The War-God's Palace

They had told him to kill war. That was how it had started. Anthony had met, in a dark and private place, with the Secretary General of the UN. The world, he had explained, had become fed up with war. The world no longer wanted war around. The world no longer cared how war was eradicated. It wanted war dead. They had heard that there was some tangible aspect of war, something physical, maybe just a spirit of war that manifested itself in flesh; Anthony had to hunt it down. And so war was stalking Anthony in the secluded chambers of the war-deity’s great battlefield-palace.

Anthony cradled the canvas-gripped hilt of a rusting ida in his scarred, and bloody hand. The curved blade felt unnaturally sharp.
Anthony ran a finger down it, causing his finger-pad to bleed profusely.

His lungs felt heavy in his chest. Panting and huffing, he scaled a pile of rubble and granite with a primate’s deftness. He nestled the blade, backwards, under a wet armpit as he clambered up onto an broken concrete overhang. It buckled and began to fall. With a lunge, Anthony pulled himself to safety.

From the veiled shadows, he heard footsteps from below. Bone clacked and golden ornaments clanged as the war-god came into sight. His body was leather-tough, and marred by many lateral scars, steadily seeping a black blood onto the loa’s brown body.
"Hello, soldier-boy," the War-God said.
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*


Adetokunbo sat pensively across from Anthony, in a watering hole in Lagos, flipping through a sheaf of coffee-stained and time-worn papers.

There were pictures: photographs of rock-etchings, the obscure tracings of the veve – the symbol of Ogun – on dirt and on white paper. There were interviews with greatest Mambos – voudon priestesses - of Haiti, and the testimony of the hidden Yoruba chieftains of the Niger states.

Anthony trusted Adetokunbo implicitly. When Anthony had been a mercenary in the Sierra Leone diamond wars, Adetokunbo had been the commander who had hired him to fight and reconnoiter the rebels. When Anthony had been looking for marks in his “hunting” expeditions, Adetokunbo had pointed him to the right Preserves to poach in: allowing him to kill white rhinoceros after white rhinoceros, and reap a hefty prize for each horn. Adetokunbo helped, Anthony did.


At length, Adetokunbo spoke.

“The closest I can come,” he said, in a voice laced thickly with the silted history of the tides of the Niger, “Are the horses.”

“I can’t talk to a horse,” Anthony sneered.

“You can talk to anything; you just have to find the right words. But no, I mean the horses. The people the loa mount and ride.”

“That sounds dirty.”

“That’s because of Hollywood,” he said, “And your dirty pornographic films. Mounting is… mounting is like possession. I have seen your Exorcist, and it is like that.”

Anthony smirked and began to chant, over the steel-drums and mbira of the bar band.

“In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti…”

Adetokunbo rumbled with a throaty laughter.

“No, no.” he said, guffawing, “Here… we enjoy. We enjoy being ridden, and I’m not just talking about our women, American. I say we enjoy our gods. But Ogun… he has ripped our land apart. You have seen what he has done in Somalia and what he has done in Sierra Leone, with the diamond wars. He has made our tribes spill blood over pressed-up dinosaur shit.”

He took a draft of lager from a frosted glass, emblazoned with a red star-and-crescent. A sour sea-breeze drifted through the pub, carrying oily brine that painted the tables.

Adetokunbo drew in a sharp breath, letting it work it’s way through his palate and his sinuses. He yawned, revealing a bestial mouth studded with gold teeth, and leveled an intense, grinning gaze at Anthony.

“You,” he said, “Will find a horse. You will find Ogun, and then” – and here, he drew a meaty hand laterally across his throat in a grotesquely accurate pantomime of a throat-slitting – “You will kill him.”


*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“Come, come, my soldier!” clucked the war-god, “Gren mwe fret. My testicles are getting cold, and they will only heat for battle.”


His deep, canine voice sounded familiar. But war is born in us, and is thus familiar to all.

