Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Dark Star Trilogy)

ELEVEN

Leave the dead to the dead. That is what I tell him.”

“Before or after we went in the Darklands?”

“Before, after, dead is dead. The gods tell me to wait. And look—you alive and unspoiled. Trust the gods.”

Sogolon looked at me with neither smile nor sneer. The only way she could care less would be to try.

“The gods had to tell you to wait?”

I woke up when the sun sailed to the middle of the sky and forced shadows underfoot. Flies buzzed about the room. I slept and woke three times before the Leopard and Fumeli woke once, and the Ogo could cast off the sluggishness of the Ogudu. The room, dim and plain, walls the brown-green colour of fresh chicken dung, with sacks packed on top of each other all the way to the ceiling. Tall statues leaning against each other, sharing secrets about me. The floor smelled of grain, dust, perfume bottles lost in the dark, and rat shit. On the two side walls facing each other, tapestries ran to the ground, blue Ukuru cloth with white patterns of lovers and trees. I lay on the floor, above and under blankets and rugs of many colours. Sogolon stood by the window, in that brown leather dress she always wore, looking out.

“You leave your whole mind back in the forest.”

“My mind is right here.”

“Your mind not here yet. Three times now I say to you that journey around the Darklands take three days, and we take four.”

“Only one night passed in the forest.”

Sogolon laughed like a wheeze.

“So we come three days late,” I said.

“You lost in that forest for twenty and nine days.”

“What?”

“A whole moon come and go since you gone into bush.”

And perhaps this, like the last two times she said it, was where I threw myself back down on the rugs, stunned. Everything not dead had twenty-nine days—a whole moon—to grow, including truth and lies. People on voyages have long returned. Creatures born got old, others died, and those dead withered to dust in that time. I have heard of great beasts who go to sleep for cold seasons, and men who fall ill and never rise, but this felt like someone stole my days and whoever I should have been in them. My life, my breath, my walk, it came to me why I hate witchcraft and all magic.

“I have been in the Darklands before. Time never stopped then.”

“Who was keeping time for you?”

I knew what she meant behind the witch double-speak. What she said, not out loud, the word inside the word, was who in the world would care for me that they would count my days gone? She looked at me as if she wanted an answer. Or at least a half-wit answer she could reply to with a full-wit mockery. But I stared at her until she looked away.

“A whole moon come and go since you gone into the bush,” she said again, but soft as if not to me. She looked out the window.

“Trust for the gods be the only reason why I here for a moon in Kongor. If it was my will over the gods, this whole place and every man in it would burn. Can’t trust no man in Kongor.”

“Can’t trust any man, anywhere,” I said. She flinched when she saw I heard.

“My gratitude for waiting in a city that does you ill,” I said.

“Not for you I do it. Not even for the goddess.”

“Should I ask who?”

“Too many children in Kongor don’t have an end to they story. That older than two hundred years, that older than when I was a child. So let this be the one child who story have an ending, no matter how grim, and not be another one that wash up with no head when the floodwater roll back.”

“You lost a child? Or were you the child?”

“I should have make distance between me and this city. Make distance four nights after you didn’t show. Last time I walk these roads a man of good breeding pay five man to steal me so he can show me what an ugly woman was for. Right there in Torobe. Couldn’t beat him wife because she from royal blood, so he bond me for that.”

“Kongori masters have always been cruel.”

“Low-wit donkey, the man was not my master, he was my kidnapper. A man would know the difference.”

“You could have run to a prefect.”

“A man.”

“A magistrate.”

“A man.”

“An elder with a kind ear, an inquisitor, a seer.”

“Man. Man. Man.”

“Justice could have come for your kidnapper.”

“Justice did come. When I learn a spell and the wife pregnancy devour her from the inside. Something else go up inside the man.”

“A spell.”

“My knife.”

“When you last pass through Kongor?”

“Amadu debt to me doubling just by me coming back.”

“When last, Sogolon?”

“I already tell you.”

Noise bounced up to the window, but it had order, and rhythm, beat and shuffle, the clap of sandals and boots, the trot of hooves on hard dirt, and people who oohed to other people’s aahs. I joined her by the window and looked out.

“Coming from all corners of the North and some from the South border. The border men wear a red scarf on the left arm. Do you see them?”

