Cen

 

Light poured into the room through the big windows. The flimsy curtains swayed gently, disturbing motes floating in the shafts of light, and cast soft shadows on the opposite wall. The white paint seemed to be the latest layer added on the wall. It held a teal tinge to it, darker in some parts than others. A clock hung there, the second hand was missing and the minute hand lagged behind by six minutes. With just two couches, a centre table on a cream woollen carpet and a leafy houseplant in the far corner, the room felt spacious for its small size. 

Orac had expected a dank dim-lit shanty, or mud and wattle grass-thatched hut filled with animal skulls, teeth, hides, herbs, potions, cowries and all manner of witchy paraphernalia. He thought there would be incense burning in one corner and that he would have to grovel at the feet of some idol singing their praises while submitting to their whims. There wasn’t any half-naked hag dressed in animal skins with a face painted in the manner that effused the grotesque nature of the activities of witches. No idols. No rattling bones or choking smoke.

The middle-aged man before him had a deeply furrowed brow when he concentrated on Orac’s grandmother’s face, listening to her introductions and explanations for their visit. Many minutes would pass before he blinked and when he eventually did, it was slow, as though savouring the occasion of it. One would think he was dosing but Orac had been told to expect this. He sat upright in the single-seater couch, his arms on the armrests and listened. His dark short beard made his dark face even darker. The laughter lines wrinkled his face to the degree that he had a perpetual appearance of a focused good listener. 

Orac’s grandmother told the older man of Orac’s burden, punctuating each sentence with a slight bow. This too was unexpected. 

When the man finally spoke, the furrows softened into shallow creases and his face unfolded, crumpled paper spread flat and smoothed over, into a smile. The focused-good-listener look disappeared. Orac didn’t know where to place this new face looking at them. The man asked about generic things like her cassava garden, her goats and chickens, her health and what she thought of the weather. 

So this is ajwaka? Orac thought.

“Not what you were expecting,” the ajwaka said, turning to Orac. His eyes trapped Orac’s. “Animal skins, face paint, cowries, all that chanting and whatever.”

“Yes?” Orac said, unsure whether the man had asked a question. “No. not at all.”

“I do that too.” 

He leaned forward, released Orac’s eyes, poured a glass of water and sat back from it.  Orac found his throat suddenly dry. The corner of the man’s mouth ticked into a fleeting smirk.

“From what your grandmother described,” he said, speaking leb acoli, “it will require a combination of moyo piny and moyo kum.” Cleansing of place and body.

Orac gulped the water and held the empty glass on his thighs, staring at it like a guilty child before a disappointed elder. The ajwaka watched him. 

Orac’s gaze rose from his sweaty hands and fleeted, like it always did, to Oryem. His friend stood behind the ajwaka, silent and unmoving. He hadn’t been ushered into the room like Orac and his grandmother but there he was, an intruder everywhere Orac went. Oryem always stared at Orac. 

The ajwaka turned in his couch to look at Oryem behind him. He looked straight up at Oryem for a moment as if waiting for a contribution to the conversation. Orac feared Oryem would speak up. Ice tumbled down the rungs of Orac’s spine and his heart contracted in his chest. The room felt suddenly too small. 

Orac opened his mouth to speak but the ajwaka, still looking up at Oryem, cut him off: “I know what you feel.” Had the ajwaka addressed Oryem? Orac was confused. His grandmother, sitting beside him reached for his hand and squeezed gently. The ajwaka tore his eyes away from Oryem and turned to Orac. He repeated, deep furrows reappearing, “I know what you feel.”

Orac felt a need to say things to this man. He started to speak but the ajwaka cut him off again. “Instead, tell me about him. It would be nice to know some things before I ask him to speak.” Him?—Oryem? The ajwaka’s smile unfurled his face like a flower starting to bloom. It was supposed to be comforting but all it did was make Orac more afraid of the older man. Had he known what Orac was going to tell him or had he simply guessed from Orac’s confused look and general composure?

The ajwaka knew things, Orac felt. The gentle touch of a hand to the waist, guiding you to the edge of a cliff of one’s fears. The ajwaka was his last hope. Orac swallowed the knot in his throat.