Ogun padded around the plateau on bare feet, snorting loudly through a septum piercing. Very skillfully, and very lithely, he darted around from rock shelf to rock shelf, lashing with his glinting flyssa at the shadows that leapt on the wall. He showed no disappointment when his strikes met with only concrete.

“My Ogun Feraille only wants to help you, wants to inspire you to fight...” the deity said, indicating the right half of his body. “Then again,” he continued, indicating the other side, “Ogun Meji wants to KILL you.”

With this, he reared back with his blade - placing his right hand on the pommel, and gripping the hilt in the white knuckles of his left – and thrust the shimmering tip of it into a hanging shadow. Anthony winced.

“My Ogun Meji…” he cackled, “He says he will honey your eyeballs, and tip you into a soldier-ant den.”

He reared back again, and aimed at another shadow. Whumph. The blade struck sandstone, scattering sparks everywhere.

“And when the last ant has licked clean your cornea with its formic maw…”

Whumphscreeak.

“He will tear out your tiny testicles with a leopard claw, and put them in your empty eye sockets…”

Whumpscreeak.

A stray spark ignited a clump of dried grass.

“And then…” Ogoun announced, baring his teeth in a lion’s smile.

“He will make you see.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

The mud hut stood precariously on the banks of the Niger, its windows angled sharply over the flowing water as if peering into its depths. Anthony walked through the door, and into the murky light of the hut. He scanned the scrap of paper he had written at the watering hole in Lagos. YEJIDE, it said, in a hasty, cramped cursive.

Anthony breathed deeply, and listened to the sloshing of the Niger over the silt and rocks. Anthony paused for a second, near an end table of roughly-hewn acacia wood.

“Yejide?” he called, through two palms curved like a megaphone. Though the simple dwelling shook perilously with resonating bass, there was no response.

“Hullo?”

A warbling cry from behind him said: “Oh… so-ooh-si!”

He blanched, knocking his Panama hat off on the ceiling. Picking it up, he stumbled over the end table, sending his pistol skidding through the door and into the river. He reached for the loaded automatic rifle on his back, but before he fit his hands around the pistol-grip, another cry rang out.

“Òsóòsi!”

“Fuck!” he screamed, going to his knees, his hands in the air, “I’m done! I’m done! Don’t shoot!” He was certain it was one of the campaigning raiding groups that hindered the efforts of local police throughout Africa, with a swindled Kalashnikov or Mosin-Nagant rifle.

Anthony waited for moments with his eyes closed, appreciating the darkness before his imminent death.

Nothing happened: no shots were fired, no deafening clatter ripped through the silence of the hut.

Another cry sounded, this time quite obviously from the riverside.

“Òsóòsi!”

Anthony stood, and took in the hut, his heart pounding and his breathing quick and shallow. He recovered his semi-automatic pistol and his hat, and snuck out of the hut.
A female figure stood on a rock by the riverside, framed by the dying light of day, gilded by the African sunset.

“Òsóòsi!” she wailed, her voice warbling like a mockingbird’s.

As Anthony approached at a brisk clip, he became very quickly aware of her nudity – and even more painfully aware of a swelling erection lurking in his sweat-stained trousers. The stranger’s arms were raised in a curved minaret over her head, with her right leg tucked neatly behind her buttocks, touching her back. Every inch of her skin that was not an unhealthy caramel color was sunburned and peeling; and where Anthony had become used to the barely-stubbled texture of American women’s’ freshly shaven legs, armpits, and pubic hair, this woman’s natural sandy-blonde hair thrived.

The woman stared curiously at Anthony, unaware of her condition.

“Are you…” Anthony mouthed, awestruck, “Are you… uh, Yejide?”

“That’s what they call me,” the woman replied, “I’m Susan to you.”

“You’re… uh, you’re…” Anthony struggled to find the right words.

“What?” the woman pressed him, “White? Sunburned?”

Anthony, through a series of gestures and self-conscious stares, managed to get the woman to survey her own body.

