Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Dark Star Trilogy)

SIX

This.

You wish that I read this.

Check the account for yourself, you say. Make my mark where it says different from what happened. I don’t need to read; you write as Ashe wishes. Ashe is the everything, life and death, morning and night, good luck and bad tidings. What you in South think is a god but is where the gods come from.

But do I believe it?

A smart question. Fine, I will read it.

Testimony of the Tracker on this the ninth day. A thousand bows to the elders’ pleasure. This testimony is written witness, given appeal to the gods of sky who stand in judgment with lightning and viper venom. And as is the elders’ pleasure, the Tracker gives account both wide and far, since great many years and moons have passed from the loss of the child to the death of the same one. This is the middle of the Tracker’s many tales, meaning which be true and which be false I shall leave to the judgment of the elders, alone in the counsel of the gods. The Tracker’s account continues to perplex even those of uncommon mind. He travels deep in strange lands, as if telling tales to children at night, or reciting nightmares to the fetish priest for Ifa divination. But such is the pleasure of the elders, that a man should speak free, and a man should speak till the ears of the gods are filled with truth.

He goes into the sight, smell, and taste of one memory, with perfect recall of the smell in the crack of a man’s buttocks, or the perfume of Malakal virgins in bedchambers coming out of windows he walked underneath, or the sight of the glorious sunlight marking the slow change of seasons. But of spaces between moons, a year, three years, he says nothing.

This we know: The Tracker in the company of nine, including one more who still lives and one not accounted for, went searching for a boy. Kidnapped, he has alleged. The boy at the time was alleged to be the son or ward of a slaver from Malakal.

This we know: They set out first from Malakal at the beginning of the dry season. The search for the boy took seven moons. A success, the child they found and returned, but four years later he was lost again and the second search, in smaller company, took one year and culminated with the boy’s death.

At the request of the elders, the Tracker has spoken in detail of his upbringing, and with clear speech and fair countenance has recounted a few details of the first search. But he will speak only of the end of the second search, and refuses to give testimony of the four years in between, where it is known that he took up residence in the land of Mitu.

This is where I, your inquisitor, set a different bait. He had come, that ninth morning, to talk of the year he reunited with the mercenary called Leopard. Indeed, he had said before that it was the Leopard that came to him with the offer to search for the child. But a lie is a house carefully built on rotten stilts. A liar often forgets the beginning of his tale before he gets to the end, and in this way one will catch him. A lie is a tale carefully told if allowed to be told, and I would seek to break his untruth by asking him to tell a different part of the tale. So I asked him not of the first search or the second, but of the four years in between.

INQUEST: Tell me of the year of our King’s death.

TRACKER: Your mad King.

INQUEST: Our King.

TRACKER: But the mad one. Forgive me, they are all mad.

INQUEST: Tell me of the year of our King’s death.

TRACKER: He is your king. You tell me.

INQUEST: Tell me of —

TRACKER: It was a year, as years go. There were days, there were nights with nights being the end of day. Moons, seasons, storms, drought. Are you not a fetish priest who gives such news, inquisitor? Your questions grow stranger by the day; this is true talk.

INQUEST: You remember the year?

TRACKER: The Ku don’t name years.

INQUEST: Do you remember the year?

TRACKER: It was the year your most excellent King shat his most excellent life out in the most excellent shit pit.

INQUEST: Speaking ill of the King is punishable by death in the South Kingdom.

TRACKER: He’s a corpse, not a king.

INQUEST: Enough. Tell me of your year.

TRACKER: The year? My year. I lived it full and left all of it behind when it ended. What more is there to know?

INQUEST: You have nothing else?

TRACKER: I fear that you would find greater tales among those of us dead, inquisitor. Of those years I have nothing to report but steadiness, boredom, and the endless request of angry wives to find their unsatisfied husbands—

INQUEST: Did you not retire those years?

TRACKER: I think I am the best to remember my own years.

INQUEST: Tell me of your four years in Mitu.

TRACKER: I spent no four years in Mitu.

INQUEST: Your testimony on the fourth day said after the first search you left for the village of Gangatom and from there, Mitu. Your testimony on the fifth day began, When he found me in Mitu I was ready to leave. Four years remain unaccounted for. Did you not live it in Mitu?

[Note: The sandglass was a third from being empty when I asked him this question. He looked at me as men do when they contemplate petulance. An arch in his eyebrow, a scowl in his face, then a blankness, a drop in the corner of his lips, and his eyes wet, as if he went from anger at my question to something else at the thought of an answer. The sandglass was empty before he spoke again.]

TRACKER: I know of no place named Mitu.

INQUEST: You? The Tracker who claims to have been to so many kingdoms, to the place of flying beasts, and the land of talking monkeys and lands not on the maps of men, but you have no knowledge of an entire territory?

TRACKER:Take your finger out of my sore.

INQUEST: You forget which of us gives the orders.

TRACKER: I have never set foot in Mitu.

INQUEST: A different answer from I know of no place named Mitu.

TRACKER: Tell me how you wish this story to be told. From the dusk of it to the dawn of it? Or maybe as a lesson, or praise song. Or should my story move as crabs do, from one side to the next?

INQUEST: Tell the elders, who shall take this writing as your very own speech. What happened, your four years in Mitu?

I will describe his face without impression or judgment. His eyebrows raised higher than before, he opened his mouth but did not speak. It is my impression that he growled or cursed in one of the northern river tongues. Then he jumped from his chair, knocking it over and pushing it away. He leapt at me, yelling and screaming. I barely shouted out for the guard before his hands grabbed my throat. Truly it is my conviction that he would have strangled me until dead. And still he squeezed tighter, pushing me backward on my chair until we both fell to the ground. I daresay his breath was foul. Stab him I did, with writing stick into his hand and at the top of his shoulder, but I can say in testimony that I was indeed leaving this world and doing so with haste. Two guards came from behind and struck him in the back of the head with clubs until he fell on top of me, and even then his grip did not relax, until they struck him a third time.

