by Marlon James
She jumped. I grabbed her hand, yanked it behind her back, pressing my knife to her neck. She tried to scream but I pressed the knife harder. Then she started to utter a whisper I knew. I whispered something back and she stopped.
“I am protected by a Sangoma,” I said.
“You pick here to rob a poor woman? You pick this place?”
“What is it you carry, girl?” I asked.
For she was a girl and thin, her cheeks hungry. Her hand, which I still held, was near down to bone, something I could break with just a twist.
“Curse you if you make me drop it,” she said.
“What shall you drop?”
“Take your eyes out of my bosom, or take my purse and go.”
“Money is not what I look for. Tell me what you carry or I will stab it.”
She flinched, but I knew what it was before the dried milk vomit smell came to me, and before it gurgled.
“How many cowries buys a baby in the Malangika?”
“You think I selling my baby? What kind of witch sell her own baby?”
“I don’t know. What kind of witch buys one, that I know.”
“Let me go or I going scream.”
“A woman’s scream in these tunnels? That is every street. Tell me how you come by the baby.”
“You deaf? I say—”
I twisted her arm behind her back, right up almost to her neck, and she screamed, and screamed again, trying to not drop the child. I released her hand a little.
“Go slip back in your mother cunt,” she said.
“Whose baby?”
“What?”
“Who is the mother of the baby?”
She stared at me, frowning, thinking of something to say that would make a lie out of the sound of this baby waking up and hating the rough cloth he was wrapped in.
“Mine. Is mine. Is my own baby.”
“Not even a whore would take her child to the Malangika unless she goes to sell it. To a—”
“I not no whore.”
I let her go. She turned away from me as if to run, and I pulled one of the axes from my back.
“Try to run and this will split the back of your head before you reach fifty paces. Test me if you wish.”
She looked at me and rubbed her arm.
“I look for a man. A special man, special even in the Malangika,” I said.
“I don’t mess with no man.”
“And yet you just said this is your baby, so messed with a man, you did. He is hungry.”
“He not no concern for you.”
“But hungry he is. So feed him.”
She pulled the cloth from the baby’s head. I smelled baby vomit and dried piss. No shea butter, no oil, no silks, nothing that graces a baby’s precious buttocks. I nodded and pointed my ax at her breasts. She pulled her robe and the right breast slipped out, thin and lanky above the baby’s face. She shoved the breast into the baby’s mouth and it started sucking, pulling so hard she winced. The baby spat out her breast, and cried into a scream.
“You have no milk,” I said.
“He not hungry. What you know about raising a child?”
“I raised six,” I said. “How were you going to feed him?”
“If you didn’t interfere, we would reach home long time now.”
“Home? The nearest village is three days away on foot. Can you fly? The child would starve by then.”
She dug into her dress for the pouch, and tried to pull it open with both hands while still holding the child.
“Look here, dog-fucker or whatever you be. Take the coin and go buy yourself a girl so you can kill and eat her liver. Leave me be, me and my child.”
“Hark those words. I would say raise your child around better folks, but it is not your child.”
“Leave me be!” she shouted, and pulled the pouch open. “Here, see it here. Take it all.”
She held it out, but then dashed it. I swung my ax to knock it out of the way and it hit the wall and fell to the ground. Little vipers came out and grew big. She ran but I chased her, gained on her, grabbed her hair and she screamed. She dropped the baby. I pushed her hard, and picked up the child as she staggered to a fall. She shook her head and wobbled as I pulled the boy out of the nasty cloth. His body, dark as tea, she had marked with white clay. A line around the neck. A line at each joint in the arms and legs. A cross at his navel, and circles around his nipples and his knees.
“What a night you were planning for yourself. You are no witch, not yet, but this would have made you one, maybe even a powerful one, instead of someone’s apprentice.”
“Get you cock sting by a scorpion,” she said, sitting up.
“On the art of cutting up a child, you have no expertise, so he drew where to cut. The man who sold you the baby.”
“All coming out of your mouth is wind.”
The boy wiggled in my arms.
“Men in the Malangika, they sell wretched things, unspeakable things. Women do this too. But a baby, alive, untouched, is no easy thing to find. This is not bastard or foundling. Only the purest child could give you the most powerful magic, so you bought yourself the purest child. Stolen from a noblewoman. And no easy thing to buy, three days from the nearest city. So you must have given him something of great value. Not gold, or cowries. You gave him another life. And since merchants can only appreciate things of value, that life must have been valuable to you. A son? No, a daughter. Child brides go for even more than the newborn here.”
“A thousand fucks—”
“I have long passed a thousand fucks. Where is the master who sold you this baby?”
Still on the ground, she scowled at me, even as she rubbed her forehead with her right hand. I stepped on her left hand and she yelled.
“If I ask again, it will be after I chop this hand off.”
