The Devil Wears Gold

CHAPTER TWO

— Adaeze's POV —

My mother was a healer.

Not the kind that hangs a sign and charges cowries. The quiet kind, the kind that neighbours found their feet walking toward without quite deciding to. The kind that pressed her hands to a fevered child's chest and hummed until the fever broke. She never explained it. She said some things did not need explaining, only doing.

I used to watch her hands when she worked. The way they moved certain, unhurried, as though they already knew what the body needed before the body said so.

I never knew if I had inherited it. I was afraid to find out.

The man in the road is alive. I can see that much as I crouch beside him, his chest rises, shallowly, and his fingers flex once against the laterite like a man reaching for something he has already dropped. The mask shifts with his breath. Up close it is extraordinary, the obsidian polished to such a depth I can see a warped reflection of my own face in it. Wide eyed, afraid, already making a decision I haven't consciously arrived at yet.

'Nna', I say softly. Man. 'Can you hear me?'

Nothing.

I look up the road. Look behind me. The night offers nothing no footsteps, no torch light, no sound of anyone who might explain how a man this size came to be bleeding in the middle of an empty road at this hour.

I look at his wound.

It is bad. Something long and sharp has gone into his left side, below the ribs, and whatever went in has been pulled out. There is no blade, no arrowhead, only the ragged evidence of the entry. He is losing blood faster than I can afford to think about it.

'Okay', I whisper to myself. To him. To my mother's memory, which is the closest thing to a god I still trust. 'Okay'.

I tear the hem of my wrapper. It is already repaired three times, what is a fourth? I fold the strip into a compress and press it hard against his side.

That is when it happens.

Later, I will struggle to explain it. Even to myself, alone in the dark, I will reach for the words and find they are the wrong shape for what occurred. But this is what I know:

The moment my palms made full contact with his body not just the cloth, not just the surface, but him, the living heat of him beneath the compress something moved.

Through me. From somewhere below my sternum, something I did not know I had somewhere, a current I had no name for rose and poured down my arms and into my hands and into him. It was not painful. It was the opposite of pain. It was the feeling of a word you have been searching for suddenly arriving in your mouth, complete, inevitable, the only word that was ever right.

The man's breathing changed.

It deepened. Steadied. The desperate shallowness of it smoothing out beneath my hands like cloth under a hot iron.

I did not move. I was afraid that if I moved the thing, whatever it was, would stop.

His head turned toward me.

Even masked, even barely conscious, the movement was deliberate. Searching. As though some part of him, the part that lived below thought and decision, was trying to find the source of what was happening to him.

'Ngwa,' I breathed. Softly. Easy. 'Nọ ebe a.' Stay here. 'I've got you.'

I don't know why I said it in Igbo. I don't know why I said it at all. He was a stranger. He was enormous and masked and bleeding and very possibly dangerous, and I had a road to walk and an aunt in Onitsha who didn't know I was coming and every second I spent here was a second Uncle Tunde's household had to notice I was gone.

But my hands were on him and the current was flowing and I could feel, I could feel him, in a way I had no architecture for, the shape of his chi like a great and battered thing pressing back against mine and I could not take my hands away.

I don't know how long I knelt there. Long enough for the blood to slow beneath the compress. Long enough for his breathing to settle into something that sounded less like dying and more like sleep. Long enough for the sky to begin its first, imperceptible movement toward grey.

His hand moved.

It found my wrist. His fingers big, calloused, encircled my wrist with the careful deliberateness of a man who knows his own strength and has decided to be precise about it. He did not grip hard. He just held. As though to confirm that I was real. That I was there.

From behind the obsidian mask, I heard him say something. Low. Barely sound, barely breath.

I leaned closer.

He said it again.

I still could not make out the words only the shape of them, the particular weight of a voice that was accustomed to being obeyed and was currently too far from consciousness to remember that. It was not a weak voice, even now. Even half dead in the red dirt, there was something in it that made the small hairs on my arm rise.

Then his hand loosened.

Then he was still.

I sat back on my heels and looked at him, at the broad, masked face, at the serpent carved in obsidian, at the chest that rose and fell, rose and fell, with a steadiness that had not been there twenty minutes ago.

He was alive. Stable, I thought. As stable as I could make him.

I should go.

The road to Onitsha was still there. The night was still dark enough to cover me. Uncle Tunde's household would not stir for another two hours.

I looked at the man's wrist, where my hand had been. Where he had held me.

I looked at my own hands, my mother's hands and for the first time in three years I felt something other than afraid.

I sat down beside him in the dirt.

I did not go.

I would spend the rest of my life trying to decide if that was the bravest thing I had ever done, or the most ruinous.