I must say it was a fair account, though I remember my ribs suffering several kicks from your men, even after they bound me. My back suffering beatings from a yam sack. Also this: my feet meeting so much whipping I am surprised that I walked to this room. My memory cheats—they dragged me here. And that was not even the worst, for the worst was you having them put me in robes meant for slaves—what offense have done I to cause that?

Now look at us. Me in the dark even in daylight, you over there on a stool. Balancing paper and writing stick on your lap while you try not to knock over the ink at your foot. And these iron bars between us. The man beside me calls for the love goddess each night, and I have not heard such sounds since I searched for my father, my grandfather in a whorehouse. Between me and you, I wish she would answer, for his cries get ever louder each night.

So. My father and brother murdered and my uncle slain by my hand. Go back to my grandfather? To give him what tidings? Hail, Father, who I now know as my grandfather though you lie with my mother. I killed your other son. There was no honor in it but you are already a man with no honor. You truly are cunning. A cunning one, inquisitor, to get me so angry I speak to them and not you. What kind of testimony is this?

You have washed since I saw you last. Spring water with precious salts, spices, and fragrant flowers. So many spices I would suspect that your ten-year-old wife was trying to cook you. But Priest, I smell the blister on the right of your back, right where she poured boiling water and scalded you. By all the gods, she did try to cook you. You struck her, of course, hard in the mouth. You’ve brought her blood with you before.

Where is what happened next? After your guards clubbed me in the back of the head, but before they took me down here. The part where I strangled you till you were near dead. The part where the guards had to slap you like a fool on opium in a spirit monger’s den. Don’t ask about Mitu again.

One more thing. When did you move me to Nigiki? I ask because these are Nigiki slave robes. Besides, I smell the salt mines every direction I turn. Did you move me at night? What strange potions kept me asleep? People say a cell in Nigiki is more lavish than a palace in Kongor, but such people have never been in this cell. Did you move her as well or just your dear, difficult Tracker?

My last time in this city I was in chains as well.

I will tell you the story.

I let myself be sold to a nobleman in Nigiki, because a slave still had four meals, none by his own purse, and lived in a palace. So why not be a slave? Whenever I felt for freedom I could just kill my master. But this nobleman had the ear of your mad King. I knew because he would tell anyone who would hear. And since I was in a new game—total subservience to another—I was the one to tell. Slaves are not to be resold in the South Kingdom, especially not in Nigiki, but he did so, and that was how he made his fortune. Sometimes the slave was freeborn and stolen.

The master was a coward and a thief. He whipped his wife at night and punched her in the day so that the slaves could see that no man or woman was above him. I said to her once when he was away: If it pleases the mistress, I have five limbs, ten fingers, one tongue, and two holes, all at her pleasure. She said, You smell like a boar but you may be the only man in Nigiki who does not smell of salt. She said, I hear things of you men from the North, that you do things to women with your lips and tongue. I searched through her five robes, found her koo, spread its lips west and east, then flicked my tongue on the little soul deep in the woman that the Ku think is a hidden boy that must be cut out, but is beyond boy or girl. She made noises louder than when whipped, but since I was hidden under her robes, her slaves thought it was the recall of a whipping, or the god of harvest giving her rapture.

She never let me put anything inside her but my tongue, for such is still the way of mistresses.

“How can one lie with a boar?” she would say.

You are waiting to see how this ends. You’re waiting to see if I ever did pull apart the seas of her robes and take her without her ever asking such, because that is what you southern lords do. Or you are waiting for that moment when I kill her husband, for do not all my tales end in blood?

Soon I said to the nobleman, It is not yet a moon, yet I am already bored with being your slave. Not even your cruelty is interesting. I said good-bye, made an obscene sign with my lips and tongue to the mistress, and turned to leave.

Yes, in this way I left.

Fine, if you must know, I did strike the nobleman in the back of the head with the flat side of a long sword, bid a slave to shit in his mouth, and tied a rope around his head to keep his jaw shut. Then I left.

The children?

What does it matter?

I tried to see the children. More times than once or twice. One quartermoon after we left them with the Gangatom, I was sneaking along the two sisters river. By then the village would have smelled on wind the bodies of Kava, the witchman, and my beloved uncle. And coming up, on the Gangatom side of the river, a spear could meet my chest at any moment and my killer would not have lied when he said, Here I killed a Ku. I skipped from tree to tree, bush to bush knowing that I should not have gone. It was only a quartermoon. But maybe the albino ran into a boy who would stick him to see if his blood was white, and maybe the women of the village were scared of Smoke Girl’s troubled sleep and needed to know that one should not fear her, for how else would they know? And to let her sit on your head if she wants to sit on your head, and maybe my boy who thinks he is a ball rolls into a man because that is the only way he knows to say, Here I am, play with me, I am already a toy. And to never call Giraffe Boy giraffe. Not once. And the twins, such cunning minds and such joyful hearts, one will call you over the right shoulder saying, Where is east? while the other steals sips from your porridge.

And there was no Leopard to vouch for me; he found work and amusement in Fasisi. But the river runs through both lands, and trees stood far apart. I stopped at one tree, and was about to skip to the next, ten and seven paces ahead, when arrows shot past me. I jumped back and the tree caught the three arrows hitting it. Voices of Ku, men across the river, thinking they’d killed me. I dropped to my belly and scurried away like a lizard.

