MASQUERADE: First Chapter
Each day, countless fleets of camel caravans sailed across the desert sea to reach Timbuktu.
Here, in this port city on the southern edge of the Sahara, waves of men, women, and children flooded the market, searching for supplies. Farmers and craftsmen proudly showcased their wares from behind wooden stands or in front of tents. Threads of dancers wove through cheerful crowds; juggling entertainers could be found on every corner. Travelers’ stories of far-off lands rose and fell with the playful chords of musicians. Vibrant colors and savory scents swirled in the air as Timbuktu teemed with the trading, buying, and selling of everything from exotic spices to brilliant fabrics to precious salt and gold.
But today, Timbuktu was still.
I stood in front of a wooden platform, along with what felt like half the market goers. Rain poured from the skies, soaking through my brown wrapper. Thunder rumbled as a Songhai general was dragged onto the platform by soldiers who were not his own.
They forced the general to his knees, the wood beneath him groaning over the incessant patter of rain. His wet robes were stained with blood and grime. Water trickled from his turban, down his bruised face.
A third, smaller man drifted onto the platform. Lines were etched into his face, like ripples in a shadow. Each line marked a history—a birth, a marriage, a death. He frowned as his gaze swept over the crowd, chronicling yet another wrinkle, another event.
He extended his arms on either side of him, and his billowing sleeves crowded around his elbows. “Ọba kìí pọ̀kọrin.”
The customary introduction of griots pierced the air. The griot paused, allowing his baritone words to take their place among the crowd, before continuing in accented Arabic, “Gather, gather, hear me now. The Songhai rule this city no more. As of today, Timbuktu belongs to the Aláàfin of Yorùbáland.”
The griot gestured to a group of soldiers standing nearby. From within their circle, an old man stepped forward. He wore a red and white kente toga that draped over one of his forearms and shoulders. Beneath the painted white dots covering his body, his skin was as brown and gnarled as an ancient baobab tree. It felt as though time itself paused to accommodate his slow approach.
The griot stepped back as the old man mounted the platform; griots represented nobles and the people, but divine correspondence with the òrìṣàs was left to babaláwos.
The babaláwo looked down at the general and raised a fist. Slowly, very slowly, he uncurled his fingers, uncovering a single cowpea in the center of his palm.
People around me recoiled. I leaned forward. I had heard of the sacred Yorùbá bean, but I had never seen one myself.
Although the general had not flinched, his full lips were clamped thin. From where I stood at the front of the crowd, I saw the fear that flashed across his eyes. He struggled in vain as soldiers pried open his jaw, and the babaláwo forced him to eat the cowpea.
“Great Ṣàngó,” the babaláwo cried. His gossamer voice whirled around me, as though entwined in the wind. “This is the man who led your enemies. What is to be his fate?”
There was no answer, of course; the òrìṣàs never personally descended from the heavens to speak to the humans they presided over. Wind howled around us, growing crueler in its acceleration. Fruits were blown off nearby stands; orange sand surged forth. As I shielded my face from the storm, I wondered if all of Timbuktu would be uprooted before the trial ended.
Then lightning ruptured the sky, and the world shuddered under the thunder that followed.
“Ṣàngó has spoken,” the griot boomed. He beckoned a soldier forward.
Rage rippled through the fear on the general’s face. “This is what you call justice? You Yorùbá are nothing but a tribe of superstitious pagans—”
A soldier plunged a spear into the side of the general’s neck. His declaration sputtered into wet gurgling as blood poured from the wound. He fell onto the platform, seizing, until his movements gradually came to a stop.
The babaláwo raised his arms to the sky. “Ṣàngó yọ mí.”
“Ṣàngó yọ mí,” the crowd echoed. Ṣàngó saved me.
The affirmation scratched my throat, threatening to bring more than words with it. But like the rest of the onlookers, I knew to thank the god of thunder and lightning for not condemning me to death instead. His wrath was as deadly as wildfire and just as easily spread.
The griot said, “Nothing about your life in Timbuktu need change. So long as your governor pays tribute to the Aláàfin, he may continue to rule as he sees fit.” He turned to a richly-dressed man standing beside the platform in between two soldiers. “Do you accept these terms, or are you determined to follow the fate of Timbuktu’s former general?”
The brown seemed to drain from the governor’s face. He fell to his knees, his hands clasped in front of him. “I am honored to serve the Aláàfin,” he said. Then, in stunted Yorùbá, he added, “An honor.”
