Moon Witch, Spider King

Sogolon follows Keme one night and discovers that he has another lover, a root vendor in the Baganda district. She also follows his children when they wander into the backwoods alone. When she questions one, the girl replies, “But we always go to the woods. Or they get lonely” (284).

One morning, the night after Sogolon has watched a few donga matches, Keme storms into her room in a rage. He accuses her of “betray[ing] his house” (285). He beats her, but she fights back, and then Yétúnde joins the battle. Sogolon power slams Yétúnde into the wall and lifts both her and Keme into the air, hurling them straight through the ceiling. When the children beg Sogolon to stop, she breaks off the attack. The next morning, she packs her things to leave, but Keme asks her to stay. He questions her about the donga, and she tells him she fights there, sometimes to the death. “Who you really trying to kill?” (288), he asks. They come to a tentative agreement: She will stay, but she is free to come and go as she pleases, and if he threatens her, Yétúnde, or the children, she will kill him.

After three years with Keme, Sogolon becomes pregnant, a development that fills her with both wonder and fear of becoming trapped. At seven months, she goes into labor and delivers four babies—a boy, a girl, and two lion cubs. Sogolon wonders if she is cursed.

When he comes home and sees the cubs, Keme reveals that he has shapeshifters in his lineage. He’s never told anyone because “No lion at court ever become a general” (294). When Sogolon sees the love and tenderness in him as he handles his new babies, she tells him to show his true self to his family. Reluctantly, he agrees, changing into a half lion, half man. He stands in the doorway and lets out a roar.

Over time, the children and cubs grow, as well as the tension between Sogolon and Yétúnde over having lions in the house. Keme begins to wear his true form even for his military duties and encounters surprisingly little resistance. One day, while attending the celebration of the Nanosi (a Northern tribe) and watching a parade of boys who will be initiated into manhood, Sogolon sees the Aesi. As if perceiving her presence, he stops, scanning the crowd. Sogolon tries to muster her old rage, but all she has is the memory of it. She looks away, hoping to avoid his gaze, and he is interrupted by a ceremonial running of elephant bulls and buffalo. When the buffalo charge into the crowd—prompted by the Aesi, she suspects—chaos ensues. She runs. Not only has she lost much of her rage, but her life is different now; with children, vengeance is no longer her top priority. She still longs to fight in the donga, though, and that worries her. She wonders if she’ll outlive her children and if they’ll inherit her power.

She watches the children play in the backwoods, singing, although “[n]othing about this feel like mirth” (311). The way they whisper to the air suggests to her that spirits may inhabit these woods, but when she sends the children home and listens quietly for herself, she hears nothing. One night, however, she walks into the backwoods alone. There, she discovers a series of mounds. She digs one up and uncovers the remains of a small animal. Something compels her to keep digging, and by sunrise, she has unearthed three more graves—the remains of lion cubs born to Yétúnde whose necks she has broken. She shows the bones to Keme who, filled with rage, shapeshifts into a full lion and charges into the house to kill Yétúnde. Two of his lion children try to intervene, and he eventually stalks out of the house.

Later that day, Yétúnde prepares to leave. She justifies her actions by arguing that bearing beasts brings shame on the family and that Keme has been “breeding her like some bush beast who was only here to drop his children and bring his food” (317). She threatens to accuse him of the murders and to bring a mob to his doorstep. Sogolon warns her that if she follows through, she will come after her. Yétúnde disappears, Keme never finds her, and the dead cubs are buried anew in a mass grave.

Keme grieves over his dead children, and Sogolon fears she will never grieve for anyone that deeply. She is now the sole mother in the house, and she notes all their different behaviors. The eldest, Serwa, dislikes Sogolon, who notes that “if I should fall into a sinking sand, she would never offer a hand, or even a stick” (321). For her part, Sogolon rarely sleeps through the night, instead walking through the house or lying outside watching the moon.

