Nine Nights

Under the mask was a boy.

Not a boy, exactly. A man of perhaps twenty-five, lean and fine-boned, with skin the colour of dark honey and eyes that were not quite human. They were long and slanted and dark as a well, flecked with silver, like the sky reflected in a rain barrel. A thin scar curved along his jaw. His mouth was trembling.

"You're real," breathed Chioma.

"So are you." His voice cracked. "I had forgotten. It has been a very long time."

"What are you?"

"My name is Obiora. Once, I was a man of this village." He took the mask from her hands, gently, as one takes a sleeping bird. "Three hundred years ago, I died defending Umuoma from raiders. The ancestors made me a spirit. A guardian. I walk the bush paths and watch over the farms. Once a year, at the New Yam, I am allowed to dance."

"And speak?"

"Never. It is forbidden." He smiled sadly. "If I had stayed silent, I would have gone back to the spirit-world at dawn, and been content. Instead I looked at you. And I could not."

"Because of me?"

"Because you looked back."

The night wind stirred the iyi tree. A single leaf drifted down and landed on the ground between them.

"What happens now?" she whispered.

"I have nine nights."

"Nine?"

"The ancestors give a spirit nine nights if he breaks the veil. Nine nights to either return, or be unmade." He swallowed. "I will have to choose. But I have never before had anything to choose between."

"And me? What happens to me?"

"If the village finds out you have seen my face, they will banish you." His voice dropped. "That is the law. You will be taken into the bush and left to the spirits."

"The spirits are you."

"Not all of them. Some of the others are not so kind."

Chioma stared at the mask in his hands. The carved silver face smiled back at her, serene and indifferent. For twenty-two years she had believed the law was holy. Now she looked at the young man before her, shaking, hollow-eyed, achingly alive, and thought: it is only a rule. It is only a fear dressed up as a god.

"Then they mustn't find out," she said.

"Chioma."

"You know my name."

"I have watched you grow up. I have watched you climb the cashew tree. I have watched you read by candlelight, when your grandmother thought you were asleep." The ghost of a smile. "I have loved you since you were eight years old and sang to a dead bird."

Her breath caught.

"I did not know it was love. I am only a spirit. We do not have the word." His eyes shone. "But I know it now. I know it like a stone in the chest."

She was crying. She hadn't noticed. She wiped her face, ashamed, and said, "You can't love me. I'm not even special."

"You are the only person in three centuries who has asked what I am, and not what I can do for her."

"That's not much of a bar."

"It is the whole world."

The moon slid behind a cloud. In the darkness, she felt his hand find hers. It was cool, and slightly rough, and trembled in her palm.

"Nine nights," she said.

"Yes."

"Then let's not waste them."

She led him home through the cassava fields, the back way, avoiding the main road. He walked beside her, soundless, his mask tucked under his arm, glancing around with the wondering delight of a child. He stopped at every plant. He touched the leaves. He knelt to scoop up a handful of soil and sniff it.

"It smells exactly the same," he marvelled.

"The soil?"

"The earth. After three hundred years." He laughed, a startled boyish laugh. "Everything else has changed. The houses are different. The clothes. The speech. But the earth remembers."

She took him to the abandoned storehouse at the back of her grandmother's compound, a mud-brick hut with a collapsed roof, long unused. She cleared a corner. She spread a mat. She brought him water in a calabash, and a plate of leftover jollof.

He ate like a starving man.

"It is wonderful," he said, with his mouth full.

"It's day-old rice."

"It is the best thing I have ever tasted."

She sat on a stool and watched him, her chin in her hand, a strange warmth unfolding in her chest. He was not at all what she had imagined a spirit would be. He was clumsy with the spoon. He sneezed at the dust. He fell asleep in the middle of a sentence, with a grain of rice still stuck to his chin.

She covered him with her shawl.

"Nine nights," she whispered, to the dark.

Outside, in the bush, an owl hooted three times. Far off, a drum began to beat, slow and heavy. The ancestors were counting.