by Marlon James
“Your city is putting on her good face,” he said.
“An elder told me that peace is a rumor, and we will be back at war with the South in less than a year.”
“So in war or peace, wives will want to know who fucks their husbands.”
“That is one of your better points, Leopard.”
I lived in town, which was a new thing for me. I have always been an edge man, always on the coast, always by the boundary. That way nobody knows if I have just come or was turning to leave. I kept only as much as I could pack in a sack and leave with in less than a time-glass flip. But in a place like here, where people are always coming and going, you could stay in the center that never moves and still vanish. Which is convenient for a man that men hate. My inn was far west, at the edge of the third wall. People within the third wall other people thought were rich, but that is not true. Most of those people lived within the second wall. Warriors and soldiers and traders bedding for the night stayed within the fourth, in forts at all four points of the city that kept the enemy out. I’m telling you this, inquisitor, because you have never been there and a man of your sort never will.
I took the Leopard down streets that climbed up and rolled down, twisting and turning, winding to the last tower at the peak of the mountain range. I looked around and turned back to see him looking at me.
“He does not follow,” he said.
“Who, your little lover?”
“Call him anything but that.”
“He’ll follow you into a crocodile’s mouth.”
“Not until the swelling is gone,” I say.
“Swelling?”
“Tried to rub my belly last night. Fuck the gods, I would never believe it. Who would rub a cat’s belly?”
“Mistook you for a dog.”
“Do I bark? Do I sniff men’s balls?”
“Well . . .”
“Quiet yourself right now.”
I could hold the laugh no longer.
The Leopard frowned, then laughed. We walked downhill. Not many people were about, and whoever came out darted back indoors as soon as they saw us. I would think they were afraid, but nobody is afraid in Malakal. They knew something was afoot and wanted no part in it.
“Darkness comes quickly down this street,” Leopard said.
We went to the door of a man who owed me money but tried to pay in stories. He let us in, offered us plum juice and palm wine, but I said no, the Leopard said yes, and I said he means no, ignoring him glaring at me. The man was in the middle of another story about how the money was on the way from a city near the Darklands, and who knows what has happened, but it could be bandits, though his own brother carried the money, and sweets baked by his mother, of which he will give me as much as I could eat. The sweets from his mother was the only new part of this story.
“Is it me or are the trade routes now less safe than they were during the war?” he said to me.
I thought of which finger to break. I threatened to break one last time and to not do so would make me a man who did not keep his promises, and one could not have word like that get out in the cities. But he looked at me just then and his eyes popped open so wide that I thought I had said all that out loud. The man ran to his room and came back with a pouch heavy with silver. I prefer gold, I tell my customers before even going out looking, but this pouch was twice as heavy as the one he owed me.
“Take all of it,” he said.
“You overpay, I’m sure.”
“Take all of it.”
“Did your brother just come through the back door?”
“My house is none of your business. Take it and go.”
“If this is not enough I—”
“It is more than enough. Leave so my wife never knows two dirty men come to her house.”
I took his money and left, the man mystifying me. Meanwhile the Leopard couldn’t stop laughing.
“A joke between you and the gods or do you plan to share it?”
“Your debtor. Your man. Shit himself in the other room he did.”
“So strange. I was going to break a finger like I said I would. But he looked at me like he saw the god of vengeance himself.”
“He wasn’t looking at you.”
Just as the question was about to leave my mouth the answer came in my head.
“You . . .”
“I started changing right behind you. Wet his front with piss, frightened he was. Did you smell it?”
“Maybe he was marking territory.”
“Some thanks for the man who just fattened your pouch.”
“Thanks.”
“Say it with sweetness.”
“You try my patience, cat.”
He came with me to a woman who wanted to send a message to her daughter in the underworld. I told her that I found the missing and she wasn’t missing. Another who wanted me to find where a man who was his friend but stole his money had died, for wherever that corpse lay, beneath him would be bags and bags of gold. He said, Tracker, I will give you ten gold coins from the first bag. I said, You give me the first two bags and I will let you keep what is left, for your friend is alive. But what if there are only three bags? he said. I said, You should have said that before you let me smell the sweat, piss, and cum of his bed robes. The Leopard laughed and said, You are more entertaining than two Kampara actors pretending to fuck with wooden cocks. I didn’t notice the sun was gone until he skipped a few steps ahead and vanished into the dark. His eyes flashed like green light in the black.
“Is there no sport in your city?” he said.
“Took you long to get to this. Be warned, the pleasure women in this city gave up on being boys a long time ago. Nothing there but the scars of a eunuch.”
“Ugh, eunuchs. Better an abuka with no holes, no eyes, no mouth than a eunuch. I thought one became this to swear off fucking, but curse the gods, there they are, infesting every whorehouse, making the blood boil of every man who just wants to lie on his back for a change. I wish we could find the child right now.”
