by Marlon James
The next morning Sadogo woke up to see the blue Ogo, in the middle of the courtyard, pull himself out of her body, leaving her smashed, ripped, and wrecked in a full moon of her own blood. Sadogo did not run to her, he did not cry, he did not leave his cell, he did not speak of it to the master.
“I will pit you against him finally so you can avenge her,” he said.
Later that night, another slave girl came to his cell and said, Look at me, I am now the wagers maid. They will lower me in the bucket.
“Tell the old men it would be foolish to bet against me.”
“They have already betted.”
“What?”
“They have already cast bets, most for you, some against you.”
“What do you mean?”
“The word was you were the smart Ogo.”
“Speak plain and true, slave.”
“The Master of Entertainments, he send bets, by slave, by messenger, and by pigeon, from seven days before, saying you will be pit against the blue one in a fight to the death.”
Before the fight, noise from the well rose loud and thick and bounced off dirt and rock. Noblemen in noble gowns, and gold-streaked slippers, and because this was a special night of special entertainment, they brought several noblewomen with heads wrapped like tall flowers pointing up to the sky. They were impatient, even though many battles left men with broken limbs, smashed heads, and a neck yanked out like from a chicken. Some men started cursing and some women too. Bring the sad-faced one, they chanted. Sad Ogo, sad Ogo, sad Ogo, they said, and shouted, Sad.
Ogo.
Sadogo.
Sadogo.
The blue Ogo threw off a black hood and leapt from a high ledge to the mound. He puffed his chest out. The women hissed and called for Sadogo. I will ram an iroko branch up his ass till it bursts through his mouth and cook him on a spit, the blue Ogo said.
Sadogo came in from the west, a tunnel no man had used before. He had wrapped his knuckles in straps of iron. The master followed him and began to shout.
“Lightning strike and thunder roll, even the gods stealing a look on this right now. Mark it, good gentlemen. Mark it, good wives and virgins. This day not going to be a day anyone soon forget. Who didn’t bet, bet now! Who bet, bet again!”
The new slave girl came down in the bucket and men threw satchels and coins and cowries at her. Some fell in the bucket, some hit her face.
Sadogo saw the new slave girl, lowered to the lowest ledge, then raised from ledge to ledge and swung around to take the bets. Just then it came to him, poetry sung by the girl in a language he did not understand. A language that might have said, Look at us, we speak of melancholy, and melancholy no matter the tongue is always the same word. The blue Ogo’s fist clobbered him right on the cheek and he spat the thought out. He fell back down in the water, which rushed into his nose and made him choke.
The blue Ogo waved into the crowd as some cheered and some hissed, clear when Sadogo’s ears rose out of the water, murky when he fell back in. The blue Ogo stomped around the mound, shoved his crotch out, and fucked the air. He looked down on Sadogo and laughed so loud that he coughed. Sadogo thought of lying there, hoping the water would rise, perhaps in a tide, and swallow him. The blue Ogo backed up and lowered his head like a bull. He ran three steps and leapt high. He clasped his hands together to bring them down on Sadogo’s head. Sadogo jammed his elbow into the mud and pulled himself into a right-hand swing, which punched right through the blue Ogo’s chest and burst through his back. Blue Ogo’s eyes popped wide. The crowd fell quiet. Blue Ogo fell, and rolled, pulling Sadogo up. Blue Ogo’s eyes still popped wide. Sadogo bellowed into the walls, pulled his hand and tore Blue Ogo’s heart out. Blue Ogo stared at him quick, spat blood, fell dead. Sadogo stood up, threw the heart at the middle ledge, and all the men dodged.
The Master of Entertainments ran out and addressed the crowd.
