Care and responsibility.  Rodorodo watched over the bottle of potion with such care and responsibility over the next few days, he felt it calling to him.  Calling him, to take his chance for a woman.  Romoke, no less. 

         “Faka-fiki faka-fiki,” he huffed feverishly, imagining himself as Romoke’s husband, the lord of her household, the mound and the fertile, secret garden behind it.  Romoke’s man, walking up her track, mounting that mound daily like a train up a hill - or into a tunnel.

         “Faka-fiki faka-fiki,” and next thing the urchin knew, he was huffing up the track to her house.  The potion bottle, snatched from its sacred place in the shrine, was in his hand.  He knew from gossip in town that only the upper part of Romoke’s one-storey house was lived in, the ground floor area used for storing produce and farm implements.  He smiled, imagining himself liberated from grove duties, living on the upper floor atop that mound.  Finally reaching Romoke’s front door, he called for her to come down, the magic bottle held aloft as he shouted.

         “Romoke! Romoke! Get yourself down here!”  Not quite what he meant to say, so he tried again.  “Romoke,” he called.  “I demand to see your face!” 

         Not much better, but before he could find new words, he saw her leaning out of the top floor window. She was enraged to see Rodorodo standing right over Teniloju’s grave.

         “Ehn, disturbing my father’s rest?”

         Rodorodo lost his footing with his nerve and ran off, the bottle forgotten and dropped on the ground.  Stumbling, the urchin rolled like a human ball all the way down the mound. 

         Later that evening, Romoke found the bottle lying in the sand outside her house and marched down into town in search of Rodorodo’s master, Akonila.  He was not home and so she proceeded to the only place he would be - the grove.  There, at the most sacred moments of the ritual, with men chanting her name in lustful worship, she stormed in.  Men togged up as women saw Romoke and shame overwhelmed all their desire for her.  Only the severest punishment of the transgressive female would assuage the degradation they felt. 

         “A terrible fate awaits you, Romoke,” Babaloja said.  “You have dared to do too many things in this town.  And now, you have dared your last dare.”

         “Baba, you too are talking! I ask you, have you seen how ridiculous you look?” she mocked.

         Babaloja stiffened.  “I am sorry for you Romoke,” he said coldly.  “To allow your anger to get the better of you like this… the code of Akoni regarding females was not unknown to you.  Well, you have broken a sacred taboo and there is only one thing for it.  I call on Akonila to conduct a different ritual, one never carried out before, to cleanse our land of the sacrilege of a woman in this grove.”  Babaloja spat on the ground when he was finished speaking, as though the very sight of Romoke turned his stomach.

         “Anyone that does what no one has done before, will see things no eyes have seen before,” another man concurred.

         No one had given thought to whether the priest even knew the ritual for this unprecedented situation - or indeed what the punishment would be.  No one that is, except Akoni himself. 

         The god, roused from his hallowed place by the crisis, rose unseen on a gust of wind that ruffled the trees and tickled Akonila’s nose hairs.  The priest, feeling something but not quite knowing what, began mouthing incantations to ward off the demon of the seventh wind.

         “Efuufu-lele, Efuufu-lele…”

         The god materialised at the secret grove of the most high Aboni, the goddess with whom he was once romantically entangled.  That was until she, incensed at his dalliance with a minor river deity, packed up and left.  Now he had come to deliberate upon the fate of her earthly daughter.  She, naturally, was not too pleased to see him.

         “Aboni, good to see you,” he greeted her, not noticing the plants bending away to clear a path for his advance.

         “How long has it been now, a hundred years?” The bending vegetation rested at Aboni’s feet.

         “I have held you dear to me as though we last saw yesterday.  The goats in my grove bleat your name.  The cockerel there crows still, for you.”

         “Take your deified charm somewhere else,” she rebuffed him and turned to walk back into her grove. “I’m not interested.”

         “Ah Aboni, quit your ancient jealousy.  For how long will a goddess be aggrieved?”

         “Interesting isn’t it, how Romoke is not allowed to enter your grove, yet you come strutting uninvited into mine?”