“I know who we could find right now.”
“What, who?”
“The slaver.”
“Gone to the coast to sell his new slaves.”
“He is not even four hundred paces from here and only one of his men travels with him.”
“Fuck the gods. Well it’s been said that you have—”
“Do not say it.”
We dipped into an alley and took two small torches.
He followed me past a tower with seven floors and a thatch roof, one with three floors and another four floors high. We passed a small hut where lived a witch, for nobody wanted to live above or below a witch; three houses painted in the grid patterns of the rich; and another building of mysterious use. We had left roads and gone northwest, right at the edge of the fourth wall, and not far from the North fort. I was a savannah dog, picking up too much flesh, living and dead, and burned by lightning.
“Here.”
We stopped at a house four floors high, the taller buildings beside it throwing moon shadow. No door stood in front and the lowest window was as high as three men foot-to-shoulder. One window near the top and in the center, dark with what looked like flickering light. I pointed to the house, then the window.
“He is here.”
“Tracker, a problem you have,” he said and pointed up. “Are you now crow to my Leopard?”
“All the birds in the ten and three kingdoms and a crow is what you call me?”
“Fine, a dove, a hawk—how about an owl? You better fly quick because this place has no door.”
“There is a door.”
The Leopard looked at me hard, then walked as far around the house as he could.
“No, you have no door.”
“No, you have no eyes.”
“Ha, ‘you have no eyes.’ I listen to you and hear her.”
“Who?”
“The Sangoma. Your words fall just like hers. You think like her too, that you’re clever. Her witchcraft is still protecting you.”
“If it were witchcraft it wouldn’t be protecting me. She threw something on me that binds craft; this I was told by a witchman who tried to kill me with metals. It’s not as if one feels it on the skin or in the bones. Something that remains even after her death, which again makes it not witchcraft, for a witch’s spells all die with her.”
I walked right up to the wall as if to kiss it, then whispered an incantation low enough that not even his Leopard ears could hear.
“If it were witchcraft,” I said.
I shuddered and stepped back. This always made me feel the way I do when I drink juice of the coffee bean—like thorns were under my skin pushing through, and forces in the night were out to get me. I whispered to the wall, This house has a door and I with the wolf eye will open it. I stepped back and without my torch the wall caught fire. White flame raced to four corners in the shape of a door, consumed the shape, crackled and burned, then put itself out, leaving a plain wooden door untouched by scorch.
“Whoever is here is working witch science,” I said.
Mortar and clay steps took us up to the first floor. A room empty of man smell, with an archway setting itself off in the dark. Blue moonlight came through the windows. I knew stealth, but the cat was so quiet I looked behind me twice.
People were talking harshly above us. The next floor up had a room with a locked door, but I smelled no people behind it. Halfway up the steps the smells came down on us: scorched flesh, dried urine, shit, the stinking carcasses of beasts and birds. Near the top of the steps sounds came down on us—whispers, growls, a man, a woman, two women, two men, an animal—and I wished my ears were as good as my nose. Blue light flashed from the room, then flickered down to dark. No way we could climb the last steps without being seen or heard, so we stayed halfway. We could see in the room anyway. And we saw what flickered blue light.
A woman, an iron collar and chain around her neck, her hair almost white but looking blue as light flickered through the room. She screamed, yanked at the chain around her neck, and blue light burst within her, coursing along the tree underneath her skin that one sees when you cut parts of a man open. Instead of blood, blue light ran through her. Then she went dark again. The light was the only way we could make out the slaver in dark robes, the man who fed him dates, and somebody else, with a smell I both remembered and couldn’t recognize.
Then somebody else touched a stick and it burst into flame like a torch. The chained woman jumped back and scrambled against the wall.
A woman held the torch. I had never seen her before, was sure of it even in the dark, but she smelled familiar, so familiar. Taller than everybody else in the room, with hair big and wild like some women above the sand sea. She pointed the torch to the ground, to the stinking half carcass of a dog.
“Tell me true,” the slaver said. “How did you get a dog up into this room?”
The chained woman hissed. She was naked and so dirty that she looked white.
“Move in close and I tell you true,” she said.
The slaver moved in close, she spread her legs, her finger spreading her kehkeh, and shot a streak of piss that wet his sandals before he could pull away. She started to laugh but he cracked his knuckles and punched the cackle out of her mouth. The Leopard jumped and I grabbed his arm. It sounded as if she was laughing until the tall woman’s torch shined on her again as tears pooled in her eyes. She said, “You you you you you all go. You all must go. Go now, run run run run run because Father coming, he coming on the wind don’t you hear the horse go go go you he won’t kiss the head of you unclean boys, go wash wash wash wash wash wash wash—”
The slaver nodded and the tall woman shoved the torch right up to her face. She jumped back again and snarled.
