“I did not know that my despair was so transparent!” Romoke shrieked at the sober gathering. “I did not know o, that my misery was mewling at you like a starved kitten!  Ehn? That my sadness was out in the open, kedere!  Ah, that my yearning was naked as a newborn! I did not know oooo, you men of Karele!  I did not know!”

         Romoke had barged in, steaming like fire on a wet night, into a space forbidden to women.  It was the sacred grove of the god, Akoni.  No woman of Karele had ever been more daring.  The consequences of a female entering the shrine were unspeakable, unknowable even, since none of Romoke’s sex had ever so much as walked near.  Worse, she had done so during the invocation of Akoni, Karele’s own rite of man, when the god rained the essence of manhood down on the adult males of the town.  Only one would emerge out of it as the chosen one.

         Anger had banished Romoke’s sense of danger, and the sacrilege she had committed was yet to dawn on her.  She lived on a mound that looked down on the rest of the town.  But as an indigene of Karele, she knew the situation on the ground below as well as anyone.  Yet there she was, yelping at the men about what she didn’t know. 

         Womanhood defiling Akoni’s temple, like unclean meat in the belly of a pilgrim, was the least of the men’s concerns just then.  All they knew was, she was as beautiful as anything, the object of a common desire for whom they had convened an infrequent rite of man, each hoping with Akoni’s grace to be the chosen one.  And now there she was.  They watched her snarling face slowly begin to take to the logic of the eyes.  The proud men of Karele huddled in shame before her.  There they were, a parody of females, dressed for Akoni’s rite of man - as women.

         The simpleton Rodorodo, the urchin of the grove, was a shadow on the fringes of the men.  Romoke’s shaking and shrieking brought back to him memories of being caught in the werepe plant, and the itching, scratching and thrashing about that followed.  Werepe or no werepe, a woman at Akoni’s grove was unthinkable.  That much he knew.  Rodorodo came out of the shadows and spoke the first sense of his life. 

         “Taboo, Romoke.  Agbedo.  You have done the undoable.”

         “You with only three teeth in your mouth,” she did not spare him.  “Did you not look in the mirror first before looking up my hill?”

         “But I was not the first to walk up the beaten track to your house,” he replied with uncharacteristic courage.

         “Rodorodo, you did not walk up my track o.  You rolled up, the same way you rolled down.”

         The priest of the shrine, Akonila, puffed up his chest and glowered at his incompetent assistant, the pitiful urchin.  “Rodorodo, when men are going to seek the face of women, should you be among them?” he asked with biting cruelty. 

         Rodorodo’s courage fell away, and he skulked back into the shadows.  Akonila, meanwhile, remembered his own compromised dress sense, and his chest sank with his dignity back into his buba blouse.  Romoke stumbling on the Akoni invocation, during which the man who would win her hand was to be revealed, was not part of the plan.  The priest certainly had no premonition of it.  He had premonition of very few things, in fact. 

         Tall and gawky, Akonila was an only son.  He was descended from a long line of formidable babalawos, awesome medicine men and priests who communed more with gods than men.  Much was expected of the young Akonila who possessed little of the abilities of his great forebears.  He grew up a disappointment to the father who left him the priesthood, ineffectual as he was.

         But Akoni the god was patient with his priest.  He viewed Akonila as an incompetent assistant with an even more incompetent assistant, overlooked his failings, and filled many of the cracks himself.  And so with the complicity of a god, Akonila’s secret was safe.  And when the elders of Karele sought spiritual guidance on the problem that Romoke was becoming, it was to Akonila that they came.  

         The priest took on the air of great divination and fixed his eyes on absent spirits, his lips moving in a conversation that those present could not hear to participate.  Akonila peered into the ground to read the sky, then pronounced gravely, “What Romoke needs, is a man.”