Every morning, Oryem watched Orac brush his teeth and check himself in the bathroom and dressing mirror respectively. He sat among passengers in the taxi Orac boarded, positioning himself such that he stayed always in Orac’s visual field. When Orac had conversations, Oryem stood beside the interlocutors, or behind them, sometimes eerily close as to brush his cheek against theirs and other times at a distance but never too far that Orac couldn’t see him. Every woman Orac looked at was beautiful, and every man handsome. Oryem provided the perfect contrast with those bloodshot eyes and open mouth. When Orac watched TV, Oryem sat beside him and Orac could make out his friend’s face on the screen no matter the viewing angle or display settings. Whenever Orac used his smartphone, Oryem looked over his shoulder, cheek against cheek, straight into the screen such that his face was reflected on the screen. Oryem always looked Orac in the eyes. It was uncanny that using his phone or standing in front of the mirror in the dark, Oryem’s reflection appeared, a clear lone figure fading in, out of the dark, even as Orac’s didn’t. Wherever Orac looked—ahead, behind, aside—Oryem looked back at him, always close by, never apart.

Oryem allowed Orac some respite, however. During sex. As long as Orac kept his eyes squeezed shut. For those short periods, or longer if he took a pill, Orac managed to tuck his friend away somewhere in his mind and give himself to the oblivion in whatever woman he slept with. 

From prostitutes to workmates to neighbours, the women wondered, afterwards, why he bore such a pained expression when they had sex. They knew even when he kept the lights off, they said. Did it hurt him or were they just that ugly during sex?

How would Orac explain? That he couldn’t hold an erection if he opened his eyes? That explanation had ended many of his previous relationships before he resorted to “I need to concentrate” and later, flattery, blaming it on the intensity of emotions or the woman’s skill in bed. You felt much more with eyes closed, he would say, closing his eyes, like praying, worshipping. 

In fact, flattery had been how he escaped explaining his constant distraction when talking to people, as though there was something more interesting over their shoulder or behind them. 

Oryem lying beside a woman, her face the expression of pleasure, as Orac atop her made love, or Oryem hovering above her as she straddled Orac, and the look on Oryem’s face, as final as the last time Orac had seen it, doused the flame of any of lust, love or passion.

Many times Orac would run into the bathroom, ashamed, and look at Oryem beside his reflection in the mirror. “Please leave me alone,” Orac would beg, and when Oryem looked on, he would bargain, “allow me this, only once and I’ll do whatever you want.” Orac didn’t know what Oryem wanted. Oryem never spoke. Orac had had to replace many mirrors. Oryem’s reflection was the closest Orac could get to punching his friend.

That was then, before achieving harmony, a symbiosis of their friendship. Orac provided Oryem acceptance and acknowledgement like Oryem had done for him in the past and Oryem on the other hand provided Orac the constant reminder of what he had done, that this would be his life forever which kept his anger in check. There’s a peace that came with giving in to his fate because then he found ways of living with it. And for some time, it worked. 

Asiimwe, she had said her name was when she called. Orac didn’t remember her. They had dated for a short time two months earlier, she said. It was a short time really, she didn’t expect him to remember her. This was one of the many women he had slept with, Orac realised, and prepared to wiggle his way out of any invitation to see each other again. He had finally found peace with his situation and stopped sleeping around. In fact, he had decided to remain single for life and not to pass on his burden. 

“Can we meet?” she said. Orac could hear conductors shouting destinations and hawkers singing their wares in the background. “Hello?”

“I’m sorry but I don’t want—”

“Hello? Sorry, I’m in old taxi park. It’s very noisy.”

Orac spoke louder: “I said I don’t want to get back together—” 

“I’m pregnant.”

Orac met Asiimwe that evening at a restaurant close by. She watched him order the grilled fish fillet with mushroom sauce and coleslaw off the menu and asked for lukewarm water. Oryem kept his distance from them, standing at the neighbouring table, his eyes focused on Orac’s. 

Orac remembered her now. Bob, they had called her at the office. Her hair was always in a bob or a variation of it. It made her otherwise small head look proportional to her curvaceous body that was the talk of the office. Now her hair made her head disproportionately big on a thin body. She had been sacked for some mishap with the boss. Asiimwe cleared a short braid from her face and leaned forward. 

“No abortion.”

Orac, who had come prepared to propose abortion, deflated and leaned back in his seat. Oryem hovered closer as if to listen in. 

The waiter dodged around tables to bring Orac’s food. Asiimwe received her bottle of water and glass with a smile once radiant now bland. There was hardly any beauty in the faded blouse, over-worn jeans and dusty wedges she wore, or even in the longing way she eyed his food. Splotchy varnish sloughed off rough toenails.

