The Mantis Bride of Modekun

Chapter 6

We are mere specks in a land of giants. Picture a tree with bark so thick it takes the arm spans of five men to form a chain around it. Or trunks so colossal that the vines twisting around them look like slender trees, dark and sinewy. We taint these paradises with our body fluids and wastes—with our hunting and slashing through pristine thickets—a tragedy our nightly camps make unavoidable.

Wading through streams shimmering with crystal-clear waters, I step on smooth pebbles, fish dart away in silver flashes.

The bite of the wind tells me we’re near—a frigid, howling thing that claws through the valleys, ripping at my cloak and stinging my cheeks with grit. It batters the escarpments ahead, slamming into them like a blacksmith’s fists, the echoes twisting into something alive, almost hungry. Beside me, Ajasin’s words cut through the chaos: "We're close." His eyes, sharp and bright, glint like storm-light. He leads a strike force constantly on the increase with every ridge we cross—it's about twenty men now. With each addition to our number, the air thickens to a keening whirr as if the sky itself is grinding its jaws, the drumbeat before thunder.

Suspirations of ecstasy break into a song of low and high notes before climaxing into shrieks and cussing. Somewhere in the valleys, there are caves with plenty of raw emotion in them.

“If we go any further, the seed of lust will overwhelm you,” Ajasin says. “Can you feel anything?”

I close my eyes and open the windows of my mind. A faint charge of arousal caresses me. “Yes.”

“Now, concentrate and find the one soul different from the rest.”

Ecstasy pools around me. I'm a drop in an ocean of bliss. Climactic. Unrelenting. I implode and implode again. Even when I think it can’t get any sweeter, it does. Uh. The pleasantness of my oko in a warm orifice that nibbles and licks. I know what it’s like to have thick veined flesh in my anus without the rippingness. The essence of lovemaking is pleasure. Yes, physical stimulation is important, but without its accompanying emotional translation, the pain never becomes sheer delight. And the delight never takes you to a paradise where pain doesn’t exist—only pleasure.

***

Sun-bleached cassava leaves trembling like laughter, palm wine sweet-sour on the tongue and the drumbeat in your ribs now—kpan-kpan-kpan—pulsing with the goats’ hooves kicking red dust into the air, the baobab’s shadow a cool hand on your nape and fireflies stitching gold thread through dusk, the market’s chatter dissolving into the hum of a thousand winged things, your feet bare and alive in the soil, spinning with the whirl of your mother’s indigo wrapper hung out to dry, the world tilting as the yam seller’s song climbs into the smoke—higher, higher—and the grinding stone’s rhythm becomes your breath, becomes the village fire’s crackle, becomes the stars spilling like millet from a cracked calabash, all of it, all of it, a fever-dream of earth and sky dissolving into the drum’s throat, into the sweat-slick grip of the dancing stick, into the molten center where you are no longer body but flame, but wind, but the unnameable thing that dances when the gods forget to look away.

The kolanut’s split flesh bitter-sweet on the lips, the opele chain whispering secrets as it falls—click-clack-click—against the opon ifa’s carved ridges, the smoke of ewe osanyin curling like ancestral fingers through the hut’s dimness, and the chant rising, rising, "Orunmila o, gba mi l’owo…"—the syllables molten, merging with the crickets’ drone outside, the rustle of palm fronds a chorus of unseen voices, the sacred ikin seeds warm as living breath in my palm, their grooves mapping destinies older than the baobab’s roots, the oil lamp’s flicker now a thousand eyes—the Egbe, the ancestors—watching, breathing through the cracks in the mud walls, the gourd of oti trembling as if the river goddess herself stirs it, my skin humming, the boundary between bone and breeze dissolving, the divination powder’s white swirl becoming stars, becoming the celestial path where Olodumare’s breath still lingers, and the chant is no longer mine but the earth’s, the aro’s thud in my chest syncing with the drum of the orun, until I am vessel, void, the hollowed calabash overflowing with what cannot be spoken—only known, only felt, as the gods pull the veil aside and for a breath, a lifetime, I am nothing and everything, ori and emi, the unbroken thread between dust and divinity.

***

My cheek and ear hurt.

“Wake up,” a voice calls.

I open my eyes and see Ajasin peering over me.

I’m lying on the grass, and he is crouched over me, having slapped me awake to douse my unearthly bliss.

My memories return. Not long ago, we reached the place where the Seed and his s*x slaves are having an orgy—me, an army of Afefe warrior priests, and the howling winds. I was in the middle of using my telepathy to locate the Seed, but soon got lost in emotions so delightful I gagged with tears of joy.

“Did you find the Seed? Can you take us to it?” Ajasin asks, flanked by three other expectant faces.

Smirking, I blurt, “Oshun be praised. Never could I have imagined anything like that was possible.”

“Like what?”

“It was like being torched alive with a fire that makes you scream in ecstasy. At first, you want it to stop, but after a while, you don’t. The pleasure is so intense you pass out and return only to pass out again.”

“Did you find the Ajogun?”

“I got distracted.”

Ajasin pats me on the back. “Here. Take this. It will make you immune to the curse of the Seed.” He hands me an armband. So this is their talisman—their protective armor.

I sit up on the grass and slip it on.

“Remember your training,” he says. “You need to go back and this time, concentrate very hard.”