Beside the bed area was a small, rectangular brass box on a wooden mantle, its one drawer half open, like a jaw dropping in shock. Inside it, you could see Filo’s jewellery. Glinting silver bangles, winking gold necklaces, dark maroon rings peeping coyly from the edges, a fountain of lime-coloured beads dripping out and down the side of the box. Beneath your feet, the hardened floor felt hot and unsettling. As if you were subject to its moods.
Unaware that the brass head had been found, the servants gave up looking for it. In fact, they secretly wished it were never found. Of course the Oba would rant at them and they would soak it up, as they always did. But that artefact seemed to brew nothing but jealousy and resentment.
It was sweltering as Adesua trudged back to the main palace, suspiciously so. She knew something was amiss. The air was thick with promise. Even the flies seemed skittish. Sun-stroked, burnished green leaves from the Iroko tree had abandoned their branches to scatter and rustle against the scorched ground. There were shouting, agitated voices mingling into a chorus of noise you couldn’t clearly decipher ricocheting through the air. Above the clouds seemed to frown before shifting, one moment a face, the next a half-bitten guava.
Adesua decided that night she must see the Oba. Her husband. A man she knew less well than her personal servant. Gone were the days when she felt like a young girl, and all she worried about was falling from tall trees or the scorn of her Papa’s tongue whipping at her when she was caught attempting to wrangle her way into wrestling matches with boys from the village. Now a new, sneaky awareness had arisen, simmering to the surface, a slow burn. There was no going back; she was the young wife of Oba Odion. A king’s bride, a coveted and envied position, but this did not give her comfort, it never had. And as she followed the winding path back under the half-watchful gaze of the guards who held their spears too loosely and their slack mouths even looser, suddenly a rock of fear lodged in her throat. She tried to imagine what this thing she felt was coming could possibly be. Moments later the tantalising smell of roasted fowl infused the air and filled her nostrils. She imagined the palace cooks with their sweaty brows and teeth-dented bottom lips flapping around each other to prepare the meal on time, while her visit to Filo still weighed heavily on her mind.
Oba Odion did not delude himself into thinking he was a particularly wise man. In fact, as a boy he had been laughed out of several challenges set by his father Oba Anuje. Oba Anuje would create a riddle for him to solve and then summon him back later in the day when the hum of the palace had died down to a buzz trapped in his ear. The boy Odion would watch as Oba Anuje gleefully rubbed his large, dark brown, calloused hands together as he stood before his father trembling, pressing his thumbs against the other forlorn fingers desperately trying to settle himself. Telling bulbs of sweat would pop out of his armpits before sliding down his sides to languish in the flesh above his hips. Inevitably, when he failed, Oba Anuje would stroke his strong, jutting jaw and nod his head as if confirming what he already knew.
Several times when this ritual humiliation occurred, a boiling, yellow thought would conjure a heat so strong, it spread from Oba Odion’s head to every part of his body. It lit him up, and he was shrouded by this gleaming yellow aura before his father. Even then his father knew. Oba Odion could see it in the narrowing of his father’s eyes till they became black slits and the curling of his top lip. Finally, Oba Anuje would roar, “Get out of my sight.” And Odion would jump out of the protective gold light, which then shrank, to a dot in the air.
He remembered his father’s room as it was then. The circular shape of it, with its fading sickly plum-coloured walls. Sometimes he thought he heard the walls laughing at him and whispering to the bronze masks that decorated them, to the sturdy, shining brass chair with its crisscrossing pattern that left holes just big enough to stick fingers through. To the long, polished wooden stick that often lay by his father’s feet. It had smelled like new sweat and something else. A sickly sweet scent that cocooned something rotten which subtly oozed through the walls. Many times Oba Odion had tried in vain to figure out what that rotten smell was. He never did.
As if by doing so he would kill a memory possessing too many lives, the first task Odion completed when he became Oba was to have that room knocked out and rebuilt. On several occasions Oba Odion found himself making decisions based on avoiding his father’s haunting disapproval, although this revelation did not show its face at first. It was only when it began to eat up the ingredients that made up his judgement that the Oba ceased denying this truth. When he caught himself gauging how Oba Anuje would have reacted in a given circumstance and then vehemently deciding to do the opposite, it became even clearer.
So when Sully stood before him and the council, Oba Odion found himself clinging to the young man’s words, plucking them from his mouth as though they were fruits. And what words! It struck him that this stranger had what could only be described as a gift. With spit and perfect intonations he weaved his tale, rocking on the balls of his feet, talking not just with his lips but his hands, shoulders and it seemed every part of his body. Shrugging dramatically, angling his head at all sides of the room, and pointing to his bruises he informed them that he was an explorer from England who had travelled to India and around Europe, the Americas and the far corners of the East along his adventures. That he had heard so many tales of the great Benin kingdom from the Portuguese he had decided to come see for himself, bringing copper, brass bracelets and other items to trade.
Oba Odion had judged him before he even opened his mouth to speak, in the moment when their gazes held and Sully did not blink, his eye not automatically dropping down in false humility, nor cowering to their corners. The councilmen shifted in their seats, as though somebody had rubbed nettle leaves there to itch their backsides. They drew long, slow breaths that puffed out their cheeks and short, shallow ones through dry, pursed lips. They drummed their fingers and tapped their feet, throwing cynical glances for each other to catch. They shot Sully clever threats posing as questions which curled above their heads in circular patterns before wilting on contact with his skin. When a tiny, fleeting smile cracked across the Oba’s face, the councilmen noted it. Clasped hands unclasped and their coughs fell at Sully’s feet.
Talking before the Oba and his council, Sully felt the heat of their gazes. He was pleased. He did not crumble nor lose his will. At that moment, he thought of purpose and how it could con you into a different direction, lull you into a trap. He could hear the comings and goings of the palace above a bubble of gas, which roiled and gurgled in his stomach.
Booming laughter, strangled shouts, what sounded like the blade of a cutlass slicing into a coconut shell. He imagined juice spitting as it split into two. He curled his fingers into his palms to stop himself from running to the large window overlooking the grounds and sating his curiosity.
“And you say you have no family?” The question from a councilman stilled him. He turned to face the culprit.
“No sir, I have moved from place to place since coming to Africa.” This was met with a rigid “humph.”
Beneath his chest Sully’s heart quickened and the cut on his lip began to burn as he forced a bright, deceptive smile. He wondered how long this ordeal of questioning would last, not that it worried him because challenging trials were part of life, just as long as they came to an end before you did. The Gods would see to that, but he knew that sometimes the Gods displayed a vicious humour.