The Law of the Mask

In Umuoma, a girl learns three things before she learns to read. Never whistle at night. Never answer a voice that calls you from the bush. And never, ever look beneath a masquerade.

Chioma Eze had known these laws since she could walk. Her grandmother had sung them to her in a rhyme, as she plaited her hair by the cooking fire. A girl who sees the face, the song went, loses her place. A girl who breaks the veil, goes into the bush and does not come back.

She had never been tempted. Not once, in twenty-two years.

Until the night of the New Yam Festival.

The village was shaking with noise. From the compound of the oldest chief to the lowest hut at the edge of the cassava farms, Umuoma was alive with drums, whoops, the clatter of ankle bells, the steady roar of three thousand people. Torches burned on every wall. Women in wrappers of gold and green carried calabashes of palm wine. Children ran shrieking between the stalls, clutching skewers of roasted corn.

Chioma stood at the edge of the square in her best blue lace, with her cousin Adaora clutching her arm.

"Here they come," breathed Adaora.

The drums changed. A deep, trembling rhythm rose from the earth. The crowd parted, and from the bush path beyond the iyi tree came the first of the spirits.

Agaba, the great horned one, twelve feet tall, in a robe of red raffia. Ijele, the king of masquerades, his towering headdress swaying like a ship in a storm. Then the lesser dancers: the Mgbedike warriors, the swift Okonko, the funny Ogbodo with his painted face.

The villagers sang. The ground thundered. And last of all, as the moon rose over the trees, came a single figure that Chioma had never seen in her life.

He was tall and slim, wrapped in indigo cloth from head to foot. His face was hidden by a carved wooden mask, silver-white, with long slanting eyes and a serene half-smile. Beads of cowrie and glass hung from his shoulders. He moved without a sound, like water across stone, and when he turned, the torchlight touched the mask and made it glow like a second moon.

"Who is that?" she whispered.

"I don't know." Adaora's voice was hushed. "Nobody does. He's never come before."

The drums stopped. The silence was so sudden that it rang.

The masked figure walked into the centre of the square. He did not dance. He stood, motionless, and slowly turned his head, scanning the faces of the crowd. The mask's eyes passed over the chiefs, the elders, the young men with their palm-wine breath.

They stopped on Chioma.

She felt it like a hand on her heart. She could not breathe. Then, very slowly, the figure raised a hand, palm out, and the whole village gasped.

"He's blessing you!" hissed Adaora.

"Why?"

"I don't know! Nobody's blessed in thirty years!"

The spirit lowered his hand. The drums began again, and the dance resumed, wilder than ever. But Chioma's skin was prickling. All through the next hour she could feel the mask's gaze, steady as a lantern, following her through the crowd.

At midnight, the spirits departed. They filed back along the bush path in silence, the great Ijele at their head. The villagers dispersed to their houses, singing, stumbling, exhausted and happy. Chioma lingered at the edge of the square after the others had gone, staring at the dying torches.

"Stupid," she told herself. "He's a masquerade. He's a man in a costume."

But she knew that wasn't true. She knew it in the pit of her stomach. The spirits of Umuoma were not men. They were something older.

She turned for home. And a voice, soft as the wind in the thatch, said:

"Daughter of Eze."

She froze.

He stood at the edge of the iyi tree, in the shadow, indigo on indigo. The mask caught the moon. For a moment neither of them moved.

"You shouldn't be here," said Chioma.

"No."

"The law..."

"I know the law." The voice was low and warm and strangely young. It did not come from behind the mask. It came from everywhere, from the leaves, the stones, the air. "I have broken it by speaking to you. I will break it further, if you permit."

"What do you want?"

"To see you."

"You're looking at me."

"No." A pause. "To be seen."

Her heart thundered. She knew the song. A girl who sees the face. She knew every word of it. She knew what happened to the girl in the story, and to the girl before her, and the girl before that.

"Why me?" she whispered.

"Because you were the only one who did not look away."

She took a step forward. Another. The air smelled of rain and woodsmoke and something sweet, like frangipani. Her fingers reached up toward the carved silver face.

"Don't," said the spirit, very softly.

"Why not?"

"Because I want you to." His voice cracked. "And I have waited three hundred years to want anything."

She touched the mask. It was warm, like a living thing. Beneath it, she could feel breath.

Then she lifted it away.