Two years later I went to see my mingi children. I came from Malakal, taking a different route than used by Ku. Giraffe Boy was now as tall as an actual giraffe, his legs reaching my head; his face, a little older but still young. He saw me first when I entered the Gangatom township. The albino, I did not know was the oldest until I saw that he grew the most, thick in muscle and a little taller in height, and very handsome. I couldn’t tell if he really grew up in the quick or had I only now noticed. Even as he ran to me, the women’s eyes followed him. The twins were in the bush hunting. The boy with no legs got even more fat and round, and rolled himself everywhere. You will be useful in war, I said to him. Are you all warriors now? The albino nodded while the boy with no legs giggled and rolled right into me, knocking me over. I did not see Smoke Girl.

And then after a moon I went walking with Giraffe Boy and said, Smoke Girl, does she hate me still? He did not know how to answer me, because he had never known hate. Every man who comes into her life leaves, he said as we walked back to his home. At the door, the women raising him said, The chief is dying and the man to be the next chief has bad feelings for all Ku, even one who lives with other people in houses of stone.

You don’t need their names.

As for the Leopard, five years passed before I met him at Kulikulo Inn. He was at a table, waiting for me.

“I need you to help me find a fly,” he said.

“Then consult the spider,” I said.

He laughed. The years had changed him, even if he looked the same. His jaw was still strong, his eyes, light pools where you saw yourself. Whiskers and wild hair that made him look more lion than panther. I wondered if he was still as quick. For long I wondered if he aged as a Leopard or as a man. Malakal was a place of civil butchery, and not a city for werefolk. But Kulikulo Inn never judged men by their form or their dress, even if they wore nothing but dust or red ochre spread with cow fat, as long as their coin was strong and flowed like a river. Still, he pulled skins from a sack and wrapped something coarse and hairy about his lap, then draped shiny leathers over his back. This was new. The animal had learned the shame of men, the same man who once said that the Leopard would have been born with skirts if he was supposed to wear any. He asked for wine and strong drink that would have killed a beast.

“No embrace for the man who saved your life more times than a fly blinks?”

“Does the fly blink?”

He laughed again and jumped from his stool. I took his hands, but he pulled away and grabbed me, pulling in tight. I was ready to say this feels like something from boy lovers in the east until I felt myself go soft in his arms, weak, so weak I barely hugged back. I felt like crying, like a boy, and I nodded the feeling out of me. I pulled away first.

“You have changed, Leopard,” I said.

“Since I sat down?”

“Since I saw you last.”

“Ay, Tracker, wicked times have left their mark. Are your days not wicked?”

“My days are fattening.”

He laughed. “But look at you, talking to the cat of change.” His mouth was quivering, as if he would say more.

“What?” I asked.

He pointed. “Your eye, you fool. What kind of enchantment is that? Will you not speak of it?”

“I have forgotten,” I said.

“You have forgotten there is a jackal’s eye in your face.”

“Wolf.”

He moved in closer and I smelled beer. Now I was looking at him as deep as he was looking at me.

“I am already waiting for the day you finally tell this one to me—lusting for it, I am. Or dreading it.”

I missed that laugh.

“Now, Tracker. I found no boys for sport in your city. How do you make do with night hunger?”

“I quench my thirst instead,” I said, and he laughed.

It was true that in those years I lived as monks do. Other than when travels took me far and there were comely boys, or not as comely eunuchs, who though not pretty were more skilled in love play. And even women would sometimes do.

“What have you been doing the last few years, Tracker?”

“Too much and too little,” I said.

“Tell me.”

These are the stories I told the Leopard as I drank wine and he drank masuku beer at Kulikulo Inn.

One year I lived in Malakal, before I moved to Kalindar, the disputed kingdom at the border with the South. Home of great horse lords. Truly, the place was more a set of stables with lodging for men to fuck, sleep, and conspire. No matter which side you came from, the city could only be reached by hard land journey. War-loving people, bitter and vengeful in hate, passionate and vigorous in love, who despised the gods and challenged them often. So of course I made it home.

So in Kalindar was a Prince with no princedom, who said his daughter was kidnapped by bandits on the trail north. This is what they wanted in ransom: silver, the weight of ten and seven horses. Hear this, the Prince sent his servant to get me, which he tried to, in a way keeping with the Prince’s foul manners. I sent him back missing two fingers.

The Prince’s second servant bowed and asked me to please the Prince with my appearance. So I went to his palace, which was just five rooms, each stacked on the other, in a courtyard overrun with chickens. But he had gold. He wore it on his teeth and stringed it through his eyebrows and when the privy boy passed by, he carried a shit pot of pure gold.

“You, the man who took my guard’s fingers, I have use for you,” he said.

“I cannot find a kingdom you have not lost,” I said. The Kalindar have no double tongue, so the remark went right back out to sea.

“Kingdom? I don’t need kingdom finding. Bandits kidnapped my daughter, your Princess, five days ago. They have demanded a ransom, silver the weight of ten and seven horses.”

“Will you pay it?”

The Prince rubbed his bottom lip, still looking in the mirror.

“First I need trustful word that your Princess is still alive. It has been said that you have a nose.”

“Indeed. You wish that I find her and bring her back?”

“Listen to the way he speaks to princes! No. I only wish you find her and give me good report. Then I shall decide.”

He nodded to an old woman, who threw a doll at me. I picked it up and smelled her.

“The price is seven times ten gold pieces,” I said.

“The price is I spare your life for your insolence,” he said.

This Prince with no princedom was as frightening as a baby crying over shitting itself, but I went searching for the Princess, because sometimes, the work is its own pay. Especially when her scent took me not to the north roads, or the bandit towns, or even a shallow grave in the ground, but less than a morning’s walk from her father’s little palace. In a hut near a place that used to be a busy market for fruit and meat, but is now wild bush. I found her at night. She and her woman-snatchers, one of whom was reeling from a slap to the side of his head.

