws gripping his neck from behind. From over his shoulder, an eye peeped at her, then a second, then a hundred, all shrouded in darkness.

“Let him go!”

Like a puppet, they strung Nnayeleugo forward, up to her. He let out a cry as the claws dug deeper into him.

“Please,” she cried, falling to her knees.

One by one, they took their claws out of him as Nnayeleugo exhaled. And in all their voices, “Come drink with us,” they said. Their claws to the front of his neck, they slashed his throat open, and like a black hole, vanished into themselves. Nnayeleugo’s hands went to his neck as he reached for his voice and crashed to the ground. Odili ran to him, tying her baby to her back. Unsure, tears clouding her sight, she pressed her hands against the gash, blood spluttering all over.

“Help! Somebody help!” She stood in an attempt to find help and Nnayeleugo held her, his touch weak, cold. He did not say a word, he didn’t need to. Odili sat with him, in his blood, in the pieces of her heart. She stayed till the light left his eyes.

---

Odili threw her things into a box, torched her house with Nnayeleugo’s body in it, and she ran. Journeying for days, her child on her back, she made it to the bank of the Eke River. Regardless of the serpent horde weaving through its waters, the river was the fastest route into Obosi. Making the crossing on a crowded ferry and hoping no one recognized her, she got to her mother’s hut. It was how she remembered it, a roof built out of palm fronds, an unkempt hibiscus hedge, and the constant bleating of goats. Her mother was bent over a mortar, pounding cocoyams when Odili walked in.

“I knew you’d come,” she said. She didn’t even look up at Odili. “Ngwanu, let us begin, for night gathers.”

In the passing months, they performed the cleansing ritual of rebirth. Every third market day, Adaugo washed Odili in the Eke. Her body breaking the waters, it reminded her of her baptism, of Edward.

“Mere mortals would be whipped through the village for this sacrilege, but you are my child, the blood in your veins spirit water. Your shame is mine alone to bear.”

The nights when Adaugo flung open the ancestral gates, she’d balance a calabash of python eggs on Odili’s head and have her walk naked into the wilds. Odili just prayed she didn’t run into a night-wolf.

“Before the ones who came before us, be bare.”

In between bathing in the Eke and running from wolves, Odili’s days became cold and terrifying. One day, her mother nowhere in sight, she sat in the yard, in the gentle breeze, and watched her child build mud dunes.

“What is his name?” Adaugo sprang from behind her.

“Nkeala,” Odili said, recovering from the fright. “I named him after grandmama,” she added as it dawned on her that her mother had never asked for her son’s name.

Adaugo sat in the sand, next to her. She had not heard her mother’s name in a while. “Like its bearers, it is beautiful,” she said, her gaze on the boy. “He has her eyes.”

“He has yours too.”

They were looking at each other now. For the first time in a long time, Odili saw her mother. She placed her hand in hers and Adaugo squeezed it, a knowing squeeze. Hand in hand, they sat in silence.

For the final rites, the ashes of her familiar — Odili had brought it along in an old Milo tin — was scattered into the Eke, a wake held in its honor.

“Weep child, for we lay our mothers to rest.”

And weep, Odili did. At the end of the rituals, a grave illness overtook her. On her mother’s mat, sweat soaking into her clothes, her breathing rasp, her body felt paper thin. Wiping her with a cold towel, Adaugo chanted incantations under her breath, her head bobbing back and forth.

“What — what is happening to me?” Odili’s speech was starting to leave her. “Did we do it wrong?”

“Be calm, the ritual is taking its toll,” Adaugo hushed her. “Atonement is a long, hard road and you have much to atone for,” she continued. “Abandoning your sacred duty, murdering your familiar, then there’s that peasant trickster you spawned a child with — good thing I rid you of him.”

“You — you rid me — of him?”

“Quiet now, you need rest.”

Sitting up, Odili pushed her mother’s hands away. She saw clearly now, for in Adaugo’s caged eyes a darkness lingered, the darkness that had come for her child . . . the darkness that murdered Nnayeleugo.

“Gods, it — it was you.” All the color drained from Odili’s face.

Adaugo straightened up from the mat, her face vacant, unapologetic.

“Why, Mama?”

