God of Mercy

by Okezie Nwoka

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Cultural Heritage; Magical Realism

Synopsis

Homegoing meets Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Okezie Nwoka's debut novel is a powerful reimagining of a history erased.



God of Mercy is set in Ichulu, an Igbo village where the people's worship of their gods is absolute. Their adherence to tradition has allowed them to evade the influences of colonialism and globalization. But the village is reckoning with changes, including a war between gods signaled by Ijeoma, a girl who can fly.



As tensions grow between Ichulu and its neighboring colonized villages, Ijeoma is forced into exile. Reckoning with her powers and exposed to the world beyond Ichulu, she is imprisoned by a Christian church under the accusation of being a witch. Suffering through isolation, she comes to understand the truth of merciful love.



Reimagining the nature of tradition and cultural heritage and establishing a folklore of the uncolonized, God of Mercy is a novel about wrestling with gods, confronting demons, and understanding one's true purpose.

Release date: November 2, 2021

Publisher: Astra House

Print pages: 312

Sample

 

PROLOGUE

NOBODY IN ICHULU CARED FOR the erosion. Its tired old and its tired young were rebuilding the village indifferently. Its little ones were keeping weary smiles and discarding playtime, giving skinny dogs their place in the orange mud. Its surviving cassava leaves were drinking their share of light, with folded, wrinkled chaff corrupting the cassava’s green. All in Ichulu, every person, every household, ignored the honored eagles soaring over them.

Igbokwe foretold the dangers this rainy season would bring, scurrying behind forest trees, booming his quivering cries. He pronounced them many weeks before the storm, several weeks before it came, and was not moved to read his cowrie shells the morning the message arrived. White paint adorning his old, small body bequeathed him with gifts like clairvoyance—as the gods themselves revealed a message in the skies once a cock had crowed its fourth crow. And when he emerged from his red-painted obi, with equanimity beside him, praying a small prayer and then trudging toward a goat-horn cup for water, his gaze met the clouds, clouds shaped in ominous ways—clouds shaped in symbols that he could not name, lurking within the sickly firmament of Igwe, the god of the sky. His eyes filled with panic. He opened the earth with the tip of his staff. Its bells were shaking with war on their lips. He could not wait for the town crier, his words were too urgent, he had to deliver it himself, every ear in Ichulu was to hear his solemn warning—

“It is coming! It is coming! Dangerous water is coming!”

The fear and confusion that followed traveled faster than the winds of harmattan. Nobody in Ichulu could say how water could harm. The town stretched along Idemili, a sacred river that gave the people a place to bathe, to drink, and to witness their faith in the god after whom the river was named—Idemili, the one for whom the river was. To touch the waters of the river was to touch the body of the divine. Irrigation channels ran from the riverbanks to the rippled farmlands: heaps of earth impregnated with the seeds of yam, groundnut, and other vegetation. The village did not thirst. The children did not drown. Idemili lived for Ichulu, and Ichulu satisfied him. It held past storms with ease given Igbokwe’s divinations. If a storm’s language became threatening, Igbokwe subdued Idemili with a sacrifice. Now, Igbokwe, consulter to the gods, warned that this long-sacred deity was to attack.

This wild pronouncement might have caused the village to ignore Igbokwe’s cries echoing from within the forest. But the people of Ichulu knew Igbokwe’s word to be good and believed him to be a matchless diviner. He possessed power known far past the ends of Idemili, which the white ones too had come to fear. On days filled with jeering and humor, the elders would remind the little ones of when the white ones lost their way, stumbling upon the village seeking to establish the laws of a foreign god—laws that would shatter the peace of Ichulu as well as the peace of the white ones and their village. They would say that the white ones first came with friendship woven into their smiles, promising to build schools for the children’s reconnaissance and to build a church where the white ones spoke often of their god. Then, after four Eke market days, their friendship turned to enmity and their smiles converted to bullets. It was said that the power of Igbokwe’s predecessor caused those inept schools to crumble, and caused the barren church to collapse. It was said that the power given to him by Ichulu’s gods expelled the white ones from the village as they cried, “Their midget witch doctor has deranged me! Give me anything, anything to drink!”