The street stretched behind the house, several floors below. Like most of Kongor, it was built of mud and stone, mortar to stop the rains from beating the walls away, though the side wall looked like the face of man who suffered pox. Six floors high, ten and two windows across, some with wood shutters, some open, some with a platform outside for plants but not people to stand, though children stood and sat on many. Indeed the whole house looked like a large honeycomb. Like all buildings in Kongor, this looked finished by hand. Smoothed by palms and fingers, measured by the old science of trusting the god of skill and creation to measure what is good weight and what is good height. Some of the windows were not in line, but up and down like a pattern, and some were taller than others, and not perfect in shape, but smooth, and done with either the care of a master or the crack of a master’s whip.

“This house belong to a man from the Nyembe quarter. He be in my debt for many things and many lives.”

I followed Sogolon’s eyes as she looked down from the window. In the winding snake of a street, men approached. Groups of three and four walking so in step it looked like marching. Coming from the east, men on white and black horses with red reins, the horses not covered head to tail like the stallions of Juba. Two men passed below us, side by side. The one closer to the street wore a helmet of lion hair, and a black coat trimmed in gold with splits to the sides, with a white robe underneath. He carried a longsword in his belt. The second man kept his head bald. A black shawl draped his shoulders, covering a loose black tunic and white trousers, and a shiny red sheath for a scimitar. Three men on horseback went back up the snake street, all three in black wraps to hide their faces, chain mail, black robes over legs in armour, with a lance in one hand and the bridle in the other.

“Whose army assembles?”

“No army. Not King’s men.”

“Mercenaries?”

“Yes.”

“Who? I spend little time in Kongor.”

“These be the warriors of the Seven Wings. Black garments on the outer, white on the inner, like their symbol the black sparrow hawk.”

“Why do they assemble? There is no war, or rumor of war.”

She looked away. “None in the Darklands,” she said.

Still looking at the mercenaries gathering, I said, “We came out of the forest.”

“The forest don’t lead into the city. The forest don’t even lead to Mitu.”

“There are doors, and there are doors, witch.”

“These sound like doors I know.”

“Wise woman, do you not know everything? What kind of door closes on itself and is no more?”

“One of the ten and nine doors. You talk of it in your sleep. I didn’t know of a door in the Darklands. You smell it out?”

“And now you have mirth too.”

“How you know there be a door in the Darklands?”

“I just knew.”

She whispered something.

“What?” I said.

“Sangoma. It must be the Sangoma’s craft on you why you can see even when you eyes blind. Nobody know how the ten and nine doors come to pass. Though old griots say each make by the gods. And even the elder of elders will look at you and say, Fool, nothing never go so in all the worlds above and below sky. Other people—”

“You speak of witches?”

“Other people will say that it is the roads of the gods when they travel this world. Step through one and you in Malakal. Step through one in the Darklands and look: You in Kongor. Step through another and you even in a South kingdom like Omororo, or out in the sea or mayhaps a kingdom not of this world. Some men spend till they gray just to find one door, and all you do is sniff one out.”

“Bibi was of Seven Wings,” I said.

“He was just an escort. You smelling a game that nobody playing.”

“Seven Wings works for whoever pays, but nobody pays more than our great King. And here they assemble outside this lookout.”

“You tracking small matters, Tracker. Leave the big things to the big people of the world.”

“If this is why I woke myself I will go back to sleep. How are the Leopard and the Ogo?”

“Gods give them good fortune, but they recover slow. Who is this mad monkey? He rape them?”

“Strange how I never thought to ask that. Maybe he was going to suck their souls, and lick their feelings.”

“Ba! Your sour mouth tire me out. The Ogo of course stand because he never fall.”

“That is my Ogo. Does the girl still ride with you?”

“Yes. Two days I slap out this foolishness about running back to Zogbanu.”

“She is dead weight. Leave her in this city.”

“What a day when a man tell me what to do. Will you not speak of the child?”

“Who?”

“The reason we come to Kongor.”

“Oh. In these twenty and nine days gone, what news have you of the house?”

“We did not go.”

This “we” I left for another day. “I do not believe you,” I said.

“What a day when I care what a man believe.”

“What a day when these days come. But I am tired, and the Darklands took my fight. Did you go to the house or no?”

“I bring peace to a girl that monsters breed to make breakfast of her flesh. Then I wait for usefulness to return to you. The boy not more missing.”

“Then we should go.”