“Was ever a champion so, so melancholy, my brothers? When will he be beaten? When will he be stopped? Who shall stop him? And whose death—I said whose death, my brothers—will make him smi—”
The people right in front of the master saw it. Iron knuckles as they burst out of the master’s chest. The master’s eye flipping up into white. The Ogo’s hand pulling back in the quick and wrenching out his backbone. The master crumpled like fabric. The slave looked down from her bucket. The whole well fell quiet until one woman screamed. Sadogo dashed to the first ledge, punched away the wood brace supporting it, and screaming men slid right into his punching fist. First, second, third. The fourth tried to run through the water, but he grabbed her leg and swung her into another ledge full of men, knocking them all off. Men and women screamed to the gods and scrambled up ladders. More men scrambled on people scrambling up ladders. But Sadogo pulled away another brace and two ledges fell, and in one blow, one punch, one rip, one bludgeon, bodies piled on bodies. A man he punched flew into the mud and was swallowed by it. Another he stomped into the water until it went red. And so he pulled down ladder after ladder and ledge after ledge. He leapt onto one of the few ledges left, slamming, jamming, and knocking men off, and jumped from one to another, then another till he was so high that to kill, he just threw people off. He jumped to the top of the well and caught two as they ran, grabbed them both by the head and slammed them into each other. A boy climbed up and ran into him. A boy nowhere near a man, a boy dressed in rich robes like his father, a boy who looked at him more curious than afraid. He touched the boy’s face with both hands, gentle, soft, like silk, then grabbed him and threw him down the well. Then he roared like the beast. The slave girl in the bucket was still hanging above. She said nothing.
Sadogo almost skipped all the way to this lord’s dwelling. Then he went to his room and fell to snoring in a blink. The buffalo was in the courtyard eating grass, which must have been foul tasting but he seemed to like it. He looked up and saw me wearing the curtain and snorted. I hissed and tugged at it, pretending that I could not take it off. Again, he did something that sounded like a laugh, but none of these horned animals can laugh, although who knew which god was working mischief through him.
“Good buffalo, has anyone come around to this man’s place? Any dressed in black or blue?”
He shook his head.
“Any in the colour of blood?”
He snorted. I knew he could not see the colour of blood, but something in this bull made me want to have sport with him.
“Alas, I think we might be watched.”
He turned around, then turned back on me and grunted long.
“If any man shows up in black and blue, or in a black cape, raise alarm. But do what you wish with him.”
He nodded up and down and gargled.
“Buffalo, before the sun goes we shall go back to the riverside for better bush.”
He gargled and swished his tail.
Inside the Leopard’s room was only a trace. If I wanted to, I could smell deep into the rugs, past the shit and sperm and sweat of him and the boy, and know where they went and would go. But here is truth: I did not care. All that was left in the room was what they did, nothing of theirs. Here is another truth. I did have some trace of care, enough to know they were going southwest.
“They leave before day burst,” said the lord of the house behind me. He wore a white caftan that did not hide that he wore nothing underneath. Old shoga? That was a question I did not wish to ask.
He followed me as I walked to Sogolon’s room. He did not try to stop me.
“What is your name, sir?” I asked.
“What? My name? Sogolon said there would be no names …. Kafuta. Kafuta it is.”
“Great thanks for the room you give us and the food, Lord Kafuta.”
“I am no lord,” he said, looking past me.
“You are the lord of this magnificent house,” I said.
He smiled but it quit his face quick. I would have said, Take me to her room, this is still your house, if I thought to enter her room was w
hat he wished. He was not afraid of her; instead they seemed like brother and sister or sharers of old secrets.
“I shall go in,” I said. He looked at me, then past me, then at me, pressing his lips to appear unconcerned. I headed for her door.
“Will you follow?” I asked as I turned around to see him gone.
Sogolon did not lock her door. Not that any of the doors had locks, but I would have thought so of hers. Maybe every man believes that all an old woman has is secrets, and that was the second time I thought of secrets when I thought of her.
