She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Wayétu Moore
- Language: English
- Genre: Historical Literary Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
GBESSA
IF SHE WANTED TO CONTINUE, Gbessa rst had to rid the road
of a slow-moving snake. Greenish brown with golden eyes as
dicult to gaze into as the sun, the snake’s body was no dierent in
color from the woods it had crawled from, and it seemed to Gbessa
that the surrounding bushes were jealous of her departure, so they
extended their toes to block her path. Orange dust stained the belly
of the snake, which writhed as it hissed, and Gbessa pointed a vefoot stick in its direction. The snake was not afraid of her, or of the
stick, and it raised its head and advanced.
The confrontation occurred several moonfalls after that searing
hot day when she was banished from Lai for good. She had
championed that path for weeks, stumbling over iron pebbles and
timber branches departed from their roots, squeezed between
sugarcane stalks, and still, refusing to look back. Strands of her hair
left her for the veils of clay grains that also traveled the long and
pitiless road. Gbessa could not return. Safua was in the other
direction, hand in hand with her rejection, and also those deaths.
Gbessa lightly poked the belly of the excitable creature, and at once
it lunged at her. She took a step back, only barely avoiding a bite on
her shin.
I was there that day, drawn to her, just as I was drawn to those
gifted others who were present the day the ships came.
“Take care, my darling,” I whispered in Gbessa’s ear. “Take care,
my friend.”
She glanced over her shoulder, as if she had heard me, or as if
she hoped the movement was Safua, and the snake lunged again,
this time biting her ankle before eeing into the stalks at the other
end of the road. Gbessa fell to the ground, yelling. She cried, and it
was clear that her leg was in pain, but also her heart, because she
held the tears captive, clenching her jaw closed through the sobs.
She rubbed her ankle as if digging for bones, then squeezed the
reddened skin where the snake had bitten, squeezed hard to relieve
herself of the poison. Perhaps nothing would happen beyond the
sting. Perhaps she would faint from the pain. But eventually, she
would wake up. Gbessa rubbed her wound, but she knew then, as
she knew always, that this poison would remain with her forever.
She knew then, as she knew always, that she, like her love for Safua,
would not, could not, die.
THERE WERE NO VAI GIRLS LIKE GBESSA. The coastal village of
Lai had seen only one woman as cursed—Ol’ Ma Famatta—who they
say is sitting in the corner of the moon after her hammock ung her
there on her 193rd birthday. But even Ol’ Ma Famatta’s misfortune
was nothing compared to that of Gbessa, whose curse was not only
her inability to die, but also the way death mocked her.
Lai was hidden in the middle of forests when the Vai people
found it. There was evidence of earlier townsmen there, as ends
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