The Lands of Lesa and Mogue

The Lands of Lesa and Mogue

From the Odu Ejila Oché (12-5)

Bitterness cannot turn sweet, but sweet things can go bad.

Is it related to this?
https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803100100976

Eyila

The town of Mogue was filled with the rich scent of damp earth, and when the breeze stirred amid the streets there came through the village the heavy odor of the blood, or the more acrid scent of the decayed bodies.

In Lesa it was no different, but the stench was worse and people traveled the streets with scarves wound about their mouths and noses.

For the field between the two towns was strewn with bodies and blood; the earth was caked with it, the soil blackened, saturated and unable to suck it down as it was spilled. Like red jelly it lay on the ground.

This was the field where the warriors of Lesa and Mogue fought—it lay stretched between their towns, a nether land that neither owned but both wanted for themselves.

For decades one village had tried to claim the land; its people would spread out over the rolling hills and begin to build, and when they were done, in the night and under the cover of darkness, the warriors from the other town would march with torches and burn it all to the ground.

Children—silenced; women—raped; men—murdered; and the war had gone on for decades.

No one remembered how it began.

No one cared.

The earth was angry, hot as it was with all the blood. The yams and corn planted seasons ago by one of the villages still grew, and the spirit of the earth sent a rot that covered them like black silk. When the wind blew, it carried their spores across the fields and into the towns.

Soon each village was covered in black dust and they swore, “Those people in the other village are sorcerers. They send this to us.”

When the weakest of each town, the elderly and the children, developed fevers and sores they drew arms.

Again, as they had for decades, both towns prepared for war. Yet war would not be.

For the earth, indeed, was angry, and by the time the armies were ready to battle they, too, fell ill. Soon neither town had anyone left to fight, and the villagers languished and died among the black rot.

Both became ghost towns filled with bodies; and once everyone was dead the earth, again, knew peace.

Remember this: the earth has teeth and it will eat you, and no one will escape her wrath.