by Marlon James
“Go back!” I said. “Go back, I don’t want you.”
I started walking and she appeared in front of me again. I was about to shout but she was crying. I turned away and she appeared again. The Leopard started to change and growled, and she jumped.
“Go back before I curse you!” I shouted.
We were at the edge of Gangatom territory going north into free lands and then Luala Luala. I knew she was behind me. I picked up two stones and threw one at her. Went right through her, the stone did, but I knew it would horrify her, the move.
“Go back, you fucking ghost!” I shouted, and threw the second stone. She vanished and I did not see her again. The Leopard had walked off far before I realized I was still in one spot and had not moved. I wouldn’t until he growled.
I went with the Leopard to Fasisi, the capital city of the North, and found many men and women with lost things and people, who could use my nose. The Leopard grew tired of walls and left after two moons, and I was for long moons alone.
* * *
—
When I next saw the Leopard, years had passed and I was a man. Too many bitter men knew me in Fasisi, so I moved to Malakal. He was there for four nights before leaving word with my landlady that he would see me, which I thought was clear since he would have no reason to see this city. The Leopard was still strong in jaw and handsome and came in man form, tunic and cape, as men in the city would have killed a beast. His legs thicker, the hair around his face wilder. He wore whiskers, but this was a city where men loved men, priests married slaves, and sadness was washed away with palm wine and masuku beer. I smelled his arrival the night he came to the city. A night where even the rain, waking up old smells, could not weaken his funk. He still smelled like a man who only washed if he happened to cross a river. We met at Kulikulo Inn, a place where I did business, a place where the fat innkeeper served soup and wine, and nobody cared who or what came through the door. He held a jug of beer and offered me palm wine that he would not drink himself.
“You look well, so different, a man now,” he said.
“You look the same,” I said.
“How is your nose?”
“This nose will pay for this wine, since I see no pouch on you.”
He laughed and said he came with a proposal.
“I need you to help me find a fly,” he said.
2
MALAKIN
Gaba kura baya siyaki.
—
SIX
This.
You wish that I read this.
Check the account for yourself, you say. Make my mark where it says different from what happened. I don’t need to read; you write as Ashe wishes. Ashe is the everything, life and death, morning and night, good luck and bad tidings. What you in South think is a god but is where the gods come from.
But do I believe it?
A smart question. Fine, I will read it.
Testimony of the Tracker on this the ninth day. A thousand bows to the elders’ pleasure. This testimony is written witness, given appeal to the gods of sky who stand in judgment with lightning and viper venom. And as is the elders’ pleasure, the Tracker gives account both wide and far, since great many years and moons have passed from the loss of the child to the death of the same one. This is the middle of the Tracker’s many tales, meaning which be true and which be false I shall leave to the judgment of the elders, alone in the counsel of the gods. The Tracker’s account continues to perplex even those of uncommon mind. He travels deep in strange lands, as if telling tales to children at night, or reciting nightmares to the fetish priest for Ifa divination. But such is the pleasure of the elders, that a man should speak free, and a man should speak till the ears of the gods are filled with truth.
He goes into the sight, smell, and taste of one memory, with perfect recall of the smell in the crack of a man’s buttocks, or the perfume of Malakal virgins in bedchambers coming out of windows he walked underneath, or the sight of the glorious sunlight marking the slow change of seasons. But of spaces between moons, a year, three years, he says nothing.
This we know: The Tracker in the company of nine, including one more who still lives and one not accounted for, went searching for a boy. Kidnapped, he has alleged. The boy at the time was alleged to be the son or ward of a slaver from Malakal.
This we know: They set out first from Malakal at the beginning of the dry season. The search for the boy took seven moons. A success, the child they found and returned, but four years later he was lost again and the second search, in smaller company, took one year and culminated with the boy’s death.
At the request of the elders, the Tracker has spoken in detail of his upbringing, and with clear speech and fair countenance has recounted a few details of the first search. But he will speak only of the end of the second search, and refuses to give testimony of the four years in between, where it is known that he took up residence in the land of Mitu.
This is where I, your inquisitor, set a different bait. He had come, that ninth morning, to talk of the year he reunited with the mercenary called Leopard. Indeed, he had said before that it was the Leopard that came to him with the offer to search for the child. But a lie is a house carefully built on rotten stilts. A liar often forgets the beginning of his tale before he gets to the end, and in this way one will catch him. A lie is a tale carefully told if allowed to be told, and I would seek to break his untruth by asking him to tell a different part of the tale. So I asked him not of the first search or the second, but of the four years in between.
INQUEST: Tell me of the year of our King’s death.
TRACKER: Your mad King.
INQUEST: Our King.
TRACKER: But the mad one. Forgive me, they are all mad.
INQUEST: Tell me of the year of our King’s death.
TRACKER: He is your king. You tell me.
INQUEST: Tell me of —
TRACKER: It was a year, as years go. There were days, there were nights with nights being the end of day. Moons, seasons, storms, drought. Are you not a fetish priest who gives such news, inquisitor? Your questions grow stranger by the day; this is true talk.
INQUEST: You remember the year?
TRACKER: The Ku don’t name years.