The griot nodded, and the crowd began to disperse, many of them taking cover from the rain. But I remained rooted in place. I watched as soldiers stepped forward to retrieve the body of the Songhai general. They hauled it onto a wagon like it was a sack of garri, moving with an efficiency that suggested they had done this for years, though they could not have been much older than I was, around the age of nineteen.
“There, there.” A robust man slid next to me. He lay a meaty arm around my shoulder, his palm moist against my skin. “I understand your shock. Is it difficult to wrap around your head?”
“I’ve seen executions before,” I said quietly. Though this was true, I had never seen lightning be the final verdict.
“I don’t mean the execution.” The kindness enveloping the man’s words peeled back to reveal impatience beneath. I looked at him and saw that he was pointing at my head. “Your headscarf is the brown of an overripe plantain,” he said. “It is old and stiff. Difficult to wear, yes?”
From somewhere within the sleeves of his tunic, he extracted a silk scarf so white that it stung my eyes. “My dear girl,” he continued, “your scarf does justice to neither your black nor your beauty. What you need is a bright scarf, for the night sky needs its stars.”
It was then I remembered that I did not know this man.
I shrugged his arm off, and as I made my way through the marketplace, other vendors called out to me, also telling me what I needed.
“Come and see your new sandals,” called a man with a large beard and a larger belly. “The leather is soft and smooth, but they are strong.”
“Fruit directly from the riverbanks of the Niger,” proclaimed a woman as orange as the mangoes she held. “The juice can cure the most stubborn of illnesses.”
The marketplace’s rhythm resumed as though it had never paused. The Yorùbá seizure came as a surprise to no one; Timbuktu sat on agriculturally rich land in a commercially active area. When the Songhai captured the city three years ago, in 1468, they had only been one more addendum to Timbuktu’s long history of changing hands. The city’s population was not made up of just one people; there were the Songhai and the Yorùbá, but there were also the Fulani, the Moors, the Portuguese, and more. The only thing that unified Timbuktu’s inhabitants was a drive for profit. So long as the marketplace continued running, who ruled the city was of little importance.
I had come to the marketplace today with my mother, but in the commotion of the execution, I lost her. Knowing that she would not want me wandering around alone, I decided to head home.
As I rounded a corner onto another busy song-laced street, the Songhai general’s execution replayed in my mind. It was an unconventional method of justice, feeding a cowpea to a man then killing him if lightning subsequently flashed or sparing him if it did not. Perhaps the Songhai general was right to call the Yorùbá superstitious, to imply that the will of their god was nothing more than nature’s chance. And yet—with it being the very end of wet season, today’s rainfall should not have been as heavy as it had been. I could not help but wonder if there was some truth to the common saying that the Yorùbá brought the storm wherever they went.
The rain had dwindled into a drizzle by the time I reached a quieter end of Timbuktu, on the outskirts of the market. The sandy road, less trodden upon here, branched out into evenly spaced compounds. Each were enclosed within waist-high mud-brick walls.
Eventually, I entered the compound of a sun-dried mud house with a flat roof. Its sandy yard was occupied by a handful of women, all of whom wore plain, brown wrappers and headscarves that blended into their skin. Under great plumes of smoke, the women moved between anvils, forges, and furnaces.
Metronomic pings rung through the air as two-handed hammers molded iron and steel into weapons or shaped gold and silver into elaborate designs. One woman sat on a low stool, pounding boiled yam in a wooden mortar for tonight’s dinner. I knelt before them all, my knees sinking into warm mud.
“Good afternoon, aunties,” I greeted.
“Welcome, child,” my aunties chorused without looking up from their work, cuing me to stand.
These women were not really my aunties, but I had called them that for so long that their names had become foreign to my memory. Really, I was unsure if I had ever learned their names—and given that they had called me “child” my whole life, perhaps they never learned mine either.
I made my way to the house. I had just reached the archway when an auntie emerged from inside.
“Why are you going inside?” she asked me. “Is the work at your forge done?”
It was a clear reprimand, for we both knew that the work at our forges was never done. “My mother wants me to take inventory,” I said. It was a task I had been given earlier that day.
Her brow unfurrowed; like all the other women here, she might have never fully warmed up to me, but she had nothing but respect for my mother.
She sighed. “You’ll have to do inventory another time. I don’t want you to wake her.”
