The spiders that lived skittered into the flame at the entrance of the cave. I will never know if this was a mass suicide or a decision to return to whence they came. I had retreated from the wilderness entirely the moment that lightning struck, so I did not see if they’d returned there.
“Mwita?” I whispered, ignoring the spider carcasses lying beside him. My body was drenched with sweat yet I shivered with cold. Luyu ran over and threw a rapa over us.
“I’m fine,” he said, caressing my cheek.
“I guided it,” I said.
“I know,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t feel a thing.”
“What were those?” Luyu asked.
“I have no idea,” I said.
Something caught Mwita’s eye. I turned in the direction he was staring. Luyu did, too. “Oh,” she said.
The bodies had fallen, the ropes holding them singed by the blast. And now the dry remains burned bright. The mysterious executed sorcerer and sorceress finally got the funeral pyre they deserved.
The storm was still going when morning came. The only way we knew it was morning was by checking the time on Luyu’s portable. While Luyu boiled some rice to mix with some dried goat meat and spices, Mwita used a pan to dig a grave on the side of the cave. He insisted on doing it alone.
I walked over to the electronics at the back of the cave. We’d avoided these items more than the corpses. They were the old devices of a doomed people. After what had happened last night, I was in the mood to look doom in the face.
“What are you doing?” Luyu asked, as she turned the rice. “Haven’t you had enough…”
“Leave her,” Mwita said, pausing in his digging. “One of us should look.”
Luyu shrugged. “Okay. I know I’m not going near that cursed junk.”
I chuckled to myself. I understood her sentiment and I think Mwita probably felt the same way. But me, well, this was a page right out of the Great Book. If I was going to somehow rewrite it then it made sense for me to look.
The tinny smell of old wiring and dead motherboards was stronger up close. There were scattered keys from keyboards and pieces of thin plastic in the sand from broken screens and casings. Some of the computers had designs on the outside-faded butterflies, loops and swirls, geometric shapes. Most were a uniform black.
A device that looked like a small very thin black book caught my eye. It was wedged between two computers and when I pulled it out, I was surprised to see that it had a screen when I opened it up. It looked beaten up but, unlike the other items, not old. It was about the size of the palm of my hand. The back of it was made of an extremely hard substance that looked oddly like a black leaf. The screen was unscratched.
All the buttons on the front were blank, the words rubbed off long ago. I touched a button. Nothing happened. I touched another and the thing made a sound like water. “Oh!” I exclaimed, almost dropping it.
The screen lit up showing a place of plants, trees, and bushes. I gasped softly. Just like the place my mother showed me, I thought. The place of hope. My chest swelled and I sat down right there beside the pile of decaying useless hardware from another time.
The image rolled and moved, like someone was walking and I was looking through her eyes. Through its tiny speakers came the sound of birds and insects singing and grasses, plants, and leaves being stepped on and pushed aside. Then the title slowly came up from the bottom of the screen and I understood that this was a large portable with a book on it. The book’s title was The Forbidden Greeny Jungle Field Guide, written by some group calling themselves The Great Explorers of Knowledge and Adventure Organization.
Suddenly the image froze and the sound stopped. I pressed more buttons but nothing helped. It switched itself off and no matter how many times I pressed the buttons, nothing more happened.
No matter. I threw it aside. I straightened up. I smiled. Hours later, the sky smiled too. The storm had finally passed. We left the cave before dawn.
Over the next two days of travel, the land grew hillier. The ground became a mix of sand and patches of a sort of dry grass. Here we found lizards and jackrabbits to eat, and just in time, as our dried meat was running out. We came across fat-trunked trees I couldn’t name and more and more palm trees. The climate remained cold at night and relatively warm during the day. And thankfully, we came across no more ungwa storms. Of course, there are worse things.
CHAPTER 54
THERE IS A PORTION OF THE GREAT BOOK that most versions exclude. The Lost Papers. Aro had a copy of them. The Lost Papers go into detail about how the Okeke, during their centuries festering in the darkness, were mad scientists. The Lost Papers discuss how they invented the old technologies like computers, capture stations, and portables. They invented ways to duplicate themselves and keep themselves young until they died. They made food grow on dead land, they cured all diseases. In the darkness, the amazing Okeke brimmed with wild creativity.
Okeke familiar with the Lost Papers are embarrassed by them. Nurus like to cite them whenever they want to point out how fundamentally flawed Okeke are. During the dark times, the Okeke may have been problematic, but now they were worse off.
A sad miserable unthinking lot, I thought, as we approached the first of many villages just before the border of the Seven Rivers Kingdom. I could understand how they felt. Only a few days ago I had felt the same way. Hopeless beyond hopeless. If we had not found that cave of corpses, spiders, and moldering computers, I probably would have wanted to join them.
These villages consisted of Okeke who were too afraid to fight or flee. They were shifty-eyed people who’d be easily exterminated when my father came east with his army. They walked with their heads down, afraid of their own shadows. They grew sad limp onions and tomatoes in soil brought from the riverside. In the front and back of their clay brick huts, they cultivated a waxy maroon plant which they dried and smoked to make themselves forget. It made their eyes red, their teeth brown, their skin smell like feces, and had no nutritional value. Of course, of all things, this weed grew easily in the ground here.
The children had large bellies and stunned faces. Mangy dogs trotted about looking as pathetic as the people; we saw one making a meal of its feces. And once in a while, when the wind shifted, I could hear screaming in the distance. These villages had no names. It was sickening.
Everyone, even the children, wore a dangling earring with black and blue beads in the upper part of their left ear. It was the only hint of culture and beauty that these people possessed.
We got past the first cluster of huts unnoticed. Around us, Okeke people dully trudged about, argued, slept in the roads, or wept. We saw men with missing limbs, some of them lay against huts, the wounds festering. Near death, or dead. I saw a pregnant woman laughing hysterically to herself as she sat in front of her hut pushing dirt into a mound. My hands itched and I felt jittery.
“How do you feel, Onyesonwu?” Mwita asked, as soon as we were past the last hut. A half mile away was another village.
“The urge isn’t so strong here,” I said. “I don’t think these people want healing.”
“Can’t we go around these places?” Luyu asked.
I just shook my head, offering no explanation. I didn’t have one. The next group of huts was in the same condition. Sad, sad people. But this place was at the bottom of a hill and we were in full view as we walked down it. As we passed the first hut an old woman with many unhealed cuts on her face stopped and stared at me. She looked at Mwita and her face pulled into a wide toothless grin. Then the woman’s grin decreased. “But where are the rest of you?” she asked.