“But what is witch, ehhhh?” the elders would say, chortling above the little ones. “Igbokwe—that shorter man you see—he is our dịbịa.”

Ichulu remembered the wars fought by the town of Etuọdị, and it remembered the negotiations initiated by the town of Ụmụka. It remembered, because neither the sword nor the tongue prevented either town from being toppled by the poison of a white god. “Where were the gods of Etuọdị and Ụmụka,” Ichulu’s people would ask as they threw snaps of disdain, recounting how men were imprisoned for speaking to the ones called their ancestors; and how schoolchildren were mercilessly beaten for uttering the sounds they were taught to speak; and how the fate of Anị, the goddess of the earth, was sung of in dirge, as hidden voices seldom remained to pass on sacred memories.

Only the village of Ichulu remained as it was. It remained because of the divination of Igbokwe and his predecessors—divination that came through the one called their god. Chukwu was the life source of the line of dịbịas. While it was true that their homage to Anị, Ikenga, Amadiọha, and the rest of the gods seldom wavered, they knew that the entire pantheon summed to nothing without the Supreme Being. Chukwu was the most of what any thing or one could be—the greatest among that which could be called great. Chukwu was called Chineke when Chukwu made creation; Chukwu was called chi when Chukwu became a friend; Chukwu was everywhere, unbound to any material thing. Anị had her earth; Anyanwụ had his sun; Igwe had his sky; Idemili had his river. But Chukwu-Chineke-chi governed all creation. Even as the dịbịas worshipped Idemili, Chukwu was the one they had, the one who empowered them to guide and protect the village.

So when the present Igbokwe cried that dangerous water was coming, the people of Ichulu jounced in an unexpected fear. Men hurried to thatch the roofs of their compounds with the town’s thickest palm leaves, nimbly weaving the leaves in the patterns of nests, and praying that Igwe, the god of the sky and the bearer of rain, would send them time. Women rushed to the market to sell a portion of their premature harvest, with a woman named Ngọzi already selling forty cups of groundnut, causing the others to wonder how a woman who could not conceive, how it was that she could quickly harvest and sell such an abundance of produce.

The animals, too, prepared themselves. The black nza birds flocked away from the town, dismantling their cushioned nests and migrating toward Ụmụka in the north. The vultures left the festering carcasses and sojourned northward as well, as the cows, cocks, goats, and rams allowed themselves to be sealed in barns by their owners and peacefully waited for the storm to come and pass. And the little ones, they felt no anxiety at Igbokwe’s words, but grew eager in taking a thousand showers beneath the clouds—to feel the touch of raindrops—knocking, knocking—against their naked skin.

But on the day after Igbokwe’s pronouncement, the elders of Ichulu gathered to discuss their plans to avert the storm. They knew they were required to offer something to Idemili, and they purchased a bull to appease the god of the river. Soon, they beheld four very young men pressing the animal down with taut bodies as Igbokwe opened the bull’s neck with a blade, collecting its spilling blood with a metal bowl while praying over it and asking Idemili to protect the people of Ichulu. He reminded the deity that if he failed to send mercy to the village, the people would condemn him, and he would be chastised by the power of Chukwu—warning that the Supreme Being would send a new river, and the people of Ichulu would find a new god. He reasoned. He asked. He threatened. Still, when the elders looked to Igbokwe’s face for signs that the sacrifice was taken, they wondrously found an empty gaze: abandonment and apathy.

Igbokwe was befuddled. He did not understand what could cause the storm, since he had placed four holy stones from the depths of Idemili in the four corners of Ichulu. The stones were feared throughout the village, as they had been among the stones living beneath Idemili, which kept the river clear and unpolluted. Nobody would dare move them, he believed, while thinking of the one he placed in the northwest corner, in the forest used for hunting; then thinking of the one he placed in the southwest, near Idemili, where compounds sat beside one another; then thinking of the third, placed by the iroko trees in the southeast, which separated Ichulu from Amalike; then the last one—the one he saw in his mind—lodged deep inside the northeast, fixed within the Evil Forest. He had blessed them each morning, and could not understand why they now failed, and dismissed the thoughts of accusing a faultless person, or an innocent town. And before Anyanwụ, the god of the sun, had departed from the day of sacrifice, Igbokwe knelt among his scattered cowrie shells cast within his obi, offering supplications to Chukwu, pleading to the Most Supreme that power be restored to those holy stones.