She gestured over her shoulder to inside the house. Within the dark single room, one of my older aunties lay on a sleeping mat. Although her eyes were closed, beads of sweat ran down her face, and her expression was pulled taut as though sleep was an arduous task. Alarmed, I noted that she was even skinnier than the last time I had seen her.
“She hasn’t gotten better?” I asked.
My auntie shook her head sadly. “It is the governor’s responsibility to provide for our guild, but even so, he’s as stingy with medicine as with the food he gives us. I don’t think he wants to waste any resources on an old blacksmith.”
I frowned; the woman was not that old. Her sickness might have aged her, but I remembered the unlined, lively face she had worn when she had still been healthy. I had always believed her to be around the same age as my mother.
I shivered, a motion that had nothing to do with my soaked clothes. My mother and I had been blacksmiths my entire life. As unmarried women, it was one of the few ways we could make a living—but sometimes I feared it was what would also kill us. My sick auntie was not the first of us to expire at her forge. Was this to be the fate of my mother and I as well, meeting death exhausted, neglected, and, worst of all, much too soon?
My distress must have shown on my face because my auntie placed a hand on my shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” she said gently. “She’ll wake up soon, and when she does, we should give her something nice. Why don’t you take a short break to make her one of your flowers?”
Holding silver and a tweezer, I sat in my usual spot behind the house, my legs tucked to one side of me.
The silver had been shaped into a cylinder. One of the cylinder’s ends was open, while the other was fused to a star-shaped sheet of metal. It was meant to be a nearly completed daffodil—or, at least, what I could remember of a daffodil’s appearance. I had only seen a real one once, when a trader gifted me the flower.
That day, the trader had arrived in Timbuktu after weeks of traveling with his colorful caravan of slaves, bodyguards, scholars, poets, and fellow traders. Like so many others, the trader had heard of my mother’s and aunties’ abilities, and he had come to request an iron dagger. My aunties always focused on the orders from generals and kings, leaving less important clientele like him to me. My hands had been less steady than they were now, and my eyes less attuned to identify flaws, yet the trader had marveled at my average dagger.
“My dear,” he said in awe, “what is your name?”
Since he already knew my state-given name, I told him my personal name. His eyes widened. “Wait here—I have just the thing for you.”
I thought he was one of those people who tried to skip out on payment, and I thought he was doing a poor job of it—as we spoke, his traveling companions had been paying my mother.
He proved me wrong, however, by returning. “A flower for the child whose name means flower,” he proclaimed, handing me a flower that was a yellow unlike any gold I had ever seen. “This is a daffodil. They grow in distant lands far, far above the Sahara.”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. Then I grew sad, remembering the flowers I always saw in the market. They bloomed in the day, but after the sun had set and the customers had gone, merchants disposed of wilted petals. “But it’ll die.”
“Daffodils do not fear dying, for they have conquered Death himself.”
“Oh.” A pause. Then, “Perhaps you should keep this . . .”
I tried to return the flower to the possibly delirious man, but he only laughed. “Do not be afraid of daffodils, my dear,” he said, mistaking my wariness of him for fear of the flower. “They used neither strength nor sorcery to best Death. Just a simple song.” He grinned. “From the look on your face, I am guessing you are wondering what that song is?”
I had actually been wondering how a flower could possibly sing. However, the trader was clearly motivated more by his own pride than by my curiosity. So, I simply said, “Okay.”
He sang. He could not hold a tune, and he sped up in odd places only to slow much too abruptly. The beginning of the trader’s song had since eluded me, and I was no longer certain about its ending. However, what I could remember of the song had burrowed deep into my mind.
The daffodil had succumbed to the desert heat two days later. Since then, I had rebirthed it countless times, using whatever metals my aunties spared me from their work. And with each flower I crafted, I sang the little of the trader’s song that I knew, just as I did now.
“You listen to her tale
One her teacher always told
Of roads his son walked
Roads paved with petals of gold
See them bloom, see them shine
See this garden become a sky
With a thousand tiny suns
It’s no lie, it’s no lie
Light the world through the night
Keep this glow inside your heart
Flowers wilt, lands dwindle
But survival is in the art.”
“Beautiful.”
In my surprise, I nearly dropped my flower. Ahead of me, a man stood on the other side of the wall. His tattered tunic appeared brown, but when he rested his forearms on the wall and left an imprint, I realized the color was just dirt. He was a culmination of hard lines, from his strong jaw to his broad shoulders. The only soft thing about him was the smile he gave me.
