Black Leopard, Red Wolf

by Marlon James

  In the morning, when I woke, a boy looked down on me. Not surprised at all, I was waiting for him, and for more like him. He raised his eyebrows, curious, and scratched at the shackle around his neck. Mossi grunted, frightening him, and the boy faded into the wood.

  “You have saved children before,” Mossi said.

  “I didn’t see you were awake.”

  “You are different when you think no one watches you. I always thought that what made one a man was that he takes up so much space. I sit here, my sword is there, my water pouch there, tunic there, chair over there, and legs spread wide because, well, I love it so. But you, you make yourself smaller. I wondered if it was because of your eye.”

  “Which one?”

  “Fool,” he said.

  He sat across from me, leaning against the wood planks. I rubbed his hairy legs.

  “That would be the one I speak of,” he said. “My father had two different eyes. Both were gray, until his enemy from childhood punched one brown.”

  “What did your father do to his enemy?”

  “He calls him Sultan, Your Great Eminence, now.”

  I laughed.

  “There are children of great importance to you. I have thought of such things, of children, but . . . well. Why think of flight when one can never be the bird? We are of strange passions in the East. My father—well my father is my father and just like the one before him. It was not that I . . . for I was not the first . . . not even the first carrying his name . . . and besides, my wife was chosen from a noble house before I was born, and so it would have gone, for such is the way of things. The thing is not what I did, the thing is the prophet allowed men to discover us and he was poor so he . . . I . . . they sent me away and told me never to sail back to their shores or it would be death.”

  “A wife? And a child?”

  “Four. My father took them and gave them to my sister to raise. Better to keep my filth away from their memory.”

  Fuck the gods, I thought. Fuck the gods.

  “Then I sailed off course. Maybe it was the gods. There are children you think of.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “A night never passes.”

  “This must be why loose wives dismiss us as soon as we burst. Sad talk of children.”

  He smiled.

  “Do you know of mingi?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Some of the river tribes and even some places in great cities like Kongor kill newborns who are unworthy. Children born weak, or limbless, or with top teeth before bottom, or with gifts or forms strange. Five of those children strange in form we saved, but they return to me in dreams—”

  “We?”

  “Does not matter now. These five return to me in dreams and I have tried to see them, but they live with a tribe that is my tribe’s enemy.”

  “How?”

  “I gave them to my tribe’s enemy.”

  “Nothing you ever say ends the way I think you would end it, Tracker.”

  “After my tribe tried to kill me for saving mingi children.”

  “Oh. You and these people, none of your rivers run straight. Take us finding this boy. There is no straight line between us and this boy, only streams leading to streams, leading to streams, and sometimes—and tell me if I lie—you get so lost in the stream that the boy fades, and with him the reason you search for him. Fades like that boy who just vanished in the ship.”

  “You saw him?”

  “Truth does not depend on me believing it, does it?”

  “This is truth, there are times I forget who we are after. I don’t even think of the coin.”

  “What compels you, then? Not reunite mother with child? You said that only a few days ago.”

  He crawled over to me and shafts of light marked stripes on his skin. He rested his head in my lap.

  “This is what you ask?”

  “Yes, this is what I ask.”

  “Why?”

  “You know why.”

  I looked at him.

  “The further I go—”

  “Yes?”

  “The more I feel that I have nothing to go back to,” I said.

  “This comes to you after how many moons?”

  “Prefect, news such as this comes only one way: too late.”

  “Tell me about your eye.”

  “It is from a wolf.”

  “Those jackals you call wolves? Maybe you lost a bet with a jackal. This is not jest, is it? Which question do you desire first: how or why?”

  “A shape-shifting hyena bitch in her woman form sucked the eye out of my skull, then bit it off.”

  “I should have asked why first. And after last night,” he said.

  “What of last night?”

  “You . . . nothing.”

  “Last night was not a deposit on something else,” I said.

  “No, that it was not.”

  “Can we talk of something else?”

  “We talk of nothing now. Except your eye.”

  “A gang ripped my eye out.”

  “A gang of hyenas, you said.”

  “Truth does not depend on you believing it, prefect. I wandered that wilderness between the sand sea and Juba for several moons, I can’t remember how many, but I do remember wanting to die. But not before I killed the man responsible.”

  Here is a short tale about the wolf eye. After this man betrayed me to the pack of hyenas, I couldn’t find him. After that I went roaming, and roaming, full and brimming with hate but with nowhere to let all this malcontent out. I went back to the sand sea, to the lands of beetles big as birds, and scorpions who stung the life out, and sat in a sand hole while vultures landed and circled. And then the Sangoma came to me, her red dress blowing though no wind blew, and her head circled by bees. I heard the buzz before I saw her, and when I saw her I said, This must be a fever dream, sun madness, for she was long dead.

  “I expect the boy with the nose to not have the nose but did not think the boy with the mouth would no longer have a mouth,” she said. It came trotting beside her.