“Ten and seven horses? Is that all I am to you, ten and seven? And in silver? Was your birth so low that you think this is what I am worth?”

She cussed and snarled for so long that it began to bore me, and still she cussed. I could tell the kidnapper was coming to think mayhaps he should pay the Prince to take her back. I smelled the shape-shifter’s gift on him, a cat like the Leopard. A Lion, perhaps, and the other men lying about were his pride and the woman by the fire looking at them both with a scowl was his mate until this princess. All of them squeezed into a room with the Princess yapping like cockatoo. This was the plan: that the Lion and his pride kidnap the Princess and demand a sum. A sum which her father would gladly pay because his daughter is worth more than silver and gold. The ransom, the Princess would use to pay mercenaries to overthrow this Prince, who had no princedom to overthrow. At first I thought she was like those boys and girls kidnapped too young, who in the midst of captivity start to show loyalty to their captors, even love. But then she said, “I should have picked Leopards; at least they have cunning.” The head Lion man roared so loud it frightened people in the street.

“I think I know how this story ends,” the Leopard said. “Or maybe I just know you. You told the Prince his daughter’s plot, then slipped away as quiet as you came.”

“Good Leopard, what would be the fun in that? Besides, my days were long and business slow.”

“You were bored.”

“Like a god waiting for man to surprise him.”

He grinned.

“I went back to the Prince and gave good report. I said, Good Prince, I have yet to find the bandits, but on my way, I did pass by a house near the old market, where men were conspiring to take your crown.”

“What? Are you sure of it? Which men?” he asked.

“I did not look. Instead I hurried back to you. Now I will go find your daughter,” I said.

“What should I do with these men?”

“Have men sneak up to the house like thieves in the night and burn it to the ground.”

The Leopard stared at me, ready to pull the story out of my mouth.

“Did he?”

“Who knows? But next moon I saw the daughter at her window, her head a black stump. Then I cursed Kalindar and moved back to Malakal.”

“That is your story? Tell me another.”

“No. You tell me of your travels. What does a Leopard do in new lands where he cannot hunt?”

“A Leopard finds flesh wherever he can find it. And then there is flesh he eats! But you know how I am. Beasts like us were never made for one place. But nobody traveled as far as I. Boarded a ship I did, eager I was. I went to sea, then boarded another ship and it went farther out to sea for moons and moons.”

He climbed up in the chair and stooped on the seat. I knew he would.

“I saw great sea beasts, including one that looked like a fish but could swallow an entire ship. I found my father.”

“Leopard! But you thought he was dead.”

“So did he! The man was a blacksmith living on an island in the middle of a sea. I forget the name.”

“No you did not.”

“Fuck the gods, maybe I don’t want to remember. He was no longer a blacksmith, just an old man waiting to die. I stayed there with him. Saw him forget to remember, then saw him forget that he forgets. Listen, there was no Leopard in him—he had forgotten it all living with his young wife and family under one roof, which is no Leopard’s nature. Curse you and your whiskers, he said to me many times. But some days he would look at me and growl and you should see how startled he was, wondering where the growl came from. I changed in front of him once and he screamed as an old man screams, making no sound. Nobody believed him when he shouted, Look a wildcat, he will eat me!”

“This is a very sad story.”

“It gets sadder yet. His children in that house, my brothers and sisters, all had some trace of the cat in them. The youngest had spots all over his back. And none of them liked to wear clothes, even though on this island in the river, men and women covered everything but eyes. When he was dying he kept shifting from man to Leopard to man on his death mat. It scared the children and grieved the mother. In the end it was only me, my youngest brother, and him in the room, since everybody else but the youngest thought it was witchcraft. The youngest looked at his father and finally saw himself. We both became Leopards and I licked my father’s face to calm him. In endless sleep, I left him.”

“That is a sad story. Yet there is beauty in it.”

“You a lover of beauty now?”

“If you saw who left my bed just this morning, you would not ask that question.”

I missed his laugh. The entire inn heard when the Leopard laughed.

“A wanderer I became, Tracker. How I moved from land to land, kingdom to kingdom. Kingdoms where people’s skin was paler than sand, and every seven days they ate their own god. I have been a farmer, an assassin, I even took a name, Kwesi.”

“What does it mean?”

“Fuck the gods if I know. I even became an entertainer of the bawdy arts.”

“What?”

“Enough, man. The reason I sought you out—”

“Fuck the gods with your reason, I will hear more of these bawdy arts.”

“We don’t have much time, Tracker.”

“Then be quick about it. But spare no detail.”

“Tracker.”

“Or I shall rise and leave you with the bill, Kwesi.”

He almost winced when I said that.

“Fine. Enough. So I was a soldier.”

“This doesn’t begin like a bawdy story.”

“Fuck the gods, Tracker. Maybe the story begins when a man found an army—”

“North or South?”

“Fucks for both. I say, this man found an army with need for a man with superior archery skills. This man found himself in lands with no food, and no amusement. This man might have been great with killing the enemy, but was not great keeping peace between his fellow soldiers. Though one or two comely ones served their use.”

“Ever the Leopard.”

“This is how it came to pass. We attacked a village that had no weapons besides stones to cut meat, and burned down their huts with women and children still in them. It happened this way. I said, I do not kill women and children, not even when hungry. The commander’s little bitch says, Then kill them with your bow. I say these are not fighters in war and he says you have an order. I walk away because I’m no soldier and this was not a fight worth coin.

