The bronze-casters' guild had sent a formal apprenticeship offer three weeks ago and Kola had been avoiding thinking about it for exactly three weeks.
This was not because he did not want it. He wanted it in the simple, physical way he wanted to be near the forge, the way the fire felt familiar to him in a room where everything else was ordinary. The offer was from the guild itself, not from Gbadegesin's yard, which was a different level of thing. The guild meant formal training. It meant the full curriculum of Benin-tradition casting alongside the Yoruba ironwork that Gbadegesin had taught him.
It meant a career that was the shape of the thing he was good at.
The difficulty was that it also meant commitment, and commitment meant the conversation with his uncle about his intentions, and that conversation would eventually arrive at the question of his father, and he was not ready for that arrival yet.
He went to Gbadegesin's yard to think about it.
This was slightly circular, he acknowledged.
Going to the forge to think about the offer from the guild associated with the forge. But the forge was where he thought best and the yard was quieter than the compound, and Gbadegesin never required explanation for presence.
The old smith was working when Kola arrived, as he almost always was. A set of decorative door-hinges for a merchant family who apparently had very strong feelings about their doors. The fire was burning well. Kola took the bellows position without being asked.
They worked for a while in the comfortable silence that had developed over years of this arrangement.
Then Gbadegesin said, without looking up:
"You are going to take the offer."
"I have not decided."
"You decided when you came here instead of sending a message."
Kola considered this. It was probably accurate. "There are complications."
"Your uncle."
"Among other things."
Gbadegesin set down his tools and picked up the hinge to examine it. He had a way of examining his work with his whole face, not just his eyes, as if quality was something you felt rather than saw. "Your uncle," he said, "has been waiting for you to decide your own direction for two years. He will be relieved."
"He wants me to work in the cloth trade."
"He says he wants you to work in the cloth trade. What he actually wants is for you to stop coming home with forge-smell on your clothes and pretending you have been somewhere else." He set the hinge down. "He is not a stupid man. He knows where you are."
Kola pumped the bellows twice. The fire brightened. "The guild will want to know about my lineage for their records."
"Yes."
"My father's name is not in any record I know of."
"Your mother knows it."
"She has not told me."
Gbadegesin looked at him then, for the first time since he had arrived. The look was direct and not unkind. "Then perhaps it is time to ask her," he said.
"I have asked."
"When you were twelve. Asking at twelve and asking now are different questions."
This was true in a way Kola had been aware of and not addressing. He was seventeen now. He was not asking as a child wanting a father. He was asking as a person who needed information for a practical purpose, and those were different questions from a different kind of person and they got different answers.
Or they were supposed to.
* * *
"I know you are going to ask me," his mother said, when he came home that evening. She was sitting at the compound's central courtyard with a piece of mending in her lap and the expression of a woman who had been waiting for something and had decided to be ready for it.
"Mama."
"Sit down."
He sat.
She did not put the mending down. She kept working the needle through the cloth while she spoke, and he understood this was deliberate, that the needle and the cloth were giving her hands something to do so her hands would not say what her voice was saying.
"His name is Olasubomi Ajanlekoko," she said.
The courtyard was very quiet. From the street outside came the sound of someone singing as they walked, a snatch of a market song, gone in a moment.
"The Aare-Ona-Kakanfo," Kola said.
"Yes."
He had known it was going to be something large. The sky did not take an interest in ordinary people. He had known it, abstractly, as a category of answer. The specific answer was different from knowing the category.
"When?" he said.
"Eighteen years ago. He was a war-chief then, not yet Aare-Ona-Kakanfo, passing through the city with a small escort on his way north. We knew each other for two months." She kept her needle moving. "He did not know I was pregnant when he left. I did not know either."
"Did you tell him afterward?"
She was quiet for a moment. "I sent a message. Once. Through a channel I thought was private. I received a response that was polite and asked for proof." A pause. "I did not send the proof. It seemed like the beginning of a very long argument I did not want to have with a man I did not know anymore."
Kola looked at the courtyard wall. There was a crack in the plaster he had noticed since childhood, running diagonally from the top corner. He had looked at it a thousand times.
He looked at it now.
"Does he know now?" he said.
"I don't know what he knows."
"The message from the palace ward last week."
She nodded, just once. "I assumed it was connected. I did not know how to handle it and so I did nothing, which is the wrong answer but sometimes the wrong answer is the only one available."
He was quiet for a long time. His mother kept sewing.
"I am not angry," he said finally.
"You are a little angry."
"A little," he admitted. "But mostly I am thinking."
"What are you thinking?"
"That the palace was asking about me. And that the weather has been doing strange things near me for most of this year. And that the smith who has been teaching me everything I know just told me to ask you a question he already knew the answer to." He looked at her. "Everyone knows but me."
"Gbadegesin has known since you were eleven," she said. "He recognized the Ase in the forge work. He came to me. I asked him to say nothing."
"And he agreed?"
"He said it was your story to find, not his to give. He was right." She folded the mended cloth. "I am sorry it took this long. I was afraid of what finding it would start."
"What do you think it will start?"
She looked at him steadily. "Something that I cannot stop once it begins. That is why I was afraid."
* * *
He walked afterward. He went out into the streets of Oyo-Ile's lower ward and walked without particular direction, because the walk was the thinking and the thinking needed movement.
His father's name. He said it quietly to himself as he walked. Olasubomi Ajanlekoko. The Aare-Ona-Kakanfo.
Undefeated in twelve campaigns. The most senior military commander in Oyo. A man he had never met who made the sky react the same way he did.
He passed Gbadegesin's yard. The old man was inside, still working, visible through the open gate in the lamplight. He did not go in.
He passed the palace ward market. It was closing for the evening, the stalls shuttering one by one, the last of the day's traders moving their surplus goods on headloads through the thinning crowds.
He walked to the northern boundary road, the one that ran between the city wall and the Aare-Ona-Kakanfo's encampment, and he stood for a moment looking at the campfires in the distance.
He could see the glow of them against the early dark, a constellation of orange points in the black. Somewhere in that constellation, his father was doing something military commanders did in the evening after campaigns.
He did not know what that was. He had no idea what his father was like. He knew the titles and the victories because those were public. He knew nothing else.
He stood on the boundary road for a while, looking at the fires. Then he turned and went back into the city.
He would send a message to the bronze-casters' guild in the morning accepting the apprenticeship. That part was decided. The other part he would watch, from a distance, until he understood enough to know what watching was supposed to become.
Above him, the sky was clear and quiet.
He appreciated the restraint.