Love in Color: Mythical Tales from Around the World, Retold(4)
After a few moments, ?ba saw ??un through the branches and froze. ?àngó followed ?ba’s gaze, saw ??un too, his eyes flashing in alarm, a bolt across his face. ??un observed his eyes slide from silver to slate. He stepped forward, ??un raised a hand. ?ba looked sorry for ??un, which made ??un feel sick to her stomach. So ??un smiled, wide and beautiful, dazzling and terrible. It made ?àngó call on the rain clouds for anchor, and the sky turned grey. It made ?ba feel like she was submerged in the river behind her, unable to breathe, to see, to speak. Then, ??un turned around and returned to the party as if nothing had happened. After that day, ?ba found that the ear that ?àngó had whispered in felt like water had plugged it. Try as she might, nothing would pour out. Herbalists couldn’t fix it, priests feared it. It forever felt as if she was half submerged in the river. From that day on, ?àngó was too terrified to speak to ?ba ever again and didn’t dare visit his other girls. For reasons ??un could not confess to anyone, not even herself, she stayed. ?àngó still never asked ??un to dance.
He was talking to his boys now, palm wine sloshing out of his cup. ??un rolled her eyes. ?àngó loved an audience, adored holding court, regaling them all with stories from sports tournaments, from the places he visited and sought to conquer when he ascended the academy. His people laughed on cue, a chorus in a call and response tale, unable to display anything but sycophantic joy as ?àngó told of how, once, a market man refused to sell a lion-skin cape to him. The man had told him the cape was for men with honour, and that he hadn’t seen enough in ?àngó to sell it to him.
‘I told him I would rule over him one day. Old fool said that he knew. He said that he hoped that I would accrue enough honour for the lion-skin, that my back would become broad enough for it. Can you imagine? A whole me. A whole me who can carry an ox on his back? Two oxen! I thought he must have surely been joking.’ ?àngó spat into the earth as his eyes melted into something darker than slate at the memory. ‘So I laughed in his face.’
With ?àngó’s angry laughter came thunder, and with thunder came lightning.
‘The only problem was that now the lion-skin was stained with ash. Dyed with idiot.’
His court roared with jest. ??un felt ill.
She shrugged ?àngó’s arm off her neck, feigning that she was readjusting the multicoloured beads that hung around her throat. The feeling of being watched grew more intense. She turned around, and through the heated dancing bodies, she saw a tall, lithe, muscular figure, leaning against a tree. His arms looked like branches twined to make a trunk, and so it almost seemed as if he was mocking the fever tree’s strength. He was eating a rose apple, white teeth sinking into membrane and then flesh, playful eyes never leaving ??un’s. His left ear glinted with a silver crescent cuffed into his lobe and it matched the flash in his eyes. It was different to the light she saw in ?àngó’s eyes, which was entirely indicative of himself, his whims. ?àngó’s eyes flashed lightning when he was in the mood to drown in her, but he never asked her if he ever made her catch fire. This man’s eyes were calling her, pressing through her. He was seeing into her and he wasn’t bowing. He had three striking scars across his muscular chest, on the left side, welts she immediately wanted to run her fingers across. He smiled at her as if he knew.
She turned back around, alarmed. She pinched her sister next to her and drew her away from the conversation she was engaged in. Yem?ja was ??un’s closest friend, in that she was her only friend, bound by blood and bonded through water.
‘Turn around slowly, like you’re looking for someone. Do you know who the tall new boy is?’
??un said ‘boy’ to calm herself, to allow herself to feel some semblance of control over this man whose gaze was making carefully compacted parts of her stretch and bloom into their fullness.
Yem?ja blinked twice, thrice, startled that ??un was talking to her casually about things that regular sisters talked about casually. Yem?ja’s baby sister was extraordinary beautiful, and extraordinarily, beautifully strange. Once, when they were on the benches in the school field, watching ?àngó and his boys defeat another county, ??un’s eyes had glazed over and she’d said, ‘Did you know that thunderstorms don’t always produce rain? It’s a shame, because the rivers hear the thunder and see the lightning and expect to be filled up, only to end up disappointed. Dry thunderstorms are just show offs. Scaring birds and burning trees while the river pants. Forgetting that the river helps feed the clouds that thunderstorms are created from.’ Her eyes never left the sports field as she spoke. Soon after, ?àngó scored the winning goal.
Yem?ja rarely knew what ??un was talking about. She often nodded and smiled when ??un uttered things like this, knowing that anything she replied would only ever make ??un’s eyes shadow in impatience, would cause her to retreat quickly again, when her cerebral soulfulness wasn’t matched. Yem?ja was of the ocean as ??un was of the river, but Yem?ja was earthy, practical, tethered to the things of this world, tied to the non-anointed peoples, so she could relate to them, mother them. Her younger sister had the freedom to stay connected to the heavens, to allow her psyche to dwell outside this realm. Yem?ja was the root and ??un was blossom, forever reaching for the sky. And so, Yem?ja pretended to understand what ??un was saying and ??un pretended that she was understood. It was a sweet kindness they shared that benefitted them both. But Yem?ja understood ??un clearly now and was pleased. ??un needed more than ?àngó. ?àngó would rather make himself feel bigger with women less powerful than ??un instead of elevating himself. Yem?ja did as she was told – turned around casually – and when she turned back to ??un, her smile was gleeful.