“Say this also happened. The little bitch screamed traitor and in the quick his men were upon me; meanwhile soldiers were still setting fire to children trapped in huts. Four soldiers came at me, and I fired four arrows between four sets of eyes. The little bitch tried to scream again but my fifth arrow went right through his throat. So it goes without telling you, Tracker, that I had to leave, under the cover of fire smoke. But then I wandered for days and days before I found that I was in the sand sea where nothing lives. Four days without water or food, I started to see a fat woman walking on clouds and lions walking on two legs, and a caravan that never touched the sand. Men from the caravan picked me up and threw me in the back.

“I woke up when a boy’s mother had him throw water in my face. The caravan dumped me at some doorstep in Wakadishu.”

“From the sand sea to Wakadishu takes moons, Leopard.”

“’Twas a fast caravan.”

“So now you’re a mercenary,” I said.

“Look at this leper accusing another leper of leprosy.”

“But I find men, not kill them.”

“Of course. It’s cow’s blood you’re always wiping from your helmet. Why do we war over words? Are you happy, Tracker?”

“I am content with much. This world never gives me anything, and yet I have everything I want.”

“Fool, not what I asked you.”

“Beasts look for happiness now? Be less the man and more the Leopard, if this is the man you are going to be.”

“Fuck the gods, Tracker, ’tis a simple question. The longest answer is but one word.”

“This affects your offer?”

“No.”

“Then there’s your answer. I am busy and better busy than bored, is that not so?”

“I’m waiting—”

“For what?”

“For you to say that sadness is not the absence of happiness, but the opposite of it.”

“Have I ever said that?”

“You say something close. And who does your heart belong to?”

“You told me once nobody loves no one.”

“I may have been young, and in love with my own cock.”

“Jakrari mada kairiwoni yoloba mada.”

“What use is that tongue to a cat?”

“Your cock is like a camel to you.”

I was starting to tell him things just to hear that cat laugh.

“I don’t trust people who take voyages without return; it gives them no stakes. I’ve been, let’s say, disappointed by men with nothing to lose,” he said.

“Are you happy?” I asked.

“You answer a question with a question?”

“Because here we are, whining like first wives of husbands who no longer want us. But then I’m a boy raised by no one and you pretend to be a man when it suits you, but there are many enchanted beasts that can talk. Whatever this offer is of yours, I’m liking it less and less.”

“My offer hasn’t left my lips, Tracker.”

“No, but you are doing some kind of test.”

“Forgive me, Tracker, but I have not seen you in moons upon moons.”

“And you are the one who sought me out, cat. And now you waste my time. Here’s coin for the raw boar. And extra for all the blood they left in for you.”

“It does me good to see you.”

“I was about to say the same, then you started wondering about my heart.”

“Oh brother, your heart I wonder about all the time. Worry too.”

“This too is part of it.”

“What?”

“Your fucking test.”

“Tracker, we are freeborn. I am drinking and eating with another. At least sit if you’re never going to eat.”

I got up to leave. I was a good few paces away from him when I said, “Send word for me when I have passed whatever test it was you were trying to give me.”

“You think you passed?”

“I passed when I came through the door. Or you wouldn’t have waited four days to call on me. You ever see a man who doesn’t know he’s unhappy, Leopard? Look for it in the scars on his woman’s face. Or in the excellence of his woodcraft and iron making, or in the masks he makes to wear himself because he forbids the world to see his own face. I am not happy, Leopard. But I am not unhappy that I know.”

“I have word of the children.”

He knew that would stop me.

“What? How?”

“I still trade with the Gangatom, Tracker.”

“Give me this word. Now.”

“Not yet. Trust me, your girl is fine, even if she still huffs and puffs and turns to blue smoke when she loses her temper, which is often. Have you seen them?”

“No, not ever.”

“Oh.”

“What is this oh?”

“A strange look on your face.”

“I have no strange look.”

“Tracker, you are nothing but strange looks. Nothing is ever hidden from your face, no matter how much you try to mask it. It’s how I can judge where your heart is with people. You are the world’s worst liar and the only face I trust.”

“I will hear of the children.”

“Of course. They—”

“Did none say I came to see them? Not one?”

“You just said you have not seen them. Not ever, this is what you said.”

“Not ever it might as well be, if they say they have not seen my face.”

“More strangeness, Tracker. The children are fat and smiling. The albino will soon be their best warrior.”

“And the girl?”

“I just told you about the girl.”

“Eat.”

“We have other matters to discuss, Tracker. Enough with nostalgia for now.”

He took the last chunk of flesh in his mouth and chewed. There was blood on the dish. He looked at it, I looked at it, then he looked at me.

“Oh be a fucking beast, Leopard. Your wanting man’s approval troubles me.”

He smiled his huge grin, put the plate to his face, and licked it clean.

“Not fresh kill,” I said.

“But it will do. Now finally. Why I came to see you.”

“Something about a fly?”

“That was me being clever.”

“Why did you ask if I was happy?”

“This road I am asking you to come on. Oh, Tracker, the things it will take from you. Best if you have nothing in the first place.”

“You just said it was better if I have something to lose.”

“I said I’ve been disappointed by men who have nothing. Some. But the Tracker I know has nothing and cultivates nothing. Has that changed?”

“And if it had?”

“I would ask different questions.”

“How do you know I …”

Leopard swung around, trying to see what took my words.

“Nothing,” I said. “Thought I noticed … thought it went and came back …. It …”

“What?”

“Nothing. A thought loose. Nothing. Come now, cat, I’m losing patience.”

The Leopard got off the chair and stretched his legs. He sat back down and faced me.

“He calls him little fly. I find it strange that he does so, especially in that voice of his that sounds like an old woman more than a man, but I think the fly is dear to him.”

“Once more. This time with sense.”

“I can only tell you what the man told me. He was very clear—Leave instructions to me, he said. Fuck the gods, you men who are not direct. Fucks for you too—I saw that look. Friend, this is what I know. There is a child that went missing. The magistrates said he most likely got swept off in a river, or mayhaps the crocodiles got him, or river folk, since you will eat anything if hungry.”

