Black Leopard, Red Wolf

by Marlon James

  “This is new waters for me. Never had I had a man fuck somebody else for my benefit. If she conceives they will come for you.”

  “If she conceives they will come for everyone,” Mossi said.

  “No, you.”

  “Then let them come. They will learn there is one man who is not a coward in Dolingo.”

  “I could strike you so hard right now.”

  “You, the hound on two legs, thinks he can strike a warrior? I wish you would.”

  I walked right up to him, my fists clenched tight, just as several men in the gowns of scholars came out of an alley and walked past us. Three turned around, walking with their group, but backward to look at us. I turned away and walked to my room. I didn’t want or expect Mossi to follow me, but he did and as soon as he came through the door I pushed him hard against the wall. He tried to push me off but could not, so he kneed me in the ribs, and they shifted like he broke one. The pain hit my chest and ran up to my shoulder. He pushed me off hard. I staggered, tripped, and fell.

  “Fuck the gods,” he said, and sighed.

  He offered a hand to pull me up, but I pulled him down, punching him in the stomach. He fell, yelling, and I jumped on him trying to punch him, but he grabbed my hands. I pulled, and we rolled and hit the wall, rolled to the terrace door, which opened and we almost fell out. I rolled on top again and grabbed his neck. He swung his two legs up from behind me, crossed them at my shoulder, and pushed me off, then jumped on me when I slammed into the floor. He punched but I dodged and he hit the wood and yelled. I jumped on him again, wrapping my arm around his neck, and he flipped backward, slamming hard into the floor with me underneath him, and the air pushed right out of my nose and mouth. I couldn’t move or see. He flipped under me, choking me with one arm and locking down my legs with his legs. I swung my one free arm and he caught it.

  “Stop,” he said.

  “Go fuck the prickle palm.”

  “Stop.”

  “I will kill—”

  “Stop or I start breaking fingers. Are you going to stop? Tracker. Tracker.”

  “Yes, fucking whorseson.”

  “Apologize for calling my mother a whore.”

  “I call your mother and your fath—”

  I screamed the rest of the word out. He had pulled my middle finger so far back I could feel the skin about to pop.

  “I apologize. Get off me.”

  “I’m under you,” he said.

  “Let go.”

  “By the gods, Tracker. Flush this fury from you. We have bigger fusses than this. Will you stop? Please.”

  “Yes. Yes. Yes.”

  “Give me your word.”

  “You have my fucking word!”

  He let go. I wanted to turn around and punch him, or slap him if I couldn’t punch, or kick him if I couldn’t slap, or head-butt him if I couldn’t kick, or bite him if he caught my head. But I stood up and squeezed my finger.

  “It is broken. You have broken it.”

  He sat on the floor, refusing to get up.

  “Your finger is no more broken than your ribs. Fingers are spiteful, though. If it is sprained it will stay sprained for a year.”

  “I will not forget this.”

  “Yes you will. You picked this fight because another deceived you long before I even met you. Or because I fucked a woman.”

  “I am the biggest fool. You all look at me, the fool with the nose. I am just a hound, as you say.”

  “I spoke harsh. In the middle of a fight, Tracker.”

  “I am the hound from the river lands, where we build huts from shit, so I am nothing but the beast to all of you. And everybody had two plans, or three, or four, plans so they win, and everybody else lose. What is your second plan, prefect?”

  “My second plan? My first plan was to find out who murdered an elder and his family, until I came across some people who would not leave their bodies alone. My second was not to follow a suspect to the library that got burned down. My second plan was not to kill my own prefects. My second plan was not to be on the run with a bunch of bastards who can’t even cross a road together, all because my brothers would kill me on sight. My second plan, believe it or not, was not to be stuck with such a sorry bunch of fellows because I have nowhere else to go.”

  He stood up.

  “Fuck yourself and your self-pity,” I said.

  “My second plan is to save this boy.”

  “You have no stake in this boy.”