“Who? Who? Who would curse us this way?” implored the women selling food near sunrise.

“It could be those goats from the village of Etuọdị,” one said as she adjusted her mat of greens.

“Sit down!” said another, while biting on her chewing stick. “Whose gods are greater than the gods of Ichulu? Or are you among the foolish—those stupid ones—who have forgotten the power of Idemili?”

“Then you have not heard of emissaries going to Amalike to remove the curse from Ọfọdile’s child?”

Ngọzi, a childless woman, was pouring groundnut onto her light yellow cloth as she spoke good words to the others.

“Ijeọma? The mute? But for what?” said the woman with the chewing stick.

“Yes. Ijeọma,” Ngọzi said, “It is a good word. My husband told me that after the sacrifice failed, Igbokwe spoke with the gods, and they told him that whoever cursed Ọfọdile’s daughter also cursed the people of Ichulu with this evil water that is coming.”

Ngọzi heard the women laughing, and saw them turn their heads from her—knowing that it was because she had not given birth to a living child. But she continued pouring her groundnut, and disregarded their eschewals, leaving the market women to themselves.

---

ỌFỌDILE WAS SURPRISED TO SEE Igbokwe standing in his modest compound. He was thatching the roof of his red-clay obi when he saw the dịbịa below him, cloaked in a rappa of yellow and blue and holding his iron staff. Ọfọdile pulled at the ends of the raffia the moment Igbokwe’s eyes fell on his, and felt his heart quivering at the sound of Igbokwe’s bells.

“Welcome,” said Ọfọdile.

“I see you preparing your house for the water,” Igbokwe said.

“Yes … My family has been using time to prepare …”

“That is wise. That is very wise,” said the dịbịa, while casting his eyes on a gliding falcon.

“Come inside,” said Ọfọdile as he slid down from his raffia roof. “I know you did not leave your prayers with the gods … to inspect my thatching patterns.”

“You are a keen man, Ọfọdile.”

The two men entered the obi and sat upon its earthen floor, and Ọfọdile reached into a small bag made of goat hide, moving past his containers of snuff, searching for his chalk to begin drawing four lines on the floor, one for each day of the week. He reached into the bag again, after drawing the four lines, and removed a bright pink kola nut, one no larger than a river stone.

“Ijeọma! Ijeọma! Come here!” Ọfọdile said from inside his obi.

And before the moment passed, Ijeọma, Ọfọdile’s nine-year-old daughter, appeared, wearing a green rappa that wrapped across her chest and reached the top of her ankles. Her hair was plaited tightly in very small loops with its blackness complementing her nighttime-colored eyes; her skin was dark; her nose was broad, curved at the nostrils like the petals of a flower; and her cheeks were high, resembling those of the one called her father, while her beaming smile indicated that she was ready to receive his instructions. I have heard you, she said within herself. Speak, my father, I have heard.

“Ijeọma! Go and get the ose ọjị from your mother. Have you heard me?”

Ijeọma nodded three times and ran to get the ose ọjị to halt any disappointment, then returned with a brown-nut cream plopped onto a metal dish. She placed it by Ọfọdile’s outstretched legs, then left his obi once he lifted the dish with the kola nut, not seeing Ọfọdile present the dish to Ichulu’s observant dịbịa.