“Thousand fucks for your mother.”

“A thousand and one if we’re speaking of my mother,” he said, and laughed. “This is what I know. The magistrates think this child either drowned or was killed and eaten by a beast. But this man, Amadu Kasawura is the name he goes by, he is a man of wealth and taste. He is convinced that his child, his little fly, is alive, mayhaps, and moving west. There is compelling stuff there, Tracker, in his home, evidence so that you believe his story. Besides, he is a rich man, a very rich man given that none of us come cheap.”

“Us?”

“He has commissioned nine, Tracker. Five men, three women, and hopefully you.”

“So his purse must be the fattest thing about him. And the child—his own?”

“He says neither yes nor no. He is a slaver, selling black and red slaves to the ships that come from people who follow the eastern light.”

“Slavers have nothing but enemies. Maybe somebody killed the child.”

“Mayhaps, but he is set in his desire, Tracker. He knows that we might find bones. But then he would at least know, and knowing for certain is better than years of torment. But I skip too much and make the mission—”

“Mission, is it? We’re to be priests now?”

“I’m a cat, Tracker. How many fucking words do you think I know?”

This time I laughed.

“I told you what I know. A slaver is paying nine to either find this child alive, or proof of his death, and he does not care what we do to find him. He may be two villages away, he may be in the South Kingdom, he might be bones buried in the Mweru. You have a nose, Tracker. You could find him in days.”

“If the hunt is so swift, why does he need nine?”

“Clever Tracker, is it not clear to you? The child didn’t leave. He was taken.”

“By who?”

“Better if it comes from him. If I explain you might not come.”

I stared at him.

“I know that look,” he said.

“What look?”

“That look. You are more than interested. You’re glutting on the very idea of it.”

“You read too much in my face.”

“It’s not just your face. At the very least come because something will intrigue you and it won’t be the coin. Now speaking of desires …”

I looked at the man, who not long before the sun left convinced an innkeeper to give him raw meat soaking in its own blood for dinner. Then I smelled something, the same as before, on Leopard yet not on him. When we stepped outside the inn, the smell was stronger, but then it went weak. Strong again, stronger, then weaker. The smell got weaker every time the Leopard turned around.

“Who is he, the boy following us?” I asked.

I spoke loud enough for the boy to hear. He shifted from dark to dark, from the black shadow cast by post to the red light cast by a torch. He slipped into the doorway of a shut house, less than twenty paces from us.

“What I would like to know, Leopard, is would you let me throw a hatchet and split his head in two before you tell me he is yours?”

“He is not mine, and by the gods I’m not his.”

“And yet I smelled him the whole time we were at the inn.”

“A nuisance he is,” the Leopard said, watching the boy slip out of the doorway, too timid to look. Not tall, but skinny enough to come across so. Skin as dark as shadow, a red robe tied at his neck that reached his thigh, red bands above his elbow, gold bracelets at his wrists, a striped skirt around his waist. He was carrying the Leopard’s bow and arrows.

“Saved him from pirates on either the third or fourth voyage. Now he refuses to leave me alone. I swear it’s the wind that keeps blowing him my way.”

“Truly, Leopard, when I said I keep smelling him, I meant smelling him on you.”

The Leopard laughed, but a tiny laugh, like a child caught right as he is about to do mischief.

“He has my bow when I lose arms and always finds me no matter where I go. Who knows but the gods? He might tell great stories of me when I am gone. I pissed on him to mark him as mine.”

“What?”

“A joke, Tracker.”

“A joke doesn’t mean false.”

“I’m not an animal.”

“Since when?”

I stopped myself from asking if this is not the fifth boy or sixth you are leading astray, him waiting without hope for something you will never give him, because that is what you give, is it not, your eyes upon his eyes, your ears for whatever he says, your lips for his lips, all things you can give and take away, and nothing that he wants. Or is he your tenth? Instead I said, “Where is this slaver?”

The slaver was from the North, trading illegally with Nigiki, but he and his caravans, full with fresh slaves, had set up camp in the Uwomowomowomowo valley, not even a quarter day’s ride from Malakal and quicker by just going down the hill. I asked Leopard if the man had no fear of bandits.

“A pack of thieves tried to rob him near the Darklands once. They put a knife to his throat, laughed that he had only three guards that they easily killed and how is it that he had no weapon himself, with such cargo? The thieves fled on horseback, but the slaver sent a message by talking drum that reached where the thieves were going before they approached the gate. By the time the slaver reached the gate the three robbers were nailed to it, their belly skin flayed open, their guts hanging out for all to see. Now he only travels with four men to feed the slaves on the journey to the coast.”

“I have great love for him already,” I said.

When we reached my lodgings, I tiptoed past the innkeeper, who told me two days ago that I was one moon behind in rent, and while scooping her huge breasts in her hands, said there were other ways to pay. In my room I grabbed a goatskin cape, two waterskins, some nuts in a pouch, and two knives. I left through the window.

The Leopard and I went by foot. From my inn we would leave through the third city wall, going under the lookout to the fourth and outer wall, which went around the whole mountain and was as thick as a man lying flat. Then from the South fort gate, out to the rocky hills and right down into the valley. The Leopard would never travel on the back of another animal, and I have never owned a horse, though I have stolen a few. At the gates, I noticed the boy walking behind us, still jumping from tree shadow to tree shadow and the ruined stumps of the old towers that stood long before Malakal was Malakal. I slept here once. The spirits were welcoming, or maybe they did not care. The ruins were from people who discovered the secret of metals and could cut black stone. Walls with no mortar, just brick on top of brick, sometimes curving into a dome. A man from the sand sea who counted ages would have said old Malakal was from six ages ago, maybe more. Surely at a time when men needed a wall as much to keep in as to keep out. Defense, wealth, power. In that one night I could read the old city; rotten wood doorways, steps, alleys, passages, ducts for water foul and fresh, all within walls seventy paces high and twenty paces thick. And then one day, all the people of old Malakal vanished. Died, fled, no griot remembers or knows. Now blocks crumbed to rubble that twisted direction here and there, and around, and back and down what used to be an alley, halted at a dead end with no choice but to go back, but back to where? A maze. The boy held back so far behind us he was at this point lost.

