The funereal rhythm of the ogene drums was a shackle around Inikpi's soul, each beat a hammer blow driving the reality of the prophecy deeper. She stood frozen in her mother's chamber, the world reduced to the sound of her own frantic heart and the slow, dreadful pulse from the temple. Omele's sobs were a distant, muffled thing, separate from the cold clarity that had descended upon her.
The words echoed in the new, hollow spaces of her mind. Living burial. Royal daughter. They were no longer abstract concepts whispered by priests. They were a verdict. Her verdict.
But a verdict, to be just, required evidence. And Inikpi, in that moment of terrifying stillness, realized she had only heard the testimony of the king and the priests. She had not heard the voice of the people for whom this price was to be paid. The people she, as royalty, was born to serve.
A resolve, hard and sharp as a forged blade, solidified within her. She would not be a passive lamb led to the altar. If this was to be her fate, she would meet it with her eyes wide open. She would see, with her own eyes, what her death was meant to purchase.
"Mother," she said, her voice unnervingly calm.
Omele looked up, her face a ruin of tears. The sight of her daughter's composed expression seemed to frighten her more than her tears had.
"I need to go to the outer quarters. To the refugee camps."
"No!" Omele scrambled to her feet, clutching at Inikpi's arm. "It is not safe! The disease… the desperation… you cannot!"
"I must," Inikpi replied, gently but firmly prying her mother's fingers loose. "A ruler must look upon the faces of those they rule, especially in their darkest hour. I have been shielded for too long."
She did not wait for further argument. She moved through the palace corridors, a ghost in her own home. The servants and guards she passed bowed, but their eyes were haunted, their minds on the drums and the enemy beyond the walls. They saw the princess, but they did not truly see her; they saw a symbol of a dynasty that was failing them.
She bypassed the main gates, which were heavily fortified and thronged with soldiers, and slipped out through a small, rarely used postern gate used by the water-bearers. The guard there, recognizing her, hesitated, but the look in her eyes—a regal authority mixed with a profound, chilling sorrow—stayed his challenge. He bowed and let her pass.
The moment she stepped outside the palace walls, the world changed. The curated scents of the royal gardens were obliterated by a wall of stench that made her gag. It was the smell of unwashed bodies, of human waste trenching too full, of sickness, and of despair so thick it had a taste—metallic and sour. The orderly hum of the palace was replaced by a cacophony of misery: the low, constant moaning of the wounded, the sharp, hacking coughs of the sick, the wailing of children, and the desperate, angry arguments over a crust of bread or a sip of water.
The refugee camps were not camps; they were a new, festering layer of the city, a shantytown of misery erected in every available space between the grander mud-brick houses. Makeshift shelters of sticks and ragged cloth fluttered in the hot, foul breeze. People lay listlessly on the ground, their eyes hollow, their ribs stark against thin skin. The air shimmered with the heat of too many bodies and too little hope.
Inikpi pulled the hood of her plain linen cloak over her head, but her bearing, the quality of her garment, even in its simplicity, marked her as an outsider. Eyes, dull with hunger or bright with fever, followed her as she picked her way through the human devastation.
She saw an old woman, her hands trembling as she tried to spoon a thin, watery gruel into the mouth of a listless infant. She saw two young boys, their bellies grotesquely distended, staring at nothing, flies crawling on the corners of their eyes and they lacked the energy to brush them away. She saw a man with a festering leg wound, the gangrenous flesh a palette of greens and blacks, the smell a sweet, rotten horror that clung to the back of her throat.
This was the suffering she had only viewed from her balcony. Up close, it was an assault. It had a sound, a smell, a texture of gritty filth beneath her sandals. It was real in a way the strategic discussions in the throne room could never be.
Her feet, guided by a terrible purpose, carried her towards the riverbank on the eastern side, away from the main Benin advance. This was where many of the newest refugees, those from the most recently poisoned villages, had been settled. The drums from the temple seemed to follow her, a grim soundtrack to her descent into hell.
Here, the suffering had a different quality. It was sharper, more acute. She came upon a cluster of people gathered around a small, muddy stream that fed into the great river. The stream's water was murky, with a faint, iridescent sheen. A dead fish, its scales dull, floated belly-up near the bank.
A young mother was kneeling, clutching a child of maybe four or five years to her chest. The child was convulsing, his small body racked with violent tremors, white foam flecking his blue-tinged lips. His eyes were rolled back in his head.
"The water… the cursed water…" the mother was keening, rocking back and forth. "They poisoned the streams… the Benin… they put their evil medicine in the water…"
A man, perhaps the child's grandfather, stood by helplessly, his fists clenched. "There is no other water! The wells inside the walls are guarded for the warriors! We have nothing! Nothing!"