INQUEST: Do you remember the year?
TRACKER: It was the year your most excellent King shat his most excellent life out in the most excellent shit pit.
INQUEST: Speaking ill of the King is punishable by death in the South Kingdom.
TRACKER: He’s a corpse, not a king.
INQUEST: Enough. Tell me of your year.
TRACKER: The year? My year. I lived it full and left all of it behind when it ended. What more is there to know?
INQUEST: You have nothing else?
TRACKER: I fear that you would find greater tales among those of us dead, inquisitor. Of those years I have nothing to report but steadiness, boredom, and the endless request of angry wives to find their unsatisfied husbands—
INQUEST: Did you not retire those years?
TRACKER: I think I am the best to remember my own years.
INQUEST: Tell me of your four years in Mitu.
TRACKER: I spent no four years in Mitu.
INQUEST: Your testimony on the fourth day said after the first search you left for the village of Gangatom and from there, Mitu. Your testimony on the fifth day began, When he found me in Mitu I was ready to leave. Four years remain unaccounted for. Did you not live it in Mitu?
[Note: The sandglass was a third from being empty when I asked him this question. He looked at me as men do when they contemplate petulance. An arch in his eyebrow, a scowl in his face, then a blankness, a drop in the corner of his lips, and his eyes wet, as if he went from anger at my question to something else at the thought of an answer. The sandglass was empty before he spoke again.]
>
TRACKER: I know of no place named Mitu.
INQUEST: You? The Tracker who claims to have been to so many kingdoms, to the place of flying beasts, and the land of talking monkeys and lands not on the maps of men, but you have no knowledge of an entire territory?
TRACKER: Take your finger out of my sore.
INQUEST: You forget which of us gives the orders.
TRACKER: I have never set foot in Mitu.
INQUEST: A different answer from I know of no place named Mitu.
TRACKER: Tell me how you wish this story to be told. From the dusk of it to the dawn of it? Or maybe as a lesson, or praise song. Or should my story move as crabs do, from one side to the next?
INQUEST: Tell the elders, who shall take this writing as your very own speech. What happened, your four years in Mitu?
* * *
—
I will describe his face without impression or judgment. His eyebrows raised higher than before, he opened his mouth but did not speak. It is my impression that he growled or cursed in one of the northern river tongues. Then he jumped from his chair, knocking it over and pushing it away. He leapt at me, yelling and screaming. I barely shouted out for the guard before his hands grabbed my throat. Truly it is my conviction that he would have strangled me until dead. And still he squeezed tighter, pushing me backward on my chair until we both fell to the ground. I daresay his breath was foul. Stab him I did, with writing stick into his hand and at the top of his shoulder, but I can say in testimony that I was indeed leaving this world and doing so with haste. Two guards came from behind and struck him in the back of the head with clubs until he fell on top of me, and even then his grip did not relax, until they struck him a third time.
* * *
—
I must say it was a fair account, though I remember my ribs suffering several kicks from your men, even after they bound me. My back suffering beatings from a yam sack. Also this: my feet meeting so much whipping I am surprised that I walked to this room. My memory cheats—they dragged me here. And that was not even the worst, for the worst was you having them put me in robes meant for slaves—what offense have done I to cause that?
Now look at us. Me in the dark even in daylight, you over there on a stool. Balancing paper and writing stick on your lap while you try not to knock over the ink at your foot. And these iron bars between us. The man beside me calls for the love goddess each night, and I have not heard such sounds since I searched for my father, my grandfather in a whorehouse. Between me and you, I wish she would answer, for his cries get ever louder each night.
So. My father and brother murdered and my uncle slain by my hand. Go back to my grandfather? To give him what tidings? Hail, Father, who I now know as my grandfather though you lie with my mother. I killed your other son. There was no honor in it but you are already a man with no honor. You truly are cunning. A cunning one, inquisitor, to get me so angry I speak to them and not you. What kind of testimony is this?
You have washed since I saw you last. Spring water with precious salts, spices, and fragrant flowers. So many spices I would suspect that your ten-year-old wife was trying to cook you. But Priest, I smell the blister on the right of your back, right where she poured boiling water and scalded you. By all the gods, she did try to cook you. You struck her, of course, hard in the mouth. You’ve brought her blood with you before.
Where is what happened next? After your guards clubbed me in the back of the head, but before they took me down here. The part where I strangled you till you were near dead. The part where the guards had to slap you like a fool on opium in a spirit monger’s den. Don’t ask about Mitu again.
One more thing. When did you move me to Nigiki? I ask because these are Nigiki slave robes. Besides, I smell the salt mines every direction I turn. Did you move me at night? What strange potions kept me asleep? People say a cell in Nigiki is more lavish than a palace in Kongor, but such people have never been in this cell. Did you move her as well or just your dear, difficult Tracker?
My last time in this city I was in chains as well.
I will tell you the story.
I let myself be sold to a nobleman in Nigiki, because a slave still had four meals, none by his own purse, and lived in a palace. So why not be a slave? Whenever I felt for freedom I could just kill my master. But this nobleman had the ear of your mad King. I knew because he would tell anyone who would hear. And since I was in a new game—total subservience to another—I was the one to tell. Slaves are not to be resold in the South Kingdom, especially not in Nigiki, but he did so, and that was how he made his fortune. Sometimes the slave was freeborn and stolen.