“Truth, you can rip a man’s head off in one bite and yet he’s more afraid of me. What is his name?”

The Leopard, as always, walked off ahead. “I never bothered to ask,” he said, and laughed.

“Fuck the gods, if you are not the worst of the cats,” I said.

I held back a few paces, until I too lost myself in shadow. I saw the boy trying to go from stump to stump, ruin to ruin, crumbling wall to crumbling wall. Truth, I could have watched him for as long as it was dark. He fell deep in the ruins that were not that deep, and tried to walk himself out of them. As he began to run, his smell changed a little—it always does when fear or ecstasy takes over. He tripped over my foot and landed in the dirt. Perhaps my foot was waiting for him.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“No business it be for you to know,” he said, and stood up. He puffed his chest up and looked past me. He looked older than before, one of those who might be ten and five years, but were still ten in the mind. I looked at him, wondered what would be left when the Leopard no longer had use for him.

“I could leave you in these ruins and you will be lost until daylight. And where will your precious Leopard be then, tell me?”

“Is just brick and shit nobody want.”

“Careful. The ancestors will hear you, and then you will never leave.”

“All him friends fool as you?”

The first one I saw, I picked up and threw at him. He caught it in the quick. Good. But he dropped it as soon as he saw it was a skull.

“He don’t need you.”

I turned away, back to where I knew the gate would be.

“Where you going?”

“Back to drink some good soup from a bad woman. Tell your, whatever you call him, that you said he didn’t need me, so I left. That is if you can find your way out of the ruins.”

“Wait!”

I turned around.

“How I get out of this place?”

I walked past him, not waiting on him to follow. I stepped in cold ash, the fire long gone out. Sticking out of the dirt were pieces of white cloth, candlewax, rotten fruit, and green beads that might have been a necklace. Someone tried to reach an ancestor or the gods more than a moon ago. We made it out of the ruins and the last of the trees to the edge of the valley. Another night with no moon.

“What do they call you?” I asked.

“Fumeli,” he said to the ground.

“Guard your heart, Fumeli.”

“What that mean?”

I sat down on the rock. Foolishness it would be to try to go down to the valley in this dark, though I could smell the Leopard was halfway down already.

“We sleep till first light.”

“But he—”

“Will be right down there fast asleep until we wake him tomorrow.”

Two thoughts while I slept that night.

The Leopard says too many things that slip off him like water does oil, but sticks to me like a stain. Truth, there are times I feel like I should wash him out. I am always happy to see him, but never sad when he is gone. He asked me if I was happy and I still didn’t understand either the question or what knowledge he would get from an answer. Nobody smiles more than the Leopard but he speaks the same in happiness and sadness. I think both are faces he puts on before matters that strike deep, first in the heart. Happiness? Who needs happy when there is masuku beer? And spicy meat, good coin, and warm bodies to lie with? Besides, to be a man in my family is to let go of happiness, which depends on too many things one cannot control.

Something to fight for, or nothing to lose, which makes you a finer warrior? I have no answer.

I thought of the children more than I believed I would. Soon it was something I felt like a slight pound in the head, or a quickening of the heart, that even when I told myself it was gone, there was no worry, and I have done good by those children, or at least the best I could do, the feeling came that I had not. A dark evening becomes darker. I wondered if it was yet another one of the things the Sangoma left as a stain on me, or maybe it was a mild madness.

I woke up to the boy bent over me.

“Your other eye shine in the dark, like a dog,” he said. I would slap him but a new cut above his right eye glimmered with blood.

“How slippery the rocks are in the morning. Especially if you don’t know the way.”

The boy hissed. He picked up the Leopard’s bow and quiver. I wondered if any person ever made me shiver like the Leopard did this boy.

“And I do not snore,” I said, but he was already running down into the valley, until he stopped.

He walked, he sat on a rock and pondered, he waited until I was just paces behind him, and set off again. But not very far, for he didn’t know where to go.

“Rub his belly,” I said. “It pleases him. Great pleasure.”

“How do you know that? You must rub all sorts of men.”

“He is a cat. A cat loves that you rub his belly. Just like a dog. Is there nothing up in that head of yours?”

The ground turned red and damp, and green shrubs popped up like bumps. The farther down we walked, the larger the valley looked. It went straight to the end of the sky and beyond that. The wise ones said that the valley was once just a little river, a goddess that had forgotten she was a god. That little river snaked through the valley, washed away ground, dirt after dirt, stone after stone, deeper and deeper until by the time of this age of man, she had left valleys that dug so deep that man started to see the opposite, that it was not land lying so low, but mountain reaching so high. Looking up as we went down, and looking across the sky and the mist, we saw mountains pressed beside mountains, each one bigger than cities. So high that they took the colour of sky, not bush. It was enough to keep your eye to the sky and not the ground. The dirt as it reddened, the shrubs as they gave way to trees, the river clear like glass, and in it, fat nymphs, with broad heads and wide mouths, not hiding in the day, and knowing that they were not the prey this caravan hunts for.

