As soon as Asàgà realized that the sudden wetness pouring down her thighs was yet another miscarriage, she decided that the devil in her womb would have to be plucked out by force. She had been lenient for long enough.

 

This was her fourth miscarriage, her seventh lost child. The other three had been kind enough to be born, stillborn as they were.

 

It had stilled her, how easily she had learnt neither loss nor grief in the face of her dead children, but a shame so pungent, it seeped into every pore of her being. Her husband had taken a second wife after their fifth child was born with vacant eyes and hands that were so tightly fisted, she could not pry them open. It was during that time that the whispers came. She heard them everywhere, in the presence of her in-laws, in the bustle of the market, in the quiet stillness of her dreams.

 

Barren woman.

 

Her womb is bewitched.

 

She must have sinned against the gods!

 

I pity her!

 

I pity her!

 

I pity her!

 

During that first week when the whispers started, mere days after Ifenkilinnaya—her husband’s new wife—moved into the family compound, Asàgà would startle awake from dreams of hands pressing down her throat, hands poking her stomach as though to pry her womb open and forcefully cause her to conceive a living child.

 

She began to avoid public gatherings, started to walk to Obunigwe stream only after midnight, when she was sure she would not meet any person on her path; started to finish her chores very late into the night or very early in the morning and then resigned herself to her hut for the rest of the day. And in this, her self-imposed isolation from the world, she bore no grudge against her husband, Nnaka.

 

He was a kind man and he had resisted the pressures of taking a new wife for as long as he could.

 

I am only doing this so that our people can finally rest easy. If you do not want this, I will wash my hands off the matter. 

 

But she had asked him to go ahead, had donned her prettiest smile and assured him that she understood, that it was a good idea for him to marry a new wife. He needed an heir and she was willing to share. He did not resist her acquiescence and she had wanted to resent him for how easily he smiled and hugged her, how earnestly he said, Thank you, as though he’d desperately needed her permission in the first place.

 

When the new wife arrived, pretty and fair skinned as she was, Asàgà took one look at her and knew immediately that she would bear healthy children. There was a quality about the girl that caused Asàgà to want to wrap her in banana leaves and preserve her forever. An innocence that was neither naive nor performative, a strength that did not wholly show itself.

 

The first words Ifenkilinnaya said to her were, I understand it if you hate me. I am the daughter of a second wife and so I know very well how these things play out. But do not hate me because you are expected to do so as the first wife. It will be shameful if you do not at least have a valid reason to do so. If you think you cannot like me, then you can ignore my existence and I will keep to myself. I am not here to usurp your place. If I had my way, I would not even be here at all. I just wanted you to know this.

 

Asàgà had been stunned by her bluntness, by the way her words had come off as curt but not impolite. She had expected a bratty teen who would try to walk over her and she had been met by a young woman who had no such interests. She had been too stunned to say anything other than, Okay.

 

True to her premonitions, Ifenkilinnaya did bear healthy children. By her fifth year, she had borne two healthy boys, three years apart. They both looked like their father, same flat nose and wide foreheads and mischievous eyes. It pained Asàgà to look at them—for in the place where she should have seen their beauty, she saw only the absence of her own children, the color of her own shame. She had lost two more children during that time.

 

It was then that she decided to exorcise the devil from her womb.

 

Her parents had brought her up in the path of the true religion but she had grown agnostic over the years and so, in her desperation, she decided that the only way to free herself of the child eater in her womb was to rekindle her link to the deities.

 

At midnight, three weeks after the unformed fetus was induced out of her body, she took a gourd of jojoba oil, a live cock and three tubers of yam and began the long trek to the Agbala’s cave in Idú.

 

As she walked the path, she recited the prayer her mother had taught her as a child, Ogé; Time, the great witness of all that has been and all that is and all that will be, be my anchor. Uwà; Space; the infinity of the universe, the being that never ends, the land that never dies, be my home. Ndú; Life, the great mother, the first breath, guide my path. Onwú; Death; the malevolent eater, the end of all things, turn away from me..

 

And as she spoke this prayer over and over again, every step came to her lighter than the last, every breath unknotted something within her, and she felt renewed by it.

 

Asàgà prayed for a week at the cave and when she returned to Ukpo, she arrived with an assurance that her next conception would live. She had felt it on her way back from the cave; a sense of something unbecoming, of something happening and unhappening at the same time.

 

She conceived on the second month after her visit to the cave and despite Nnaka’s unenthused reception of the news, Asàgà was determined not to hold any ounce of doubt in her mind because doubt, too, was a child-killer.

 

She nurtured her newest fetus with the fastidious excitement of a first-time mother, singing to the child at night and paying no mind to the whispers around her. 

 

Every night, she willed the child to live, to be so brilliantly alive and beautiful, even the deities would marvel at it.

 

As the ninth month neared, Ifenkilinnaya began to offer to help her with her chores, to sweep her hut and fetch her waters and cook her meals.

 

This is the most delicate time of your pregnancy, she said. You must not put any strain on yourself. Let me help.

 

Asàgà cried in the face of the other woman’s kindness and nodded her agreement.

 

This child will live. I know it. She said these words so often, she feared that the others would deem her mad. But every time she said the words to Ifenkilinnaya, the woman nodded in a way that did not seem patronizing or pitying. She agreed that it was true, that the child would live.

 

On the day that the child came into the world, a storm took over the skies in Ukpo, sent trees toppling over each other, houses crumbling and rivers flooding. But the child came, bright and beautiful with a cry as sharp as a hunter’s whistle and Asàgà wept at the sight of her daughter.