“Soon.”

I wanted to say that nobody seemed too earnest in completing our mission and finding this boy, nobody meaning her, but she went to the doorway and I noticed there was no door, only a curtain.

“Who owns this house? Is it an inn? A tavern?”

“I say again. A man with too much money, and too many favors he owes me. He meet us soon. Now he running around like a headless chicken, trying to build another room, or floor, or window, or cage.”

She was already beyond the curtain when she looked back.

“This day is already given. And Kongor is a different city at night. See to your cat and giant,” she said. Only then did my head remember that she was saying she was over three hundred years old. Nothing said old more than an old woman thinking she was even older.

The Ogo sat on the floor, trying on his iron gloves, punching his left palm so hard that little lightning sparked in his hands. It was all over his face, blankness. Then as he punched his hand, he worked up into a rage that made him snort through his teeth. Then he went blank again. Standing in front of him as he sat there was the first time our eyes met on the same line. Sun was running from noon, but inside his room dimmed to evening. Things were stored in this room as well. I smelled kola nuts, civet musk, lead, and two or three floors below, dried fish.

“Sadogo, you sit there like a soldier itching for battle.”

“I itch to kill,” he said, and struck his palm again.

“This might happen soon.”

“When do we go back to the Darklands?”

“When? Never, good Ogo. The Leopard you should have never followed.”

“We would have slept there still, if not for you.”

“Or be meat for the mad monkey.”

Sadogo roared lion like, and punched the floor. The room shook.

“I shall rip his tail from his shit-smeared ass, and watch him eat it.”

I touched his shoulder. He flinched for a blink, then rested.

“Of course. Of course. As you say, it will be done, Ogo. Will you still go with us? To the house. To find the boy, wherever it takes us?”

“Yes of course, why would I not?”

“The Darklands leave many changed.”

“I am changed. Do you see that? That on the wall.”

He pointed to a blade, long and thick, iron brown with rust. The grip wide for two hands, a thick straight blade right down to halfway, where it curved to a crescent like a bitten-out moon.

“Do you know it?” Sadogo said.

“Never seen the like.”

“Ngombe ngulu. First I grab the slave. The master bred red slaves. One ran away. The gods demanded a sacrifice. He struck the master. So I set him before the execution floor. Three bamboo stalks sticking out of the ground. I push him down, force him to sit up, lean him against the stalks, and tie both hands back. Two small stalks, I drive in right by the feet and bind the ankles. Two small stalks I drive in right by the knees, and tie the knees to them. He’s stiff, putting on bravery, but he’s not brave. I take a branch from the tree and strip it of leaves and pull it down so it bends tight like a bow. The branch is angry, it wishes to be straight again not bound, but bind it I do, bind it to grass rope, then I tie it around the head of the slave. My ngulu is sharp, so sharp that looking at it will make your eyes bleed. My blade catches sunlight and flashes like lightning. Now the slave starts to scream. Now he calls for ancestors. Now he begs. They all beg, do you know? Men all talk of how they rejoice the day of meeting the ancestors but nobody has joy when it comes, only crying and pissing and shitting. I swing back my arm with the sword, then I scream and I swing and I chop off the head right at the neck, and the branch breaks free with the head and flings it away. And my master is happy. I killed one hundred, seventy and one, including several chiefs and lords. And some of them were women too.”

“Why did you tell me this?”

“I do not know. The bush. Something about the bush.”

Then I saw the Leopard. In his room, lying on rags bunched up as if he’d slept as a cat. Fumeli not there, or gone, or whatever. I had not thought of him, had not, I just realized, even asked Sogolon of him. The Leopard tried to turn behind him, craning his neck.

“There are holes in the ground, baked clay and hollow like bamboos.”

“Leopard.”

“They take your piss and shit away when you pour water from the urn in the hole after.”

“Kongor is unlike other cities in what she does with piss and shit. And bodies as—”

“Who put us in this place?” he said, pulling himself up to his elbows, frowning at being watched.

“Take that up with Sogolon. This lord seems to owe her many favors.”

“I wish to leave.”

“As you wish.”

“Tonight.”

“We cannot go tonight.”

“I never said we.”

“Leave? You can’t even stand. Change form and a half-blind bowman could kill you. Find your strength, then go where you wish. I will tell Sogolon—”

“Don’t speak for me, Tracker.”