He pushed the plate toward her. “Then better eat.”

Orac could’ve convinced her to abort but he had sensed a certain wariness in her eyes. Although she said she didn’t want to, it seemed she had battled with the decision to do it and failed. She wouldn’t bear the burden of taking a life and so she turned to Orac to convince her it was the right thing to do. 

Or, Orac could’ve decided to disappear and let her struggle on her own. They were essentially strangers. Orac already had a burden on his conscious. What was one more? The image of his grandmother scraping scales off the fish she’d bought at the market flashed in his mind. One of his last meals with the old woman before he left her in the village. 

“Children are how parents right their wrongs,” his grandmother had said of his father. “But for some, it is how they continue their wrongs.”

Orac watched Asiimwe gather the last morsels of food onto the fork. She sat like she belonged there, more confident and relaxed now. Oryem watched Orac. Orac looked into his friend’s eyes and saw something there—a fleeting glimmer over the glazed grey. A slight tick at one corner of Oryem’s open mouth that stretched slowly and gave the impression he was about to shout. Teeth floated in that mouth and blood flowed from it.  

Orac’s grandmother’s cough burst into the silence like a prisoner finally breaking free. It racked her, the sound filled the room. She shook from it. Orac threw his arm around the old woman and held her until the itch at the back of her throat was gone. When she looked up, there were tears in her eyes. 

“A great grandmother,” she said, in leb acoli, sniffled and repeated, “a great grandmother.” She gave herself fully into Orac’s embrace and shushing noises. The ajwaka watched them, his brow corrugated in concentration. He interrupted before she could speak any further.

“Now you know one thing Oryem wants,” the ajwaka said, leaning forward to pour a glass of water. Orac and his grandmother sat up straighter. The emotion in her face was replaced by a cold seriousness. She said, empty of any deference, “What?”

“What all cen want.” The ajwaka sat back in the couch before continuing in English, “Communicability.” The old woman looked to Orac for an explanation. The ajwaka returned to speaking leb acoli, “To make life a sexually transmitted disease. So what you are suffering now may be suffered by all and any you give life.”

It would explain why sex was the only freedom Oryem allowed him, Orac thought. And why all the other escapes—alcohol, drugs, church—failed. 

“Everything else failed, right?” the ajwaka said, as though he’d read Orac’s mind. “And church? I get a lot of people who curse me in Jesus’ name and then return months later for help in secret.”

“I don’t believe in spirits,” Orac asserted and believed he believed it.

“And yet here you are.”

“It is because she,”—Orac held his grandmother closer—“asked me. And I respect her belief. Always have.”

There was that comforting smile again that did nothing of the sort. “You pray against spirits of a million things—from poverty to adultery to barrenness to lies and so forth. Then pray to be filled with the spirits of charity, forgiveness, love, fertility and so forth. Against evil spirits for the Holy Spirit. And yet here you are.”

Orac had no response. He had initially refused to visit the ajwaka when his grandmother had suggested it after he had explained his burden to her. He had deliberately skipped the part about Asiimwe and the baby. He had gone from church to church like a drunkard bar-hopping in search of the most potent spirit. From apostle to pastor to prophet he had gone, paid tithe diligently, fasted, joined prayer cells, visited Prayer Mountains and braved the elements. Oryem accompanied him all the way. He only needed to believe stronger, he kept telling himself, and the Holy Spirit would intoxicate him and set him free. While other church members convulsed on floors, spoke gibberish and revealed traumatic histories in the invisible Holy Spirit fire summoned by the pastor, Oryem stood still in the congregation and watched Orac. If HIV could be cured by the prophet down the road, why waste time with this apostle who had pushed him to his knees and claimed it was the power of the Holy Spirit?

“Do cen care what you believe?” Orac said, looking at Oryem who hadn’t moved an inch.

“If it were as simple as belief, many would be free. We aren’t simply the things we believe. And so are cen.” The ajwaka crossed his ankles.

“I’ve told you everything. Now what?”

“No, you’ve not.”

Oryem, when he was still alive, had cleared a space for Orac one afternoon and sat silent throughout the lesson. Orac, at sixteen years, big, with traces of a beard, was at least three years older than most of his classmates. He was nicknamed Mze, the old man of the class. He could hear it whispered just out of earshot. No amount of bullying and beatings could stop his classmates from using it. It stuck. 