  “You are wrong. One night. It took one night to lose everything. But maybe everything was nothing if it could be lost so fast. This boy is now the only thing that will make my life seem as if the past few days have any sense to them. If I am going to lose everything, then fuck the gods and the devils if my life will not mean something. This boy is the only thing I have left.”

  “Sogolon wants to save the boy herself. Maybe the girl and the buffalo as well to protect them on the way back to Mantha.”

  “A thousand fucks for what Sogolon wants. She still needs you to find the boy. Here is a simple thing, Tracker. Give her no news.”

  “I don’t—”

  He looked at me and put a finger to his lips. Then he nodded over his shoulder. He stepped to me quiet until his lips touched my ear and whispered, “What do you smell?”

  “Everything, nothing. Wood, skin, arm funk, body smells. Why?”

  “Both of us have been scrubbed clean.”

  “What do you smell that you don’t know?”

  I switched places with him, backing slow to the other end of the room. My calf hit the stool and I moved it out of the way. Following me slow, Mossi picked up the stool, by the leg. Right before the side wall, the same wall that a table came out of, I stopped and turned around. Porridge, wood oil, dried grass rope, and sweat, and again the stink of an unwashed body. Behind the wall? In the wall? I pointed to the planks of wood and the look on Mossi’s face asked the same questions. I slapped the wood and something scurried like a rat.

  “I think it’s a rat,” Mossi whispered.

  I moved my fingers along the top of the wood, and stopped at a slot about the size of three fingers. My fingers gripped the wood and yanked. I yanked again and the wood broke from the wall. My hand gripped the space and tore out the plank.

  “Mossi, by the gods.”

  He looked in, and sucked in his breath. We stood there, staring. We grabbed planks and ripped them away, planks as tall as us, and what would not move we kicked in, and kicked away. Mossi grabbed at the boards almost in a panic, as if we were running out of time. We yanked and tore and kicked out a hole in the wall as wide as the buffalo.

  The boy was neither standing nor lying, but leaning against a bed of dry grass. His eyes were wide open, seeing terror. He was scared but could not speak, tried to scamper but couldn’t. The boy couldn’t scream because of something like the innards of an animal pushed through his mouth and down his throat. He couldn’t move because of the ropes. Every limb—legs, feet, toes, arms, hands, neck, and each finger—was tied to, and pulled, a rope. His eyes, wide open and wet, looked river blind, the black circles as gray as moody sky. He looked blind but he could see us, so terrified at us moving in closer that he pulled and yelped and grabbed and tried to shield his face from a blow. It made the room go mad, with the table pushing out and in, the door swinging open and shut, the balcony ropes loosening and tightening, the shit bucket emptying. Rope wrapped around his waist to keep him there, but one of the planks had a hole wide enough for his eye, so yes, he could see.

  “Boy, we will not hurt you,” Mossi said. He reached in with his hand to the boy’s face and the boy banged his head against the grass over and over, turning away, expecting a blow, his eyes running tears. Mossi touched his cheek and he screamed into the innard.

  “He does not know our tongue,” I said.


  “Look at us, we are no one blue. We are no one blue,” he said, and stroked the boy’s cheek long and slow. He was still pulling and kicking and the tables, windows, and doors were still opening and closing, pushing out and slamming in. Mossi kept stroking his cheek until he slowed and then stopped.

  “They must have tied these ropes with magic,” I said.

  I could not untie the knots. Mossi stuck his finger in a slot on his right sandal and pulled out a small knife.

  “Sentries are less likely to search when you step in shit,” he said.

  We cut every rope away from the boy, but he stood there, leaning against the dry grass, naked and covered in sweat, his eyes wide open as if he was never anything but shocked. Mossi grabbed the tube going down his mouth, looked at him with all sadness, and said, “I am so, so sorry.”