 

She named her Nkebialu’uwànandú: ‘the one who came into the world alive.’

 

***

 

The Agwu struck Ukpo in the eighth year after her daughter’s birth.

 

The Living Madness was what everyone called it. A sickness that seeped into the heads of children and caused them to gouge out their eyes, to claw open their skin until they bled to death. 

 

Sometimes, parents bound their children’s hands away from their body to keep them from the madness. Sometimes, they cut off their children’s hands entirely. Anything to stop the Agwu from taking their lives. But even then the madness persisted and caused children to bite their tongues or caused their lungs to reject air until they asphyxiated on sheer unwillingness to live.

 

By the fourth moon, every family in Ukpo with a child below ten had a freshly dug stump of earth in their compounds.

 

All except Nnaka’s household.

 

It did not take long for all of Ukpo to notice this quirk. Most of Nnaka’s children had grown beyond ten years except for his last daughter, Nkebialu’uwànandú. She was eight. And the sickness that had spared no child within the hundred mile radius had simply passed over her.

 

It was not long before their grief and confusion coagulated into a searing rage, a damning hunger for retribution.

 

They flocked as one angry mob to Nnaka’s house, eyes blazing in shared fury, mouths spewing threats coated in lava.

 

The girl is a witch.

 

Her mother has cursed us all.

 

End their lives.

 

Give us back our children!

 

Give us back our children!

 

Give us back our children!

 

Asàgà was the one to meet them at the fore of the compound. A mother ready to smite anyone who would dare harm her child. Nnaka was notably absent but Ifenkilinnaya stood with her and together, with their desperations combined, the mob halted.

 

Why have you come here? What crime has my child committed against you? Asàgà asked, her voice quaking with thunder. Her eyes brimming with determination. 

 

Your child lives when all of ours are dead. What do you say for yourself, witch? They asked.

 

She lives only because the gods have willed it so. If you have any qualms, take it up with them. Ifenkilinnaya responded on her behalf, hands folded against her chest in a show of resistance. Asàgà felt her heart bloom with gratitude.

 

Don’t you have a man to speak for you, gbo? Have you eaten your husband’s tongue, witch? They asked.

 

Speak one more foul word to her and you will eat your own tongues this very day, Ifenkilinnaya said back to them.

 

And in all of this, Nnaka remained absent.

 

The mob threatened and they cursed and they raged, but in the end, they left. Defeated.

 

Where is our husband? Asàgà asked, her relief and her trepidations coalescing into anxiety. Why does he abandon me in my hour of need?.

 

In the days that passed, Asàgà kept close watch over her daughter, Nkebialu’uwànandú, frightened that the raging villagers would hunt her in her moment of vulnerability.

 

Ifenkilinnaya urged her not to worry too much. It does the heart no good to be this anxious all the time, she said, and yet Asàgà’s heart would not sit still. Always it thudded. Always she jumped in fright at the most mundane of things.

 

At night, she would startle out of sleep and hurry to her daughter’s cot to make sure she was okay. To make sure she had not been taken by death in the night.

 

I will go to my father’s place in Ifite, she said to Ifenkilinnaya one day after her daughter woke up with a rising fever. I cannot stay here another day knowing that these people harbour plans to harm my sick child. 

 

Do you think your daughter’s fever is a result of evil juju from the villagers? Ifenkilinnaya asked, her worry evident.

 

Grieving parents can do heinous things sometimes, Asàgà answered.

 

She did not tell Nnaka of her plans to visit her family, still aggrieved as she was by his absence on the day when the mob came. From his hut, he watched her on the morning when she left with Nkebialu’uwànandú and a supplies bag strapped to her back. Something in his eyes spoke of a malevolence directed at her, but he said nothing. Did nothing.

 

The journey from Ukpo to Ifite took half a day and by the time they arrived, the sun had set in the horizon and her daughter’s fever had spiked alarmingly, but Asàgà was not too worried by it.

 

Ada’m, her father said upon her arrival, pleasantly surprised.

 

He hugged her to his frail chest and she felt relief course through her. She remembered her late mother’s words: ‘There is always love at home.’

How is your husband and your co-wife? Her father asked.

 

They’re fine, she answered, the lie stale on her tongue.

 

We heard of the horrible things happening in Ukpo. All those dead children. Tueh! Gods be praised my granddaughter was spared.

 

Gods be praised. 

 

That night, Asàgà slept at ease despite her daughter’s fever. She slept calm as a dove, and she dreamt of the day when she went to the Agbala’s cave to pray for a child.

 

She dreamt of the witch doctor; a buxom, middle-aged woman with sharp eyes and a chalk-painted face telling her, in very clear tones, that her womb was a harbinger for doom and that it was only by the mercy of the gods that she had not conceived or borne a living child.

 

For this one child that you seek, the witch doctor had begun, thousands shall fall. Do you still want this?

 

Yes. She’d answered confidently and irrevocably before the effigies of her gods. A bargain sown in blood. A covenant crested in death.

 

In the morning, Asàgà was roused from her sleep by the anguished cry of a nearby mother screaming over the body of her dead child.

 

She rose, daintily, and walked up to her daughter’s cot. The little girl was still soundly asleep. Still so marvelously alive and beautiful. Her fever had broken in the night.

 

Asàgà remembered the witch doctor’s last words to her.

 

For every decade of that child’s life, a hundred unlived lives must be found and sown.

 

As she caressed her daughter’s head, Asàgà wondered where next she’d go after Ifite had paid its due.

 

Maybe Igbariam or Otimkpu, she thought aloud as the wail of yet another mother rang into the morning air. I hear they have many children there.