  “You brought a jackal?” I asked.

  “Do not insult the wolf.”

  She grabbed my face, firm but not hard, and said words I did not understand. She grabbed some sand in her hand, spat in it, and kneaded it until the sand stuck together. Then she ripped off my patch and I jumped. Then she said, Close your good eye. She put the sand on my eye hole and the wolf came in closer. The wolf growled, and she whimpered, and she whimpered some more. I heard something like a stab and more growls from the wolf. Then nothing. Sangoma said, Count to ten and one before you open them. I started counting and she interrupted me.

  “She will come back for it, when you are near gone. Look out for her,” she said.

  So she lent me a wolf’s eye. I thought I would see far and long and make people out in the dark. And I can. But lose colour when I close my other eye. This wolf will one day come back and claim it. I couldn’t even laugh.

  “I could,” Mossi said.

  “A thousand fucks for you.”

  “A few more before we dock will be fine enough. You might even turn into something of a lover.”

  Even if he was joking, he annoyed me. Especially if he was joking, he annoyed me.

  “Tell me more about witches. Why you hate them so,” he said.

  “Who said I hate witches?”

  “Your own mouth.”

  “I fell sick in the Purple City many years ago. Sick near death—a curse some husband paid a fetish priest to put on me. A witch found me and promised me a healing spell if I did something for her.”

  “But you hate witches.”

  “Quiet. She was not a witch, she said, just a woman who had a child without a man, and this city can be wicked in its judgment of such thing
s. They took her child, she said, and gave it to a rich but barren woman. Will you make me well, I asked, and she said, I will give you freedom from want, which did not sound like the same thing. But I followed my nose and found her child, took her away from that woman in the night, disturbing no one. Then I don’t know what happened, except I woke up the next morning, well, with a pool of black vomit on the floor.”

  “Then why—”

  “Quiet. It really was her child. But she had a smell about her. Tracked her down two days later in Fasisi. She was expecting someone else. Somebody to buy the two baby hands and one liver she left out on the table. Witches cannot work spells against me, though she tried. I chopped her in the forehead before she could chant, then hacked her head off.”

  “And you have hated witches ever since.”

  “Oh I’ve hated them from long before that. I hate myself for trusting one, is more the like. People always go back to their nature in the end. It’s like that gum from the tree, that no matter how far you pull it, snaps itself back.”

  “Maybe you bear hatred for women.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “I’ve never heard you speak good of a single one. They all seem to be witches in your world.”

  “You don’t know my world.”

  “I know enough. Perhaps you hate none, not even your mother. But tell me I lie when I say you always expected the worst of Sogolon. And every other woman you have met.”

  “When have you seen me say any of this? Why do you say this to me now?”

  “I don’t know. You can’t go inside me and not expect me to go inside you. Will you think on it?”

  “I have nothing to think—”

  “Fuck the gods, Tracker.”

  “Fine, I shall think on why Mossi thinks I hate women. Anything more before I go on deck?”

  “I have one thing more.”

  * * *

  —

  We docked a day and a half later at noon. His forehead wound looked sealed, and none of us were sore, though we were all covered in scabs, even the buffalo. Most of that day I passed in the slave cabin, me fucking Mossi, Mossi fucking me, me loving Mossi, Mossi loving me, and me going above deck to check faces to see if anyone would start words with me. They either didn’t know or care—sailors are sailors everywhere—not even when Mossi stopped grabbing my hand to cover his shouts. The rest of the time Mossi gave me too many things to think about and it all came back to my mother, who I never, ever wanted to think about. Or the Leopard, who I had not thought of in moons, or what Mossi said that inside me is a hate for all women. It was a harsh thought and a lie, as I could not help that I have run into witches.

  “Maybe you draw the worst to you.”

  “Are you the worst?” I asked, annoyed.

  “I hope not. But I think of your mother, or rather the mother you told me about who might not even be real, or if she is real, not as you say. You sound like fathers where I am from who blame the daughter for rape, saying, Had you not legs to run away? Had you not lips to scream? You think as they do that suffering from cruelty or escaping it is a matter of choice or means, when it is a matter of power.”

  “You say I should understand power?”

  “I say you should understand your mother.”

  The night before we docked he said, Tracker, you are at all times a vigorous lover, but I do not think that was praise, and he kept asking me about long gone things, dead things, afterward. So much so that yes, I was getting a little tired of the prefect and his questions. In the morning the crew repaired a hole the Ogo punched through the bulkhead, without asking any questions. He said it was a nightmare.

  Kongori deserted their streets at noon, a perfect time to slip into the city and vanish down an alley. Take away the streets where the Tarobe, or the Nyembe, or the Gallunkobe/Matyube lived, and people made house anywhere they could buy, cheat, inherit, or claim, which meant that if most of the people stayed indoors then the entire city would look as if it hid behind walls. Not even the sentries, usually on guard around the city limits, stood by the shore. Mossi and I took two of the ship crewmen’s clothes in exchange for cowrie shells, and one, stunned, said, I have killed men for less. We wore the sea-worn robes of sailors, robes with hoods, and trousers like men from the East.

