The hut reeked of stale breath. The sour air pressed against Anaka’s nostrils like a second skin. Smoke curled from a rusted iron bowl in the corner, thick with the smell of burnt leaves, dried piss, and something sweet going to rot. Anaka’s knees were pressed into the gravel, and he felt the sharp bite of stones through the skin of his knees. The torches hissed softly on the walls. No wind moved. He was sweating.
The villagers stood around him in a ring, quiet and watchful. Their faces were streaked with charcoal and ochre, unmoving in the flickering firelight. One woman held a gourd to her chest, not drinking, just holding it like a charm. She was unclad, her breasts long and slack like empty calabashes. The way they watched him made Anaka think of vultures circling something that had not yet died. He tried to speak, but his throat was dry, so the silence stretched.
He thought of the mask. Not where it was now, but how it had pulled him here. Not with words but with something heavier, like a tug behind his ribs. Leave. Walk. We are waiting. He hadn’t meant to cross this far. But the dreams had grown louder, and the forest no longer scared him.
A man stepped forward—broad-shouldered, with a scar that curved from neck to chest like a hook. He crouched in front of Anaka and looked at him carefully, like someone assessing a broken water-pot to see if it still held water.
“Where are you from?” the man asked.
Anaka opened his mouth to answer, but another voice cut through the air before he could speak.
“Spy! He’s hiding something.”
“Strange timing,” another muttered. “He came right after the procession.”
“I am not a spy,” Anaka said quietly. “I am just a sculptor, away from his home.”
The man studying him tilted his head. “And what were you carving? Our faces?”
A woman moved closer. “The mask has six tribal marks. Our enemies wear six lines.”
Gasps rippled through the circle. “He must be from Ụmụ-Ọhaba,” someone spat. “Those blood-sucking evil people.”
“You don’t understand,” Anaka said, his voice low but steady. “It was carved in memory of my father.”
“Your father?” the man echoed, stepping closer.
Anaka hesitated. “Yes, my father. A soldier they called great. His name was celebrated beyond these borders.”
The man’s face twisted. “Celebrated by whom? He didn’t fight for us.”
That was true. His father had fought against them—not for plunder, but in defense of villages Ụmụ-Ọhaba still called enemies. Anaka had never cared much for wars; they were not his business. But it was impossible to stay distant when the man leading the charge was your father. He learned the names of those places by accident, gathered from the cracks of grown-up arguments, or from mothers who forgot themselves and muttered things children were not meant to hear.
Anaka lowered his eyes. “I only made a mask.”
A small palm kernel husk hit his shoulder. He turned. One of the mischievous teenagers in the gathering had thrown it. No one stopped him.
“Enough. Bring him to me,” a voice from behind the shrine wall echoed.
Two men stepped forward and pulled Anaka to his feet. His legs wobbled as they led him to a stone slab, flat and dark. It smelled like something long dead.
A frail figure emerged slowly. Anaka suspected he was the custodian of the shrine. He was thin and sharp-faced, with a faded Akwete cloth tied at the waist. His feet were bare. White chalk lined the creases of his forehead, like someone had tried to draw a map on his skin. He said nothing at first. He walked around Anaka once, stopped, and touched the boy’s wrist.
“You didn’t make these,” he said, almost to himself.
Anaka looked down. Six faint ridges had emerged on his right lower elbow, the same ones carved on the mask. He hadn’t noticed them forming. They weren’t scars from his childhood, but they felt like they had been there for long, somehow.
“They came after,” Anaka whispered.
“Yes,” the priest said. “They do.”
He looked at Anaka for a long time, his head tilted slightly.
“The tethered carry signs,” he said, almost a whisper. “Even if they do not know what they carry.” He turned to the others and raised a hand. “Leave us,” the priest said, his voice quiet but firm. He did not raise it; he didn’t need to. His left hand gestured once, and the villagers obeyed like dry leaves caught in a slow wind. “Go back to your families.”
They began to scatter. Some reluctantly, some stealing glances back at Anaka. A few muttered beneath their breath, one woman clutching her wrapper as she hissed a proverb about “spirits without footprints.” An old man with a cane spat into the dirt and shook his head, as if Anaka were already halfway gone.
And then it was only the two of them. The tired young man collapsed onto the cold earth, chest heaving, as if the ground itself were pressing him down. The chief priest stood tall and still, his eyes steady, filled with knowing.
Anaka could barely think. His thoughts darted like frightened lizards across sunlit stone. How did it come to this? His head pounded with questions, most of them without answers. He blamed the fear, the mask, and the long string of choices that led him here. Maybe if he hadn’t stared too long. Maybe if he hadn’t carved it at all.
“Tell me,” the priest said, voice low now, almost kind. “Do you know why they sent you?”
Anaka blinked. The question was confusing. Sent? No one sent him. He had run. He had fled. Hadn’t he?
“Sit over there,” the priest said, pointing at a stool by the corner.
Anaka obeyed slowly. His muscles ached. Sweat slid down his neck in thin lines. His eyes struggled to meet the priest’s, but when he finally did, he felt something in his chest stutter. The man’s gaze wasn’t just watchful. In fact, it was knowing.