  And he pulled it out not fast, but vigorously, and did not stop until it was all out. The boy vomited. With all the ropes cut, the door and all the windows closed shut. The boy looked at us, his body skinned by rope burns, his mouth quivering, as if about to speak. I did not say to Mossi that they might have cut his tongue out. Mossi, a prefect for one of the most unruly cities in the North, had seen everything but cruelty such as this.

  “Mossi, every house, every room, those caravans, they are all like this.”

  “I know. I know.”

  “Everywhere I go to find this boy, to save this boy, I run into something worse than what we are saving him from.”

  “Tracker.”

  “No. These monsters won’t kill him. No harm has come to the boy. None. I smell him; he is alive, no decay or death on him. Look at this boy you are holding up, he cannot even stand. How many moons was he behind that wall? From birth? Look at this nasty dream of a place. How are bloodsuckers any worse?”

  “Tracker.”

  “How? You and I are the same, Mossi. When people call on us, we know we are about to meet evil. Lying, cheating, beating, wounding, murdering. My stomach is strong. But we still think monsters are the ones with claws, and scales and skin.”

  The boy looked at him as Mossi rubbed his shoulders. He stopped trembling, but looked past the balcony doors as if outside was something he had never seen. Mossi placed him on the stool and turned to me.

  “You are thinking what can you do,” he said.

  “If you say nothing.”

  “I would never tell you what to think. Only . . . Tracker, listen. We come here for the boy. We are two against a nation and even those who came with us might be against us.”

  “Every person I have met says to me, Tracker, you have nothing to live for or die for. You are a man who if he were to vanish this night, nobody’s life would be any worse. Maybe this is the kind of thing to die for. . . . Say it.”

  “Say what?”

  “Say that this is bigger than me and us, that this is not our fight, that is the way of the foolish and not the wise, this will make no difference. . . . Well, what are you going to say?”

  “Which of these mangy sons of bitches do we kill first?”

  My eyes popped wide open.

  “Consider this, Tracker: The plan is to never let us leave. So then let us stay. These cowards have lived without an enemy so long they probably think swords are jewelry.”

  “They have men in the hundreds upon hundreds. And hundreds more.”

  “We need not care about hundreds. Just the few at court. Beginning with that hideous Queen. Follow for now, play the fool. They will summon us to court soon, tonight. Right now we should really feed this—”

  “Mossi!”

  The stool sat empty. The terrace door swung back and forth. The boy was not in the room. Mossi ran so fast to the balcony that I had to grab his cloak so he wouldn’t fall. No sound came out of Mossi’s mouth but he was screaming. I pulled him back into the room but still he pushed forward. I wrapped my arms around him tighter and tighter. He stopped fighting and let me.

  We waited until dark to set out for the Ogo. That idiot who fed me came to the door to tell me of dinner at court, though not with the Queen. I should go to the docks and wait for the caravan when the drums begin to sound. No? Yes? Mossi held back behind the door with his knife. Someone must have seen the boy jump to his death, even if the poor child said nothing all the way down. Or maybe a slave falling to his death was not a new thing in Dolingo. This is what I was thinking while the man kept trying to stick his head in my door until I said, Sir, if you come in I shall fuck you too, and his blue skin went green. He said he would return for a glorious breakfast tomorrow, no? Yes.

  I sensed Sadogo in MLuma, the third tree, the one more like a pole with massive wings to trap sunlight. Mossi worried that guards would be watching us, but such was the arrogance of Dolingo that nobody looked at two future seed pods as much of a threat. I said to him, How quaint our weapons must have seemed to them, not just our weapons, but all weapons. They were like those plants with no thorns that have never known an animal to eat them. When the men and women staring at us made Mossi reach for the knife hidden in his coat, I touched his shoulder and whispered, How many men with skin such as yours have they seen? He nodded and kept his peace.

  At MLuma, the caravan stopped at the fifth floor. Sadogo was on the eighth.

  “I do not know why she is so sour. Sour before we even got to this city,” Sadogo said.