“Nobody comes! Nobody comes! Nobody comes! Who are you?” the woman said.
The slaver moved in to strike her. The chained woman flinched and hid her face, begging him not to strike her anymore. Too many men striking her and they strike her all the time and she just want to hold her boys, the first and the third and the fourth, but not the second, for he does not like when people hold him, not even his mother. I still held on to the Leopard’s arm and could feel his muscles shift and his hair grow under my fingers.
“Enough with that,” the tall woman said.
“This is how you get her to talk,” the slaver said.
“You must think she is one of your wives,” she said.
The Leopard’s arm stopped twitching. She wore a black gown from the northern lands that touched the floor, but cut close to show she was thin. She stooped down to the woman in chains, who still hid her face. I couldn’t see it but knew the chained woman was trembling. The chains clanged when she shook.
“These are the days that never should have happened to you. Tell me about her,” the tall woman said.
The slaver nodded to his date feeder and the date feeder cleared his throat and began.
“This woman, her story, very strange and sad. It is I who am talking and I will—”
“Not a performance, donkey. Just the story.”
I wish I could have seen his scowl but his face was lost to the dark.
“We don’t know her name, and her neighbors, she scared them all away.”
“No she did not. Your master here paid them to leave. Stop wasting my time.”
“As if I give two shakes of a rat’s ass about your time.”
She paused. I could tell nobody expected that to come out of his mouth.
“This always his ways?” she said to the slaver. “Maybe you tell me the story, slave monger, and maybe I cut his tongue out.”
The date feeder pulled a knife from under his sleeve and flipped the handle to her.
“How this for sport? I give you the knife and you try,” he said.
She did not take it. The woman in chains was still hiding her face in the corner. The Leopard was still. The tall woman looked at the date feeder, with a curious smile.
“He has chat, this one. Fine, out with your story. I will hear it.”
“Her neighbor, the washerwoman, say her name is Nooya. And nobody knows her or claims her so Nooya be her name, but she don’t answer to it. She answer to him. Nobody living to tell the story but she, and she not telling. But this is what we know. She live in Nigiki with her husband and five children. Saduk, Makhang, Fula—”
“The shorter version, date feeder.”
The tall woman pointed at him. She did not take her eye off the woman in chains.
“One day when the sun past the noon and was going down, a child knock on her door. A boy child, who look like he was five and four years in age.”
“We have one word for that in the North. We call it nine,” the tall woman said.
She smiled; the date feeder scowled and said, “A boy child knocking on the door rapraprapraprap like he going to knock it down. They after me, they coming for me, save this boy child! he say. Save this boy child, save him, he said. Save me!”
The chained woman darted a look. “Sssssssssssssssave the chhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh,” she said.
“The little boy screaming and screaming, what could a mother do? A mother with four boys of her own. She open the door and the boy run in. He run right into a wall and fall back and wouldn’t stop moving till she close the door. Who is after you? Nooya ask. Is it your father you run from? Nooya ask. Your mother? Yes, mothers can be strict and fathers can be wicked, but the look in his eye, the fear in his eye was not for strong word or the switch. She reach to touch him and he stagger back so quick his head hit the side of a cupboard and he fall.
“The boy wouldn’t nod, the boy wouldn’t talk, only
cry and eat and watch the door. Her four sons including Makhang and Saduk say, Who is the strange boy, Mother, and where did you find him? The boy will not play with them so they leave him alone. All he do is cry and eat. Nooya’s husband was working the salt pits and would not be back till morning. She finally get him to stop crying by promising him millet porridge in the morning with extra honey. That night, Makhang was asleep, Saduk was asleep, the other two boys were asleep, even Nooya was asleep, and she never sleeps until all her boys was under the one roof. Hear this now. One of them was not asleep. One of them get up from the mat, and answer the door though nobody knock. The boy. The boy go to the door that nobody was knocking. The boy open the door and he come in. A handsome man he was, long neck, hair black and white. The night hide his eyes. Thick lips and square jaw and white skin, like kaolin. Too tall for the room. He wrap himself in a white-and-black cloak. The boy point to rooms deep in the house. The handsome man go to room of boys first and kill the first son to the third son and the floor was wet from blood. The little boy watch. The handsome man wake the mother by strangling her throat. He lift her up above his head. The boy watch. He throw her to the ground, and she is crippled with pain and she whimpering and screaming and coughing and nobody hear. She watch when he bring out the fourth son, the smallest boy, the little dormouse, holding his sleepy head up. The mother trying to scream no, no, no, no, but the handsome man laugh and cut his throat. She screaming, and screaming and he drop the fourth son and move in for her. The boy watch.
