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As I rounded a corner onto another busy song-laced street, the Songhai general's execution replayed in my mind. It was an unconventional method of justice, feeding a cowpea to a man then killing him if lightning subsequently flashed or sparing him if it did not. Perhaps the Songhai general was right to call the Yorùbá superstitious, to imply that the will of their god was nothing more than nature's chance. And yet—with it being the very end of wet season, today's rainfall should not have been as heavy as it had been. I could not help but wonder if there was some truth to the common saying that the Yorùbá brought the storm wherever they went.
The rain had dwindled into a drizzle by the time I reached a quieter end of Timbuktu, on the outskirts of the market. The sandy road, less trodden upon here, branched out into evenly spaced compounds. Each were enclosed within waist-high mud-brick walls.
Eventually, I entered the compound of a sun-dried mud house with a flat roof. Its sandy yard was occupied by a handful of women, all of whom wore plain, brown wrappers and headscarves that blended into their skin. Under great plumes of smoke, the women moved between anvils, forges, and furnaces.
Metronomic pings rang through the air as two-handed hammers molded iron and steel into weapons or shaped gold and silver into elaborate designs. One woman sat on a low stool, pounding boiled yam in a wooden mortar for tonight's dinner. I knelt before them all, my knees sinking into warm mud.
"Good afternoon, aunties," I greeted.
"Welcome, child," my aunties chorused without looking up from their work, cuing me to stand.
These women were not really my aunties, but I had called them that for so long that their names had become foreign to my memory. Really, I was unsure if I had ever learned their names—and given that they had called me "child" my whole life, perhaps they never learned mine either.
I made my way to the house. I had just reached the archway when an auntie emerged from inside.
"Why are you going inside?" she asked me. "Is the work at your forge done?"
It was a clear reprimand, for we both knew that the work at our forges was never done. "My mother wants me to take inventory," I said. It was a task I had been given earlier that day.
Her brow unfurrowed; like all the other women here, she might have never fully warmed up to me, but she had nothing but respect for my mother.
She sighed. "You'll have to do inventory another time. I don't want you to wake her."
She gestured over her shoulder to inside the house. Within the dark single room, one of my older aunties lay on a sleeping mat. Although her eyes were closed, beads of sweat ran down her face, and her expression was pulled taut as though sleep was an arduous task. Alarmed, I noted that she was even skinnier than the last time I had seen her.
"She hasn't gotten better?" I asked.
My auntie shook her head sadly. "It is the governor's responsibility to provide for our guild, but even so, he's as stingy with medicine as with the food he gives us. I don't think he wants to waste any resources on an old blacksmith."
I frowned; the woman was not that old. Her sickness might have aged her, but I remembered the unlined, lively face she had worn when she had still been healthy. I had always believed her to be around the same age as my mother.
I shivered, a motion that had nothing to do with my soaked clothes. My mother and I had been blacksmiths my entire life. As unmarried women, it was one of the few ways we could make a living—but sometimes I feared it was what would also kill us. My sick auntie was not the first of us to expire at her forge. Was this to be the fate of my mother and I as well, meeting death exhausted, neglected, and, worst of all, much too soon?
My distress must have shown on my face because my auntie placed a hand on my shoulder. "It'll be okay," she said gently. "She'll wake up soon, and when she does, we should give her something nice. Why don't you take a short break to make her one of your flowers?"
* * *
Holding silver and tweezers, I sat in my usual spot behind the house, my legs tucked to one side of me.
Excerpted from Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi. Copyright © 2024 by O.O. Sangoyomi. Excerpted by permission of Forge Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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