I returned my attention to my flower. The man appeared too poor to place an order with my aunties, and had he meant me harm, he would have done so already. He was just a wanderer; if I ignored him, he would see there was nothing here and drift on elsewhere.
However, my silence did not seem to dissuade him. “The song was nice too,” he remarked.
His Arabic was fluent, but he spoke with a strong Yorùbá accent. I curled one of the flower petals up, allowing it to bloom around the cup. Silence settled around me. For a moment, I believed the man had gone. Then—
“What’s that you’re making?”
I sighed. “It’s a flower,” I finally obliged, speaking in Yorùbá.
He looked pleasantly surprised. “You’re from Yorùbáland?” he asked, switching to Yorùbá as well. In his native language, his voice was deeper and more mellow.
“My mother is. I’ve never left Timbuktu, but I grew up speaking Yorùbá with her.”
“What is your name?”
I hesitated. Then, realizing I had no reason to care about what a beggar thought, I told him, “Òdòdó is the name I have chosen. But the name that was chosen for me is Alálẹ̀.”
The man cupped his chin in his broad, bronze colored hand. “Owners of the Earth,” he thoughtfully repeated my second name, which I shared with my aunties. “Ah. You’re a witch.”
I narrowed my eyes, peering at him closely. “You seem to have neither the naivete of youth nor the delirium of old age, yet you still believe that blacksmiths are witches?”
His grin widened; he had my full attention now, and he knew it. “You take the ore that Earth gifts us and transform it into deadly weapons or elegant jewelry. That must take magic.”
“Because fire is too difficult to fathom.”
He laughed. “That’s fair,” he said. “Although, I think I’d associate you more with rain. Your voice must be what moved the heavens to tears today.”
Living in the desert, I had seen more than my fair share of sunny days. However, as I looked at the radiance with which the man’s black eyes shone, I wondered if I had ever seen a light such as his.
I looked at my flower. It still lacked a stem, but the head alone was recognizable enough as a flower. I debated for a moment, then I rose.
As I approached him, the man straightened. There were not many people whom I needed to look up at, but he was an exception.
He allowed my examination with an amused patience. Up close, I saw that he had long curly hair wound into a black knot at the base of his head. A vertical scar ran over his left eye, from above his brow down to his cheek. It was the same mark I had seen on most of the Yorùbá soldiers—the mark of the Aláràá, a clan within the Yorùbá tribe. My mother was Aláràá as well, but since she was neither a man nor born into a prominent family, she did not bear the tribal mark.
There was another, longer scar trailing from the base of the man’s neck to beneath his tunic. A token from battle, no doubt. Deep as the wound must have been, the spark in the stranger’s gaze made me pity, not him, but rather the man he had fought.
For a vagrant, I decided, he was rather charming.
“Here,” I said, holding out my flower. It had been intended for my sick auntie, but I could always make her another.
A dimple sank into the stranger’s right cheek as he smiled. “You’re giving me your flower?”
“It’s not just a flower. It’s a daffodil.” My interaction with the trader all those years ago surfaced in my mind, and I added, “You said you liked my song. This daffodil may just sing it to you.”
He laughed again. This time, I was close enough to feel the joy that emanated from him, warm and encompassing. It was a nice sound.
“In that case, how could I say no?” His calloused hand brushed my own as he accepted the flower.
“It’ll fetch a nice price,” I informed him. I hoped he would have the sense to trade it for a decent meal. Or at least a bath.
He smiled as he inspected the flower, though when he looked up, his expression had become more pensive. “What do you know of the Aláàfin?”
“The king of kings?”
He nodded, and I frowned. The question was unexpected—but then again, so was this entire conversation.
A falcon cried overhead. I watched it disappear into the horizon as I pondered the question. I knew that the Aláàfin presided over Yorùbáland from his city, Ṣàngótẹ̀. That he led a great army with which he had now conquered most regions west of the Niger.
Even if the stranger did not have a rugged physique, I would have known he was a soldier; every boy in Yorùbáland underwent rigorous military training that lasted well into adulthood. And the Aláàfin was said to be the most skilled fighter of them all. He had taken so many lives in battle that he was often referred to as the Commander of Death.
So, what I knew of the Aláàfin was what anyone else knew. But from the stranger’s intense gaze, I gathered these were not the answers he sought.
At last, I shrugged. “When I was a child, I wanted to live in his stables.”