The smells in the room hit me first. Some I knew that took me out of the room, some I have never smelled the like. In the center of the room, a black-and-red rug with the curved patterns of textiles from the eastern kingdoms, and a wood headrest. But on the walls, painted, scrawled, scratched, and written, were runes. Some as small as a fingertip. Some taller than Sogolon herself. From them came the smells, some in coal, some in wood dye, some in shit, and some in blood. I saw the rug and the headrest and paid no attention to the floor. That was covered in runes as well, the freshest ones in blood. The room was so covered in marks that I hesitated to look at the ceiling, for I knew what I would see. Runes but also a series of circles, each wider than the one before. Truth, had I the third eye, I would have seen runes written in air.
One smell in the room, fresher than the rest, moved on the wind and grew stronger.
“You scare the lord of the house,” I said.
“He is no lord to me,” Bunshi said as she poured herself down from the ceiling to the floor.
I stood still and stiff; there was no way a black mass moving down from the ceiling was going to trouble me.
“I don’t think I want to know who are your lords,” I said. “Maybe you are a lord yourself that nobody worships anymore.”
“And yet you are so gentle with the giant,” she said.
“Call him Ogo, not giant.”
“That was a noble thing, hearing a man as he empties the whole world of his conscience.”
“Have you been spying on us, river witch?”
“Is every woman a witch to you, Wolf Eye?”
“And what of it?” I said.
“All you know of women is your mother jumping up and down your grandfather’s cock, yet you blame all of womandom for it. The day your father died was the first day of freedom your mother ever saw until your grandfather enslaved her again. All you ever did was watch woman suffer and blame her for it.”
I walked to the door. I would not hear any more of this.
“These are protection runes,” I said.
“How do you know? The Sangoma. Of course.”
“She covered the tree trunks with them, carved some, branded some, left some hanging in air and on clouds and on the ground. But she was Sangoma. To live as her is to know that evil forces rise day and night to come for you. Or wronged spirits.”
“Who did the Sangoma do wrong?”
“I mean Sogolon, not her.”
“What a story you have made of her.”
I went by the window and touched the marks all around the frame. “These are not runes.”
“They are glyphs,” Bunshi said.
I knew they were glyphs. Like the brands on that attacker who came in the whore’s window. Like the note wrapped around the pigeon leg. But not the same marks exactly; I could not tell for sure.
“Have you seen them before?” she said.
“No. She writes runes to keep spirits from coming in. For what does she need glyphs?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“I need no answer. But I leave today, before the sun goes.”
“This day? Do you need me to tell you that is too soon?”
“Too soon? It has been a moon and several days. A moon already wasted in a forest that nobody should have gone into. Me and the Ogo leave this evening. And anyone else who cares to. Maybe the buffalo.”
“No, Wolf Eye. There are more things to learn here. More things to—”
“To what? I am here to find a child, collect my gold, and go find the next lost husband who is not lost.”
“There are things you don’t even know that you don’t know.”
“I know where goes the child.”
“You keep this secret?”
“I tell who I feel needs to know. Maybe you sent us on a mission expecting us to fail. Good … whatever you are, for truly I know not … how stands your fellowship now? Nyka and his woman—”
“She has a name.”
“Fuck the gods if I care to remember it. Besides, they took off first, before we even left the valley. The Leopard is gone, and so is Fumeli, not that the boy had much use, and now your Sogolon is gone to wherever. Here is truth. I saw no reason for a group to find one child anyway. Nor did any of us. Not Nyka, not that cat, and not your witch.”
“Think like a man and not a child, Tracker, this is no task for one, or two.”
“And yet two is what you have. If Sogolon returns and is willing then we will be three.”
“One, three, or four might as well be none. If all I needed was someone to find the child, Tracker, I could have hired two hundred trackers and their dogs. Two questions, you can choose which to answer first. Do you think his abductor will hand him to you just because you say, I am here, hand me the boy?”
“They will—”
“Is the tracker such a fool to think I am the only one looking for this child?”
“Who else seeks him?”
“The one who visits you in dreams. Skin like tar, hair red, when you see him you hear the flutter of black wings.”
