by Marlon James
Now I wanted to jump, just to land on his head. But sleep came at me like a mistress.
“Tracker. Do not even think of jumping into this river wearing that stupid curtain. You act as if clothes are second nature to the Ku, when we all know.”
You have been trying to get me out my robes for two days now, I thought but did not say. My splash was so loud I thought it was somebody else’s until I sunk under the water. The cold hit so hard and sharp that I sucked in water and broke the surface coughing. The prefect laughed until he coughed as well.
“At least you can swim. One never knows with men from the North.”
“You think we can’t swim.”
“I think you are so obsessed with water spirits you never go in the river.”
He flipped over, dived under, and his feet splashed me.
He was still swimming, and diving, and splashing, and laughing, and shouting at me to get back in the water when I sat on the banks. My clothes were back on the cliff and I needed to get them, but not because it was cold. He stepped out of the water, shaking off the glisten of his wet skin, and sat down beside me.
“Ten years I lived in that place. Kongor, I mean,” he said.
I looked out at the river.
“Ten years I lived in that city, ten years among its people. ’Tis a funny thing, Tracker, to live in the same place for ten years with people who are by far the most open yet the least friendly people I have yet to meet. My neighbor would not smile when I said, Good morning and be safe from ruin, brother. But he will say, My mother is dead, how I hated her in life and will now hate her in death. And he might leave fruits at my door if he has too much, but will never knock on my door for me to greet him and say my thanks, or worse, invite him in. ’Tis a coarse love.”
“Or maybe he is no friend of prefects.”
I could tell without looking that he was frowning.
“Where do you go with this?” I asked.
“I feel you were about to ask how I felt to have killed men dear to me. And they were, in a way, dear. The truth is I feel remorse at not feeling remorse. I say to myself, How do I feel grief for people who kept their love at arm’s length from me always? This bores you. It bores me. Do you still wish for sleep?”
“More talk like this and I will.”
He nodded.
“We could talk through the night, or I could point out mighty hunters and wild beasts in the stars. You could also say, Fuck the witch and her old beliefs, I am a man of science and mathematics.”
“Mockery is cheap.”
“Fear is cheap. Courage costs.”
“So I am now the coward for not sleeping. What say you?”
“A strange night this is. Are we near the noon of the dead?”
“It has come and passed, I think.”
“Oh.”
He was quiet for a while.
“You men from the eastern light worship only one god,” I said.
“What is meant by ‘eastern light’? The light which falls on that place falls on this also. There is only one god. Vengeful in humor, merciful too,” he said.
“How do you know you picked the right god?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“If you can only have one, how did you make the right choice?”
He laughed. “Choosing a lord would be like choosing wind. He chose to make us.”
“All gods make. No reason to worship them. My mother and father made me. I don’t owe them worship for it.”
“So you raised yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Hard for a child to grow with no parents, East or West.”
“They are not dead.”
“Oh.”
“How do you know your god is even good?”
“Because he is. He says he is,” Mossi said.
“So the only proof you have that he is good is his own word for it. Have I told you? I am the mother of twenty and nine children. And I am sixty years old.”
“You make no sense.”
“I make too much sense. If he says, I am good, there is no proof, only that he said so.”
“Maybe you should sleep.”
“Sleep if you wish,” I said.
“So that you can watch me in slumber?”
I shook my head. “If we are in Dolingo, you are ten days’ ride from Kongor.”
“There is nothing to ride back to, in Kongor.”
“No wife, no children, no sisters or brothers you traveled with? No home with two trees and your own little granary with millet and sorghum to return to?”
“No, no, no, no, no, and no. A few of those I fled to come here. And what do I go back to? A room that I owe in rent. A city where people grabbed at my hair so much that I cut it off. Brothers in the chieftain army I have killed. Brothers who now want to kill me.”
“There is nothing to ride forward to in Dolingo.”
“There is adventure. There is this boy you search for. There are uses for my skilled sword yet. And there is your back, which clearly needs watching, since nobody else does such.”
I did not laugh long.
“When I was young, my mother said that we sleep because the shy moon did not like when we watched her undress,” I said.
“Don’t close your eyes.”
“They are not closed. Yours are, right now.”
“But I never sleep.”
“Never?”
“A little, sometimes never. Night comes and goes like a flash and I may have slept for two flips of a sandglass. Since I never tire in the morning, I assume I slept according to need.”
“What do you see at night?”
“Stars. In my lands night is where people do the evil to enemies they call friends in the day. It’s when sihrs and jinns come play, and people scheme and plot. Children grow to fear it because they think there be monsters. They build a whole thing about it, about night and dark and even the colour black, which is not even a colour here. Not here. Here evil has no qualm with striking at noon. But it leaves night beautiful in look and cool of feel.”
“That was almost verse.”
“I am a poet among prefects.”
I thought to say something about wind rippling on the river.
“This boy, what is his name?” he whispered.
“I don’t know. I don’t think anyone bothered to name him. He is Boy. Precious to many.”
“And yet nobody named him? Not his mother? Who has him now?”
I told him the story up to the perfume and silver merchant. He raised himself up on his elbows.
“Not this Omoluzu?”
