Adesua dropped the spear. She had been concentrating so deeply, she barely heard him coming. Either that or he was good at catching people off guard.
“Oh. It is you. Should you not be following my husband around?” she spat.
“Shouldn’t you?” he asked, giving her an amused look. “You must be the least enamoured bride I have come across.”
To her horror, he took off his boots and began to roll his trousers up, exposing tanned well-defined bow legs lightly covered with fine brown hairs.
“No, what are you doing?” She held the spear up, aiming it at his moving chest.
“Easy,” he chuckled, barely breaking stride. “You’re not going to use that thing on me are you?” The water felt cool on his limbs. If she had not been there, he would have stripped and taken a dip naked. The devilish part of him almost suggested it. Barely a hair’s breadth away, he wrapped his hand around hers, gently prying the spear out of it. “I’m your husband’s guest. Do you not think you could bring yourself to be more hospitable than aiming a weapon at me?”
He thought he saw a flicker of shame in her expression but it vanished quickly. The water rippled, mouths of fish glimmered seductively below and the afternoon light threatened to bend things to its will. The air between them crackled. He could almost hear the flutter in her long, elegant neck. He knew that flutter could catch things; a bright neon fish scale, the frayed thread on the inside of his trousers, the cut on his jaw he had given himself shaving with his pocket knife three days earlier. He knew if he ran his finger over that flutter the skin would be soft, the shape unpredictable, that he would remember the contours days later.
The catapult in his left pocket was firing a series of jagged objects at an entrance Adesua did not know she had.
“Why do you wear that annoying hat?” She asked suddenly, breaking the tension.
“Oh, this offensive thing?” He answered, giving a half smile and pointing at it. “To protect me from the kingdom’s curses.”
“You are mocking me!” she exclaimed, wiping a trickle of water from her forehead.
“Come here.” He instructed. “I want to show you something.” He grabbed hold of her hand. She jerked it back, a scowl on her face. “How dare you? I am one of the Oba’s brides. You show no respect. I could report you to the Oba for that, have you flogged, made an example of.”
A tight expression appeared on his face, as if he was considering throttling her. He laughed instead, taking her hand again. “Come and I’ll help you catch a fish,” he said softly.
He led her to the bank where the water gently lapped at scattered stones. They sat down. He took the hat off, turning it in his hands. “You see this hat? I negotiated with a Chinaman on a ship for it, gave him my pipe in return. Was compelled to at the time, couldn’t understand why.”
He placed the hat on her head, tugging it down firmly. “There. You look like a modern young woman. What a picture.”
She put her hand on her head uncertainly and her lips curved realising it provided shade.
“See?” Sully continued. “Not so bad after all.”
She touched a braid poking out, rubbing the kinky hair that had somehow partially unravelled. “Why are you in Benin?” she asked, slapping away the fly she had one eye on, listening to the soft trickle of water, the gentle crackling of the surrounding bush. He turned foreign, cool green eyes at her. “Why is anybody in Benin? I’m a man of adventure. My travels led me here. I have to tell you, that hat looks much better on you than it did on the Chinaman, beautifully turned out fellow that he was. He looked like an Emperor, gave me opium too. I never did ask him how he got the hat.”
Adesua did not know who a “Chinaman” was or what “turned out” meant or what “opium” was. Some kind of seasoning for food maybe? She did not ask for fear of appearing ignorant. She knew this shifty stranger would add it to his arsenal of weapons, using it against her when she least expected. She took those funny sayings to be yet more unusual things from this strange man with the crooked smile and unsettling ways.
Later when they caught the silvery fish, Adesua was struck by how quick Sully was, striking with the spear while she was still trying to follow its movements. He made her hold it down on the riverbank. It felt cool and smooth, a watery distance shrunk in its gaze. He tied it with some string. “For the palace cook! When you eat this tonight, you’ll remember our time here,” he said, holding it up.
On the way back, she kept the hat on to stay cool, following his lead, his easy manner. He whistled, occasionally peppering their silence with bits of information about the forest’s inhabitants; ladybirds, lizards, snakes, throwing curious, loaded looks her way. A molten heat began to spread through her body. She could hear each sound fully, intensely; his long strides eating through the ground, her damp wrapper dripping into the earth, watering the heads of creatures underneath, her breath lined with unspoken things. She watched the curve of the fish’s mouth, remembered it bucking against the stones, struggling to breathe and at that moment, imagining it turning blind in one eye from the brightness of the light. She returned his hat just before they snuck back into the palace separately, their chests expanding with the weight of new secrets.
And all the way back to her quarters, she thought about her treacherous braid coming undone in the wide-brimmed brown hat.
Adesua responded to the call at night. It winged its way across the palace grounds and she sat up restless. Listening, she succumbed to it. It rumbled its intentions and she only paused to gather fragments of her resolve with a scented cloth laced with coconut oil. She followed the call. She counted out her steps to the rhythm of it, as it skirted along the empty trail that led to the main palace. She was so light; if someone laughed it would surely carry her away. She went on past the high iron gates abandoned by distracted guards and rounded the backside of the servant quarters brimming with people. Past the servant quarters, the call tested her, she came to a threshold, a low wall, and beyond it in the near distance was a small, familiar building surrounded by shrubbery. She could make out the outline of a man, and the building behind him was glowing amber approval. She could hear her breaths and the faint thrum of hundreds of caterpillars hatching out of their cocoons and she was crushing them with each step towards Sully’s quarters, leaving a trail of squashed, meshed, butterflies spilling colours.
Sully was waiting for her. The sky seemed wider, open with longing, the stars twitching in their ceiling. In that sweet darkness, with only the elegy of the grasshoppers nudging them on, in the clammy anticipation of the night air, she wilted as Sully’s face close to hers, naked with intent, seemed to block all that surrounded her. Somewhere on the palace roof her caution plunged down. She ran her fingers through his thick, dark hair, holding his head to the rise and fall of her chest. In the dark, his green eyes seemed bewitching, calming. His beard was rough on her skin. He kissed a trail down her firm stomach, then further down still, till his head was buried between her legs. His tongue softened the bud there. Then he caressed her belly button, running his tongue back up, murmuring her name in slow seductive chants. He held both breasts, chuckling; he named them.
Behind the curtain of a mist that made the palace dewy, as though it were floating in a giant watermark freshly wet, two ghosts peered through. The blurry figures of Oba Odion’s father Oba Anuje and his hanged childhood friend Ogiso were keeping busy, spinning a curse so potent, it whipped through the grounds gathering momentum and snatching solace from its unwitting bearers.