Leave your yams and cocoyams
And come to school.
And I must scuttle away in haste
When children in play or in earnest cry:
Look! a Christian is on the way.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha…
The singer’s sudden, demented laughter filled Ezeulu’s compound and he woke up. In spite of the cold harmattan he was sweating. But he felt an enormous relief to be awake and know that it had been a dream. The blind alarm and the life-and-death urgency fell away from it at the threshold of waking. But a vague fear remained because the voice of the python had ended as the voice of Ezeulu’s mother when she was seized with madness. Nwanyi Okperi, as they called her in Umuaro, had been a great singer in her youth, making songs for her village as easily as some people talked. In later life when her madness came on her these old songs and others she might have made forced themselves out in eccentric spurts through the cracks in her mind. Ezeulu in his childhood lived in fear of these moments when his mother’s feet were put in stocks, at the new moon.
The passage of Ogbazulobodo at that moment helped in establishing Ezeulu in the present. Perhaps it was the effect of the dream, but in all his life he had never heard a night spirit pass with this fury. It was like a legion of runners each covered from neck to ankle with strings of rattling ekpi
li. It came from the direction of the ilo and disappeared towards Nkwo. It must have seen signs of light in someone’s compound for it seemed to stop and cry: Ewo okuo! Ewo okuo! The offender whoever it was must have quickly put out the light, and the pacified spirit continued its flight and soon disappeared in the night.
Ezeulu wondered why it had not saluted him when it passed near his compound. Or perhaps it did before he woke up.
After the dream and the commotion of Ogbazulobodo’s passage he tried in vain to sleep again. Then they began to fire the cannon in Amalu’s place. Ezeulu counted nine claps separated by the beating of ekwe. By that time sleep had completely left his eyes. He got up and groped for the latch of his carved door and opened it. Then he took his matchet and his bottle of snuff from the head of the bed and groped his way to the outer room. There he felt the dry chill of the harmattan. Fortunately the fire had not died from the two big ukwa logs. He stoked it and produced a small flame.
No other person in the village could carry the ogbazulobodo as well as Obika. Whenever somebody else tried there was a big difference: either the speed was too slow or the words stuck in his throat. For the power of ike-agwu-ani, great though it was, could not change a crawling millipede into an antelope nor a dumb man into an orator. That was why in spite of the great grievance which Amalu’s family nursed against Ezeulu and his family Aneto still came to beg Obika to run as ogbazulobodo on the night before his father’s second burial.
‘I do not want to say no to you,’ said Obika after Aneto had spoken, ‘but this is not something a man can do when his body is not all his. Since yesterday I have been having a little fever.’
‘I do not know what it is but everybody you see nowadays sounds like a broken pot,’ said Aneto.
‘Why not ask Nweke Ukpaka to run for you?’
‘I knew about Nweke Ukpaka when I came to you. I even passed by his house.’
Obika considered the matter.
‘There are many people who can do it,’ said Aneto. ‘But he whose name is called again and again by those trying in vain to catch a wild bull has something he alone can do to bulls.’
‘True,’ said Obika. ‘I agree but I am agreeing in cowardice.’
‘If I say no,’ Obika told himself, ‘they will say that Ezeulu and his family have revealed a second time their determination to wreck the burial of their village man who did no harm to them.’
He did not tell his wife that he would be going out that night until he had eaten his evening meal. Obika always went into his wife’s hut to eat his meals. His friends teased him about it and said the woman had spoilt his head. Okuata was polishing off the soup in her bowl when Obika spoke. She crooked her first finger once more, wiped the bowl with it, stretched it again and ran it down her tongue.
‘Going out with this fever?’ she asked. ‘Obika, have pity on yourself. The funeral is tomorrow. What is there they cannot do without you until morning?’
‘I shall not stay long. Aneto is my age mate and I must go and see how he is preparing.’
Okuata maintained a sullen silence.
‘Bar the door well. Nobody will carry you away. I shall not stay long.’
The ekwe-ogbazulobodo sounded kome kome kokome kome kokome and continued for a while warning anyone still awake to hurry up to bed and put out every light because light and ogbazulobodo were mortal enemies. When it had beaten long enough for all to hear it stopped. Silence and the shrill call of insects seized the night again. Obika and the others who would carry the ayaka spirit-chorus sat on the lowest rung of the okwolo steps talking and laughing. The man who beat the ekwe joined them, leaving his drum in the half-light of the palm-oil torch.
When the ekwe began to beat out the second and final warning Obika was still talking with the others as though it did not concern him. The old man, Ozumba, who kept the regalia of the night spirits took a position near the drummer. Then he raised his cracked voice and called ugoli four or five times as if to clear the cobweb from it. Then he asked if Obika was there. Obika looked in his direction and saw him vaguely in the weak light. Slowly and deliberately he got up and went to Ozumba, and stood before him. Ozumba bent down and took up a skirt made of a network of rope and heavily studded with rattling ekpili. Obika raised both arms above his head so that Ozumba could tie the skirt round his waist without hindrance. When this was done Ozumba waved his arms about like a blind man until they struck the iron staff. He pulled it out of the ground and placed it in Obika’s right hand. The ekwe continued to beat in the half-light of the palm-oil torch. Obika closed his hand tight on the staff and clenched his teeth. Ozumba allowed him a little time to prepare himself fully. Then very slowly he lifted the ike-agwu-ani necklace. The ekwe beat faster and faster. Obika held his head forward and Ozumba put the ike-agwuani round his neck. As he did so he said:
Tun-tun gem-gem
s mgbada bu nugwu.
The speed of the deer