With an expert eye and leaning his muscular back against the smooth wooden post of a stall, he cast a deceitfully casual gaze across the scene. It was all familiar to him, mentally imprinted on his mind. Every marketplace in every town looked the same. There was fresh fish and meat furthest up the strip, and if he were to progress down the thoroughfare, there would be stalls filled with clothing, jewellery, brass, exotic wares and art. He noted where the gaps were between the wooden stalls: he knew the easiest route back to the forest and had rightly judged which Uncle stored a cutlass at the back of his shop and which Mama carried a dagger tucked into the folds of her wrapper.
It was high noon on the Fourth Day. The marketplace was at its busiest, with the townspeople out to purchase goods with their week’s wages. He could hear the clatter of cowrie shells and that clatter was the rhythm his heart beat to. Ituen was a hunter by trade. When his arrow was pointed towards an antelope, he was taking from the forest. This was part of the forest’s cycle and he was integral to its nature. People needed to eat, and the forest had to purge, lest it sank into itself. And when Ituen stole from humans, he was helping them re-value what they held dear. Can you properly cherish and relish and revere something without the fear of losing it? It is the fear of losing ownership that gauges integrity. It defines whether a man is greedy or if he is generous. It defines what defines him. The world needed him.
In his mind, the hunter and the thief were blended, melded. His manner of operation meant they were just as noble as each other. Ituen targeted the strongest animals just as he targeted the richest of men. In the moment between the draw of his bow and the piercing of skin and sinew, a temporal vacuum was created, one within which all he could hear was the panting of his own breath, the beating of his heart. If it wasn’t so fanciful, he would have sworn he could also hear the heartbeat of the animal synced with his. It almost felt as if the spirit of a god moved him, if not that he was a god.
When he stole from the rich, he felt the same sensation. Except, in that instance, it wasn’t a sense of control over life and death that made him feel all powerful, it was the fact that he, Ituen, the only son of poor farmers from a small, exploited village, was taking something away from those who thought they were superior. He was usurping – in his own small way – the chiefs and kings that unfairly taxed his people back home and fattened themselves on their people’s suffering. Ituen took their riches and used them to free those who were indentured to pay off debts. Ituen was in the business of balance.
‘Sir, are you buying?’ a sweet cajoling voice called out to him from the stall opposite. Ituen squinted against the sun to look at the bead-seller. He could tell from the way her yellow-and-blue head wrap was tied elaborately and from the layers of red beads that dripped on to her ample chest – tightly wrapped to lift and accentuate – that she was unmarried. She gestured to her wares splayed across a woven mat.
‘ . . . for your wife,’ added the coquette, with a tilt of her head.
Ituen threw the picking stick from his mouth on to the dust and flashed an easy grin. He knew this call and response song. He had been practising, learning and honing his lines since he turned fourteen and his face became angular and his muscles became tauter, maidens’ eyes lingering upon his for longer, with soft eyes and sharp smiles. Ituen cast a quick eye across the market and ambled over to the stall.
‘I am still searching for a wife, queen.’
The bead-seller smiled wider still and ran her eyes across his trim, muscular form. ‘Then you must be a blind man.’
Ituen laughed, leant a hand on the post of the stall and looked deep into her eyes. ‘I’m just looking for someone who sees me as I see them.’
The woman nodded and giggled, hearing but not listening, her eyes running across Ituen’s bare chest. ‘I see you, sir.’
Ituen smiled. He knew his best camouflage was his looks, because no one cared about who he was underneath them. He introduced himself to villagers, winked at the girls, drank palm wine with the men and let the mamas squeeze his cheeks, feed him and lament that they weren’t twenty years younger. It allowed him to slip in and out unnoticed. But there was also a part of him that enjoyed being part of a community, if only for a day or two. His parents had died when he was young and his hamlet had been robbed dry, a home turned into a wasteland because of greed and self-interest. There was nothing for him to go back to after his own family told him he was better off venturing out on his own. He wondered what it would be like to be welcomed into a home because he belonged there, not just as a guest.