Orac was known for his outbursts, so he had also once been nicknamed Grenade. One classmate, feeling brave, had called Orac ajwaka to his face and when Orac had not reacted, he had added, “Like your grandmother,” and burst into convulsive laughter, performing a mockery of the old woman’s shuffling gait. 

It took four teachers to get Orac off that boy, and tie him to a tree with ropes. Even then Orac fought against the ropes, frothing with rage. The boy never walked right again. 

No one called Orac ajwaka again. It had taken the breaking of another boy’s thumb to stop anyone from calling Orac a Lakwena.

The day Mr Anywar, the science teacher, made fun of Orac’s dumb answers in a recent exam, Oryem had been the only one not to have laughed. At the end of the school day, as the rest of the class hurried home to escape Orac’s wrath, Oryem had said, “I would be angry too,” and smiled sympathetically. Orac had thought to slap the smile off his neighbour’s face but he caught the tail end of someone saying Mze and got up to administer a beating.

Oryem and Orac were different on all accounts. Oryem was lanky but fluid in his movements where Orac was stocky with the grace of boulder tumbling downhill. Orac helped his grandmother with the goats, chickens and in the cassava garden. Oryem studied. His mother wanted him to become a doctor, Oryem told Orac one afternoon. Orac’s grandmother had long since given up hope on his academic future. Orac would be like his grandfather, she would say, but with a less fortunate outcome. Oryem listened to Orac quietly and didn’t offer anything further. 

Oryem’s father was the village drunk. Everyone knew. Oryem remained stoic, responding when his classmates called him Alcoco—the phrase his father shouted on many nights when Oryem’s mother dragged him home from a drunken brawl. For her curse of a husband, the other market women—the mothers of many of his classmates—said about Oryem’s mother, she had been blessed with a bright son as consolation. Unlike their good-for-nothing children. His classmates disliked Oryem for that comparison. They laughed at how Oryem would climb trees to escape bullies. But Oryem remained airy and lively in his ways, smiling even when his classmates slurred their speech, staggered around him before bursting into laughter, calling, “Alcoco! Alcoco!” Oryem did classwork for the entire backbench, Orac learned a while later after joining him at the front of the class. He thanked them for not making him piss himself like his father or chase him up a tree. Orac had overheard the boys brag about how they made Oryem say such things. Then one day, Orac found the four backbenchers crowded around Oryem who seemed to have coiled into himself like a poked millipede. 

Orac’s face had the softness of a battered rock. Orac himself couldn’t recall the last time he wasn’t angry. Anger was a part of him—it was only a matter of degree. It took all the restraint he could muster not to let it out.

“Go. Away.” Orac spoke with a forced calmness. The boys looked at him in shock. After all he was a bully too. “Don’t disturb my friend.” Oryem looked up, sharing the look of surprise with the other boys. Orac had never called anyone a friend. The boys stood straighter, emboldened by Orac’s implied threat. They outnumbered him and could’ve dared Orac but one of them tapped the others on the shoulder and whispered something in their ears. Orac merely watched them. In Orac’s quiet anger, the pencil in his hand had snapped in two. He was bleeding. 

Oryem would see, the bullies said, as they made their way out, it wasn’t over. He would see.

Oryem never saw. 

Even in absentia, Orac cast a protective presence over Oryem. The fear his classmates afforded Orac extended to include Oryem. That fear, Orac thought, was what he brought to their friendship.

Orac found his anger softening in Oryem’s presence. He spent more and more time with Oryem—during school lunch break, and walking back home. Orac found that he could vent to Oryem who always listened and nodded understandingly. He told Oryem of his inexplicable anger—the lava in his chest that threatened to erupt. Anything could make him angry, he told Oryem. It didn’t matter what it was—the anger seemed to be a being of its own that decided when it would wake, prowl within him or sleep. “It’s always there. I feel it.” 

They sat at a clearing near the swamp at the northern edge of the village. Giant alocasias grew out of the thick murky water. The wide leaves swayed in the breeze that carried the cricketing and ribbiting from the crickets and frogs. Dragonflies flew about. Oryem had taught Orac how to make riffles out of the thick alocasia stalks the first time they had met there.

Orac, sitting beside his friend, felt calm in the harmony of their friendship. Any differences between them didn’t matter anymore, only that Oryem provided peace.

