Moon Witch, Spider King

Ikede tells his tale as recorded in the scrolls.

After leaving Keme, Sogolon journeyed south from Wakadishu, hiding among the Bintuin, a clan of nomadic horse and camel lords, until she reached the kingdom of Lish. She sought passage aboard a ship sailing around the eastern horn to Omororo. While she waited for the ship to set sail, she sensed the presence of Bunshi in her room one night—Bunshi was the catalyst for her journey, the one who “pull me from my man and my children without even a word why” (387). Sogolon was on a mission that would right 1,000 wrongs; Bunshi was still vague on the details but told her that a southern griot would be on board the ship to record her deeds for posterity.

When Sogolon killed a Sangomin in Kalindar, it warned her that its death would foretell Sogolon’s coming to others. True to its words, when she reached Lish, she was ambushed by another Sangomin. After a long chase and a battle on the rooftops, Sogolon defeated her attacker and reached the departing ship at the last moment. Her mission, she was finally told, was to kill a 12-year-old boy in Omororo.

Nsaka reports that all of Sogolon’s family are long dead, although Matisha, her eldest daughter, lived the longest. Bunshi then fills in additional memory gaps. She began to observe Sogolon after the Aesi’s death, curious about this woman with a power strong enough to defeat the king’s right hand. She came to her by the river and told her that the Aesi was fated to be reborn every eight years, and she must make sure that never happens. They were able to track him by observing the Sangomin who watched over and protected him. Citing scrolls from hundreds of years ago, Bunshi told her that when the Aesi reached 12 years, he would “reset” the world. These scrolls mention the appearance, time and again, of an Aesi, always at the right hand of a king, a man who history forgets until he is born anew. Only the scrolls keep that memory alive. If Sogolon could kill him on the eve of his 12th birthday, the line would stop and he would die for good. Otherwise, he would seek vengeance on her, his killer.

With this information, Sogolon left Keme and her children to take on this quest, but Keme, not understanding the stakes involved, was angry that she would abandon her family. On her way south, she stopped at a bookbinder and paid him to bind Emini’s scroll.

Ikede resumes the story. Aboard the ship and masquerading as a man, Sogolon tried to avoid unwanted attention, but she was a curiosity who seemed much older than she looked. As she assessed the crew, she found the navigator to be wise, the only one who saw through her disguise. On the 10th day, the ship encountered a violent storm. It was tossed like a cork, and a massive shape rose before them—a chipfalambula, a giant sea creature many times the length of the ship. It opened its maw, about to swallow them, when Sogolon saw Bunshi standing in the creature’s mouth, beckoning her and Ikede inside. They rode inside the chipfalambula all the way to Omororo. Once they reached the central city, Bunshi instructed them to seek a Green Witch who would give them shelter. Then, beyond the central city, they would find the village of the Asakin tribe, the people raising the young Aesi. Suddenly suspicious of Bunshi—someone seemed to be sharing their movements with the Sangomin—Sogolon decided not to follow the sprite’s advice but rather sought her own path.

After taking a roundabout way, she and Ikede arrived at the Asakin village, but all the boys were gone, undergoing the initiation rite of manhood. They stole a canoe and rowed out to the island of Wakeda, where Sogolon spied the boys, but she couldn’t identify the Aesi. She waited. The next morning, she observed a flock of circling pigeons. They land and peck the ground near one boy in particular. She followed the boys into the forest, where they took refuge under a canopy. She suspected this was the moment they would shed their boyhoods and become men: the moment she must kill him. She approached the sleeping boys, but the ground began to rumble, and out of the earth rose the spider-child, now an adult over three stories tall. She ran, but the massive spider pursued her, reeling her in with its web. She fought back with her machete and lopped off a hand, but another grew in its place. She tried to summon her wind, but it didn’t respond. The creature pinned her to the ground, held her mouth open, and tried to drip its burning venom into her, but its leg burst into flames. Ikede rescued her, despite the griot’s vow to only chronicle events and never intervene.

She pulled out her dagger, but the boys dissolved into dust—they were decoys. She ran back to the canoe, the griot furiously writing down what had passed when a massive flock of crows appeared, commanded by the Aesi. Sogolon and Ikede rowed away from shore, but huge waves rocked the boat. On the shore, a tall woman was carrying the boy. They watched Sogolon and Ikede row away, the boy “burst[ing] into a glow. Brighter, whiter” (423).

