Rain sat on the zinc of Igun Street like a patient elder. It did not rush. It only listened.
Ighodaro stood in the yard with his sleeves rolled and charcoal under his nails. The furnace was cold. The clay moulds from yesterday still held the shape of a leopard head that had not yet met fire. He had promised the guild he would finish the piece before Igue, but the promise felt thinner than the smoke that used to rise from this same compound when his grandfather was alive.
From the inner room came the sound of a box lid that had not moved in years.
Evbu did not call him. She never called when the matter was heavy. She only let the house know that a door had opened.
He wiped his hands on a rag that had once been white and stepped inside. The room smelled of camwood, old cloth, and the faint sweetness of coconut oil. Evbu sat on a low stool. Her wrapper was red. Coral sat at her neck in three quiet rows. On her lap was a small wooden box with a brass latch shaped like a mudfish.
“Sit,” she said.
He sat.
“Your father was a man who loved the work and feared the palace in equal measure,” Evbu said. “That fear kept him alive. It also kept this box shut. I am tired of keeping another man’s fear.”
She opened it.
Inside, wrapped in faded white cloth, lay a single coral bead larger than a thumb. It was darker than the ones on her neck, almost the colour of wet earth after first rain. Fine lines ran through it like veins. When Ighodaro leaned closer, he thought he heard a market, then a drum, then nothing.
“It is only a bead,” he said.
Evbu smiled with one side of her mouth. “That is what men say when they want to sleep well.”
She placed it in his palm. The coral was cool, then warm, then cool again, as if it could not decide which century it belonged to.
“Your sister Agharese will ask questions,” Evbu said. “Answer only what the work requires. Uhunoma already knows I opened the box. She is at the shrine of Olokun by the river path. She went before dawn. That should tell you the weight of this thing.”
Ighodaro closed his fingers around the bead. In the yard a goat complained. Somewhere down Igun Street a hammer struck bronze, once, then twice, then stopped, as if the street itself had remembered to be quiet.
“What does the guild owe?” he asked.
Evbu looked at the empty box. “A memory that was never meant to travel. And a name that the palace still keeps in its mouth.”
She stood with the slowness of a woman who had carried many festivals on her back. “Igue is coming. Ebe ewere will be in every hand that wants joy. This bead does not care for joy. It cares for truth. Take it to Osatohamwen at the guild house before the sun sits on the roof. If he refuses to see you, leave it on the threshold and walk away. Do not argue with an elder who has already chosen fear.”
Ighodaro wrapped the coral in the same faded cloth. His palm still felt the heat.
Outside, the rain thinned. The leopard mould waited in the yard, hollow and blind. He thought of fire, of metal, of the way bronze remembers the face you give it. He wondered what face this bead would ask him to cast.
He put the cloth in his pocket and walked toward the guild house, past compounds where women were already sorting leaves for the days ahead. A child ran by with a stick and a song that named no god. The city was ordinary. The bead against his thigh was not.
At the turn before the guild house he stopped. For a breath he heard a court that no longer stood, a voice speaking Edo the old way, and the scrape of a stool in a hall of coral and brass. Then a motorcycle tore the street, and the voice was gone.
Ighodaro kept walking. The furnace at home was still cold. The season had already begun to heat.
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