“Who is haunting your dreams?”
The question hit him like a stone to the skull. Anaka froze. His mouth parted slightly, but nothing came out. The priest waited. There was no urgency in him, only patience. The silence broke with the soft jingle of tiny bells as the priest drove his staff into the ground like a practiced motion. The sound cut through the still air like a clean blade. He crouched slowly, tucking the edge of his wrapper between his legs. Then he sat, cross-legged, facing Anaka. The firelight danced across his face, casting deep shadows in the lines around his eyes, sharpening his cheekbones into something almost otherworldly.
“You carry the mark of the tethered,” the priest said, finally. “It is in your eyes. In the way you run.”
Anaka said nothing. He didn’t have to. His mind had already left the hut.
In the hush that followed, his thoughts wandered to Ụmụ-Ọhaba. The way the red dust clung to the soles of feet. The sound of pestles thudding in the early morning. And beneath the great iroko tree near his family’s obi, where the air always seemed to move slower, he would crouch with wood in hand.
It was there he came alive.
His hands, dark and calloused, had memorized the language of wood. The grain spoke, and he listened. He carved with ambition and instinct. Every curve, every line, was a kind of offering. While other boys dreamt of slingshots and glory, Anaka dreamt of masks that bore no names. His people thought him odd. A sculptor in a warrior’s lineage. A quiet boy with an old soul. The son of Ikponze.
Ikponze: celebrated soldier. Not just for Ụmụ-Ọhaba, but for the surrounding kingdoms too. Enuora, Nnọko, Okwuma. Villages that once raided their own. He had fought for the enemy, but they sang his name all the same. The village elders often said he fought for justice, not for homeland. He had marched because he believed in what was right.
But what use was justice to a child missing his father?
Anaka had never known what it meant to be protected. He remembered, instead, a night soaked in rain. He recalled the thatch leaking, his mother trying to keep the fire lit. Ikponze was there, sitting by the hearth, sharpening his blade with long strokes. The sound had filled the room like thunder.
“You will carve yourself a life, boy,” his father said. “You must live up to your name, Anakana. You must live up to your name. But a homestead is only great when its fire stays burning. As for me?” he paused, sparks flying from his blade, “I have carved mine with blood.”
He left days later, answering a call to defend the Bini kingdom in a war no one in Ụmụ-Ọhaba cared about. He never returned.
When the news came with no body, but only a courier’s words, Anaka’s mother had not wept in public. But that night her wailing rose through the walls like smoke, a song for no one.
Anaka had never cried for his father. Not once. But the grief turned to something else, something even stranger. He had his chisel, working at the soft places of his soul. Every mask he carved was a silent rebuke.
You left. You chose the spear. I chose the wood.
And then came the mask. Not one he planned. Not one he copied from his grandfather’s hut. It came to him in a dreamless sleep like a whisper through thin walls. He woke with the shape already formed in his mind. He had carved it slowly yet reverently. The wood accepted his hands and when the mask finally emerged, it had a sharp, grimacing mouth and six deep marks on each cheek. Its eye sockets were hollow, yet they stared. The red lips were set in anger and in pain.
At first, Anaka thought it was beautiful. But soon the dreams began. The mask would appear, sitting beneath the tree, or by his father’s obi, still but watching. Then, with each passing night, it moved and danced with the grace of palm fronds in the harmattan breeze. It grew limbs which swayed in rhythm, its headdress of woven cane catching the dying light. Invisible rattles filled the air. Anaka would wake trembling, drenched in sweat.
He began to feel watched even in daylight. He stopped sleeping. He stared at the mask too long. It began to hum when no one else could hear it. Some mornings, he thought it had changed shape.
Four nights before the Ọfàla festival, he broke. The fear sat behind his ears and whispered madness.
He held the mask and stared into it.
What possessed you?
It wasn’t his father’s ghost he feared. Anaka feared that something older and darker was about to take over his life. Something that had worn a familiar spirit like a garment. And now, it had stretched out its hand for him. So, he ran, leaving his mother, his carving shed, and his name.
“You will live,” the priest said, his voice breaking into the memory.
Anaka blinked.
“But he will come again. This time, you must dance.”
Dance? The word hung in Anaka’s chest like a stone. Dance? He isn’t a part of the secret masquerade society. He had not been initiated. Only the initiated may understand the undertone of these words. Besides, the initiated are believed to represent the forebears and through their choreographed precisions, the ancestors are revered. Anaka never paid mind to these beliefs. His father had once laughed when he said he did not believe in the gods of the land.
He stared at the priest, confused.
The man only smiled faintly and leaned forward. “Once, there was a hunter,” he began. “They said he was sharp-eyed, that he could strike a bird mid-flight.”
Anaka watched him, caught between confusion and awe.
“One day, he chased an antelope deeper into the forest than he ever had before. The antelope was clever. It led him past rivers he did not know and trees that whispered warnings.”
The priest paused, then continued. “The hunter did not stop. He had long forgotten why he had picked up the bow in the first place.”
Anaka sat straighter now.