“Then let Fumeli speak for you. What does he not do for you?”

“Speak again and—”

“And what, Leopard? What poison has come over you? Everybody sees you and that little bitch of a boy.”

This made him angrier. He rose from the rugs but stumbled.

“What makes you laugh so? Nothing is funny.”

“Nobody loves no one. Remember? Verse I learned from you. I have heard of warriors, mystics, eunuchs, princes, chiefs and their sons, all wither from futile love for the Leopard. And who is it, that finally clips your balls? This little clump, who wouldn’t be worth saving if he was the only man on the boat. Hark, everyone in this house. Hark how your bitch turns the great Leopard into an alley cat.”

“And yet watch this alley cat find the boy on his own.”

“Another great plan. How went the last one? And yet it is I, the man whose love you have forgotten, who rode in to save you. And the little bitch. And lost all our horses doing so. Maybe I saved the wrong animal.”

“You want thanks?”

“I have truth. Join Nyka and his woman, or make trails with your bitch.”

“Call him that one more … By the gods I will …”

“Find your strength and go. Or stay. Your malcontent is no mystery to me anymore. You are always the Leopard. But maybe you stay out of bushes you don’t know. I won’t be there to save you next time.”

Fumeli stood in the doorway. He carried bow and quiver and straightened, trying to puff his chest out. Whether to laugh or slap him I could not decide. So I passed him close enough to knock him out of the way. The Ogudu was still in him, a weak trace, but he stumbled and fell. He yelled for Kwesi and the Leopard jumped to a crouch and wobbled.

“Deal with him,” Fumeli said.

“Yes, deal with me, Leopard.”

I scowled at the boy.

“Either he’s marking the room as his, or he can’t even rise to go piss somewhere else,” I said.

In the hallway the girl walked up to me. She had found white clay and covered her body in patterns underneath a red-and-yellow sheath. A headdress hung on her head, little ropes with cowries, and iron loops, with two ivory tusks down each temple. Something wicked came upon me to say something about man- and woman-eaters. But she was just looking through clothes and tusks and scents to find herself. The thought was a wild animal.

Night in Kongor. This city with a most brazen love for war and blood, where people gathered to see man and animal rip flesh, still shuddered to see anyone bare it. Some say this was the influence of the East, but Kongor was far west and these people believed in nothing. Except modesty, a new thing, a thing that I hope never reached the inner kingdoms, or at least the Ku and Gangatom. I grabbed a long strip of Ukuru cloth lying in a bundle on the floor of my room, wrapped it around my waist and then over my shoulder, like a woman’s pagne, then tied it with a belt. I lost my hatchets in the Darklands, but still had my knives, and strapped them to each thigh. Nobody saw me leave, so nobody knew where I was going.

The city, almost surrounded by the great river, never needed a wall, only sentries along the banks. Along with fishermen, trade ships, and cargo boats coming from north and south to the imperial docks. Leaving by anything that will take them. During the wet season, in the middle of the year, rain floods the river so high that Kongor becomes an island for four moons. The city rises higher than the river, but some roads in the South were so low that you traveled by foot in the dry season and by boat in the wet. They ate the crocodile here, something that would make the Ku scream in fear and Gangatom spit in disgust.

Down the steps and out the building I looked at this lord’s house. The children had left and nobody stood by any window. None of the Seven Wings gathered in the street. He lived in the south of the Nyembe quarter. The matanti winds flew up and rolled through the roads, leaving a dusty haze all over the city.

I took the cloth on my shoulder and wrapped it over my head, like a hood.

Kongor split itself in four. Quarters not equal in size and divided by professions and livelihood and wealth. Northwest lay the wide, empty streets of the nobles of the Tarobe quarter. Beside them, for one served the other, was the Nyembe quarter—artists and artisans who made crafts for the homes of the nobles—all that was beautiful. And metalworkers, leatherworkers, and blacksmiths who made all that was useful. Southwest was the Gallunkobe/Matyube quarter, free people and slaves both laboring for masters. Southwest was the Nimbe quarter, with streets for administrators, scribes, and keepers of logs and records, with the great hall of records standing tall in the center.

