The eight days that followed the Oracle's decree were a slow, excruciating unraveling, a tapestry of dread woven hour by agonizing hour. The sun, which once blessed the kingdom with golden light, now seemed a malevolent eye in a bronze sky, its heat a weight upon the spirit. The very air of Idah thickened, saturated with the collective anxiety of a people waiting for the final blow to fall.
For Princess Inikpi, the world had become a study in her father's suffering.
It began subtly. On the first morning after his night in the grove, she saw him at the dawn council. He was seated on his throne, but his posture was wrong. The unbending spine that defined Ata Ayegba was curved, as if under an invisible yoke. His hands, usually resting with calm authority on the carved leopards at the ends of the armrests, were clenched into white-knuckled fists. When a scout reported the Benin vanguard was now encamped a mere three hours' march away, detailing the gleam of their Portuguese muskets in the morning light, her father did not roar a defiance or issue a sharp command. He simply nodded, his eyes distant, haunted, fixed on some internal horror far worse than the one at the gate.
"Father," Inikpi had approached him after the council dispersed, her voice soft with concern. "You did not sleep."
He flinched at the sound of her voice, a tiny, almost imperceptible recoil that struck her heart like a sliver of ice. His gaze, when it finally met hers, was a landscape of storms. The love was still there, but it was a love drowning in a sea of anguish.
"The weight of kingship is a heavy blanket, my little eagle," he had said, his voice a hollow echo of its usual resonance. He reached out and cupped her cheek, but his touch was hesitant, almost tremulous. It was the touch of a man saying goodbye. "Do not trouble yourself with an old man's fatigue."
But it was more than fatigue. It was a soul-deep erosion.
On the second day, she watched him from her balcony as he walked the walls. He moved not with the confident stride of a commander inspecting his defenses, but with the slow, heavy tread of a man visiting his own future grave. He would stop and place a hand on the sun-baked mud bricks, his head bowed, as if listening for a weakness the enemy would exploit. The warriors he passed straightened in respect, but their eyes, full of desperate hope, seemed to cause him physical pain. He would look at them, and a spasm of something like guilt would twist his features before he looked away.
The third day brought the sound of drums from the Benin camp—a relentless, mocking rhythm that pulsed through the day and into the night, a sonic siege meant to fray already shattered nerves. That evening, Inikpi went to the Great Hall for the evening meal. The long, low table, usually laden with platters of spiced goat, river fish steamed in plantain leaves, and mounds of pounded yam, was sparse. A single, thin stew of greens and grubs sat in a central pot, and the air was filled with the scent of deprivation, not feast.
Her father's chair remained empty.
"Where is the Ata?" she asked one of the servants, a young girl whose eyes were too large for her thin face.
"He is in his chambers, Princess," the girl whispered, not meeting her eyes. "He… he says he has no hunger."
Inikpi took a bowl of the meager stew and went to him. The corridor to his private chambers felt longer, darker. The torches seemed to gutter lower, as if in sympathy. She found the door ajar and pushed it gently.
He was not resting. He was standing before a large map of the kingdom carved into a polished mahogany panel on the wall. But he wasn't studying troop movements or geographical advantages. His finger was tracing the蜿蜒 path of the River Niger, the lifeblood of Igala, as it curved around the western edge of the capital. He was staring at a specific point on the riverbank, his entire body rigid with a concentration so intense it seemed to suck the air from the room.
The smell in the chamber was stale—old sweat and the cold, ashy remains of a fire. A single oil lamp cast a puddle of jaundiced light, leaving his face in deep shadow.
"Father?" she said softly.
He started violently, spinning around. For a terrifying moment, he didn't seem to recognize her. Then his eyes focused, and the mask of the king crumbled completely. Raw, unvarnished terror looked out at her.
"Inikpi! You… you should not be here."
"I brought you food," she said, holding out the bowl. "You must keep your strength."
He looked at the bowl as if it contained poison. "Strength," he repeated the word with a bitter, hollow laugh. "What use is strength against fate? What use is a spear against a god's will?"
He turned back to the map, his shoulders shaking. "I have sent messengers to the Jukun, to the Nupe. I have offered them alliances, trade rights, anything. Silence. The world has abandoned us. I have consulted the war-shamans, the geomancers. They speak in riddles of balance and sacrifice. I have had my men dig new trenches, set new traps. It is like trying to stop a flood with a basket."
His voice was rising, edged with a desperation that frightened her. "There must be a way. A strategy I have not considered. A prayer I have not uttered. There must be."
He slammed his fist against the map, right on the image of the river. The wood shuddered. "Why there?" he whispered, the question clearly not meant for her. "Why must it be there?"
"Why must what be there, Father?" Inikpi asked, her own fear a cold knot in her stomach.
He turned to her, and his expression was one of such profound sorrow that her breath caught. He crossed the room in two long strides and took her face in his hands. His palms were cold and damp.