  More than seven nights had gone since we saw the city last. Maybe more but I could not remember. No loud music and nothing left of Bingingun masquerade but bits of straw, cloths, sticks, and staffs in red and green, all scattered on the street, with no master to claim them.

  I looked for the Ogo to look at me and the prefect with different eyes, but saw nothing. If anything, the Ogo talked more than he had in almost a moon, on everything from the agreeable sky to this most agreeable buffalo, that I almost told him that a chatter-loving Ogo would bring attention to us. I wondered if Mossi thought the same and that was why he kept behind us, until I caught his eye sweeping up and down and behind and beside, past each crossroad, his hand never leaving his sword. I pulled back, walking beside him.

  “Chieftain army?”

  “Down a merchant’s street? They paid us well to never come to these parts.”

  “Then who?”

  “Anyone.”

  “Which enemy is expecting us, Mossi?”

  “Not enemies on the ground. It’s pigeons in the sky that worry me.”

  “I know. And I have no friends here. I—”

  I had to stop right there, right on that road as we walked. I clutched my nose and backed against the wall. So many at once that an older me would have gone a little mad, but now they slapped my mind around, pushing me forward, and back, and all around at once; my nose making me dizzy.

  “Tracker?”

  I can walk in a land of a hundred smells I do not know. I can walk into a place with many smells I know if I know this is the place where they will be, and decide what scent my mind will follow. But six or even four ambushing me unawares and I go almost mad. So many years have gone since this has happened to me. I remembered the boy who trained me to cluster on one, the boy I had to kill. There, all of them came at me, all I remember, not all I remember being in Kongor.

  “You smell the boy,” Mossi said, grabbing my arm.

  “I’m not going to fall.”

  “But you smell the boy.”

  “More than this boy.”

  “Is that good or not so?”

  “Only the gods know. This nose is a curse, it is no blessing. Much afoot in this city, more than when I was last here.”

  “Speak plain, Tracker.”

  “Fuck the gods, do I sound mad?”

  “Peace. Peace.”

  “That’s what that fucking cat used to say.”

  He grabbed me and pulled me into his face.

  “Your temper is making it worse,” he said.

  The Ogo and buffalo had walked on, not noticing we had stopped. He touched my cheek and I flinched.

  “No one sees us,” he said. “Besides, it gives you something else to worry about.” He smiled.

  “I think someone tracks us. How far are the Nyembe streets?” I asked.

  “Not far, north and west of here. But there’s no masking these two,” he said, pointing at the buffalo and the Ogo.

  “We should stay along the coast. Do we go to the boy?” Mossi asked.

  “It’s only three of them now, and the Ipundulu is wounded. No witch-mother to quicken his healing.”

  “You say wait?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “Mossi.”

  “Tracker.”

  “Quiet. I say while we hunt people, people hunt us. The Aesi might still be in Kongor. And I have this feeling he watches us, just waiting for us to fall into his lap. And others, others who track us.”

  “My sword is ready when
they find us.”

  “No. We shall find them.”

  Dusk came before we snuck through deserted alleys to get west. We passed a lane narrow enough for only one to pass through that Mossi dashed in and came back with blood on his sword. He did not say, I did not ask. We continued north and east, lane to lane, until we reached the Nyembe quarter and that snake street that led to the old lord’s house.

  “Last I was on this street it was infested with Seven Wings,” I said.

  He pointed to the flag of the black sparrow hawk, still flying from that tower three hundred paces away. “That still flies, though. And the Fasisi King’s mark is everywhere.”

  We came to the doorway, suspiciously open.

  “There’s a mark right here on this wall that I know,” I said.

  “I thought you would give word about the piss first.”

  Mossi jumped, but I did not move, though I wished I had an ax. He came from somewhere deep in this house, running down the narrow hallway leading outside, and leapt straight at me, knocking me down flat on the ground. The buffalo snorted, the Ogo ran to my side, and Mossi drew his two swords.

  “No,” I said. “He’s a—”

  The Leopard licked my forehead. He rubbed his head against my right cheek, dipped under my chin, and rubbed against the left. He rubbed his nose against my nose and rested his forehead on mine. He hummed and purred as I sat up. Then he shifted shape.

  “Picked that up from lions, you poor excuse of a leopard,” I said.

  “Shall we go into the foul things you’ve picked up, wolf? Because foul they are. Soon I shall hear that you kiss with tongue.”

  The snort came from me, not the buffalo.

  “You, with your eye of a dog, me with my eyes of a cat. We are quite the pair, are we not, Tracker?”

  Leopard jumped to his feet and pulled me up. Mossi still had both swords drawn, but the Ogo went right up to the Leopard and picked him up.

  “I like you more than most cats,” he said.

  “How many cats do you know, Sadogo?”