“I don’t know this man.”
“He knows you. They call him the Aesi. He answers to the North King.”
“Why would he visit my dreams?”
“They are your dreams, not mine. You have something he wants. He too might know that you have found the child.”
“Tell me more of this man.”
“Necromancer. Witchman. He is the King’s adviser. From an old line of monks who started working secret science and invoking devils and were thrown out of the order. The King consults him on all things, even which direction to spit. Do you know why they call Kwash Dara the Spider King? Because in everything he moves with four arms and four legs, except two of each belong to the Aesi.”
“Why does he want the boy?”
“We have spoken on this. The boy is proof of the killings.”
“Are bodies not proof enough? Or do they think the wife cut her own self in two? Who is the boy?”
“The boy is the last son of the last honest man in the ten and three kingdoms. I will save him if that is the last thing I do in this world or another.”
“I will not ask a third time.”
“How dare you ask me anything! Who are you that demands that I make things clear to you? Are you master over me now, is that how you will have it?”
Her eyes bulged and the fin grew out of the back of her head.
“No. I will have nothing but rest. I am tired from this.” I turned and walked out. “I leave in two days.”
“Not today?”
“Not today. It seems there is more I need to know.”
“Where is the child? How many moons away is he?” she asked.
“Don’t speak of my mother again,” I said.
That night I was again in a dream jungle. A new kind of dream where I wondered why I was in it, and why a dream of trees and bushes and bitter raindrops. And moving but not walking, and knowing something would reveal itself in a clearing, or in the mirror of a puddle, or in the lonely cry of a lonely ghost bird. Reveal something that I already knew. The Sangoma once told me that the dream jungle is where you find things that are hidden in the waking world. And that hidden thing might be a lust. The knowledge is in leaves, and dirt, and mist, and heat thick like a ghost, and it is a jungle because the jungle is the only place where anything can wait behind the cover of a large leaf. The jungle finds you, you cannot seek it
, which is why everyone in the jungle seeks why they are there. But looking for meaning will drive you mad, the Sangoma also said.
So I did not ask for meaning when Smoke Girl was the first to run to me, then run past me, not ignoring me but so used to my presence. And in the jungle was a man I only saw by hair on his hands and legs. He touched my shoulder, and chest, and belly, leaned his forehead to touch mine, then grabbed two spears and walked away. And Giraffe Boy stood with his legs wide open, the boy with no legs curled into a ball and rolled right between them, and the patch of sand in the middle of the bush blinked, then smiled, and the albino rose out of the sand as if he came from it and was not just hiding in it. Then he grabbed a spear and went to find the man I had no name for, but still felt warm at the thought that I do know his name. I had stopped walking but I was still walking and Smoke Girl sat down on my head and said, Tell me a story with an ant, a cheetah, and a magic bird, and I heard every word she said.
FIFTEEN
A ghost knows who to scare. As the sun glides to noon, men and women grab their children and run home, close windows, and draw curtains, for in Kongor it is noon that is the witching hour, the hour of the beast, when heat cracks the earth open to release seven thousand devils. I have no fear of devils. I went south, then turned west along the border road to the Nimbe quarter. Then I turned south down a crooked street, west down an alley, then south again until I came upon the Great Hall of Records.
Kongor was the record keeper for all the North Kingdom and most of the free states, and the Hall of Records was open to anyone who stated his purpose. But nobody came to these large rooms, five tall floors of scrolls stacked on shelves, stacked on top of each other, as tall as any palace in Kongor. The hall of records was like the palace of clouds in the sky—people were satisfied that it existed without ever entering, ever reading book or paper, or even coming close. On the way there I was hoping to meet a demon, or a spirit of someone who would feed the hunger of my two new axes. I truly wanted a fight.
Nobody was here but an old man with a hunch in his back.
“I seek the records of the great elders. Tax records as well,” I said to the old man. He did not look up from the large maps he stood over.