“No. It wasn’t the boy’s blood they followed. These were different. The merchant, his two wives and three sons all had their lives sucked out of them. Just like Fumanguru. You saw the bodies. Whoever they are, they leave you worse alive than dead. Did not believe it until I saw a woman like a zombi with lightning coursing through her like blood. I came to Kongor to find the boy’s scent.”
“I see why you need me.”
I knew he smirked, even if I didn’t see it.
“All you have is a nose,” he said. “I have an entire head. You want to find this child. I will find him in a quartermoon, before the man with wings finds him.”
“Seven nights? You sound like a man I used to know. Do you care what we do when we find him?”
“Pursuit, Tracker. I leave capture to others.”
He stretched out on the grass and I looked at my toes. Then I looked at the moon. Then I looked at the clouds, white and shiny on top, silver in the middle, and black underneath as if pregnant with rain. I tried to think of why I never think of this boy, not what he might look like, or sound like, even though he was the reason we were here. I mean, I thought of him when I tracked all that happened, but I was more taken with Fumanguru, and the lies of Belekun the Big, and the game both Sogolon and Bunshi were playing with information; taken by all who sought this boy more th
an the boy himself. I thought of a room of women all about to fight over a dull lover. Even this Aesi wanting the boy sparked something brighter in me than the boy himself. Though I was sure that it was the King himself who wanted him dead. This King of the North, this Spider King with four arms and four legs. My King. Mossi uttered something, somewhere between a sigh and a moan, and I looked over. His face was to me but his eyes closed and the moonlight moved up and down his face.
Before first light something floated on the breeze, a smell of animals far off, and I thought of Leopard. Anger burned in me, but then it left in the quick, leaving sadness and many words that I could have said. His laugh would have bounced all over that cliff. I did not want to miss him. I had gone years without seeing him before we met at that inn, but until then I always felt that he was the one soul who if I ever needed him would appear without me even asking. The detestable Fumeli crowded my thoughts and made me want to spit. Still, I wondered where he was. His smell was not unknown to me; I could have used the memory of it to find him, but did not.
We set out before sunrise. The buffalo kept nodding to his back until I climbed on, lay down, and went fast to sleep. I woke up to my cheek rubbing against the coarse chest hair of the Ogo.
“The buffalo, he grew tired of carrying you,” Sadogo said, his massive right hand cradling my back, his left in the hook of my knees.
Ahead, Sogolon rode with the girl and Mossi rode alone. The sun, almost gone, left the sky yellow, orange, and gray, with no clouds. Mountains far off on both sides, but the land was flat and grassy. I didn’t want to be cradled like a child, but I didn’t want to ride with Mossi either, and I would have slowed everyone down on foot. I pretended to yawn and closed my eyes. But then he ran across my nose and I jumped. The boy. I almost slipped from Sadogo’s hand but he caught me and put me down. South, but heading north, just as sure as we were north heading south.
“The boy?” Mossi said. I didn’t see him dismount, or that everybody had stopped.
“South. I can’t say how far. Maybe a day, maybe two days. He’s heading north, Sogolon.”
“And we are heading south. We will meet in Dolingo.”
“You seem very sure,” Mossi said.
“I sure now. Not so sure ten days ago until I go and do my own work, just as the Tracker go and do his work.”
“Here is good trade. You tell me how you come by your knowledge, and I will tell you how I come by mine,” I said.
“Yes, the boy run hot, then it run cold. Hot for one day and then cold just like that. Never fades, no? Not like a boy who run too far, he scent just vanish, like he dip himself in the river to throw off wild dogs. This not a riddle, Tracker, surely you know why.”
“No.”
“A house with a man who owe me many things up ahead. We stop there. And … house of a man …”
Wind knocked her off the horse, kicked her high in the air, and dropped her flat on her back. Breath burst out of her mouth. The girl jumped off the horse, ran to her, but a nothing in the air slapped her. I heard the slap, the sound of wet skin on skin, but nothing to see, the girl’s face twisting left then right. Sogolon raising a hand to block her face, as if somebody came at her with an ax. Mossi jumped off his horse and ran to her but wind knocked him back as well. Sogolon fell to her knees and clutched her belly, then screamed, then yelled, then said something in a language I didn’t know. All of this I saw before, right before the Darklands. Sogolon stood up but air slapped her down again. I drew my axes but knew they were no use. Mossi ran to her again and the wind knocked him down. On the wisp of air came voices, a scream one blink, a laugh the next. Whatever it was disturbed the Sangoma’s enchantment, and I could feel something on me and within me trying to flee. Sogolon shouted something in that language again, as the wind gripped her neck and pushed her down in the dirt. The girl searched around for a stick, found a stone, and started drawing runes in the sand. The girl marked, and scratched, and dug, and brushed dirt with her fingers, making runes in the dirt until she made a circle around Sogolon. The air howled until it was just wind, then nothing.
Sogolon rose, still trying to catch her breath. Mossi ran over to help her up, but the girl jumped between them and swatted away his hand.
“She not to be touch by no man,” she said.
Which was the first time I was hearing such news. But she let the Ogo lift her up on her horse.