“Oh! Of course…” she exclaimed, “Naked. Well, you get used to it. I’ve been out here for three years this next, is it Wednesday? Right, this next Thursday … and, well, you don’t wash clothes, you don’t shave. You know… it’s just more hassle.”

“Do you want some clothes?” Anthony asked, overcoming a rising blush, “I’m sure I have a T-shirt, or something?”

“No,” the woman said, wistfully, “No, don’t worry about it.”

Anthony could not help but worry. His throat was dry and his eyes ached.

“Can we, maybe, go inside?” he asked, timidly.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Ogun stalked the lower level of the plateau for an eternity. A cold sweat began to well on Anthony’s brow. He wiped it away. As he moved his hand back to his chest to cradle his ida, the weapon slipped from his grasp. In adrenaline-slow gravity, the weapon clattered to the shelf below. Ogun’s snapped to the sword. With animal-like dexterity, he leapt upon it. He picked it up. After staring at it curiously for some time, he threw it off of the plateau.

“I’ll make you a compromise, my soldier-boy,” Ogun offered, “You seem more at home with a rifle than with my… armory. Let’s make you more at home.”

Something hissed through the air. Anthony’s vision blurred, and became slowly black. His head ached furiously; the war-god had found him.

Anthony woke; and, as if nothing had happened, the plateau became a trench-cut Flanders battlefield. Anthony was standing in a concrete bunker, his powder-blue uniform submerged to the hip in mud. He was staring at a bolt-action rifle laying on the ground just below him. He swiped it from the sucking mud, and wiped the sediment from the stock.

“You see,” said Ogun, his voice echoing over the trenches “I am not just any war. I am War, my pretty little stevedore. I am familiar with your Four Horsemen, and your world-ending Djinni; I know the tales of your Ragnarok, your Armageddon. And they are so … incorrect. I can make this battle anything I choose. I can construct our private war from weapons humans haven’t even conceived yet. I can end the world with a snap.”

A thunderous rifle shot coincided with the end of his sentence. A cloud of wet dirt leapt up to the right of Anthony’s bunker, spraying his face. Anthony cowered below the porthole.

“But you don’t want to see those weapons… and you know why?” asked Ogun.

The silence answered for him.

“Because the worst weapon of all… is you.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

“Yejide…” Anthony began.

“Susan,” the woman corrected, “Yejide is for the villagers. Can’t have a crazy Caucasian woman with no name running around. Three of four, apparently, was okay.”

“Where did you come from?”

“I was a missionary in Benin…”

“Er… Susan” he continued, “You’ve been ridden, correct?”

The room fell silent. Susan breathed noisily. Her jaw quivered.

“Once,” she finally said, “By one of these peoples’ loa.”

“It was Ogun, correct?” Anthony asked.

After some time, Susan nodded.

“Yes,” she said, “Yes, it was Ogun…”

Anthony stared at her, with longing and false sympathy in his eyes.

“Please,” he pleaded.

She breathed deeply, pursed her lips, and continued.

“I was teaching the Word of Christ in Porto Novo. I had just finished working with the students at the agricultural project, at Centre Songhai. I was walking to my hotel. And then… and then I felt him. He felt just like a man’s, except harder, more soulful. I collapsed.”

She was crying softly now.

“I’m ashamed of him…” Susan sobbed, “He comes, every night now. And he rides me again and again. I have no idea even where he takes me when he mounts me. I come back with blood on my hands, spots that won’t come out. Blood on my forehead and on my eyelids.”

Tears welled on the brims of her crystalline green eyes, and she stared at Anthony, begging for his empathy.

“I want him gone!” she screamed, “Why can’t ... he just leave?”

Anthony drew her out of her misery.

“That’s why I need you,” he explained, choosing his words carefully, “I need to kill Ogun.”

“You can't kill him! He's a GOD. And he's inside me. What do you...” she asked.

“I don’t know…”

Susan composed herself.

“He comes at midnight,” Susan announced, sweating, “Every night. You just need to wait.”


