The warrior and the spirit bride

At a Glance

• Central figures: Tsütongi, a young Ao Naga warrior seeking his first head and the status of Pasaltha; and Limasenla, a spirit woman who appears to him in the forest between two villages.
• Setting: The Ao Naga hills of present-day Nagaland, in the country between the village of Longkhum and the deep forest ravine called Tzüla, where the spirits of the unburied dead are said to walk.
• The turn: Tsütongi takes Limasenla as his wife without knowing she is a spirit, and she bears him a son; but when the village priest performs the gennas rites over the child, Limasenla’s nature is revealed.
• The outcome: Limasenla returns to the ravine of Tzüla. Tsütongi follows her to the edge and cannot cross. The son lives and grows in the village, but carries the mark of the spirit world - one eye darker than the other.
• The legacy: Among some Ao Naga clans, a child born with mismatched eyes is said to carry the blood of Tzüla, and the family must observe three days of genna before the child may be brought into the morung for the first time.

The fire in the morung had burned low. Tsütongi sat with his back against the post where the older warriors hung their dao blades after feasting, and he listened to them talk about the raid on the Sangtam village to the east. They named the men they had killed. They described the path through the bamboo. One of them, Imchen, had taken two heads and earned the right to wear the ceremonial cloth with cowrie shells sewn across the chest. Tsütongi had not been on the raid. He had been too young by one season, and the older men had left him behind to guard the granary. He could still hear the sound of their return - the singing, the way the women came out to meet them.

He was twenty. He had killed nothing larger than a barking deer. He decided that before the next planting season he would go alone into the forest between Longkhum and the ravine of Tzüla, where enemy warriors sometimes crossed, and he would come back with a head or not come back at all.

The Path to Tzüla

Tsütongi left before dawn. He carried his father’s dao, a short spear, and a bag of rice wrapped in banana leaf. The trail from Longkhum drops steeply through terraced fields and then enters forest - first the open kind where sunlight gets through, then the thick kind where it does not. By midday he had reached the ridge above Tzüla. The ravine ran below him, deep and narrow, with a stream at the bottom that made no sound he could hear from where he stood.

He sat on a rock and ate his rice. He watched the far side of the ravine for movement. Nothing moved. The birds were quiet, which should have told him something.

A woman came up the trail behind him.

She was carrying a basket of taro on her back, the way Ao women carry things, with the strap across her forehead. She wore a plain white cloth. Her hair was loose, which was unusual - married women tied theirs, and unmarried women braided theirs. Hers hung straight to her waist and did not move in the wind, because there was no wind.

Limasenla

She told him her name was Limasenla and that she was from a village on the other side of Tzüla. He asked which village. She named one he had not heard of. He asked again. She said the name again, and this time it sounded different, as though the word had shifted while she spoke it.

He did not ask a third time.

She sat beside him and they talked. She asked him what he was doing on the ridge alone, and he told her the truth - that he wanted to prove himself, that he was tired of being the youngest in the morung, that he wanted the cloth with cowrie shells. She did not laugh. She said her father had been a warrior and had died in a raid, and that she was alone now and had no brothers to provide for her.

Tsütongi looked at her and saw a woman who needed a husband. He looked at the empty ravine and saw no enemy warriors. The choice between the two seemed obvious to him at the time.

He brought her back to Longkhum.

The Marriage and the Son

The village accepted her. The elders asked where she was from, and she said the name of the village across Tzüla, and they nodded as though they knew it, though none of them had been there. She worked hard. She pounded rice faster than the other women. She wove cloth that was tighter and finer than any cloth in the village, with patterns no one recognized - not Ao patterns, not Sangtam, not Lotha. The women admired the cloth but did not copy it.

Tsütongi married her in the proper way, with the killing of a pig and the blessing of the village priest. They lived in a house near the edge of the village, close to the forest. At night Limasenla sometimes stood at the door and looked out into the dark for a long time, and Tsütongi learned not to ask her what she was looking at.

She bore a son in the cold season. The boy was healthy and cried strongly. But when the women cleaned him and brought him into the light, they saw that one of his eyes was dark brown and the other was the color of river water in shade - grey, or green, or something that was neither.

The women said nothing. They wrapped the boy and gave him to Limasenla, and she held him without surprise.

The Priest’s Fire

On the third day the village priest came to perform the genna rites over the child - the prayers and the small sacrifice that would bind the boy to the village and to the living world. The priest was old and had seen many things. He prepared the fire. He killed a chicken and read its entrails. He began the words.

Halfway through, he stopped.

He looked at Limasenla. He looked at the boy. He looked at the fire, which had turned from orange to a pale white, the color of mist over Tzüla.

This woman is not from the other side of the ravine, he said. She is from inside it.

Limasenla stood up. She did not deny it. She set the boy down on the sleeping mat and looked at Tsütongi, and her face was the same face he had seen on the ridge - calm, still, with hair that did not move.

I wanted to stay, she said.

She walked out of the house. Tsütongi followed her. She walked through the village and down the trail toward the forest, and the villagers who saw her pass said later that her feet did not quite touch the ground - that there was a thin line of space between her soles and the dirt, though it was hard to be sure in the failing light.

The Edge of Tzüla

Tsütongi followed her to the ridge. She did not walk fast, and she did not walk slow. She went to the edge of the ravine and stopped.

He stood three paces behind her.

Come back, he said.

She did not turn around. She stepped off the edge and went down into Tzüla, and the forest closed over the place where she had been - not with a sound, but with a thickening of the air, the way fog settles into a valley when the temperature drops.

Tsütongi stood at the edge for a long time. He could hear the stream at the bottom now, which he had not been able to hear before. It sounded like a woman singing, or it sounded like water. He could not tell which.

He went back to Longkhum. The boy was on the mat where Limasenla had set him down, sleeping with his mismatched eyes closed. Tsütongi picked him up.

The boy grew. He became a warrior - a good one, fast with the dao, respected in the morung. But he never went near Tzüla, and when his own sons were born, each with two brown eyes, he observed three days of genna before he brought them to the elders. The family kept this practice. Some Ao families in the Longkhum area keep it still.