Arrow of God (The African Trilogy 3)

‘Yo

u were quarrelling with someone and saying you would see who would drive the other away.’

‘I think there must be spiders on the rafters.’

He was now sitting up on his mat. What he had just seen was not a dream but a vision. It had all taken place not in the halflight of a dream but in the clarity of the middle day. His grandfather whom he had known with the eyes of a child had emerged again very clearly across a whole lifetime in which his image had grown weak and indistinct.

Ezeulu took out his ground tobacco and put a little in each nostril to help his thinking. Now that Obika was asleep again he felt free to consider things by himself. He thought once more of his fruitless, albeit cursory, search for the door of the new moon. So even in his mother’s village which he used to visit regularly as a boy and a young man and which next to Umuaro he knew better than any village – even here he was something of a stranger! It gave him a feeling of loss which was both painful and pleasant. He had temporarily lost his status as Chief Priest which was painful; but after eighteen years it was a relief to be without it for a while. Away from Ulu he felt like a child whose stern parent had gone on a journey. But his greatest pleasure came from the thought of his revenge which had suddenly formed in his mind as he had sat listening to Nwaka in the market place.

These thoughts were a deliberate diversion. At the end of them Ezeulu had steadied himself from his dizzy nightmare. Now he looked at it again more closely and one thing stood out. His quarrel with the white man was insignificant beside the matter he must settle with his own people. For years he had been warning Umuaro not to allow a few jealous men to lead them into the bush. But they had stopped both ears with fingers. They had gone on taking one dangerous step after another and now they had gone too far. They had taken away too much for the owner not to notice. Now the fight must take place, for until a man wrestles with one of those who make a path across his homestead the others will not stop. Ezeulu’s muscles tingled for the fight. Let the white man detain him not for one day but one year so that his deity not seeing him in his place would ask Umuaro questions.

Following Captain Winterbottom’s instruction that Ezeulu should be put in his place and taught to be polite to the Administration Mr Clarke refused to see him on the next day as the Head Messenger had promised. In fact he refused to see him for four days.

On the second morning as Clarke and Wade drove again towards the hospital at Nkisa they came upon a sacrifice by the roadside. They often saw roadside sacrifices and would not normally have stopped. But this one struck them by its extraordinary lavishness. Wade pulled up and they went to see. Instead of the usual white chick there were two fully grown cocks. The other objects were normal; young, yellowish palm fronds cut from the summit of the tree, a clay bowl with two lobes of kolanut inside it and a piece of white chalk. But the two white men only saw these objects later. What caught their eye immediately on reaching the sacrifice was the English florin.

‘Well I never!’ said Wade.

‘Now this is very strange, a most extravagant sacrifice. I wonder what it’s all about.’

‘Perhaps it’s for the recovery of the King’s Representative,’ said Wade lightly. Then something seemed to strike him and he spoke seriously. ‘I don’t like the look of it. I don’t mind if they use their cowries and manillas but the head of George the Fifth!’

Clarke chuckled but stopped immediately as Wade put his left hand into the bowl and picked out the piece of silver, cleaned it first with leaves and then on his woollen hose and put it into his pocket.

‘Good heavens! What do you think you are doing?’

‘I won’t have the King of England dragged into a disgusting juju,’ replied Wade, laughing.

This incident worried Clarke a great deal. He had convinced himself that he admired people like Wade and Wright who seemed to do an important job without taking themselves too seriously, who were always looking for the lighter side of things. But was this lack of feeling – for it certainly showed a monstrous lack of feeling to desecrate someone else’s sacrifice – part of the temperament of looking for the lighter side of life? If so would one not finally come down in favour of the seriousness (and its accompanying pomposity) of the Winterbottoms?

Without making any conscious decision Clarke was preparing himself to assume the burden of the Administration in the event of Winterbottom’s death. It would fall on him to defend his natives if need be from the thoughtless acts of white people like Wade.