"Nothing, my heart. It is nothing. The ramblings of a tired old man." His eyes searched her face, drinking in every detail—the curve of her cheekbones, the shape of her eyes, the set of her mouth—as if he were a man condemned, memorizing a final, beautiful sight. "You are so like your mother. The same light in your eyes."
Tears welled in his own eyes, but he did not let them fall. He pulled her into a crushing embrace, so tight she could barely breathe. He was trembling.
"I will find a way," he whispered into her hair, his voice a ragged promise. "I will protect you. I swear it. On my life, I swear it."
It was an oath, but it sounded like a dirge.
The fourth and fifth days blurred into a montage of her father's decay. He stopped attending councils altogether. The booming voice that could rally an army was now silent. He was seen wandering the palace gardens, but he did not see the brilliant red of the hibiscus or smell the fragrant frangipani. He would stop and stare at the earth, at the way the roots of a great tree gripped the soil, his face a mask of torment.
Rumors, like poisonous vines, began to creep through the palace and the city. The Ata's spirit is broken. The gods have cursed him. He seeks a magic that does not exist. The priests, led by Ohioga Attah, moved through the corridors with grim, purposeful expressions, their silence more terrifying than any prophecy. They would look at Inikpi, and their eyes would slide away, filled with a pity so profound it felt like a physical touch.
On the sixth day, the Benin forces advanced again. From the walls, Inikpi watched their battle lines form, a disciplined, glittering snake of men and steel. And at their head, a unique standard was raised: a carved ivory tusk, curved and pristine against the smoky sky. A murmur rippled through the Igala defenders, a sound of pure dread.
"Idia," a warrior next to Inikpi breathed, his voice full of superstitious fear. "The Oba's mother. The Iyoba. She who fights with medicine and musket. She has come herself to witness our end."
Queen Idia. Her name was a legend, a figure of awe and terror. She was said to be a warrior queen, a powerful sorceress, and the strategic mind behind the Benin throne. Her presence on the battlefield was the final, unequivocal sign that Benin intended not just to defeat Igala, but to erase it.
That evening, the cannon fired again. This time, it was not a test. The cannonball, a solid sphere of iron as large as a man's head, struck the western wall with a cataclysmic CRUUMP that was felt in the teeth of every person in Idah. It did not break the wall, but it left a massive, spider-webbed crater, a grotesque wound oozing dust and rubble. The message was clear: the next shot, or the one after, would be the last.
The sound seemed to shatter the last of her father's pretense. Inikpi, seeking solace, found her way to her mother's quarters.
Omele, the senior wife of the Ata, was a woman whose beauty had been refined by grief and wisdom into something serene and unshakeable. She lived in a quieter wing of the palace, surrounded by her herbs, her looms, and the memories of a daughter she had lost to a fever years ago. Her chambers always smelled of dried lavender, camwood, and the faint, clean scent of shea butter.
When Inikpi entered, she found Omele not at her loom, but standing by her own window, looking out at the wounded western wall. Her posture was straight, but her hands, clasped tightly in front of her, betrayed her tension.
"Mother," Inikpi said, her voice breaking. The composure she had fought to maintain crumbled in the presence of the one person who required no masks. Tears she had not known she was holding back began to stream down her face. "What is happening to Father? He is… he is being consumed from the inside. He looks at me as if every glance is a knife in his heart. And the priests… the way they look at me…"
Omele did not turn immediately. She took a slow, deep breath, as if steeling herself. When she finally faced her daughter, her eyes were dry, but the sorrow in them was an ocean.
"Come, my child," she said, her voice low and melodious, a balm on Inikpi's frayed nerves. She led Inikpi to a pile of soft cushions and sat beside her, taking her hands. Omele's hands were warm, the skin smooth, but Inikpi could feel a fine tremor in them.
"Your father," Omele began, choosing her words with the care of someone walking through a field of buried thorns, "carries a burden no man was meant to bear. It is a choice that would break a mountain."
"What choice?" Inikpi pressed, her tears cooling on her cheeks. "What could be worse than the enemy at our gates? He speaks of fate, of the gods' will. He stares at the river as if it holds some terrible secret."
Omele's gaze grew distant, and a shadow passed over her face. "The gods are not always kind, Inikpi. Their ways are not our ways. When the world is out of balance, they do not ask for a gentle correction. They demand a… a restoration. A payment."
"Payment? We have given them everything! What more could they possibly want?"
The question hung in the lavender-scented air. Omele's eyes, so like her own, filled with a painful, knowing light. She looked at Inikpi, really looked at her, with the same devastating, memorizing intensity that her father had. Her breath hitched, and for a moment, she seemed unable to speak.
"Mother?" Inikpi whispered, a new, formless dread coiling in her gut. "Tell me."