Inikpi watched, frozen, as the child's convulsions slowed, then stopped. The small body went limp. The silence that followed the mother's wails was more deafening than any scream. It was a final, absolute silence. The little chest did not rise again.
The mother's wail that tore from her then was the sound of a soul being ripped in two. It was a raw, animalistic sound of pure, unendurable loss. It was a sound that had no place in the world, a sound that accused the heavens themselves.
The sound lodged in Inikpi's chest, a shard of ice that stopped her own heart for a beat. She stared at the tiny, lifeless body. She saw the utter devastation on the mother's face, a pain so complete it erased everything else—fear, pride, hope. This was what defeat looked like. Not the breaching of a wall, but the silencing of a child's breath.
Another woman, her face gaunt, put a hand on the grieving mother's shoulder. "Be strong, Adanma. His suffering is over. He is with the ancestors now."
"What ancestors?" the mother, Adanma, shrieked, her voice cracking. "What gods? Where were they when my Ewe drank death? Where is the Ata? Where is his power? He feasts in his palace while our children drink poison!"
The words were a physical blow. Inikpi stumbled back a step, the hood falling from her head. A few people noticed her now, their eyes widening in recognition, then hardening with a resentment they no longer had the energy to conceal.
"Princess," the gaunt woman said, her tone flat, devoid of reverence. It was a statement of fact, an accusation.
Inikpi could not speak. Her gaze was locked on the dead child. She saw not just one child, but a hundred, a thousand. She saw the future of Igala—not a future of warriors and farmers and mothers, but a future of small, still bodies and the endless, echoing wails of those left behind. The vision was more terrifying than any nightmare of a dark, earthy tomb.
The theoretical had become visceral. The "price" was no longer an abstract spiritual transaction. It was this mother's pain weighed against her own life. It was the death of one child to save ten thousand.
The cold stone of resolve in her gut warmed, transforming into a fierce, burning certainty. The question was no longer if she would do it, but how she could do it with the most meaning, the most power.
She turned away from the heartbreaking scene, her own tears now flowing freely, but they were not tears of self-pity. They were tears of cleansing, of a terrible, final understanding. She walked back through the camps, no longer seeing individuals, but seeing a people. Her people. And she knew, with a certainty that surpassed fear, what she had to do.
---
The throne room was a pressure cooker of despair. The ogene drums had fallen silent, their grim work of announcement done. The silence they left behind was somehow worse, filled with the tense, waiting dread of the entire city.
Ata Ayegba was on his throne, but he was a king in name only. He looked like a man who had been flayed alive, his spirit raw and exposed. The council and the high priests stood before him in a tense semi-circle. The air crackled with unspoken conflict.
Chief Priest Ohioga Attah stood foremost, his skeletal frame rigid with implacable resolve. "The dawn approaches, Ayegba. The mist is gathering on the river. The time for the rite is near. You can delay the sun no more than you can command the tide to retreat. You must give the word."
"I will not," Ayegba whispered, but the words had no force. They were the last, dying embers of a father's love.
"Then you sign the death warrant for every soul in Idah!" Ohioga's voice rose, sharp as a flint knife. "Is your paternal love so selfish that it condemns a nation to the sword? Is her one life more precious than the entire tapestry of the Igala people?"
"Do not speak her life as a number!" Ayegba roared, a last spark of fury igniting. "She is my heart! She is the best of me! To consent to this… this abomination… is to become a monster! What kingdom is worth saving if it is built on the bones of an innocent child?"
"A kingdom that wishes to live!" countered War Chief Ohiemi, his voice gravelly with exhaustion and grief. "My Ata, I have stood with you on a hundred battlefields. I would gladly take a spear for you. But I cannot fight this. My warriors are brave, but they are not stone. They see the enemy's magic. They feel the hunger in their bellies. Morale is shattered. If the walls are breached, it will not be a battle; it will be a massacre. Would you have the last sight of your daughter be the sword that cuts her down in the chaos, or the blood of her brothers staining the palace floors? This… this sacrifice offers a clean death. A meaningful one. A death that saves."
"There is nothing clean about it!" Ayegba cried, his voice breaking. He buried his face in his hands. "O, gods, why? Why have you forsaken me? Why this choice?"
It was at that moment of utter, broken desolation that the great carved doors of the throne room swung open.
Princess Inikpi stood there.
She had not changed her clothes; she still wore the simple, dust-stained linen cloak from the refugee camps. But she had transformed. The girl who had questioned and feared was gone. In her place stood a woman, her posture regal and unshakeable, her face pale but composed, her eyes holding a light that was both sorrowful and terrifyingly serene. The grief of the camp was etched into her features, but it had been refined into a purpose.
Every head turned. Gasps echoed in the vast chamber. The guards at the door looked stunned, having clearly not been instructed to refuse her entry.
