The Devil Wears Gold

CHAPTER FOUR

— Adaeze's POV —

On the fourth day, a procession comes.

I hear it before I see it. From my locked room I have learned to interpret the compound entirely through sound, and what I hear is, the gate swinging wide, not the reluctant creak of ordinary visitors but the full open sweep of people who do not knock. The rush of house staff footsteps, the particular scramble of a household trying to look like it was always this presentable. My uncle's voice, shedding its flat authority for the layered warmth he reserves for people above him.

And beneath all of it, drums.

Not celebration drums. Not the "égwú" of a festival or the "ógèné" of a market day. These are smaller, more deliberate the kind that announce rather than celebrate. The kind that say, something of consequence has arrived.

I press my face to the gap in the shutter.

The procession fills the compound like water fills a vessel. Unhurried, inevitable, taking up exactly as much space as it requires. Twelve women in indigo wrappers with coral beads at their throats and gold thread in their gele. Six guards in brass buckled uniforms, the insignia at their breast a serpent coiled around a crown, the royal crest. And at the centre of it, moving the way important women move when they are entirely aware of their own importance.

A woman.

She is perhaps fifty, perhaps ageless in the way of certain women who have made a decision about time and won. Her wrapper is deep crimson with gold embroidery at the border, and she wears her gele like a crown because, I realize slowly, she is next to one. She is not the Queen. But she speaks for her.

Her eyes find my window without difficulty, as though she has always known I was there.

I step back from the shutter.

They unlock my door an hour later.

Uncle Tunde stands in the corridor with an expression I have never seen on him before. Not the flat control, not the satisfied manipulation, but something cautious and very slightly afraid. He is holding his hands together in front of him the way men do when they are working very hard to appear unbothered.

"Clean yourself", he says. "Change your wrapper. You have a visitor."

"Who?"

A pause. Unusual, for him. He does not normally pause.

"The Chief Lady Adaku. Emissary of Queen Moremi of the Zolari throne."

The words land in my chest like stones dropped into still water. I watch the ripples.

"Why does the Queen's emissary want to see me?"

Another pause. Longer.

"Get dressed, Adaeze."

They receive me in the formal parlour, the one Uncle Tunde keeps for guests who matter, with the carved ebony chairs and the brass kola nut bowl and the photograph of my grandfather on the wall, the one Uncle Tunde keeps because my grandfather was a titled man and the title is useful to display.

Chief Lady Adaku sits in the centre of it as though the chair were a throne.

She looks at me the way I have seen dibia look at a person's palm, not appraisingly, not with the calculating eye of someone determining value, but with recognition. As though she is confirming something she already knew.

"Sit down, nwa." . Her voice is low and precise. 'We have very little time and a great deal to discuss."

I sit.

Uncle Tunde moves to sit also. She looks at him, one look, brief and absolute and he remains standing.

She turns back to me.

"The Queen Mother of the Zolari Empire has need of you," she begins, without preamble, in the manner of someone to whom preamble has always been an inefficiency. "Specifically, she has need of your installation as wife to the Eze-Ugo, the Iron Duke, heir apparent to the throne."

The parlour goes very quiet.

I hear Uncle Tunde's sharp breath. I do not look at him.

"There is a contract," Chief Lady Adaku continues. "Bride price, land title, and political protection extended to your uncle's household for three generations. In exchange, you will travel to Idu. The marriage will take place at the Onicha Palace under royal rite."

She opens the satchel at her side and sets a rolled document on the ebony table between us. Even from here I can see the royal seal, the coiled serpent in crimson wax.

"What does the Duke say about this?" I ask.

For the first time, something moves behind Adaku's composed face. Not a smile — something smaller. Something knowing.

"The Eze-Ugo has agreed."

They give me one hour.

One hour in my locked room though unlocked now, the new lock suddenly irrelevant to make my decision. Uncle Tunde follows me to the door and stands in it and talks for the first five minutes, but I stop hearing him after a while. His words become sound, and then the sound becomes something like wind, and I sit on my mat and I hold my own hands and I think.

Chief Eze. Sixty-one years old. Four wives. A particular way of looking at bodies.

The Iron Duke. The Eze-Ugo. A name spoken in the compound in the way that people speak of storms and natural disasters, not evilly, simply factually. He has conquered three territories. He has pacified two rebellions. He wears a mask in public and no one sees his face and lives to describe it.

Two doors.

I think about doors. I think about my uncle's voice saying six days, the way it landed in my body like a sentence. I think about the Chief's eyes at the funeral, that appetite, that assessment. I think about a locked door with a new heavy lock, and the sound of it closing, and closing, and closing.

Then I think about the road. The dark road and the red dirt and a pair of hands, my hands, my mother's hands pressing against a wound and something moving through me like I was a river and had always been a river and only now was finally being asked to run.

I think about what it felt like to not be afraid.

Even for an hour. Even in the dirt.

Even with a stranger's blood on my hands.

I stand up.

I open my door.

Uncle Tunde and Chief Lady Adaku are in the corridor. My uncle with his careful face, the Chief Lady with her composed one, both of them waiting. Behind them, the house girls. Old Chukwu. Everyone who belongs to this compound that has never, not once, been mine.

I look at my uncle. I want to remember this, the exact expression on his face as I step out of the last door he will ever be able to lock on me.

I turn to Chief Lady Adaku.

"I will go to Idu,' I say. My voice comes out steadier than I expected. My mother's voice, perhaps. 'I accept."

Uncle Tunde exhales. Relief for the contract, for the bride price, for three generations of political protection he has just secured at no cost to himself. He is already calculating. He will be calculating for the rest of his life and never arrive at what this moment actually cost him.

Chief Lady Adaku nods. One small, decisive movement.

"Good,' she says. And then, quieter, so that only I can hear: 'Nwa, my child you have made the right choice. But prepare yourself."

I look at her.

"For what?"

She looked at me with eyes that held a secret older than the both of us, and said: "For the fact that the Iron Duke has already chosen you. He chose you four nights ago, in the dark, on a road you were not supposed to be on. And Eze-Ugodi does not unchoose what is his."