A Door Is Not a Promise

Two days later, the first refugees from the eastern posts reached Abomey without their shadows.

Senamé thought the woman carrying the news had misspoken. Then the potter took her to the doorway and pointed towards a cart stopped in the road. Morning light fell across its wheels, its bundles, the woman holding its reins. Beneath the two men lying in the back, the planks remained evenly bright.

“They’re alive,” the potter whispered. “The healer says they’re alive.”

Senamé approached on legs that still felt borrowed. One man turned his face towards her. His lips moved with the effort of somebody trying to remember the way out of a dream.

“They came through the spears.”

She crouched beside the wheel.

“Who?”

“The soldiers. The old ones.”

He began shaking. She took his hand and stayed until the healer came, resisting the urge to pour power into something she did not understand.

By noon, a messenger had brought the military account. Oya’s living troops were marking the roads with iron stakes and ritual ash. Behind them came men who bled no blood. Arrows passed through their cloth. A guard had knocked one down by breaking the ground beneath its feet; another had risen where it fell.

The army was still several days from the capital. Its advance riders were not.

Senamé read the account with a hand she could finally close. Beside her, water travelled between two bowls placed at opposite ends of the shelf. It had taken half the morning to keep the thread from breaking.

She looked from the bowls to the number of people on the road.

It was not enough. For once, the thought did not require her to hate herself before she did anything about it.

“I need to speak to the queen.”

The potter folded her arms.

“You need clean clothes.”

“I have a war.”

“It can have you washed.”

Senamé let herself be bullied into the wash yard. She borrowed a wrapper, tied her hair back with both hands and wept once from the relief of being able to do it.

* * *

Sètondji met her at the servants’ entrance after sunset. He had slept badly, if at all. A dark scar remained above his heart, visible through the open neck of his robe.

He kissed her forehead before leading her inside. It was so brief, so unambitious, that she caught his sleeve.

“That’s all?”

He looked at the guard watching the passage.

“I was trying to preserve some dignity.”

“Whose?”

For one moment she had the smile she remembered from the lessons. Then he took her good hand, and they went to the queen.

Tassi had moved her command table into an open court. Kpo stood beside the eastern wall in her enormous animal form, black shoulders higher than the lintel. Thin silver lines ran through the masonry around her. The whole wall trembled whenever she moved.

Kossiwa had attached her restraint to the structure of the inhabited court. Kpo could break it. The crushed rooms would fall inward on the healers and children sheltered underneath.

Senamé studied the lines without touching them. Their cold pattern ran towards the western drainage channel, beyond the palace walls.

“That is where she has joined them.”

“Can you undo it?” Tassi asked.

Senamé opened her mouth, then stopped herself.

“Not from here. Not safely.”

The queen nodded and returned to the map. No reproach followed. Senamé found herself absurdly grateful for the absence of one.

Adonon stood at the other end of the table. Her fan lay closed beside her hand. Olúṣọlá had left the palace under escort that morning, abandoning the language of negotiation once his army no longer needed it. Two of his companions had tried to remain at the eastern gate. The queen’s guards had removed them.

“They will say you attacked an envoy,” Adonon warned.

“They have brought an army of dead men, Mother. I doubt they are waiting for a better sentence.”

Adonon’s mouth tightened. Senamé watched her glance towards the occupied rooms, and for the first time saw something that resembled fear for the people in them.

“I intended to preserve the dynasty.”

Tassi pressed a marker onto the western road.

“Then help me preserve the people it governs.”

She assigned her mother the evacuation of the household stores. Adonon began to object to the use of her private gates, looked at Kpo holding the wall steady, and sent for her steward.

Only then did the queen turn back to Senamé.

“Afiwa brought your shell. She reached Azara last night.”

“Will you ask them?”

“I already have.”

Tassi held out a copy of the letter. Azara was offered recognition as a free refuge, its own laws within its boundary and protection for those travelling to it. Help in the present war would create no permanent claim on its women.

Senamé read the last line twice.

“And if they refuse?”

“The offer stands.”

She looked up.

Tassi’s expression was tired and quite steady.

“I cannot promise them freedom only on condition that they obey me.”

Kpénahi was brought into the court a little later. No chains bound her wrists. A guard carried the wrapped sword several steps behind her.

Senamé moved towards her before remembering she did not know whether they were ready to touch.

Kpénahi stopped at the edge of the table.

Tassi pushed the report from the eastern posts towards her.

“You know the ground workings of Sakpata.”

“Yes.”

“Can you break an army’s footing?”

Kpénahi read. When she finished, she looked towards the royal sword.

“If the dead have been called through the earth, they still require an agreement with it.”

“I am releasing you to help defend the city. The charge for Allada remains. When this is over, you return to answer it.”

Kpénahi’s face closed. Senamé felt the old collision approach and braced for it.

Tassi waited.

At last Kpénahi held out her hands to the guard.

“Give it here.”

He looked to the queen. She gave permission.

The familiar weight settled at Kpénahi’s side. She touched the hilt, then looked past Tassi to the rooms full of people who had nothing to do with what had happened to her father.

“Where do you need me?”

Senamé let out a breath she had not known she was holding.

They planned around a simple piece of ground. West of Abomey, the road crossed a broad hollow by a raised causeway. The old river passage ran beneath it. Refugees were using the causeway to enter the city; if Oya took it, the western escape road would close. Beneath its far end stood the abandoned dye house. Kossiwa had placed the heart of her workings there, beyond the queen’s immediate reach.

Senamé laid her finger on it.

“I will go to her.”

Sètondji shifted beside her. She felt the objection before he spoke.

“Come with me as far as the hollow,” she added. “I need people moving through the right gate when it opens. I can’t do that part.”

He studied the map, then nodded.

Tassi set the lambi beside her mirror.

“And if she will not let you through?”

Senamé thought of the hand beneath Loló’s hand, the closed boundary, a child keeping herself alive beside a mother who had stopped breathing.

“Then I’ll have to stop her.”

* * *

In the dye house, Kossiwa sat beside the frozen vat and tried to persuade her fingers to release a comb.

The genette had pressed itself into the crook of her elbow. Its warmth hurt.

“They are frightened of you,” the reflection observed.

“They are safe.”

“Then why are they trying to leave?”

Kossiwa looked at the map spread across her knees. The seals joined in a pattern she could hold in her mind without effort. Palace doors. River crossings. The Python’s water. Each place kept, each uncertainty removed.

Under the edge of the ice, something shifted independently of her breathing.

She tightened the ring that held it.

“Stay where I put you.”

The reflected woman smiled.

“Everything you close has to stay somewhere.”