Ayegba looked up, and the sight of her there, in the heart of his torment, seemed to paralyze him. "Inikpi…" he breathed, the name a prayer and a curse.
She did not look at the priests or the warriors. Her gaze was fixed solely on her father as she walked slowly, deliberately, down the long central aisle. Her sandals made a soft, whispering sound on the polished floor, the only sound in the breathless room.
She stopped at the foot of the dais and knelt, not in submission, but in formal address. She lowered her hood.
"Father," she said, and her voice, though quiet, carried to every corner of the chamber, clear and resonant as a bell. "Ata of the Igala."
"My child, rise," Ayegba said, his voice thick with emotion. "You should not be here. This is no place for you."
"There is no other place for me," she replied, rising to her feet. Her eyes swept the assembled council, meeting the gazes of the shocked and the grim. She saw the hope flare in Ohioga's eyes, the pained respect in Ohiemi's, the utter devastation in her father's.
"I have walked among our people," she began, her voice gaining strength. "I have left the palace and walked through the camps. I have smelled the sickness on the air. I have heard the cries of the hungry. I have felt the desperation that clings to the skin like a foul dew."
She paused, and the memory of what she had seen flashed in her eyes. "And I have seen a child die. A little boy named Ewe. He drank from a stream the enemy had poisoned. He convulsed in his mother's arms until his life left him. I heard his mother's scream. It is a sound that will haunt me for all the days I have left."
A profound silence gripped the room. Even the most hardened warriors looked down, shamed and stricken.
"For weeks, I have asked myself, from my sheltered balcony, what I, as royalty, could do to protect my people," Inikpi continued, her gaze returning to her father. "I have no skill with a spear. I cannot devise war strategies. I cannot call upon the gods. I am just a girl. I have felt so… useless."
She took a step closer to the throne. "But now I understand. My use was not in what I could do, but in what I am. I am the daughter of the king. My spirit is tied to the spirit of this land. And the land is dying, Father. Our people are dying."
Ayegba shook his head, a frantic, denying motion. "No, Inikpi. Do not say it. Do not give voice to this madness."
"It is not madness," she said, her voice softening with a love so profound it brought fresh tears to the eyes of the courtiers. "It is love. You have taught me that a ruler's first duty is to his people. That the vessel must sometimes shatter to preserve what is inside. You have loved me, protected me, cherished me all my life. You have been the best of fathers. Now, let me be the best of daughters. Let me be the princess my people need."
She drew herself up to her full height, and in that moment, she seemed to eclipse everyone in the room. She was no longer just a princess; she was the living embodiment of the kingdom's soul.
"The Oracle has spoken," she declared, her voice ringing with a final, absolute authority. "The price for victory, for life, for the future of the Igala, is the living burial of the royal daughter at the river's edge."
She took a final, deep breath, her eyes locked with her father's, offering him her strength, her absolution, her love.
"I am the royal daughter. And I offer myself willingly."
A collective, shuddering exhale passed through the room. Priests bowed their heads. Warriors clenched their jaws, their eyes glistening. The reality of the sacrifice, now made flesh and blood and breathtaking courage, was overwhelming.
Ayegba stared at her, and the last of his resistance crumbled. He saw not a child to be protected, but a queen offering her life for her subjects. He saw the truth in her eyes, a truth more powerful than his love, more powerful than his fear. The father in him was being asked to make the ultimate sacrifice, but the king in him was being shown the only path to salvation.
He rose from his throne, his movements slow, as if he had aged a century in a single moment. He descended the dais steps until he stood before her. He was a giant of a man, but he seemed to shrink before her resolve.
He reached out a trembling hand and cupped her face, just as he had when she was a child. His thumb stroked her cheek, wiping away a single tear that had escaped her composure.
"Inikpi," he whispered, his voice ravaged, broken. "My little eagle. My heart."
"It is the right thing, Father," she whispered back, her own composure wavering for a moment, a crack in the serene facade through which the terrified girl peeked. "Let my life be the bridge. Let my spirit be the shield."
He pulled her into a final, crushing embrace, holding her as if he could imprint her very essence into his soul. He inhaled the scent of her hair, memorizing it. He felt the steady, brave beat of her heart against his chest.
When he finally released her, he was the Ata again. The grief was still there, a bottomless chasm in his eyes, but it was now contained by a terrible, iron will. He turned to the assembled court, his face a mask of stone.
He looked at Chief Priest Ohioga. The priest met his gaze, his own eyes filled not with triumph, but with a solemn, awestruck grief.
The silence in the room was absolute, waiting for the word that would seal a fate and, perhaps, save a kingdom.
Ayegba's voice, when it came, was low, but it carried the weight of continents shifting.
"Make the preparations."
The words fell like a headsman's axe. The decision was made. The princess had chosen. The king had consented. The long, agonizing torment was over. Now, only the terrible, sacred ceremony remained.