The Drummer's Daughter

In the kingdom of Oke Ijin, the morning is announced by drums.

Ayo Oladele woke before the first one, in the grey hour when the cocks were still thinking about it. She lay on her mat in the back room of her father's house and listened to the village waking: the slap of bare feet on red earth, the clink of a water pot, an old woman coughing and cursing in two languages. Beyond the mud wall, past the baobab, the hills rolled away blue and sleeping.

She was seventeen. She had dreamed of lightning again.

She slipped out through the back door with her bare feet silent on the packed floor, and went to the one place in the world where she felt entirely herself: the drum shed.

It was a low thatched hut behind her father's compound. Inside, hanging from the rafters on leather cords, were forty-one drums. Dundun, gangan, bata, igbin. Round-bellied, hourglass, long-necked. Her father, Baba Oladele, was the finest drum-maker in three provinces. He sold to chiefs and to kings. He sang over every skin as he stretched it.

And at the very back, wrapped in indigo cloth, hung a drum that nobody was allowed to touch.

She touched it.

She always did, when she was alone. Only a fingertip, only for a moment, the way you lay a hand on a sleeping animal. The cloth was cool and old. Beneath it, the wood hummed. Not a sound, exactly. A pressure, like the air before a storm.

"Ayo."

She jerked. Her father stood in the door with a lantern, his big shoulders stooped, his face lined and tired and fierce.

"Baba. I was only looking."

"You were touching."

"I only..."

"Ayo." He came in and set the lantern on a shelf. He took her hands in his huge scarred ones. "Listen to me. That drum is the Ilu Sango. The thunder drum. It was made by my great-grandfather, who was given the wood by the god himself, in a dream. It can call the storm. It can break the sky. It has been in our family for nine generations, and in nine generations no woman has played it."

"Why not?"

"Because the god forbids it."

"The god told you this?"

"The priests told me."

"Then the priests forbid it," said Ayo, quietly. "Not the god."

Her father's jaw tightened. For a moment, in the lantern light, she saw something cross his face. It was not anger. It was fear, an old, quiet, patient fear that she had seen in his eyes on certain nights when thunder came.

"Daughter," he said, "you have never asked me why I taught you every drum in this shed except that one."

"I thought it was because you didn't trust me."

"It was because I trusted you too much." He let go of her hands. "Your mother had the gift. She could make the lightning dance. And the priests found out."

Ayo's heart stopped.

"What happened to her?"

"She was taken to the Temple of the High Priest, Baba Olu. She was told she was blessed. She was never seen again." His voice cracked. "I have waited seventeen years for you to ask me, and I have prayed every night that you would not."

Outside, in the village, a drum began to beat. Not one of theirs. A deep, slow, ceremonial pulse that rolled across the hills like a gathering fist. She had never heard it before. Her father's face drained to grey.

"What is that?"

"The king's drum," he said. "Soldiers. They are coming."

The village woke in a clatter. Doors banging, children shrieking. A man ran down the path crying that riders were at the gate, a hundred of them, in the red of the Alaafin's guard.

Ayo ran after her father to the village square. And there, on a black horse, gleaming in bronze and crimson, sat a young man with a face like carved wood and eyes like a winter night.

"By order of Alaafin Adeyemi, Lord of Oke Ijin," he called, in a voice that cut the noise in two. "This village is to be searched. A thief has stolen the sacred drum of the Temple. We have reason to believe it was brought here."

Ayo stared. The stranger's gaze swept the crowd. It moved over her, paused, moved on.

"Captain Kayode Adeleke," whispered a woman nearby. "The king's best sword. They say he has never failed."

Behind Ayo, in the shed, the indigo drum began, very softly, to hum.