CHAPTER 21
The Seer
For a month, Nasomi blubbered and screamed in the tiny dark room. Someone brought her food three times a day, but she kicked the plates away. The pain of her failure and gloominess of the room oppressed her when she was awake. The telling dreams haunted her when she was asleep.
She dreamed of a war; arrows flying, spears stabbing into flesh, fires consuming homes and villages, turning to ash in heartbeats what had taken ages to build. A wall crushed down. A whole people left their ancient home. A young girl clutched a straw doll, eyes swollen from crying, as she moved among the dead bodies of her family, calling for her mother.
In another place, a teenage boy devastated by acne boiled with murderous thoughts at his friends who danced around a fire and didn’t invite him. A starving mother received kicks and insults wholeheartedly in exchange for a morsel of bread for her baby. A pretty young lady packed a few belongings into a sack, not sure where she would go, as long as she got far away from her unfaithful husband, out to an adventure she’d been dreaming of.
And then, there was the boy in the well — she always dreamed of him. Alone in the dark, dank, stinking well. No one to hear him cry. No one to rescue him. Some light would enter when the stone covering the well would open, and a shadowy face of a man would look down on the boy. “Keep silent in there,” the man would say in a gruff voice. “Or I will throw this stone to crush you.” He would toss down a piece of bread, close the lid.
These were the dreams that dominated her madness: the sadness, the destruction, the hurt, the crushed dreams in the lives of people she didn’t even know. Sometimes she woke up with a terrible hunger, and she would salvage what she’d kicked onto the floor. If the girl who checked up on her brought food at such a moment, Nasomi would snatch the plate and yell at the girl, banging the door shut and wolfing down the food.
One dawn, she woke up from a dream of a bleeding man who knelt down to accept his death from a spear wound to his shoulder. He shivered from the night wind, winced when his wounds throbbed; but when death didn’t come, he stood up and went to look for his daughter. Nasomi was lying on the floor, and she watched the morning light through her tiny window. She had ripped the curtain off the previous night. She got up. The room didn’t seem as dark as before. The walls remained solid and didn’t close in on her.
The door opened and the girl quickly put the plate onto the floor.
“Thank you,” Nasomi said. The girl’s eyes went wide, she looked at Nasomi for a long time. “It smells good,” Nasomi said.
“You’re talking sense now, Esha,” the girl said.
“Nasomi is my name.”
“Esha is our term of respect for a woman. Musha is for men.”
“I see.” Nasomi sat on the bed. It was thick, soft, probably made of feathers. The floor was compacted clay; she counted four ruts upon it. She was in a thick seamless dress, and it stank of sweat. Her hair was a stiff mess; dandruff sprinkled out in copious amounts when she scratched it.
Nasomi went to pick up the plate, but when she sat down to eat, she fell into weeping. The girl came to sit next to her, put a hand around her.
“I’m so sorry,” Nasomi said. “I feel ashamed.”
“Do not be, Esha. You were not yourself.”
“The way I treated you. It wasn’t good of me. You’ve brought me food every day, sheltered me… I feel so bad.”
“I understand. Don’t be too harsh on yourself. You are well now. The elders insisted that you needed to face the pain in solitude.”
Nasomi learned that she was under the care of a religious women’s group called the Daughters of Mohale. They cared for the sick in body, mind, and soul, and offered spiritual guidance according to the precepts of their goddess.
The girl went to report Nasomi’s recovery. Nasomi was moved to a bigger and airier room, with a view on the square where worshippers came to lay their gifts for the goddess. Nasomi said she wasn’t quite ready to face the world, and the Daughters indulged her. Four women came, at random moments, to talk to her, and each proclaimed Nasomi had been cured of the madness.
She was surprised to learn that Wakani was still in Mifirhana. “I did not want you to think I’d abandon you, My Lady,” he said when he came to visit her when the Daughters allowed her other visitors.
“But your family. Your daughter.”
“I will go back to Nari tomorrow, My Lady. I just wanted to know you were well.”
Wakani did not go. He brought her food, some of which he’d cooked himself, and attended to her. He told her about the goings-on in Mifirhana, as if he was now one of its people. The whole town, he said, was talking about the incident at the market, and the old Bride had run off eastward. Kanguya the kowasa romped about the town, making friends with children and dogs.