The boy, whose name I already forgot, dashed after the Leopard as soon as we came down the mountain. Truth, I knew he was not his Leopard, and I knew the boy would make this cat very angry. He grabbed the Leopard’s tail, and he swung around and roared, crouched, and leapt at the boy. Another roar came from near the first caravan and the Leopard, pinning the boy, trotted away. The boy jumped up, brushed himself off before anyone noticed, and ran after his Leopard, sitting as a man on the grass, looking out to the river. He turned to me and smiled, but said nothing to the boy.

“Your bow and quiver. I bring it,” the boy said.

The Leopard nodded, looked at me, and said, “Shall we meet the slaver?”

The slaver had a tent at the front of his caravan. And the caravan, as long as a street in Malakal. Four wagons that I have seen only along the border of kingdoms north of the sand sea, among people who wander and never sow root. Horses pulled the first two, oxen pulled the last two. Purple and pink and green and blue, as if the most childish of goddesses painted them all. Behind the wagons, carts open and slatted together from wood. On the carts, women, thick to thin, some red from ochre, some shiny from shea butter and fat. Some wore only trinkets, some wore necklaces and goatskins in yellow and red, some in full robes, but most were naked. All captured and sold, or kidnapped from the river lands. None with the scars of the Ku or the Gangatom. Or the shaved teeth. Men from the East did not find those things beautiful. Behind these carts, men and boys, tall and thin like messengers, with no fat under the chin, just skin and muscle, long in arms, long in legs, many beautiful, and darker than the noon of the dead. Fit like warriors, for most were warriors who had lost in small wars, and would now do what soldiers who lose wars do. All wore irons locked around the neck and the feet, each man chained to the man in front of and behind him. There were fewer men with weapons than I thought I’d see. Seven, maybe eight men with swords and knives, only two carrying a bow, and four women with cutlasses and axes.

“In time. He’s holding court and judging the wicked,” the Leopard said with a smile that made me think it was a joke.

But past the caravans and in front of a large white tent with a dome top and flowing cloths sat the slaver. To his right a man knelt on the ground, holding a slender smoking pipe, with a folded rug in his lap. To his right, another man, shirtless like the kneeling man, with a gold bowl in his hand and a rag, as if he was about to wash the slaver’s face. Right behind him stood another, black in the shadow of the parasol he was holding to keep his master in shade. Another had a bowl of dates, ready to feed him. He did not look at us. But I looked at him sitting there, like the prince he probably was. Kalindar was famous for them, but princes with no kingdoms infested Malakal as well, it was said, because the Kwash Dara was stingy with his favors. His men had draped a long robe over his left shoulder with the right shoulder bare, as is the custom with princes. A white robe, the inner one to hide his royal orb and stick, peeked out underneath. Gold bracelets wrapped around his arms like two snakes in a killing curl. Leather sandals on dirty feet, a woven cap with silk tongues covering his ears over a broad face, and cheeks so fat they hid his eyes when he laughed. He did not look at us.

A man and woman kneeled before him, both kicked to their knees by the two women guards behind them. The man crying, the woman silent like stone. The woman, a red slave and not dark like the men at the back, a slave white in teeth and eyes and with no blemish. Beautiful. She would be a concubine to another master, mayhaps even a master in the East, where a concubine could possess her own palace. A woman captured from Luala Luala or even farther north, straight in nose and thin in lips. The man was darker, and shiny from sweat, not the body oils they rub on slave skin to fetch a bigger price. The man naked, the woman in a robe.

“Tell me true, tell me quick, tell me now,” said the slaver. His voice was higher than I expected. Like a young child’s, or a ragged witch’s. “Man live to plunder, guest attack host, but you was a man under chain. A man ira wewe. Chained to one and twenty men with heavy iron that break the leg bone. You can’t go unless they go, you can’t come unless they come, you can’t sit unless they sit, so how you find yourself up the pupu of this future princess?”

The man said nothing. I don’t think he knew the midlands tongues. He looked like the men who lived along the two sisters river, kingless and strong, but strong from farming soil, not from hunting or fighting among armies and warriors.

The guard behind the woman said that it was the woman that seek him out, or so go whispers bouncing off their backs. That she lie with him while the other men stay quiet, hoping that she will lie with them too. And she did with one or two but this man most of all.

The woman laughed.

“Tell me true, tell me quick, tell me now. What will I do with a red slave carrying baby for a black slave? No merchant going want you, nobody going one day make you their wife and queen. You’re worth less than the robes you wear. Take them off.”

The guards grabbed her from behind and pulled the robes off. The red slave looked at the slaver, spat, and laughed.

“The robes I can wash and put on another. But you …”

The man feeding him dates bent to his ear and whispered something. “You are worth less than my sickest oxen. Make peace with the river goddess for you shall be with her soon.”

“Better you chop my neck off or burn me in flames.”

“You choose how you will die?”

“I choose not to be slave to you.”

I saw the truth in her before the slaver did. She went and had a child with the black slave because she wanted to. The smile on her face said all. She knew he would kill her. Better to be with the ancestors than to live bonded to somebody else, who might be kind, who might be cruel, who might even make you master to many slaves of your own, but was still master over you.

“Men who follow the eastern light would have been good to you. You never hear of the red slave who become empress?”

“No, but I hear of the fat slaver who smelled like ox shit, who will one day choke on his own breath. By the god of justice and revenge I curse you.”

The slaver lost his face. “Kill this bitch now,” he said.

The guard took her away as she laughed. Even gone I could still hear her. The slaver looked at the man and said, “I tell you true, tell you quick, tell you now. Only one thing the northern masters love even more than unblemished woman. Unblemished eunuch. Take him away and make it so.”

Two guards took the man. He was weak and bawling, so each grabbed a chain and pulled him away.

The slaver looked at me as if I was the first of the day’s business. He stared at my eye, as everybody else did, and I had long passed speaking of it.

“You must be the one with the nose,” he said.