  “Who, Venin?” I asked.

  “Stop calling me that foul name. That is what she said. But it is her name, what else should I call her? You were there when she said, My name is Venin, were you not?”

  “Well she was always sour to me, so I—”

  “Sour, she never was. I was never sour to her when I let her sit on my shoulder.”

  “Sadogo, there are more crucial things, and we need to have words.”

  “Why did they put us away from the others, Venin? That is all I said and she says that is not her name, and yells to take my monster arms and my monster face away, you will never get anywhere near me, for I am a fearsome warrior who wants to burn the world. And then she called me shoga. She is different.”

  “Maybe she did not see things the way you saw things, Sadogo,” Mossi said. “Who knows the ways of women?”

  “No, she is different and—”

  “Do not say Sogolon. Her scrawny hand is in far too many bowls for us to talk about them all. There is a plot, Sadogo. And the girl might be in league with Sogolon.”

  “But she spat when I said her name.”

  “Who knows why they bicker? We have more serious issues, Ogo.”

  “All these ropes, coming from nowhere and pulling everything. Foul magic.”

  “Slaves, Ogo,” Mossi said.

  “I do not understand.”

  “Let that rest for another day, Sadogo. The witch had other plans.”

  “She does not want the boy?”

  “That is still her plan. We are just not a part of it. She intends to get the boy herself after I find him, and with this Queen’s help. I think the Queen and her struck a bargain. Maybe when Sogolon rescues the boy the Queen will give safe passage to the Mweru.”

  “But that is what we do. Why the deceit?”

  “I don’t know. This Queen gets to have us for their wicked science, maybe.”

  “Is that why everybody is blue? Wicked science?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Venin, she pushed me out the door with one hand. How I must disgust her.”

  “She pushed you out? With one hand?” I asked.

  “That is what I said.”

  “I have seen an enraged woman turn over a wagon full of metal and spices. It might have been my wagon, or I might have enraged her,” Mossi said.

  “Sadogo,” I said, louder, to shut Mossi up. “We need to be on guard, we need weapons, we need to get off this citadel. How do you feel about the boy? Should we resc
ue him as well?”

  He looked at both of us, then out the door, furrowing his brow. “We should save the boy. No blame is on him.”

  “Then that is what we shall do,” Mossi said. “We wait for them to arrive in Dolingo. We take them on ourselves, not telling the witch.”

  “We need weapons,” I said.

  “I know where they keep them,” said Sadogo. “No man could lift my gloves, so I took them to the swords keeper.”

  “Where?”

  “On this tree, the lowest level.”

  “And Sogolon?” Mossi said.

  “There,” he said, and pointed behind us. The palace.

  “Good. We go when the bloodsuckers come. Till then—”

  “Tracker, what is that?” Mossi said.

  “What is what?”

  “Do you have a nose or no? That sweet scent on the air.”

  As he said so, I smelled it. The smell grew sweeter and stronger. In the red room nobody saw the orange mist coming from the floor. Mossi fell first. I staggered, fell to my knees, and saw Sadogo run to the door, punching the wall out of anger, fall back on his bottom, then full on his back, and shaking the room, before everything in the room went white.

  NINETEEN

  I knew it was seven days since we left Kongor. And forty and three days since we set off on this journey. And in one whole moon. I knew because counting numbers was all that kept my feet on the ground. I knew we were in the trunk of one of the trees. One big shackle around my neck, attached to a long, heavy chain. My arms chained behind my back. My clothes gone. I had to turn to see the ball the chain was bolted to. Both were stone. Someone told them of me and metals. Sogolon.

  “I say, tell us where is the boy,” he said.

  The chancellor. The Queen must be upstairs waiting for the news. No, not the Queen.

  “If Sogolon wants news of the boy, tell the witch to come for it herself,” I said.

  “Boy, boy, boy it will be good to tell me of your nose. If I go other men will come with instruments, yes.”