“You bastard son of a whoring North wolf bitch. Cut the hand off a defenseless woman.”
“You just defended yourself with a spell of vipers. Which of his feet was for the amulet, left or right?”
“What plenty you know about witch and witchmen. You must be the real witch.”
“Or maybe I kill witches. For money, yes. One can always use money. But really for sport. The merchant, where is he?”
“Fool, he shift whereabouts every night. No elephant remember the way there, no crow can find him.”
“But you bought the child this night.”
I stomped harder on her hand and she yelled again.
“The midnight street! Go to the end, and turn right past the dead tree, then down the three sets of steps, deep in the dark. So dark that you can’t see, only feel. He in the house of a witchman with the heart of an antelope rotting on the door.”
I stepped off her hand and she grabbed it, cursing me under her breath.
“No good going come to you. Before you meet him, you going meet two.”
“What charity, giving me warning.”
“Warning not going save you. Me telling you not going mean a thing.”
I rubbed the baby’s belly. He was hungry. One of these merchants—sellers, witchmen, or witches—must have had some goat’s milk. I would kick down the next door, ask for goat’s or cow’s milk, and chop off hands until a hand brought me some.
“Say, hunter,” she said. Still on the ground, the witch started hiking up her skirt.
“What use the baby be to you? What use he be to the mother? You never going find them, and them never going find you. Put the baby to use. Think, good hunter, what I can give you when I come into my power. You want coin? You want the finest merchants to just look at you and give you fine silks and their plumpest daughter? I can do that. Give me the little baby. He so sweet. I can smell the good he going to do. I can smell it.”
She stood up and held out her hand
s for the child.
“Here is what I shall give you. I will give you a count to ten before I throw this ax and split the back of your head open like a nut.”
The young witch cursed and screwed her face, like the man whose opium you took away. She turned to go, then spun back and shouted for her baby.
“One,” I said.
“Two.”
She ran off.
“Three.”
I flung my ax, sending it spinning after her. She ran past four doors before she heard the whir coming. The witch turned around and it struck her in the face. She landed flat on her back. I went over and pulled the ax out of her head.
I passed two lanes and went down a third that carried fragrance. The fragrance was not real and neither was the lane. A street for the wicked but foolish, a street to lure people through doors from which they would never return. So I knocked on the third door I passed, the one the fragrance came from. An old woman opened the door, and I said, I smell milk here and I will have it. She pulled out a breast, squeezed it hard, and said, Any milk you get drink it, ash boy. Ten paces down, a fat man in a white agbada opened his door to my ax. Milk, I said. Inside was not inside and his house had no roof. Goats and sheep ran around bleating, eating, and shitting and I did not ask what he used them for. I placed the child on a table.
“I will be back for the child,” I said.
“Which voice in this house say you can leave him?”
“Feed him milk of the goat.”
“You leave a boy child with me? Many a witch come and many a witch go looking for baby skin. What to stop me from fatting up me purse?”
The fat man reached for the child. I chopped his hand off. He screamed and cussed and wailed and bawled in a tongue I didn’t know. I took the hand.
“I will return your hand in three flips of the time glass. If the child is gone I will use your own hand to find you and cut you to pieces, one piece a day.”
* * *
—
Midnight street was called so because at the mouth of it was a sign marked MIDNIGHT. This is how anyone coming would see me. Wearing nothing but white clay, from neck to ankles, my hands and feet. Straps for axes and sheaths for knives. Around my eyes, dark so the weak would see a man of bones coming for them. I was nothing.
Ten and five paces, the air grew colder, and heavier. Out of this strange air I stepped, then walked forward again until sour dew touched my face. The enchantment left my mouth a whisper, and after that I waited. And waited. Something scurried behind me and I pulled my knives quick, then turned around to see rats running away. So I waited longer. I was about to start walking when above me the air crackled and sparked, then burst in a flame that raced in a circle the span of my arms, and went out. The air was less heavy and sour, but the road looked the same. Not one of the ten and nine doors, but just a door. Seven steps in, the floor vanished. I tried to jump back but fell in, spun, and stabbed the knives into the dirt around me. Below my feet, only air. The drop could have been to the center of the world, or into a pit of spikes or snakes. I pulled myself up, ran back, dashed to the edge, leapt into the air, missed the landing, and slammed into the side, stabbing the dirt to not fall in again.
The path ended in a bank of bush. I turned right past the dead tree the witch spoke of, and came to a cliff with a drop, this time with steps cut into the dirt going down three flights. At the bottom, another path leading to the door of a hut cut into the rock, with two windows above, yellow with flickering light. My nose was searching for sour air, and each hand still gripped a knife. I sheathed them and pulled out an ax. Nobody had locked the door. Nobody was supposed to get this far. I stepped inside a house at least five times larger than it looked from outside, like the great halls I have seen men make on the inside of a baobab tree. Around the room books showed their backs on shelves, and scrolls and papers sat on tables. In glass jars everything that could come out of the body was kept in liquid. In a bigger jar with the water all yellow, a baby with his mother rope floating like a snake. At the right, cages one atop the other with birds of every colour. Not all of them were birds; some looked like lizards with wings, and one had the head of a meerkat.