That same morning Ezeulu sent Obika back to Umuaro to tell his family how things stood, and to arrange for his younger wife to come and cook his meals. But their clansman, John Nwodika, would not hear of it.

‘It is not necessary,’ he said. ‘My wife is the daughter of your old friend and she will not allow you to send home for another woman. I know that we cannot give you the kind of food you would eat at home. But if we have two palm kernels to chew we shall give one to you and a cup of water to swallow it with.’

Ezeulu could not refuse the offer when it was put that way. Whatever he might have against Nwodika’s son he could not offend the daughter of his friend, Egonwanne, who died three years come next harvest. So he told Obika not to send Ugoye but to arrange for large quantities of yams and other foods to be brought.

Ezeulu had good reasons for disliking the son of Nwodika. He came from the very village in Umuaro which was always poking its finger into Ezeulu’s eye; his job was said to comprise licking plates in the white man’s kitchen in Okperi which was a great degradation for a son of Umuaro. Worst of all he had brought the white man’s insolent messenger to Ezeulu’s house. But by the end of his first day in Okperi Ezeulu was beginning to soften towards the man, and to see that even a hostile clansman was a friend in a strange country. For the Okperi of Government Hill was indeed a strange country to Ezeulu. It was not the Okperi he had known as a boy and young man, the village of his mother, Nwanyieke. There must still be parts of that old Okperi left, but Ezeulu could not possibly go out in search of it at this time of his disgrace. Where would he find the eye with which to look at the old sites and old faces? It was fortunate that he felt that way for it saved him the mortification of being told he was a prisoner and could not come and go as he liked.

As he ate his meal that night he heard the voices of children welcoming the new moon. ‘Onwa atu-o-o-o! Onwa atu-o-o-o!’ went up on all sides of Government Hill. But Ezeulu’s sharp ear picked out a few voices that sang in a curious dialect. Except for the word moon he could not make out what they said. No doubt they were the children of some of these people who spoke a curious kind of Igbo – through the nose.

The first time Ezeulu heard the children’s voices his heart flew out. Although he had expected it, when it did come he was not ready. His mind had momentarily forgotten. But he recovered almost at once. Yes, his deity must now be asking: ‘Where is he?’ and soon Umuaro will have to explain.

There was great anxiety in Ezeulu’s compound throughout the first and second days of his absence. Although it was the heart of the planting season nobody went to work. Obika’s bride, Okuata, left her lonely hut and moved into her mother-in-law’s. Edogo left his own compound and sat in his father’s obi waiting for news. Neighbours and even passers-by came in and asked: ‘Have they returned yet?’ After a while the question began to make Edogo angry especially when it came from those whose main interest was gossip.

By the middle of the second day, however, Obika returned. At first no one dared ask any questions; some of the women appeared on the brink of tears. Even at such a serious and anxious moment Obika could not resist the temptation to alarm them further. He had worn a face like a muddied pond as he came up the approaches to the hut; now he slumped down on the floor as though he had run all the way from Okperi. He called for cold water which his sister brought him. When he had drunk and set the calabash down Edogo put the first question to him.

‘Where is the person with whom you went?’ he asked, skirting the dreaded finality of a name. Not even Obika could dare to joke after that. He allowed a short pause and said: ‘He was well when I left him.’

The tightening fear in the faces broke.

‘Why did the white man send for him?’

‘Where did you leave him?’

‘When is he coming home?’

‘Which one shall I answer?’ Obika tried to recover the earlier tension again but it was too late. ‘I haven’t got seven mouths. When I left him this morning the white man had not told us anything. We did not even see him because they said he was at the mouth of death.’ This piece of news caused a little stir. From the stories told of the white man it had not occurred to them that he could be sick like ordinary people. ‘Yes, he is already half dead. But he has a younger brother to whom he had given the message to give to Ezeulu. But this one was so troubled by his brother’s sickness that he forgot to see us. So Ezeulu said to me: Prepare and go home or they will think we have come to harm. That is why I returned.’