Bunshi continues the tale. The boy lived, and for generations of the Akum dynasty, the Aesi found his way to the king’s side, advising and corrupting him. Sogolon, distrusting the story and the three storytellers, threatens to walk out. They argue, Nsaka accusing Sogolon of forsaking everyone but herself during the Fasisi witch purges. Sogolon agrees to try once again to kill the Aesi, but they tell her they need a different plan. The Aesi, they say, is no devil but a god.

Sogolon returns to Fasisi, a city changed in a way she can’t define. It’s bigger and louder, a city reshaping itself for war” (430). Nsaka takes her back to her old home and introduces her to her great-great-granddaughter, Oseye. Sogolon asks about her family in the North, and Oseye runs through a litany of people and deeds, good and bad—some in military service, a fetish priest, a criminal, and even one of high esteem buried in the royal graveyard. Seeing the house again, Sogolon’s strongest memories are of her and Keme: the sights, sounds, and smells of their lovemaking. Oseye also reports that all the lions of the bloodline—full, half, or shapeshifter—have gone to live together in the grasslands. The following day, Nsaka takes her there, and she is met by a pride of lions. They recognize Sogolon as a member of the family. She spends the night with them and returns to Fasisi the next day, questioning Bunshi about more of her forgotten past.

Their journey takes them to Mantha, and on the way, Nsaka shows her the massive crater left behind when she destroyed the Sangomin so many years ago. The new Aesi, they tell Sogolon, can’t control minds, but he can control people’s physical actions and invade their dreams. As they climb the mountain to Mantha, Nsaka slips on loose rock and almost tumbles down the slope, but she stops her own fall, lifting herself back onto the path (her own unique power). They finally reach the summit, climb through a chamber, and find themselves in a wide-open space. Mantha is a fortress that rivals a king’s palace. Inside, they meet a nun who asks about Sogolon’s purpose and identity. “‘I kill people,’ I say and observe the long silence that follows’” (440).

Lissisolo, the sister of the current king, strategizes with Nsaka over how to keep her son safe until he can assume the throne as its rightful heir. With the Aesi’s spies everywhere, Bunshi claims she has found a “kingdomless prince” to raise the royal heir, but Lissisolo wonders why there couldn’t be a queen, and why it must be a man who rises to the throne. While they bide their time, Sogolon acts as Lissisolo’s bodyguard, preventing the assassination attempts sent by her brother. One night, while watching the sky from Mantha’s ramparts, Sogolon sees for the first time two winged dragons standing guard over the fortress. They are the length of six men, and they are only babies. Sogolon is fascinated and terrified.

When Sogolon returns to Lissisolo’s chamber, the princess tells Sogolon her story: Ordered by royal decree to join the divine sisterhood before turning 18, Lissisolo rejected the order as well as the gender norms imposed upon her; she rides, fences, and is an accomplished archer. However, she was “much more like a son […] to our father than he [her brother, the current king]” (446), and her father waived the royal decree banishing her so long as she married. She did and bore four children, but once her brother became Kwash Dara and assumed the throne, he killed her family and banished her to Mantha. Lissisolo asks Sogolon what stake she has in killing the Aesi. She replies that she is sick of this man who has taken everything from her.

Sogolon rides out to meet the Prince of Mitu and escort him to Mantha (to father a child to Lissisolo). Soon, the King Sister is pregnant. Six months later, Nsaka reports that she has found “the source of the Ewe drum to the west” (455): an ally and former advisor to the throne, Basu Fumanguru. Having fallen out of favor with the king, Fumanguru now offers wisdom against him. Fearing that the King Sister’s child will be born out of wedlock, Fumanguru marries her and the Prince of Mitu. Eventually, she delivers a baby boy, and they debate where to send him to keep him safe from the Aesi. Sogolon argues for Mweru in the far western reaches of the North, a place “even Kwash Dara would not dare try to conquer” (458). Later, one of the sisters reports the disappearance of another, and evidence suggests she may be in league with the throne. They fly out on the back of a dragon. When they catch her, she confesses that she was ordered by two men to send a signal if she witnessed any “strangeness” in Mantha. When Lissisolo became pregnant, she sent out the signal.

They rush to put their plan into action. Nsaka takes the boy to Fumanguru while Sogolon and Bunshi escort Lissisolo to Dolingo, an independent land free from the King’s reign. They travel inside the mouth of a chipfalambula, this one with trees and grass growing on its back. It lets them off near Mitu, and Bunshi leads them to a portal that transports them within a day’s journey of Dolingo, a passage that saves them weeks of travel. On the road to the citadel, however, Sogolon is pulled from her horse by an invisible force and beaten. She tries to fight back, but she swings into empty air.