Oryem shifted where he sat. “I get angry at my father,” he said to the ground. Orac wanted to tell Oryem he knew what that felt like but he also knew it was different: he hated the longing for something he never knew. Orac felt the being stir and decided to focus on a dragonfly making its rounds. It looked as though it floated in the air, its wings flapping too fast for his eyes to notice. Oryem said, almost to himself, “Sometimes I am angry at my mother too. Whatever he does to her, she still worries if he ate or not.” He chuckled lightly. “I hate him.” In the silence that followed Orac felt he recognised within Oryem a likeness. Silence ensued and Orac revelled in it.

“And me always winning?” Oryem asked, suddenly, the shakiness in his voice gone, “Does it make it erupt?” No matter how hard Orac tried, he couldn’t kill Oryem. Hefting his alocasia-stalk rifle, he’d search and search for Oryem in the bushes only to be caught off-guard and shot. At first, Orac had called the game childish but now found joy in it. The sound of gunfire Oryem made with his mouth and how he lunged out of the bush, diving and shooting like some film action hero made Orac laugh.

Orac laughed. Oryem joined him, brandishing his rifle and said, “Don’t worry, you will kill me one day.” 

“That will be very hard,” Orac said, hanging the banana fibre strap over his shoulder. “You always surprise me.”

Oryem laughed, righting a piece of alocasia stalk. “Waa… it’s easy. After that, you will see me all the time. I won’t be able to hide from you.” Orac knew Oryem didn’t believe that.

Each of them went into hiding and the hunt began. Orac knew he would lose and he looked forward to it. 

But everything changed when Oreym’s father became born-again after a close brush with death. Suddenly Oryem talked about his father all the time—his elevation to ‘grace’ and how anyone could achieve it in Jesus; the preaching in the bars he used to drink in, in the market alongside his mother and door to door. The Oryem who hated his father had disappeared.

Oryem spewed biblical references about the pitfalls of anger, quoting things his father preached. There was no more acknowledgement of Orac’s thoughts towards anything, just that he should strive to be Christ-like. Whatever we felt or thought, Oryem preached, was either a testament to His power or a test of our faith in Him. “He speaks to us in the ways we feel and guides our lives through every decision.”

Oryem said prayers in front of the class every morning and preached between lessons. He made friends with everyone including the bullies. Suddenly Orac’s protective presence was not needed. Oryem testified how Jesus worked in mysterious ways: who knew climbing trees to escape bullies was God preparing him for this—climbing to harvest fruits to give away and talk about ‘charity’ in Christ. The qualities of our goodness, he told the class, are an expression of the Holy Spirit living within us. “It is the living being that speaks for you to do good when evil thoughts fill your brain.” While everyone bit into the mango Oryem had handed them, Orac stared at his and felt a hot ember in his chest. The spirit Oryem claimed lived inside everyone—that which ultimately made people love, share, forgive—was tainted within Orac, prowling and waiting to destroy anything in its path. Orac didn’t hear any small voice guiding him away from his inexplicable rage. Only his thoughts which seemed to always find the things that angered him. 

Orac wondered if it was that same spirit that had caused his father to abandon his teenage mother to die in childbirth. Or had he been heeding the call of lakwena speaking through Alice Auma to wage war against Museveni’s government? Was Oryem’s Holy Spirit the same as that of Kony in his Holy Spirit Movement? If so, was it always as benevolent as Oryem made it out to be? Orac didn’t think so—apart from causing thousands of deaths and mutilations, it had turned his friend into a source of rage.

More and more, Orac’s anger stayed awake within him, drinking in annoyances like dry land drinks the rain.

“You should receive Christ,” Oryem said one evening, and waved to a group of classmates to wait for him. Orac had been waiting too, hoping they would walk home like they used to. Hoping to return to who they used to be for each other. “My father is come to preach to your grandmother soon. Maybe you two will turn away from— T-t-to Christ.”

Without saying it, Oryem had called his grandmother what most people rumoured her to be—ajwaka, a witch. As Oryem hurried away to catch up with his new friends Orac realised Oryem had been slowly distancing himself. He called many classmates brother but never Orac. Now he knew why. He’d laid himself bare to Oryem but it wasn’t enough—he needed to believe in a holy spirit for him to be considered a brother. The being rumbled in his belly and threw flames to the back of his eyes. Orac bit down hard to stop himself from crying.

There would be no need to explain the importance of abila—home spirits—to Oryem, how they were guardians and helpers of their descendants. Before resorting to violence, Orac had explained on numerous occasions that his grandmother merely gave offerings to abila out of respect for those who came before. His classmates instead blamed misfortunes in the village on his grandmother’s ‘devil worship’. Violence stopped such talk. In the school but not in the village.