In the middle of the room stood a man as small as a boy, but old, with a thick plank of glass strapped to his eyes, which made each eye look as large as a hand. I crept in, my feet kicking away papers covered in shit, some of it fresh. Something laughed from above me and I looked up to see swinging from a rope in the ceiling and hanging by the tail two mad monkeys. Face like a man, but green like rot. Two eyes white and popping, the right small, the left bigger. Not in clothes, but ripped cloth flapped all over them. Their noses punched in like an ape’s, and long jagged teeth when they smiled. One was smaller than the other.
The small monkey jumped down before I could pull my second ax. He leapt onto my chest. I pushed him away from my face as he tried to bite my nose off. Both of them EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE’d. The man ran into the other room. The small one whipped his tail around, trying to slash me, but I grabbed his neck with one hand and held the ax for him to slash his tail right into the blade. He shrieked and fell back, bawling. I pulled my second ax and hammered both at his body, but the larger monkey yanked him away with his tail. The bigger monkey threw a jar at me, I ducked and it smashed into the wall. He slapped the smaller monkey to shut him up. I ran over to a shelf as glass jars kept shattering around me. Then silence.
Near my foot, a wet hand lay. I grabbed it and threw it to my right. Jar after jar smashed against the wall. I grabbed my axes, jumped up, threw the first one. The large monkey dodged the first but ran into the second, which chopped his forehead. He fell against a shelf, pulling it down with him. The smaller one picked up his tail and ran off through a dark crevice between two shelves. I pulled away books and scrolls until I saw the stem of my ax. I hammered into the mad monkey’s head with both axes until his flesh hit my face.
In the room but behind me it was, the door where from the rotting heart of an antelope hung a cracked Ifa bowl.
Inside the room, the man sat with a woman, and child sat at the table. Both woman and boy styled their hair stranger than in any land I have been to, branches sticking out of their heads as with the deer, and dried dung holding hair and branches together. The woman looked at me with glowing eyes, and the child, a boy, perhaps, smiled as a flower popped open from one of the branches. The man looked up.
“You wearing nothing but white. Who do you mourn?” he said.
He saw me looking at the wife.
“She good with the fucky-fucky, but gods alive, she can’t cook. Can’t cook a shit. Me no know if me can offer none of this to you. Cook it too long, I tell you. You hear me, woman, you can’t cook it too long. Blink three time and peppered afterbirth is ready. You want a piece, my friend? It just come out of a woman from the Buju-Buju. She don’t care that she make the ancestors mad for not burying it.”
“Did the afterbirth come with a baby?” I asked.
He frowned, then smiled. “Strangers, they be coming to the doctor with jokes and jokes. No so, wife?”
The wife looked at him, then at me, but said nothing. The boy cut a piece of the afterbirth with his knife and shoved it in his mouth.
“So, you are here,” he said. “Who you is?”
“You sent two of yours to welcome me.”
“They welcome everybody. And since you is standing there, they—”
“Gone.”
I put away my axes and pulled the knives. They continued eating, trying to pretend I was gone, but kept looking in my direction, the woman especially.
“You the baby seller?”
“I transact many a thing, always with a honest man heart.”
“An honest man’s heart must be why you are in the Malangika.”
“What you want?”
“When did your skin return to you?”
“You
still talking nothing but foolishness.”
“I seek someone who does business in the Malangika.”
“Everybody do business in the Malangika.”
“But what he buys, you’re of a few who sell it.”
“So go check the few.”
“I have. Four before you, one after you. Four so far dead.”
The man paused, but just for a blink. The woman and child kept on eating. His face was to his wife but his eyes followed me.
“Not before my wife and child,” he said.
“Wife and child? This wife and this child?”
“Yes, don’t do—”
I threw both knives; one struck the woman in the neck, the other struck the boy in the temple. Both shook and jerked, shook and jerked, then their heads crashed on the table. The old man screamed. He jumped up, ran to the boy, and grabbed his head. The flower on his head wilted, and something black and thick oozed slow from his mouth. The old man wailed and screamed, and bawled.
“I seek someone who does business in the Malangika.”
“Oh gods, look!”
“You kill children now,” a voice I knew said.
“What he buys, you have been known to sell,” I said to the old man. “Sakut vuwong fa’at ba,” I said to the thought.
“Oh gods, my sorrow. My sorrow,” he cried.
“Merchant, if any god were to look, what would he say about you and your obscene family?”