Deciding she needs a teacher for her eldest son, she ventures into the Taha district. When she sees two guards dragging a naked woman down the street—an accused witch—she summons her wind power to help the woman escape. In the confusion that follows, she spies a familiar face in the crowd: Olu. She tries desperately to jog his memory, but those memories are long gone. He has forgotten that he has forgotten, lost that “pebble in his shoe” (328) to remind him that memories are still there even if he can’t pinpoint them. She hates the Aesi for what he’s done, but she tries to bury the anger in the solace of home and family.

One evening, as Sogolon and Keme make love behind the house, she notices an unnatural quiet. They call for their children, who warn them, “Shhh, they coming” (331). Suddenly, arrows fly through the air, and Keme is hit. Soldiers of the Red Army attack while Keme, in lion form, fights them off, and Sogolon tries to hide the children. As more soldiers crash into the house, her full power explodes, shattering their bodies. She and the children run from the house, but she stops abruptly at the sight of the Aesi. He has seen her through Olu’s dreams and knows she survived. Just then, Keme runs back to the house, but the Aesi commands the earth to swallow him. Her eldest son, Ehede, in lion form, attacks the soldiers, but he is impaled by a spear. Enraged, Sogolon flings herself at the Aesi, but he easily swats away her attack, summoning flocks of birds to attack her children. He clutches her throat, but she holds him even tighter, her wind filling his body and cracking his bones until he explodes.

She turns away from the sight of her dead child, not seeing Keme claw his way out of the earth. He lays a hand on her shoulder, but she is too grief-stricken to respond. When she sees Ehede’s body—now a boy—with a spear protruding from his chest, she screams at the other children to give the boy space, ordering him to stand up and “stop scaring your sister” (337). Finally, all that is left in her comes out in a scream.

Sogolon and Keme cope with their grief with relentless sex, no matter the time of day or night, until one evening, Keme’s daughter stands in the doorway, crying for them. Keme refuses to stop because he wants to produce another son, but Sogolon tells him he can’t replace Ehede. Days pass, and they are consumed with grief and guilt, unable to share their pain with anyone. They can’t risk bringing unwanted attention to the dead soldiers, so they don’t give Ehede a proper burial. They fight, and Keme accuses her of mistreating the other children because she can’t control her anger. He blames her for Ehede’s death, arguing that the Aesi came for her, not for him or the children. Her grief pours out, and she confesses that she wants to die.

That night, Keme comes into her bed and whispers a secret: “The court went mad” (346). The king, accustomed to being pampered by his servants, awoke one morning in an unfamiliar castle, entangled in a heap of naked bodies. The Aesi traditionally cleared the room before he woke so he “could wake up thinking he rise from pure sleep” (347). This particular morning, however, no one attended to him, and he ran through the corridors screaming for his own bedchamber. With the Aesi missing, court business ground to a halt. The king’s soldiers searched Fasisi, but still, he remained missing. With no one to act as a liaison between the king and his business, the court fell into chaos. Townspeople began to refer to him as The Spider King, he lose four of his legs” (350). Without the Aesi to temper his rage and paranoia, the king become irrational, killing or imprisoning anyone who told him something he didn’t want to hear. Two “fetish priests,” however, divined the Aesi’s presence in Ibiku (Sogolon’s village), so the king sent his Sangomin to search for him.

Sogolon, wandering the streets one morning, hears a commotion and follows it. She sees the Sangomin searching village homes for the Aesi, and from one of the homes bursts the spider-child, now fully grown. The king has little interest in reigning in the Sangomin, and they terrorize not only the poor villagers but members of the court. Fasisi and the entire northern empire descend into crime and disorder. Sogolon forbids her eldest daughter, Matisha, from venturing out alone, but when she demonstrates the same power as her mother, Sogolon’s fear eases.

Four years later, Sogolon insists that Ehede still needs a proper burial, and Keme brings home a woman to conduct the ceremony and act as a witness. With Ehede’s spirit finally set free to join his ancestors, Sogolon and her family find peace and closure.