“Igb … okwe—” Ọfọdile was ashamed to hear his voice delaying, and quickly turned from the dịbịa while coughing into his left shoulder. “Igbokwe … it is said that he who brings kola … brings life. That life, which Chukwu has placed … inside the loins of our fathers … and into the wombs, of our mothers, has not … forsaken us. It was here yesterday. It is here today. And it will be here … tomorrow—if tomorrow comes. Idemili, the god of this village … is a powerful god, he is an enduring god. He will protect … the life of his children. For what god, wants to go hungry? What god wants … his sacrifice to be ash and dust? No. Idemili will be, reasonable; he will be merciful. Let us pray, that the gods that we serve … continue to sustain us, our wives … and our children. Let us pray that our ancestors … will protect us, during this time of difficulty …”

“May the gods be quick in hearing your prayer,” Igbokwe said. “May they answer it with the speed of Amadiọha’s lightning.”

Ọfọdile broke the kola nut into four pieces, one for each day of the week, and he placed them on the dish containing the ose ọjị, and then gave the dish to Igbokwe as he ate his own share, chewing deeply into the kola’s gross bitter—the bitterness reminding him that all creation carries sorrow.

“Ọfọdile,” Igbokwe said, “you know that my medicine has never failed Ichulu.”

“Yes, yes … I-I-I know …” Ọfọdile said, reaching for his small goat bag.

“The Igbokwe before me, and the one before him—all of us from of old have been protecting this village from destruction, protecting it from floods and war. When the gods speak, I listen. When I speak to the gods, they hear. Now that this storm is coming, I have been asking them to show me, to teach me how to send it to another place. We have offered sacrifices. We have prayed prayers. None of them have been effective.”

The dịbịa paused, and looked through the black of Ọfọdile’s eyes.

“Ọfọdile, the gods have spoken. They have told me that this storm has been sent from our enemies. They have told me that the people who cursed us with it are the same people who cursed your daughter Ijeọma with muteness years ago, and they have decided to finally give me those people’s name.”

Ọfọdile glanced at the dịbịa, his face bright with anger as he raised his hands and pushed his mouth forward to speak.

“We would have fought,” Igbokwe said. “The gods did not show us our enemies when Ijeọma had lost her voice, because they knew that we would have fought. And if we had fought, we would have lost.”

“Give me their name!” Ọfọdile barked.

“It is the people of Amalike who have cursed your daughter and our village. I have tried to stop this curse with my divinations and I cannot. The gods have told me that the curse can only be broken by the medicine of Amalike’s people.”

“No! No! How can the people of Amalike still have the power of medicine! Did they not join the god of the white one!”

“Chukwu alone can answer such a question.”

Ọfọdile stared helplessly at the corner farthest from him, watching ants gathering within it, pulling his bag forward to snatch his containers of snuff, thinking that, at the age of twenty-nine, enemies were fighting a war against him. And as he looked past the ants clustering within their tangled ball, he deeply resented the hopeful promise of his youth: that once he was a graceful dancer who could shift the muscles in his arms and legs and buttocks in ways that obeyed the pleasures of the drum, who could jump toward the heavens and flip backward over and again until he found the earth once more, who could tap his feet and clap his hands together more swiftly than a feather afloat—possessed by the spirits of dance. He was an extraordinary hunter and an attractive bachelor, and was told that he chased meat and beauties as if chasing nothing at all; and his age-mates gave him the name Ekwueme, because everything he said, he did; everything he wished for, he worked to obtain. And after rejecting the advances of several women from several lands, he chose to marry Nnenna, the one for whom his heart refused reticence, and together they gave birth to a child who lost the gift of speech.

Ọfọdile spoke hopefully then—speaking for healing to enter the one called his daughter; speaking for the ones called his gods to show his family mercy; speaking so that the village would hear his words and know that he would not be defeated. And as he spoke, he did: offering sacrifices until Nnenna said they could no longer afford to eat, consulting Igbokwe until the village complained that they too required consult, then wearing pride on behalf of the newborn child until that pride had waned and his child became to him regrettable, as he no longer did those things he had been doing for her. His desire to love Ijeọma had become quieter than the gossip he had overheard: that his daughter was abominable, and should have been sent to die in the Evil Forest like other abominable children.