“I remember now,” the ajwaka said before Orac could continue. “I remember what happened to that boy. His father returned to drinking. The mother returned to her people.”

“I know,” Orac said. After Oryem’s death, Orac had decided to become Christian, no longer taking part in his grandmother’s rituals. Abila had failed him and so be abandoned them. She let him join a free missionary boarding school after weeks of arguing. His academic performance never improved. That he now takes calls at an Airtel call centre for a living is a miracle.

“How did he die?”

He fell, Orac wanted to say. He smashed his head on a rock, shattered his teeth and broke his neck. The mysterious ways of God that led him up a tree to avoid bullies, prepared him for his charity that came later, did nothing for his grip that afternoon.

“Do you know how cen come to be?” the ajwaka spoke into the silence. Orac’s grandmother shifted. He could feel her start to tremble.

“Kiir,” Orac said to the floor. Abominations.

“Yes. Cen are vengeful spirits of the mistreated dead. Their afflictions are passed on until addressed.” The ajwaka leaned forward and stepped into his element. “Cen may choose to merely disturb you from afar, manifesting through nightmares, reliving the kiir, sleepwalking, headaches, sleeplessness…” He looked at Orac’s grandmother. “… inexplicable anger.” He let that hang in the air. The old woman’s palm was wet with sweat in Orac’s hand. She kept her eyes on her feet. The ajwaka continued: “Cen are a manifestation of deep traumas we carry, guilt and regret. They can choose to manifest as voices in your head or appear everywhere you look. They lead you to do unhealthy things—fornication, drugs, alcohol and anything you think may get rid of them.” He paused and served Orac’s grandmother the same accusing look. “Even committing more kiir.” 

The ajwaka wanted Orac to reveal the abomination he committed but Orac couldn’t form the words. Oryem and his father had just ministered to Orac’s grandmother that afternoon all those years ago. The old woman had sat still and silent as they preached of salvation and the traps of evil. She had even bowed her head and let Oryem say a closing prayer. Oryem’s father left to minister to the next homestead. Oryem stayed to ‘preach more to Orac.’

Orac’s grandmother brought them food as Oryem shared more of the good news. She watched them eat and even cleared away the utensils. Nothing about witchcraft or abila or the rumours was mentioned. When Oryem left, Orac decided to walk him part of the journey as was customary.

Orac remembered Oryem’s voice washing down on him with the heat of the afternoon. He’d decided to harvest some pawpaws for Orac to take to his grandmother and thank her for the food. He would drop the fruits and Orac standing below would catch them. 

Oryem felt some discomfort in his stomach, he said, did Orac feel it too? 

No matter, nothing the Holy Spirit couldn’t heal. Oryem talked on and on about how they would finally become true friends now that Orac and his grandmother were going to turn away from witchcraft and unto the Lord. Oryem sang a song of praise down at Orac and made his way further up the tree. 

What does Orac remember of that afternoon? There were few clouds in the sky—splotches of white in a blue expanse. The breeze carried the smell of freshly cut grass. Its cool did nothing for the heat he felt. His shirt stuck to his sweaty back. Orach felt a swelling fire inside him. Oryem praised Jesus for the bounty he’d been granted. He called down for Orac to position himself to catch the fruit. Orac reached for the trunk of the tree. Then nothing. 

When Orac came to he was drenched in sweat and his whole body ached like he’d been carrying heavy loads the whole day. He still held the tree trunk. Tree leaves cheered, shaking in the wind. Dark clouds now filled a sky he’d last known to be almost empty. His hands felt burned. A distance away, Oryem’s glazed eyes stared at Orac. His head was turned the wrong way. His mouth was too widely open, the chin ensconced neatly between the shoulder blades. Blood flowed from it, teeth where his tongue should be. 

This was the face he saw everywhere and now, behind the ajwaka. But something was different. In the blood, Orac could make out pieces of food. If he looked harder, he could see gray paths on Oryem’s face where tears had dried out.

“When I summon the cen to speak,” the ajwaka said, looking intently at the old woman. “They will reveal everything. No matter what you don’t tell me.” He wrote something in a notebook Orac hadn’t noticed was on the table and ripped the page from it. Orac looked at the list. “That is what we shall need for the rituals. Those exact things.”