That night, Anthony armed himself and watch Susan sleep soundly in her bed. He checked his watch. 11:49 P.M. He worried: Ogun inhabited Susan. Susan was corporeal. Ogun was not.

His wristwatch clicked audibly, like a scuttling beetle. Tick… tick… tick. The minutes trickled away. An lost insect wandered in confusion on the acacia table.

Susan slept too soundly. A thin lock of hair was stuck between her lips; Anthony pushed it away delicately. She shifted over to one side, alarming Anthony. He trained the iron sight of his rifle on her sunburned forehead, stroking the trigger. She shifted back, and Anthony began to relax.

Anthony flexed his aching fingers. Keep them loose, he thought, keep them ready. His breathing came shallowly, and his heartbeat, deeply. The stock of the rifle was coated in perspiration, little droplets of anxiety trickling slowly down the faux oak. The silence worked his way inside of his heart until the tension was unbearable.

Tick… tick.

With a resounding snap, a crack issued along Susan’s face, splitting her nose in two, separating her eyes. Black fluid issued from the fissure, pouring torrentially down the length of her body, filling every pore and orifice, consuming her from the inside. The fluid congealed, stretched, softened. A deafening “pop” filled the room.

Susan flailed and thrashed on her straw mattress, churning it into a mess of hay and down. Her hands tore chunk after chunk of stuffing from the furniture. Gnashing, she seized a wooden chair and ripped it in two with a resounding crack. As she rolled off of her wooden bed, her eyes were submerged in the black liquid. The fluid swallowed them hungrily. She screamed; lights came on in the village a half-mile away.

Anthony could hear the voices of the villagers, and their heavy footsteps as they ran to whatever shelters they had prepared for themselves. Lanterns cropped up across the horizon, showing brown faces, short, curly hair, small children. Gripping her now-masculine face in two rough-nailed fingers, Susan rose smoothly, from the floor. Two milky-white eyes, without pupils or irises, emerged from her blackened face.

“Hello, my hunter.” Ogun said. With a snap of his fingers, they were engaged in battle.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Ogun fearlessly stepped out into the no man’s land between Anthony’s trench and his. He was dressed in a waistcoat of bone, and rock beads, which clacked and shook as he walked. Great feathers covered his genitals and the rest of his waist.

“As a race, you should know this much: I am not a god,” he explained, “I am a human being, or at least part of one. I am a portion of the heart of your race. I am your life-blood. I am the phallus that your ancestors worshipped many thousand years ago. I am the spear they carved from jagged obsidian in the dawn of their ruling age.”

Rearing up, he pointed the bayonet of his rifle at the ground, and thrust it into the loam.

“Know this much yourself: You cannot kill me; no more than you can kill Buddha, no more than you can kill Vishnu. I am no god, that you can hunt down with holy or baneful weapons, and jab in the heart. I am an idea. I reside deep inside you. I was created when you were created, when your species was created. I was alive before then, even, living in the hearts of pariah-dogs that warred over their petty soil and their petty piss-cordons.”

He drew a combat knife from his side pocket, and with a whip of his long arms, cast it far over the field of battle, to land in a pile of sandbags. He was not foolish for being less armed – Anthony knew - he was more dangerous.

He opened his full, bloodied lips to reveal twisted teeth in the shapes of the continents and the countries. He closed his mouth. Smiling again, his teeth were a line of browns, whites, and gold.

“I hold your world in my grip. Every line that divides every country is mine, not your governments’, not your United Nations’. Every border drawn on any atlas you have ever fucking seen was paved and sandbagged with bodies, sacrificed to me in the greatest of ways: by those unknowing and unwilling.”

Raising his hands to the slate-gray heavens of the forgotten battlefield, the war-god dissolved into the soil of his world. His voice continued to bathe the landscape in its vile, condescending baritone. Instead of shaking the air, his bass tongue caused the ground to quake.