He was angry at his self-declared defeat years before Igbokwe’s visit, and his spirit had been broken years before he heard Amalike’s name. And as a thread of raffia fell from his highly domed roof, landing gently on his legs, his mind revolved toward loathsome yesterdays and unmet promises, as he took a heavy snort from his now-empty container of snuff.

---

AMID THE SCURRY GENERATED by the pending storm, Igbokwe sent eight very young men to the town of Amalike, bearing the responsibility of informing its king that Ichulu wanted their curse to be broken. He gave them twigs to wear around their wrists so that they would be divinely protected, but tremors were curling beneath their throats as they walked atop the road toward Amalike. Eight very young men were keeping silent fears, and no one dared expose the truth dwelling within them; and Ụzọdị, the one called Ọfọdile’s kin, nervously swung his machete with his skinny right arm, scratching the orange surface of the earth.

“Who is the most beautiful girl in Ichulu?” Ụzọdị said.

“It is Nnọnye,” said Nwabụeze, “Have you not seen her breasts!”

“I have seen them, and they are ripe,” said one of the other eight. “She has been licking too much ọgbọnọ soup!”

Laughter erupted among them, and it lingered for much longer than they knew it was supposed to linger, as they were not saying those things which dwelt within them—an act they were told was an act for women. Still, those things dwelling within them were screaming, screaming, calling it unfair to be sent because they were eight very young men. So they continued speaking aimlessly—protectively—of other things: things like the breasts of very young women.

And when the trees became sparse and the earth became a gray-colored brown, the eight knew that they had arrived at Amalike. They began asking a small child, whom they had seen running, to take them to the palace of Obi Iroatụ, the town’s fifth descended king, and they were led by the child to the gates of a white-coated palace that bore the kind of stoutness of a towering hill; and the eight believed that its pillars were too audacious, reaching for the bowels of Igwe, the god of the sky, and laughing at the threshold of Amalike’s birds. There was no honor, they said within themselves, there was no reason, building up what Chineke could whisper down, and with great discordance the eight of them approached the king’s barred gates, quietly waiting for Amalike to speak.

“Weytin you want?” said the approaching gateman, wiping his oily nose with a shirt.

The eight of them looked about with confusion.

“Why does he not speak our language?” asked Nwabụeze.

“Because he does not come from where we come,” Ụzọdị said.

“Ụzọdị, speak to him,” said Nwabụeze. “Is it not the good word that you can speak like him?”

Ụzọdị recoiled, not wanting to speak a language that he had been instructed never to speak again, remembering the instruction of the one called his mother as he moved backward, away from the gateman.

“Go on, speak!” said one of the eight.

“If you can speak, speak, so that we can return to our home!” said another.

“Do not be like a woman!” Nwabụeze said.

“Close your mouth!” Ụzọdị said, quickly moving forward and looking below the gateman’s eyes.

“We … c-come …” Ụzọdị began in English. “We … come … to see … king.”

“Fro wee you don come?” the gateman said.

“… Ichulu,” Ụzọdị said.

“Wait hiyah make I go tell dee king.”

The gateman turned and ran toward the palace with his slippers clapping against the cement as he went; and he quickly returned—unlocking the gate for the eight emissaries, then leading them into the palace—directing them through large doors and up carpeted stairs—and, finally, ushering them inside a glimmering room at the center of Obi Iroatụ’s palace. And the eight of them saw twenty men of guns standing along the room’s four walls, their heavy artillery borrowing light from the chandeliers protruding forth from the floral wallpaper, which bore the same design as the king’s gold jewelry, which he wore as he sat atop his ivory throne—smiling at eight very young men.

“Young men, young men,” said Obi Iroatụ in Igbo, “it is beautiful that you are here. But I cannot welcome you well without first breaking kola nut.”

The king was given kola by one of the men of guns before praying over it. And after small portions had been divided, he watched the eight eat it slowly.

“Now, young men,” said Obi Iroatụ, “why have you come?”

“Iroatụ,” Ụzọdị began, “we are here to give you a message from the people of Ichulu. Someone from Amalike has cursed our village, and has also cursed the daughter of a man named Ọfọdile, the son of Nwankwọ. ...