Like every other market woman she balanced her wares on her head. Some days clay pots stacked above a folded cloth called a porters knot. Other days woven baskets loaded with millet, beans, dried peppers, and smoked fish. Every journey demanded diligence from her, and the losses often ran ahead of the sales. Somehow a handful vanished in one exchange. A portion fell short in another. By the time she reached home again, what should have stayed in her hands had magically slipped into someone else’s. Small losses of that kind piled up day after day until they turned into another burden she had no choice but to bear.
One afternoon the heat was so unbearable over the land with such an intensity that even the birds sought shelter. She stopped beside the path, lowered her load to the ground, and looked out across the open field.
“Enough,” she said.
No one stood before her that could be seen. She spoke into the empty air, to whatever power conjured to curse her coins, and as a result had followed her from market to market.
“Whoever you are, spirit or man, you cannot keep stealing from me. This ends today.”
Her words rippled into the silence around her. She had spoken them as a challenge, not a prayer.
As the evening began to blanket where she rested under the shadow of the baobab. Something rose out of the smothering heat. It took the outline of a bird unlike any the hunters or griots told stories about. Its eyes had the appearance of polished obsidian and gave back none of the light it withdrew. Feathers overlapped scales that resembled dry leaves gathered at the end of the harmattan.
The entity never opened its beak, and no sound reached her ears.
Yet somehow an image telepathically entered her mind instead. It held the certainty of conditions already lived through. She saw a black woven bag edged with cowrie shells, and with it came the knowhow of an ancient ritual to be made at a set hour of the day. Within this encounter she was experiencing, this was no invitation. It was an instruction. A means by which she might defend herself against the unseen forces working through cursed money through rituals that effected the exchange of goods from one hand to another.
The following morning she walked to the next village, where an elderly weaver still worked beneath the shade of his own compound. Only the colour she needed, the fibres to use, and the pattern of the shells was spoken from her lips, nothing more. Payment came in foodstuffs she had gathered through bartering the day before.
The old man tightened every strand until the weave admitted almost no light. He immersed the finished bag in a dark dye prepared from iron rich earth and indig. Then he cured it slowly above a bed of smoking wood until the fibres hardened.
The bag held no ornament other than the cowries that was not meant to draw admiration. Every choice in its making served a purpose. It was built shield against the unseen dangers she believed moved through the day to day exchanges of the marketplace….