Anthony cowered below the lip wood-paneled and muddy trench. His eyes darted around the closed space. He saw ammunition, he saw guns. And then he saw a grenade, and he knew what to do.



War is blind. War cannot see its victims, nor can those that make war see its cause. What is war but a sightless machine, churning and chewing and chugging to the ends of time?

The only thing that allows war to see, Anthony suddenly realized, the only thing that allows the violence to continue, is the will of the human heart. The painfully real desire to own life itself.

Anthony picked up the grenade hesitantly. It was a commitment; it was a decision. The war-god continued to talk.


“Do you think you could kill me, even if you could find me, little drummer-boy? Do you think your fighting spirit is anything other than my own property? I could take it from you, pinch it between my two black fingers and swallow it whole. And what would you be then, but a quavering lump of mortal flesh, prone at any time to dissolve into blood and humors?”

Anthony crawled through the stinking, rancid mud to a ramp, through which he could run to no man’s land. The war-god’s voice touched Anthony’s heart and mind; his head and chest were on Ogun’s ground.


“Do you even want me ended, flesh machine? You profiteer on war: your entire race does, the entire world. You shout the name of patriotism and righteousness while taking bills from my very hand. And you, especially. You make your fortune of the squabbles of the lowly. How could you live without me?”




Anthony's arms and head ached.


"Just put down your weapons, put down your spirit." Ogun chided "Acknowledge this much, flesh-thing. Acknowledge that I live in you; that neither ending me nor ending you can take me away."


Anthony's throat was dry and sticky. The smell of the thick mud rose like a gas from the ground, and filled his lungs and his brain with doubt and fear. His uniform was damp with sweat. He wondered now how precious his life was; what was his life but something that Ogun could snatch up?


Anthony saw himself then: an angry creature, who had spent his life participating in violence, ending lives. He pictured the poor soldier-children of the rebel armies, their heads a gutted mess and their bodies twisted with the force of bullets. His bullets. He saw the mass graves that the rebels had dug, and he saw bodies spilling into it: an assembly line of murder.


Anthony began to cry, once, then. He couldn't live in this world.


"Meat-creature, take me as I am. I will never conscript you, if you wish, but tell me this much: why do you hate me so?"


Anthony pulled the pin on the pineapple grenade very slowly; too fast, and Ogun would hear the screech of metal on metal that indicated his peril.



“No answer? So typical... Let me tell you this: Without me, your species couldn’t survive,” Ogun bellowed, his deep tones causing soil to shake from the trench walls. “I keep you from spilling onto each other’s lands, encroaching and eating and sapping each other’s food and resources. I keep you sane, and I keep you well-fed. Those that know me best are fat and happy, and have no worries until they fall from my grace. I am the world, flesh-thing. I am earth and sky and water. Without me, you couldn’t survive.”

Anthony fixed an arm on the lip of the trench, and hoisted himself over. He ran to the center, his feet churning with a final vigor in the all-ending mud.


“I DON’T INTEND TO!” he roared.



Taking a deep, full breath of the lung-freezing air, he crammed the live grenade into his mouth. In one moment of blinding, brain-rending pain, Anthony imagined he heard Ogun’s dying voice rip the world apart.


And then Anthony’s world was black.

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Ogun stepped out of a bunker, and marched over to Anthony's pale body.

His skull was spread over eight feet of mud, and the pink matter that had once formed his brain painted the concrete and the wood of the trench.

With an obsidian finger, Ogun prodded the body. It was dead. He dragged it to a bunker, and flipped it over unceremoniously, to reveal a soiled and bloody backpack. Unzipping it, he took it from the corpse's back and spread its contents on the pallet that served
as the floor.

The sheaf of papers was there. Ogun picked them up. Poring over them for only a second, he removed his frightful mask to reveal flat features and a row of golden teeth behind lips pulled tight in a predatory grin.

"Perfect," Adetokunbo said, "Just perfect". With a flick of his fingers, the papers burst into a purifying fire in his iron hand.