“Idemili is merciful . . . it is my duty to be her vengeance.”

Drawing strength from nowhere, Odili leaped at her. From the soil, Adaugo summoned taut roots that grasped Odili, binding her feet and wrists. Like threads, Odili tore through them and descended on her mother.

“Die!” she screamed, her hands wrapped around Adaugo’s throat. Adaugo flailed and clawed, spitting into Odili’s eyes, striking her with blindness. Odili wiped off the curse like it was water.

“You are old and like you, your power wanes.” Odili tightened her grip. “No one will mourn you.”

As Adaugo gasped for her last breath, Odili shrieked, letting go of her. Something was wrong. She could feel her muscles tearing off her bones, the bones breaking, crushing into each other, pain tearing through her.

“What have you done to me?” She glowered at her mother, her eyes cut diamonds.

“To right this wrong, there must be a reckoning.” Adaugo coughed, coming to her knees. “A strand of Idemili was torn and it must be replaced.”

“What?”

“Doing this to you, it wounds me, but I am without a choice.”

“No.” Odili’s legs had started to morph into one. “Mama, stop this, please!”

“Don’t worry, I will raise my grandchild to be stronger.”

Odili, inside of herself, her heart racing faster than a hummingbird’s wings, watched her body come undone. As the transformation edged towards her chest, Odili reached, grabbing her mother by the leg.

“This is not the last of me, Mother,” she hissed, her tongue forked in two. “Brace yourself, for I will be war, and I will come.”

Letting go, of herself, of the fight in her, Odili fledged into a python the brown of bark and into dusk, she slithered.

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Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was “The Carving of War” by Somto Ihezue, and if you enjoyed that then check out his other story in our archives, episode 776, A Girls is Blood, Spirit and Fire from two years ago—though the content note on that one is for FGM, and it’s not a passing reference either, so be sure you’re in the right frame of mind; when you are, though, it’s great. He’s also popped up all over Escape Artists, and has stories in Escape Pod (episode 876, Like Stars Daring to Shine) and Pseudopod (episode 952, Onitsha Main, Ochanja, The Twins, Nkpor, and the Shadows of Shoprite), as well as other stories round and about the place, linked from his website somtoihezue.com.

Somto sent us these notes on The Carving of War: This story draws inspiration and material from the mystery of the Eke Idemili deity: a giant peaceful python revered in certain Igbo communities. The murder of this python is considered a great taboo.

Thank you, Somto, for the background and the story. What a terrible price we can pay for not conforming to our parents’ needs and expectations, huh? I have long since grown accustomed to the disappointment that I am not already a Chief Technology Officer somewhere, or cabinet minister, or whatever; I’d like to say I had become immune to it but the truth is that I’ve only become inured to it, that buzzing sensation every time I’m with them, that silent sigh that sits over us like a blanket of fog. And all I did was decide that actually, I don’t want to spend the best decades of my life existing as a vibrating ball of stress to try and retire rich when I’m older and already broken and beyond joy! I’d rather just enjoy my life as I’m living it at a somewhat steadier pace! So imagine what it is like for trans folk, where parents can react so badly to their child deciding for themself who they are that they might end up on stage at a presidential inauguration throwing Nazi salutes.

It is surprising how difficult this fact is for so many, but you do not have the right to control anyone. Not your employees and direct reports at work, not your significant others, not even your children. You have to let people be who they want to be, and that might not be what you expected or planned on—gods know I’ve gone through that readjustment enough myself, from ten years ago assuming my kids would just be going to school and swimming lessons and friends’ houses like every other kid, to the actual path we’ve ended up on with a house that’s got more autism in it than it has bottles of milk—because if you try and fight it, well, you’re going to lose them as a person anyway. People are who they are and they can no more change that than they can change which direction their knees bend, which is to say it hurts an awful lot and leaves them unable to leave the house if they try.

Anyway. I don’t expect any of you need telling any of the above, but what you might need to hear is that if someone is trying to tell you that they know who you are better than you yourself do: you do not need to listen to them. Trust yourself. And don’t waste this limited span of life trying to make it fit someone else’s vision: it’s not worth it, and if they’re insisting on it, they only love the idea of you, not the real you. You should love yourself more than that.