I went down a wide street. A butcher shop on the left tried to trap me with carcass smells, antelope, goat, and lamb, but dead flesh all smells the same. A woman went into her house when she saw me approach and yelled at her son to come inside right now lest she call his father to fetch him. He stared at me as I passed, then ran in. I forgot that even the poorest house in Kongor had two floors. Packed close together, leaving a sense of space for the courtyard behind their walls. Also this, each house had its own entrance door, made by the finest artisans your pocket could afford, with two large columns and a cover to shield from sun. The two columns reached past the ground floor all the way to the roof, with a little window right above the entrance canopy. A line of five or ten toron sticks jutting out of the wall above that. Turrets on the roof like a line of arrows. It was not yet night, not even late evening, but barely anyone walked the streets. And yet music and noise came from everywhere.

“Where go the people?” I asked a boy, who did not stop walking.

“Bingingun.”

“Oh?”

“To the masquerade,” he said, shaking his head at speaking to such an imbecile. The curse of all so young. I didn’t ask him where, since he walked, skipped, then ran south.

This too about Kongor. Everything will be as you last left it.

The temple to one of the supreme gods was still there, though now dark and empty, with the doors open as if still hoping someone would come in. The ornaments along the roof in bronze, the python, the white snail, the woodpecker—robbers stole long ago. Not even ten paces from the temple was another place.

“Come, pretty boy boy, how you get it up? How I goin’ know which one you like when you wearing some grandmother death shroud?” she said as men lit wall torches behind her.

Still tall as the doorway, still fat from crocodile meat and ugali porridge. Still wearing a long wrap around her waist to squeeze her breasts to almost pop out, but showing her meaty shoulders and back. Still leaving her head bald and bare, a thing not liked by the Kongori. Still smelling like expensive incense because “Us girls must have one thing out of the reach of other girls,” she said every time I told her she smelled like she just bathed in a goddess’s river.

“I can just tell you who I want, Miss Wadada.”

“Oh. No, boy boy boy. Prefer the other way when your big Tracker just stiff up and point up to the one he like. I don’t know why you in that curtain. I feeling all the offense you should be feeling for yourself.”

Miss Wadada’s House of Pleasurable Goods and Services was not for people who were not themselves. Illusion was for who smoked opium. She let a shape-shifter fuck one of her girls as a lion once, until he swatted her in a fit of ecstasy and snapped her neck. I left my curtain on the floor and went upstairs with the one she said came from the land of the eastern light, which means an emissary raped a girl and left her with child to go back to his wife and concubines. The girl left the child with Miss Wadada, who looked at his skin and bathed him every quartermoon in cream and sheep butter. She forbade him to do any work so that his muscles would stay thin, his cheeks high and hips much wider than his waist. Miss Wadada made him the most exquisite of all creatures, who had all the best stories of all the worst people, but preferred that you fucked each tale out and paid him a fee on top of Miss Wadada’s for being the best information hound in all Kongor.

“Look, it is the wolf eye,” he said. “No man has made a woman of me since you.”

His room smelled like the room I just left. I never asked if saying “him” brought offense since I only called him Ekoiye or “you.”

“I can’t tell if you live with a civet or have its musk all over you.”

Ekoiye rolled his eyes and laughed. “We must have nice things, man-wolf. Besides, what man wants to enter a room where he can smell the man who just left?”

He laughed again. I liked that he only needed himself to laugh at his jokes. I saw it in people who had to endure other people. With Ekoiye it mattered not if you were a fine or a foul lover, or if you were a man of much or little sport. He took pleasure for himself first. Whether you shared in it was your business. He crowded his little room with terra-cotta statues, even more than I remember last. And this, a cage with a black pigeon I mistook for a crow.

“I change every man into one before he leaves this room,” he said, and pulled a comb from his hair. Curly hair fell down like little snakes.

“Indeed. Your shows deserve an audience. Or at least a griot.”

“Man-wolf, don’t you know the verses about me?”

He pointed to a stool with a back like a throne. A birthing chair, I remembered.

“Where is your friend? What name did they give him, Nayko?”

“Nyka.”

“I miss him. He was a man of great light and noise.”

“Noise?”

“He made the greatest noise, something like a loud cat’s purr, or the coo of a rameron pigeon, when I put him in my mouth.”

His hand grabbed me as he said that.

“You little liar. Nyka was never one for the company of boys.”

“Good wolf, you know I can be whatever you want me, even the girl you’ve never had … under certain wine and in a certain light.”