The master was a coward and a thief. He whipped his wife at night and punched her in the day so that the slaves could see that no man or woman was above him. I said to her once when he was away: If it pleases the mistress, I have five limbs, ten fingers, one tongue, and two holes, all at her pleasure. She said, You smell like a boar but you may be the only man in Nigiki who does not smell of salt. She said, I hear things of you men from the North, that you do things to women with your lips and tongue. I searched through her five robes, found her koo, spread its lips west and east, then flicked my tongue on the little soul deep in the woman that the Ku think is a hidden boy that must be cut out, but is beyond boy or girl. She made noises louder than when whipped, but since I was hidden under her robes, her slaves thought it was the recall of a whipping, or the god of harvest giving her rapture.
She never let me put anything inside her but my tongue, for such is still the way of mistresses.
“How can one lie with a boar?” she would say.
You are waiting to see how this ends. You’re waiting to see if I ever did pull apart the seas of her robes and take her without her ever asking such, because that is what you southern lords do. Or you are waiting for that moment when I kill her husband, for do not all my tales end in blood?
Soon I said to the nobleman, It is not yet a moon, yet I am already bored with being your slave. Not even your cruelty is interesting. I said good-bye, made an obscene sign with my lips and tongue to the mistress, and turned to leave.
Yes, in this way I left.
Fine, if you must know, I did strike the nobleman in the back of the head with the flat side of a long sword, bid a slave to shit in his mouth, and tied a rope around his head to keep his jaw shut. Then I left.
The children?
What does it matter?
I tried to see the children. More times than once or twice. One quartermoon after we left them with the Gangatom, I was sneaking along the two sisters river. By then the village would have smelled on wind the bodies of Kava, the witchman, and my beloved uncle. And coming up, on the Gangatom side of the river, a spear could meet my chest at any moment and my killer would not have lied when he said, Here I killed a Ku. I skipped from tree to tree, bush to bush knowing that I should not have gone. It was only a quartermoon. But maybe the albino ran into a boy who would stick him to see if his blood was white, and maybe the women of the village were scared of Smoke Girl’s troubled sleep and needed to know that one should not fear her, for how else would they know? And to let her sit on your head if she wants to sit on your head, and maybe my boy who thinks he is a ball rolls into a man because that is the only way he knows to say, Here I am, play with me, I am already a toy. And to never call Giraffe Boy giraffe. Not once. And the twins, such cunning minds and such joyful hearts, one will call you over the right shoulder saying, Where is east? while the other steals sips from your porridge.
And there was no Leopard to vouch for me; he found work and amusement in Fasisi. But the river runs through both lands, and trees stood far apart. I stopped at one tree, and was about to skip to the next, ten and seven paces ahead, when arrows shot past me. I jumped back and the tree caught the three arrows hitting it. Voices of Ku, men across the river, thinking they’d killed me. I dropped to my belly and
scurried away like a lizard.
Two years later I went to see my mingi children. I came from Malakal, taking a different route than used by Ku. Giraffe Boy was now as tall as an actual giraffe, his legs reaching my head; his face, a little older but still young. He saw me first when I entered the Gangatom township. The albino, I did not know was the oldest until I saw that he grew the most, thick in muscle and a little taller in height, and very handsome. I couldn’t tell if he really grew up in the quick or had I only now noticed. Even as he ran to me, the women’s eyes followed him. The twins were in the bush hunting. The boy with no legs got even more fat and round, and rolled himself everywhere. You will be useful in war, I said to him. Are you all warriors now? The albino nodded while the boy with no legs giggled and rolled right into me, knocking me over. I did not see Smoke Girl.
And then after a moon I went walking with Giraffe Boy and said, Smoke Girl, does she hate me still? He did not know how to answer me, because he had never known hate. Every man who comes into her life leaves, he said as we walked back to his home. At the door, the women raising him said, The chief is dying and the man to be the next chief has bad feelings for all Ku, even one who lives with other people in houses of stone.
You don’t need their names.
As for the Leopard, five years passed before I met him at Kulikulo Inn. He was at a table, waiting for me.
“I need you to help me find a fly,” he said.
“Then consult the spider,” I said.
He laughed. The years had changed him, even if he looked the same. His jaw was still strong, his eyes, light pools where you saw yourself. Whiskers and wild hair that made him look more lion than panther. I wondered if he was still as quick. For long I wondered if he aged as a Leopard or as a man. Malakal was a place of civil butchery, and not a city for werefolk. But Kulikulo Inn never judged men by their form or their dress, even if they wore nothing but dust or red ochre spread with cow fat, as long as their coin was strong and flowed like a river. Still, he pulled skins from a sack and wrapped something coarse and hairy about his lap, then draped shiny leathers over his back. This was new. The animal had learned the shame of men, the same man who once said that the Leopard would have been born with skirts if he was supposed to wear any. He asked for wine and strong drink that would have killed a beast.