“The brown horse, My Lady,” he said, touching his heart. “She was too sick. She died. The other one has adapted well to Mifirhana, and has grown healthy in the stable. He is fit to carry us both.”
“Return with it to Nari. I will find a way.”
“Do you mean to continue pursuing the witch?”
“I do. It’s the only thing for me to do. You need to go back to Nari, Wakani.”
“I will go tomorrow, My Lady.”
But he didn’t go. For another month and some days, Nasomi wept when she was left alone. Her dreams changed, too. In her sadness, she saw the shape of the world. She floated over the kingdom of mountains a thousand miles southeast of Mifirhana: a vast jagged land, black and grey, with splotches of thick forests. Some peaks were topped with white, some spewed columns of fire; red hot rivers flowed down into bright bubbling lakes. Leonine creatures roamed this land, with skin the color of the mountains, and long tails ending in stings.
North, south, east, and west her dreams took her. She saw Mishi, Nari, and Naki, knew how far each was from her position in her room in Mifirhana. She saw three frozen cities north of Arwomba, desolate and cold, preserved in an unchanging frigid era. She saw a great city of stone and fog, thousands of miles south, with buildings so tall they reached the clouds. Through the unending fog, humans with eyes the color of emerald hefted stones and sang echoing songs.
Seas, bays, plains, plateaus, vales, hills. The landforms of Ao filled her dreams. Sometimes, she went deep. Beneath the dark well where the boy was held captive, she saw fractures, felt the world groaning, saw red hot seas.
She had no dreams of Tambo or the Bride, no matter how much she focused and thought about them. She saw Meron and Ramona in Nari, him playing with some newfound friends, and her sitting on a stool, her hands on her cheeks in deep thought.
This is not right, she thought often. Nobody should be able to have this ability.
When she was ready to face life again, she went out to sit at the edge of a wide staircase and watch people go in and out to seek counsel from the Daughters. Kanguya bounded out of nowhere, rushed to embrace her leg.
She smiled. “I missed you too, my friend. I see you’ve gotten to like it here.”
He wagged all his tentacles, then dashed away to play with children. The town children had taken to the kowasa as well. They didn’t fear him as children − or even adults − of Nari would. And it seemed he caused them no harm.
Wakani came, dressed in one of the unremarkable brown tunics of the men of Mifirhana. He washed Nasomi’s hair and braided it into cornrows. Much hair remained, so he tied some of it into a bun at the top of Nasomi’s head, and combed out the rest into a thick puff at the back. “This your look, Nasomi Esha,” he said. “It fits you so well.”
Nasomi looked at her reflection in a water basin.
“I love it. Thank you, Wakani. I didn’t know you could dress hair so well.”
He smiled. “I have a daughter. And wife. They let me mess with their hair the way I want. I have a gift for you.” He presented a leather headband studded with cowries. He placed it on Nasomi’s head as though placing a crown on her. It had four loops dangling from its bottom edge, two to go over the eyes and the other two over the ears. It was a common accessory for the women in Mifirhana.
“Now I look like one of them,” Nasomi said. “Or should I say one of you. You seem to have fitted well here.”
“They have given me a small cabin not far from here. I get to help them chop wood, or feed their horses. Do you know that in the entire Mifirhana, there is a total of only twelve horses? Of which one is ours.”
She was quiet for a while. She was thinking about how she could dream again of Tambo. The Bride had done something to deter Nasomi from dreaming them. Wakani didn’t disturb her silence until she said, “Is it always this hot in Mifirhana?”
“So they tell me. It’s a wonderful place, and I admit I will be sad to leave. But I need to go home. You’re something of a celebrity here, My Lady. The Mad Esha with a Pet Kowasa. That’s what some call you.”
Nasomi gritted her teeth. “Anything but that, surely. I hope I am not scaring people by being out here.”
“Please don’t worry. It is meant to be more humorous than insulting. There’s nothing much in Mifirhana for people to talk about, so they’re always obsessed with any unusual thing… Well, there’s the missing prince now, so you’re off the top of the list.”