His robes fell down all around him, and he stepped out of the pile on the floor. He straddled me and winced as he lowered himself and I rose up inside him. This is how he always played. Sinking down on me until his ass sat on my thighs, then, without climbing off, turning around so that his back was to me. I told him once that only men who tell lies to their wives need to fuck from behind; he still did it this way. He asked what he always asked: Do you want me to fuck you? And I said what I always said: Yes. Miss Wadada always asked if he’d injured me when I left.

“Fuck the gods,” I said in a hiss, and curled my toes so tight they cracked like knuckles.

I pushed him down on the floor and jumped on top. After, with me out of him, but him straddled on top of me, he said, “You follow the eastern light now?”

“No.”

“Ghost walkers of the West?”

“Ekoiye, the questions you ask.”

“Because, Tracker, all men under the sky, men who love to think they are different from each other, perhaps to make sense of when they war, are all the same. They think whatever troubles them here”—he pointed to his head—“they can fuck it out into me. This is foreign thinking, that I did not expect from a man from these lands. Maybe you wander too much. You’ll be praying to only one god next.”

“I have nothing in my head to fuck out.”

“Then what does the Tracker want?”

“Who needs more after this?” I said, and slapped his ass. The move felt hollow and we both knew so. He laughed, then leaned until his back was on my chest. I wrapped my arms around him. I dripped sweat. Ekoiye was ever dry.

“Tracker, I lied. Men from the eastern light never fuck anything out. They always want to get sticked in the ass. So again, what does the Tracker want?”

“I seek old news.”

“How old?”

“Three years and many moons.”

“Three years, three moons, three blinks are all flat to me.”

“I ask about one of Kwash Dara’s elders. Basu Fumanguru is his name.”

Ekoiye rolled away from me, stood up, and went to the birthing chair. He stared at me.

“Everyone knows of Basu Fumanguru.”

“What does everyone say?”

“Nothing. I said they knew, not that they would talk. They should have burned that house down, to kill the plague, but none will step near it. It is a—”

“You think the house fell to disease.”

“Or a curse from a river demon.”

“I see. How powerful is he, the man who pays you to say such?”

He laughed. “You paid Miss Wadada to fuck.”

“And I pay you far above your sum to talk. You saw my pouch and you know what is in it. Now talk.”

He stared at me again, then. He looked around, as if more were in the room, then wrapped himself in a sheet. “Come with me.”

He pushed away a pile of chests and opened a hatch door no higher than my thigh.

“You will not be coming back to this room,” he said.

He crawled in first. Dark and hot, crumbly with dust, then hard from wood, then harder from mud and plaster, always too black to see. Hear much I did. From every room came men shouting and fucking in all ways and manners, but girls and boys who all moaned the same, saying fuck me with your big, your hard, your Ninki Nanka battering ram, and on and on. Training from Miss Wadada. Twice the idea ran through me that this was a trap, Ekoiye coming out first being a sign to kill the man who crawls out after. There might have been a man with a ngulu sword waiting for my neck, though Ekoiye did not hesitate. For we crawled even longer, long enough to make me wonder who built this, who traveled this long for Ekoiye’s bed. Ahead of him, the dark twinkled with stars.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked.

“To your executioner,” he said, then laughed. We came to a flight of steps, which led to the roof of a place I did not know. No smell of civet, no smell of Miss Wadada, no scent or stench of the whorehouse.

“No, there is no smell of Miss Wadada,” he said.

“Are you hearing my words unsaid?”

“If you think them so loud, Tracker.”

“Is this how you know the secrets of men?”

“What I hear is no secret. All the girls can hear them too.”

Laughter burst out of me. Who else would be expert at reading the minds of men?

“You are on the roof of a gold merchant from the Nyembe quarter.”

“I smell Miss Wadada’s perfume south of us.”

Ekoiye nodded. “Some say it was murder, some say it was monsters.”

“Who? What do you speak of now?”

“What happened to your friend, Basu Fumanguru. Have you seen the men who gather now, in our city?”

“The Seven Wings.”

“Yes, that is what they are called. Men in black. The woman who lives beside Fumanguru said that she saw many men in black in Fumanguru’s house. Through the window she saw them.”

“Seven Wings are mercenaries, not assassins. Not like them to kill just one man and his family. Not even in war.”

“I didn’t call them Seven Wings, she did. Maybe they were demons.”