“These the same spirits from outside the Darklands?” I shouted at her.
“Is the man with the black wings,” Sogolon said. “Is this—”
I heard it too, along the path, on both sides, a cracking as if earth was breaking apart. The buffalo stopped and swung around. The girl, standing by Sogolon, grabbed her staff and pulled it apart to show the tip of a lance. The earth kept cracking, and the girl grabbed Sogolon to help her back on her horse. The buffalo started to trot and Sadogo was about to pick me up and put me on his shoulders. From the cracking earth came heat and sulfur, which made us cough. And the cackle of old women, louder and louder until it turned into a hum.
“We should run,” Mossi said.
“Wise counsel,” I said, and we both ran to the horse.
Sadogo put on his knuckles. The cracking and the cackling grew louder, until something burst out, right in the middle of the path, with a scream. A column, a tower that bent, and cracked, and split pieces off. Three others burst through the ground on the right, like obelisks. Sogolon was too weak to rein the horse, so the girl pressed her knees into him. The horse tried to gallop but the shifting, cracking column unfolded itself, shaped itself, and it was a woman, larger than the horse, below the waist dark and scaly and still rising from the earth as if the rest of her body was a snake. She rose as tall as two trees, and spooked Sogolon’s horse, which jumped up on her hind legs and threw both of them off. Her skin looked like the moon, but it was white dust floating in the air like clouds. On the two sides of the path rose four more, with thin rib bones pressing against their skin, and breasts plump, faces with dark eyes and wild locks that rose high like flame. The creatures on the right covered themselves in dust, the creatures on the left covered themselves in blood. Also this, the flutter of wings, though none of them had any wings. One swooped in and knocked Mossi down. She raised her hand and her claws grew. She would slice him to nothing before he turned over. I jumped in front of him and swung my ax at her hand, chopping it at the wrist. She screamed and backed away.
“Mawana witches,” Sogolon said. “Mawana witches, he … controlling them.”
One of them grabbed Mossi’s horse. Sadogo ran to her and punched her but she still held on to the horse, which was too big for her to eat, but small enough to take down in the hole with her. Sadogo ran, jumped, and landed on her shoulder, his legs wrapped around her neck. She swung up and down and around, trying to throw him off, but he hammered into her forehead until we heard a crack, and she dropped the horse. The Mawana witch grabbed Sadogo and flung him away. He rolled in the dirt until he stopped, on his feet. He was mad now. A bloodied witch grabbed the buffalo’s horns to pull him away, but nothing would move this bull. He backed away, pulling her. I jumped up on his back and swung my ax at her, but she dodged and backed away, almost cowered. Sadogo leapt on the back of a dusty one, all of him about the size of the witch aboveground. She swung and slashed and tried to strike but he was on her back. She shot up, swung down, shook her skin rapidly like a wet dog, but Sadogo held on. He wrapped his arm around her neck and squeezed until she choked. She could not get a grip, so she rose and fell and shook, until his legs swung, then she cut into his right thigh with her claws. Yet he would not let go. He gripped her around the neck until she fell. Two more rose, and went after Sogolon and the girl. As I ran to them, jumping over Mossi and shouting for the buffalo to come with me, the girl raised her lance to ram right through the witch’s stomping hand. She shrieked and I jumped on the buffalo’s horns for him to throw me high at her. My two axes out, I swung both to her neck and chopped her head off. It hung
on, swinging on skin. The other witch backed away. Mossi looked at me. The witch was coming up behind him. I threw an ax to him, he caught it and swung his whole body around, throwing force behind the ax and slashing right through her throat. His throat. This one had a long beard. The last two, one dusty, one bloody, rose so high in the air that they looked like they would pull themselves out of the ground and fly away. But both dove back down. I ran towards them and both broke away and dove into the earth as birds dive into the sea.
“I never knew witch would attack witch,” I said.
Sogolon, still on the ground said, “They would not attack you.”
“What? I fought them all, woman.”
“Don’t tell me that you never see them all backing away from you,” she said.
“It is because I’m still covered by the Sangoma.”
“They is flesh, not irons or magic.”
“Maybe they afraid of a man-born Ku,” I said.
“You did sleep last night?”
“What you think, witch?”
“Don’t bother with what I think. You did sleep?”
“And as I said, what do you think?”
The girl grabbed her lance and raised it above her shoulder.
“You was awake all of last night?”
I looked straight at the girl. “Woman-child, what is this you doing? Sogolon teach you two lessons and you think you can throw a lance at me? Let’s see if your lance can pierce my skin before my ax splits your face.”
“He was awake all night, Sogolon. I was there with him,” Mossi said.
“You don’t have to vouch for me.”
“And you don’t have to keep making malice with people right beside you,” he said.
He shook his head as he walked past me. The girl helped Sogolon up. Sadogo came back holding his hands out as if he lost something.
“Your horse, she broke two legs,” he said. “Nothing to do but—”
“If the Aesi don’t jump in your dream, then he find some other way to follow we,” Sogolon said.
“Unless you mean the daydream of me between an Omororo prince and his comelier cousin, I will say no.”
“What about the prefect?”
“What about me?” Mossi said.