“Missing prince?”
“It’s really strange how he disappeared. He went out playing with some of his young companions, never returned to the palace. If he’s dead, or never found, his uncle Majiyo will become the ruler. The king and queen died four years ago, and they had no other children besides this one.”
“You truly have become of these people.” She chuckled. “How old is he? The prince.”
“Seven. No, wait, eight.”
Could it be? Nasomi wondered. “You said he’s been missing for how long?”
“Six days now.”
“I could be wrong, Wakani. But I know where he is.”
“Eh? You do, My Lady? One of your visions?”
“In a well. An old well. He’s trapped there − held captive.”
“There are many old wells in Mifirhana.”
Nasomi thought. She remembered that whenever the boy’s captor opened the well cover… “A guava tree! Next to the well, there’s a guava tree, with a single branch over the well if you were looking at it from below.”
Wakani stood up abruptly. “I’ll be back, Esha. I must report this.” He ran off.
Nasomi sat on the staircase for over a watch of the sun. Kanguya brought her five unique stones and went off to play again. She got tired and went inside to rest. She fought against sleep, desiring not to dream any more strange things.
Presently, before she could succumb to the power of sleep, there was a hubbub outside. She went to see what was happening. The whole town was running in one direction.
“He’s been found!” they shouted. “Prince Tebula has been found!”
Nasomi went out to join them, breaking into a trot to get a good view. Ahead, someone was shouting, “Get out of the way! Out of the way!”
People stopped moving. Nasomi pushed herself through until she came to a gap in the bodies. The man shouting “Out of the way!” was carrying a boy in his arms. The boy was limp and pallid. His eyes were wide open but Nasomi could not tell whether he could see. Her heart went out to him.
She thought of her children, couldn’t imagine what she would want to do to the person who would hurt them this way. And she was caught in a whirl of emotions. Pain at her failure to get Tambo back, sadness at having no dreams to guide her to him, shame for having left Ramona and Meron the way she did, frustration at not knowing what to do next. Her husband was bound by a spell somewhere in the east, her children were without their parents in the west, and here she was in the middle of goings-on she had no idea why she was part of.
Wakani came running toward her, excited. “Just like you said, My Lady! You were right.”
Before long, Nasomi was the center of attention. Questions, exclamations, and even a few insults, flew her way, too many for her to grasp and answer. A woman of small stature, in a flowing white robe, came before her, and quietness more or less settled among the people. This is the prophetess, Nasomi guessed, the leader among the Daughters of Mohale. From Wakani, Nasomi had learned that the prophetess was addressed as the Eyes and Ears of Mohale.
“The Goddess bless you,” the small woman said.
Nasomi didn’t know how to reply. Wakani stood beside her and it was all the comfort she could wish for. She was feeling as if the madness would overwhelm her again.
“How did you know where to find the prince, Esha?” the Eyes and Ears of Mohale asked Nasomi.
“I dreamed him.”
“You dreamed him? We have searched for him for many days. Just this evening we would have declared him dead and began the mourning ceremonies. Thanks to you, and to the Goddess, he has been saved.”
“Finally, a true prophetess,” someone said.
“Careful what you say,” someone interjected.
The prophetess lifted a hand for calm as murmurs spread. If she was insulted by the comment, she didn’t show it. “Nasomi Esha,” she said. “Tell us how you were able to dream this.”
“I just did,” Nasomi replied, not sure how to answer the question.
“Do you have such dreams then?”
“Quite often.”
“And whoever tried to harm him, would you please tell us who they are?”
“I am afraid I cannot. I did not see him clearly.”
“She knows nothing!” a cry came.
“Isn’t she the mad Esha? Why should we believe what she says?”
“She had a hand in this.”
Wakani shouted, “Don’t you say bad things about My Lady. She was in a care room for two months! She’s done a good thing for you ungrateful people.”
There was a general murmur of agreement. The prophetess extended a hand toward Nasomi. “It is the Goddess who led you to us, in our time of need. Come, have supper with me, and tell me of your dreams.”
“A Seer!” someone said, and some people took up to chanting: “A true Seer! The Goddess is good to us!”