“Omoluzu.”

“Who?”

“Omoluzu.”

“I do not know him.”

He went over to the edge of the roof and I followed him. We were three floors up. A man rolled in the road, palm wine smell coming of his skin. Other than him, the street was empty.

“Such a swarm of men, who want this man dead. Some say Seven Wings, some say demons, some say the chieftain army.”

“Because they share a love for black?”

“You the one seeking answers, wolf. This is known. Somebody entered the house of Basu Fumanguru and killed everyone. Nobody see no bodies and there were no burial rites. Imagine an elder of the city of Kongor dead with no tribute, no funeral, no procession of lords with a man of royal blood leading it, nobody even declaring him dead. Meanwhile thornbush sprung wild around the house overnight.”

“What do your elders say?”

“None come to me. Do you know he was killed on the Night of the Skulls?”

“I do not believe you.”

“That it was the Night of the Skulls?”

“That none of those chatty child-fuckers have seen you since.”

“I think the Seven Wings assemble for the King.”

“I think you dance away from the question.”

“Not how you think.”

“Lowly people all seem to know the ways of kings these days.”

He grinned. “I know this, though. People visit that house, including one or two of the elders. And maybe one or two Seven Wings. One not from here, they call him Belekun the Big, because that is how men around here joke. He was one who could not keep any of his holes shut, his mouth the worst. He came here with another elder.”

“How do you remember after three years?”

“It was last year. As they both took turns fucking a deaf girl, Miss Wadada heard also. Them saying that they need to find it. They need to find it now, or it will be the execution sword for them.”

“Find what?”

“Basu Fumanguru wrote a long writ against the King, they said.”

“Where is this writ?”

“People keep breaking in his house and not finding anything, so not there mayhaps?”

“You think the King killed him over a writ?”

“I think nothing. The King is coming here. His chancellor is in the city.”

“His chancellor visits Miss Wadada?”

“No, stupid Tracker. I have seen him, though. Kinglike but not the King, skin blacker than you and hair red like a new wound.”

“Maybe he will come sample your famous services.”

“Too pious. Holiness itself. As soon as I saw him I forgot when I first saw him and it was as if I was always seeing him. Do I sound like the fool?”

A dark man with red hair. A dark man with red hair.

“Tracker, you look gone.”

“I am here.”

“As I say, nobody can think of a time when he was not chancellor, but nobody can remember when he became so, or what he was before.”

“He was not chancellor yesterday, but has been chancellor forever. Did they kill all in Fumanguru’s house?”

“Maybe you should ask a prefect.”

“Maybe I will.”

He turned to look down in the street and wrapped the cloth over his head.

“One more thing. Come closer, one-eyed wolf.”

He pointed down into the street. I came up beside him as the clothes fell from him. He arched his back, his body was saying I could have him again right there. I turned to face him and he smiled a smile, all black. He blew it all in my face, black dust. Kohl dust, a large cloud in my eyes, nose, and mouth. Kohl dust mixed with viper poison, I could smell it. He looked at me deep, not with any malice, just with great interest, like he was told what would happen next. I punched him in the neck bump, then grabbed his throat and squeezed.

“They must have given you the antidote,” I said, “or you would have been dead by now.”

He coughed and groaned. I squeezed until his eyes bulged.

“Who sent you? Who gave you kohl dust?”

I pushed him hard. He fell back from the edge of the roof screaming and I caught his ankle. He kept flailing and yelling and almost slipped from me.

“By the gods, Tracker! By the gods! Mercy!”

“Mercifully release you?”

I eased my grip and he slipped. Ekoiye screamed.

“Who knew I would come to you?”

“No one!”

I let his ankle slip again.

“I don’t know! It’s an enchantment, I swear it. It must have been.”

“Who paid you to kill me?”

“It was not to kill you, I swear.”

“There is venom in this kohl. An ingenious thing like you must know of enchantments, so learn this. Nothing born of metal can harm me.”

“It was for anybody who ask. He never said kill you.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know! A man in veils, more veils than a Kongori nun. He come in Obora Dikka moon, in the Basa star. I swear it. He said blow kohl breath in the face of anyone who asks of Basu Fumanguru.”

“Why would anyone ask you of Basu Fumanguru?”

“Nobody ask until you.”

“Tell me more of this man. What colour his robes?”