The thin shell of hesitancy around the stranger’s smile broke, and humor rushed forth freely. “His stables?”
I nodded unblushingly. “They say that the Aláàfin is so rich that he owns ten thousand horses, and each horse has their own mattress. They say that he has hundreds of slaves who keep his stables cleaner than most manors.”
I glanced at my sandals. The leather was peeling, and my feet were constantly covered in dirt no matter how hard I scrubbed them—which I did not have time to do very often.
“Even just living in his stables would be better than the life I have now,” I remarked softly.
“What if you truly could live with him?”
I looked at the stranger, amused. “What if I could grow a pair of wings to fly me to a bed of clouds?”
I laughed. The stranger did not. He opened his mouth and closed it. Then, he opened it once more. But before he could speak, there came a shrill call.
“Òdòdó.”
I looked over my shoulder to see my mother, Okóbí, storming toward us. She was black and stout, like a block of ebony before it was carved. And just like ebony, the dark glimmer of her skin could distract the untrained eye from the resiliency of her rugged muscles.
Instinctively, I bent my knees in obeisance. “Good afternoon, ma,” I said.
In response, she grabbed my upper arm and yanked me behind her. Scowling at the stranger, she said, “Our forges are in the front of the house.”
The sharpness of Okóbí’s voice pierced the toughest of men, but the stranger did not appear fazed. “And lovely forges they are, I’m sure,” he replied kindly. “But I am afraid that I am not here for a spear.”
“Then you have no business with my daughter.”
“I will keep that in mind for when I see her, but in this moment, all I see in front of me are two beautiful sisters.”
He winked at me. A smile tugged at the corner of my mouth.
My mother, on the other hand, remained unamused. She had worked with far too many precious metals to be impressed by the silver of the stranger’s tongue.
“Come back when you are in need of a spear,” Okóbí said slowly, each word dropping with the weight of a stone.
The stranger’s smile remained, but an odd glint appeared in his eyes, illuminating them—no, that was not it. There was a light, but it did not make his eyes shine. It made them blacker. Sharper.
It was gone so quickly that I might have imagined it, for in the next moment, the stranger inclined his head. “Of course.” His eyes slid to my own, their charisma restored. “Farewell, Alálẹ̀ Òdòdó,” he said.
The ghost of for now lingered in the air.
He buried his hands into his front pockets, the silver daffodil with them, and as he walked away, he whistled a tune that sounded suspiciously close to the daffodil’s song. I found myself disappointed to see him go.
As soon as the man was out of sight, a long exhale seeped out of Okóbí. She whirled around and grasped my face in both of her hands, tilting it down.
“What did he want?” she demanded. Her touch was warm, but it was her black eyes that burned like flaming coals as they raked over my face. “What did he do to you? Did he touch you?”
“I’m fine,” I assured her. “I only spoke to the man.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
Her shoulders, which had been steadily climbing to her ears, dropped. “That’s it,” she repeated, almost to herself.
She reared her arm back and struck me across the face.
The sound whipped through the air as I staggered backwards. I held a hand to my cheek, attempting to numb the pain, but my warm touch only made it worse.
“That’s it, she says!” Okóbí cried, her voice muffled by the ringing in my ears. “How many times have I said, do not speak to these beggars? Hm? How many times?”
She lifted her hand again. With a jolt, I quickly responded, “Many.”
“Many, many times. Abeg, where do my words go? Do they float in the air until the wind blows them away? What is it about your head that they cannot enter?” she demanded, furiously jabbing two fingers to my temple. “Evil child, is it not enough to cause me misery? Must you allow a man to make your own life miserable as well?
“Listen well—that sorry story does not need to be told twice. I never want to see you so much as look at a man again. And you are my daughter, so when I give you instruction, you obey. Do you understand?”
Over the years, variations of this conversation had taught me that were I to say yes, she would accuse me of lying. Yet no was somehow an even worse answer. So, I gave her what she wanted: I dropped my gaze and waited patiently.
Sure enough, Okóbí sighed, like the final hiss of a quenched flame. “Go take inventory.”
“Yes, ma.”
As I walked away, I heard Okóbí mutter behind me, “She makes that silly flower again and again, yet she still does not understand that it would not have died had it not been beautiful enough to be picked in the first place.”
MASQUERADE by O.O. Sangoyomi will be out in the U.S. July 2 2024 from Forge at Macmillan, and out in the U.K. July 4 2024 from Solaris.
