Chapter Seventeen Afa #3
I walk back to Kaa’pah’lie like a mortal. Though I no longer have to walk anywhere at all. I can call to the wind and the rivers to travel along their channels. But I walk until my feet bleed, then heal, then bleed again. Perhaps it is because I punish myself.
I come across the first human body early in my journey. I bury my shame within the flesh of my soil. I wrap their bones in roots and grow a conifer tree upon the grave.
‘Rest well, child of Asase,’ I say before kissing the bark and moving on.
It is a family I come across next. Parents and two children. I sob as I enfold the babes’ bodies in roots and place the sarcophagus deep within the ground. I coax four conifers to grow, marking their resting place.
Twenty-five years it takes me to bury every body on the mountain range. By the end they are nothing but trees.
Every day I call to Hady. I see our children born through her eyes. A girl and a boy.
I weep and beg her to let me see them.
She is silent.
Tell them of me, Hady, tell them of me.
But she does not. I watch the children grow; ten, fifteen, twenty years pass. I see Hady’s reflection stay young in the mirror.
She is like me, timeless.
She uses her magic sparingly as she has no books to draw from. Whenever she retrieves her notebook, I watch through her eyes, trying to parse her intentions.
So she creates a language I cannot speak and weaves it into her binding so that her people can understand her, but not I.
I curse at her that day, Why hide your words, why hide your face? Let me see you, Hady.
She will not.
I know when our children die from old age. I watch as their eyes, my daughter’s first, filmed with age, close for the last time. My son is next. I watch as the tree binds with my grandchildren, the protection against me remaining.
Hady is as bereft with grief as I am.
I watch as she goes to her room one day and writes five words in a language we both understand: Meet me at the sanctuary.
Hope surges in my chest. My love is coming home to me. I spend the time awaiting her arrival by blooming all the flowers in the meadows.
I feel as she approaches; my arms ache to hold her, to share in our grief. But she stands on the threshold of the sanctuary, her back to our barren city.
‘I wish I could kill you,’ she says, and it is more painful than any death.
‘Hady, you cannot mean that,’ I gasp.
‘I do. It would be easier.’
Then she speaks, she weaves, she binds.
I call on the earth, but to stop her would be to harm her, and in my hesitation, I am too late.
I am trapped. I try to cross the threshold of the sanctuary into the city, but I cannot pass the wall of magic she has created. Hady watches me from the other side as I say in horror, ‘What have you done?’
She is crying. ‘I have known your heart and your mind all these years. I do not know when the decay began, but the rot has consumed you. You must be contained.’
I point to the walls of the sanctuary, to the books I read and read and read again. ‘Do you not see how I strive to undo what I have done?’
‘I hope you achieve that, Afa. I do. But you are not safe walking this world.’
‘I am the world,’ I thunder.
She shakes her head. ‘You are but a piece of it, as am I, and I am not foolish enough to think I control it.’
‘You confine me like a prisoner?’
‘The choice is yours, Afa. For I come to you with one other spell.’
She removes her notebook from her pocket and pushes it across the boundary to me. ‘It is in fae, so I will recite it to you.’
She speaks a combination of words that sparks no magic.
‘It is an unravelling,’ I whisper.
‘It can only be spoken by the binder who first wove it.’
I am horrified. ‘If I unravel you from the earth, you will die, Hady.’
‘Yes,’ she says. Her desperation is palpable. ‘It is all I want. I live each day poisoned by regret, by the memories of the world before. We did this, Afa. But you, you must be the one to undo it.’
I shake my head. I will not unravel her from the earth. From me.
‘You must,’ she says. ‘This knowledge must die with me,’ her voice drops to a whisper, ‘and with you.’
I laugh. ‘Death and I shall never be acquainted.’
‘Are you close to finding a way to bring back your people?’ she asks. From my silence she surmises my answer. ‘Then come with me, Afa, let us leave this world. We wanted peace, now the only war that remains is you and I.’
‘No.’ I see Hady’s request as a weakness.
Hady drops to her knees and looks up to me, pleading. ‘Then gift me this last thing, my love.’
I have never been able to refuse her, even now.
It is the hardest spell I have ever spoken. Harder still than binding to the earth or making the obeah.
As I feel her unravel from me, I begin to fall apart too.
She sighs once and is gone.
It is pain like I have never known. I relish it. I crave it.
I cry and the world cries with me. I call all the waters of the mountain to where she last stood.
A waterfall of tears.
From that moment on her absence is loud. Screaming always in my mind.
I frequently return to the unravelling spell and the letter she wrote for me, but I do not speak it. Though death is calling, I know I must bring back the humans first.
I will fix this, I say.
Then it is just me and the silence, and the rest of time itself.