“And finally, the antelope turned around. It was cornered. It looked at him and asked, ‘Do you still remember why we are racing?’”
The fire crackled between them. The priest leaned back, his face solemn again. “Some spirits run from war. Some run into it. But both are bound until the tether is cut.”
The hut was quiet now, as if the walls themselves had taken in the story and were holding their breath. The chief priest groaned softly as he stood, pressing one hand to his lower back. He moved with the slowness of someone who had seen many seasons, but his voice was clear. “Come. I’ll show you where to rest.” He didn’t wait. He stepped outside, his bare feet silent against the beaten earth.
Anaka hesitated. His thoughts were still swirling. He rose eventually, stiff-legged and dry-mouthed. The air outside was sharp and clean, as if the night had been washed in river water. The village was sleeping now, all its sounds folded into the rustle of trees and distant animal cries. The priest walked ahead without speaking, only lifting his arm at one point to gesture at a hut tucked near the shrine.
It was small, barely room enough for sleep but surprisingly tidy. A straw mat was spread on the floor, beside a clay pot of water and a neatly folded piece of Awkete cloth. A torch on the wall gave off a flickering warmth, casting long shadows.
“Drink,” the old man said simply, pointing at a little water-pot by the corner. Then he turned and walked away.
Anaka entered alone. His mouth felt like dry leaves. He dropped to his knees before the pot and raised it to his lips. The water was cool and earthy. He drank deeply, the clay against his face, the water spilling down his chest. He drank until his body no longer ached from thirst, only from memory.
When he lay down, sleep did not come. The torch dimmed. Outside, the moon moved. He stared at the ceiling, at the crisscross of dried reeds. The dreams he had been having came to him again. Visions of his father’s voice without words, the mask breathing behind him, following him. But something was different now. He saw not only the mask, but the hands that carved it. His hands.
It was during the second rainy season after Ikponze had left for the last war. Anaka had been shaping a headless figure from a log of Ụdala wood. He was thirteen. The sound of women wailing had filled the compound. They said a raid had happened in Ọhịa. That night, Anaka’s mother had lit no lamp. She sat in the dark with her wrapper around her chest, listening. Anaka had crept to her side with the half-formed carving, and without knowing why, he had whispered: “This one will be called Odonikpo.” He hadn’t known what the name meant. It had just come. Now, lying in the quiet, the meaning unfurled in him like morning light—Odonikpo, the spirit of the forest that eats men.
For years, he had resented the man who bled for other people’s lands. A father who was more myth than man, absent from every family meal, every harvest, every naming ceremony. Yet now, in the flicker of memory, another picture came. It was of Ikponze, standing at the entrance of his obi during a slave raid, shielding his wife and Anaka with his body, shouting in a voice as big as thunder, “Inside, now! Don’t look back!”
A few hours later, Ikponze staggered into the hut, blood soaking through his wrapper. A deep gash ran from his neck to his chest, just like the one Anaka had seen on the tall, grim man in the shrine. He remembered his mother kneeling beside him, pressing herbs to the wound as Ikponze muttered, “They won’t come again. I cut down their leader with my machete. They came for my family. Not under my watch.”
“Shhh,” she whispered, dabbing the blood. “Don’t speak too much, or the pain will stay.” Ikponze only chuckled, amused by her worry, as if pain were a thing to fear.
Anaka sat up, slowly. His throat felt tight. His fingers trembled where they rested on his knees. He had not known he carried that memory. Or perhaps he had buried it, like a stone at the bottom of a river, because anger made forgetting easier than grief.
But the truth was now naked before him. His father had not fought for glory, or for cowries. He had fought because it was needed. Anaka looked at his hands. Sculptor’s hands. The son of a man who wielded machetes, for conquest and shield. And suddenly, he whispered, “Anakana.” His full name. A homestead greater than others. It had always felt like a weight, that name. But now, it felt like a question, one he might finally be ready to answer.
The sky was turning from black to indigo when he stood. For a while, he stayed in the hut, his thoughts racing against each other, overlapping like voices in a crowd. Outside, the mist moved like a spirit wrapping the earth in lace. He stepped into the silence barefoot. The chill kissed his skin, but he did not flinch. The shrine’s yard was empty. From within the priest’s obi, a faint orange glow danced behind woven mats. Anaka paused, uncertain. Then, as though guided by a force that had always been waiting, he turned with the quiet certainty of someone who had made up his mind, and began walking toward the woods beyond. His steps were firm, unhurried. There was no hesitation—only the strange familiarity of a path long delayed, as though something had been calling him for years, waiting for him to finally listen.
At the far edge of the yard, the priest stood in the doorway of his hut, watching. In his hand was an ọfọ—a carved ritual staff he hadn’t held in years, blackened with age and memory. His face remained unreadable, but his eyes stayed fixed on Anaka’s figure as it moved deeper into the mist. He did not call out. He simply raised the staff slightly, like a quiet benediction.
The priest turned away and whispered, “Jee nke ọma, nwa Ikponze.” It was both farewell and blessing. Go well, son of Ikponze.
Edited by Ardith Wilson
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