Omele's lower lip trembled. She closed her eyes, and a single tear escaped, tracing a path through the fine, white tribal marks on her temple. "Eight days ago," she whispered, the words barely audible, "your father went to the Sacred Grove. He woke the Oracle of Ata."
A cold knot tightened in Inikpi's stomach. The stories of the Oracle were old and terrifying, spoken of only in hushed tones. It was a force of last resort, its counsel feared as much as it was revered.
"What… what did it say?" Inikpi asked, her voice a dry leaf in the wind.
Omele opened her eyes. The love in them was now mixed with a agony so profound it seemed to age her before Inikpi's eyes. She gripped her daughter's hands tighter, as if she could physically impart the terrible truth and absorb the pain it would cause.
"The Oracle… it spoke the price for our salvation," Omele's voice broke. She took another shuddering breath, forcing the words out. "It said the land thirsts. The river demands a bond. A bridge of spirit to mend the rift between the people and the earth."
She paused, her eyes begging for forgiveness for what she had to say next. "The Oracle decreed… that only the living burial of the royal daughter… the Princess of the Igala… at the edge of the river… can appease the spirits and bring victory."
The world stopped.
The words did not make sense at first. They were like stones thrown into a pond, and Inikpi's mind was the still water, refusing the ripples. Living burial. Royal daughter. They were just words, terrible, alien words. Then they found their target.
Her.
The air rushed from Inikpi's lungs as if she had been struck. She pulled her hands from her mother's grasp, recoiling. The cozy, fragrant room suddenly felt like a tomb.
"No," she breathed. It was not a denial, but a gasp of pure, uncomprehending shock.
"Your father has refused," Omele said quickly, her own tears flowing freely now. "He has raged. He has bargained. He has searched for every other path. He has not slept, he has not eaten, wrestling with this… this demon. He would rather see the kingdom fall than harm a single hair on your head. But the pressure… the priests… the advancing enemy… it is crushing him."
Inikpi stared at her mother, but she no longer saw her. She saw her father's tormented face, his haunted eyes, his trembling hands. She saw the way he flinched at her touch. She heard his desperate oaths to protect her, not as promises of safety, but as cries of a man fighting a losing battle against destiny.
Why there? he had whispered at the map. Why must it be there?
Now she knew. He wasn't looking at a strategic point. He was looking at her gravesite.
A strange, cold calm began to settle over her, a numbness that shielded her from the immediate, searing pain. The pieces of the last eight days snapped into a horrifying, perfect picture. Her father's torment was not just the torment of a king failing his people. It was the torment of a father being forced to sacrifice his child.
"They want me to die," she said, her voice flat, devoid of emotion.
"They say your spirit would not die, Inikpi," Omele pleaded, reaching for her again, but Inikpi shrank back. "They say it would become one with the land, eternal, a protector spirit for all Igala. That you would live on in the flow of the river, in the fruit of the harvest…"
"They want me to be buried alive," Inikpi repeated, the reality of it finally, fully taking root. It was not a spiritual transcendence; it was a physical, terrifying end. Darkness. Suffocation. The cold, crushing weight of the earth. A scream built in her throat, but it had no voice.
Just then, a new sound pierced the twilight—a sound different from the Benin war drums or the distant cannon. It was the sound of their own sacred drums, the ogene, from the temple complex. It was a slow, solemn, funereal rhythm. A rhythm used for rites of passage, for the honoring of the dead, and for the most profound of sacrifices.
The priests were preparing.
The sound was a cold splash of reality. This was not a nightmare from which she would wake. This was happening. Now.
Inikpi stood up. Her legs felt weak, but they held her. She walked to the window, the same window from which her mother had been watching. The city below was bathed in the bloody light of the setting sun. She could see tiny figures moving towards the temple. She could see the fear on the faces of the people huddled in the streets. She could smell their desperation, a scent sharper than wood smoke.
She thought of the warrior with the missing hand. The wailing mother. The hungry child. The crater in the western wall. She thought of Queen Idia, the ivory tusk standard raised high, a symbol of an enemy that would show no mercy.
And she thought of her father, broken on the steps of his throne, weeping.
The choice, the terrible, world-shattering choice, was no longer just his. It was now hers.
The numbness began to recede, replaced by a terrifying, clear-eyed understanding. The question that had haunted her for weeks—What can I, Princess Inikpi, truly do?—now had a answer. A monstrous, unthinkable answer.
She turned from the window and looked at her mother. Omele was kneeling on the floor, her body wracked with silent sobs, her face in her hands.
Inikpi did not go to comfort her. She walked slowly, deliberately, towards the door. Her heart was a wild, trapped bird beating against the cage of her ribs, but her mind was, for the first time, utterly still.
She knew what she had to do. The knowledge was a cold stone in her gut. The Father's torment was over. It was time for the Daughter's decision.