“B-black. No blue. Dark blue, his fingers blue. No, blue in the fingernails like he dyes great cloths.”

“Are you sure he was not in black?”

“It was blue. By the gods, blue.”

“And what was to happen next, Ekoiye?”

“They said men would come.”

“You said he before.”

“He!”

“How would he know?”

“I was to go back to my room and release the pigeon in the window.”

“This story grows more legs and wings by the blink. What else?”

“Nothing else. Am I a spy? Listen, I swear by the—”

“Gods, I know. But I do not believe in gods, Ekoiye.”

“This was not to kill you.”

“Listen, Ekoiye. It is not that you lie, but that you don’t know truth. There was enough venom spewing from your mouth to kill nine buffalo.”

“Mercy,” he said, weeping.

Sweat made him slippery in my hand.

“The ever-dry Ekoiye breaks into sweat.”

“Mercy!”

“I am confused, Ekoiye. Let me retell this in a way that adds up to sense, for me and perhaps you. Even though Basu Fumanguru has been dead three years, a man in blue robes hiding his face still approached you, little more than a moon past. And he said, Should anyone speak of Basu Fumanguru, a man you would have no reason to know, take this antidote, then blow viper-soaked kohl dust in his face and kill him, then send word for me to pick up the body. Or not kill him, just put him to sleep as we can collect him as garbage mongers do for a fee. Is that all?”

He nodded, over and over.

“Two things, Ekoiye. Either you were not supposed to kill me, only leave me helpless so they can squeeze fact from me themselves. Or you were supposed to kill me but ask deeper questions before.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. I don—”

“You don’t know. You don’t know anything. You don’t even know if the antidote, the poison killer, kills the poison. Here I thought you were a wise boy trapped in an unwise life. No antidote ever kills the poison, Ekoiye, it only delays it. The most you live is eight years, maybe ten, pretty one. Nobody told you? Maybe there is not too much venom in you, and you live ten and four years. I still don’t understand why they came to you.”

Now he laughed. Loud and long.

“Because everybody comes to the pleasure monger later or sooner, Tracker. You cannot help yourselves. Husbands, chiefs, lords, tax collectors, even you. Like a pack of hungry dogs. Later or sooner you all come back to who you are. Like you pushing me down and fucking the little he-whore rough because you were a dog even before that eye. You know what I wish, man-fucker? I wish I had venom to kill the whole world.”

When I let him go he screamed all the way down. He would not be dead—the fall was not high enough. But he would break something, maybe a leg, maybe an arm, maybe a neck. I went back the way we came, passed under the same sounds of men fucking every last coin into wet rugs, and bolted the hatch behind me. The pigeon that he kept in a bamboo cage by the small window I took out and held gentle. The note wrapped around her left foot I removed. At the window I let it loose.

The note. Glyphs, the like I had seen before, but could not remember it. I pushed the birthing chair into the darkest corner of the room and waited. The window looked large enough. The door would mean that others knew about this arrangement, among them, Miss Wadada. I thought on this hard. Nothing could have happened under Miss Wadada’s roof without her knowing of such. But this too is so of the Kongori. If I did kill Ekoiye tonight, she would still welcome me tomorrow with a Take off those robes so I can see you, big stiff prince, and then send me off with her newest girl-boy.

Even as night grew deep the heat still crawled around, leaving my back sticking to the seat. I peeled off the wood and almost missed it, the kick of feet on the wall. Climbing without ropes, a man perhaps under enchantment, where whatever the foot touched became floor. Hands at the windowsill first, knuckles ashy. Hands pulled up the elbows, which pulled up the head. Black head wrap around the forehead and the mouth. Eyes, an opium-lover red, sweeping the room, locking with my eyes, but not seeing me. Shoulder robes in blue, a leather sash over the left shoulder. One leg in, and at the bottom of the sash, two sheaths for two swords and a dagger dangling. I waited until all of him was in and his long blue robes swept the floor.

“Hail.”

He jumped. He grabbed for his sword. My first dagger cut his neck, my second plunged under his chin, killing his head before his legs knew he was dead. He fell, his head slamming into the floor right at my foot. Undressing him felt more like unwrapping him. Scars on his chest, a bird, lightning, an insect with many legs, glyphs that looked in the style of the note. Top joints of both index fingers missing. He was not Seven Wings. And he had the knotty, violent crotch scar of a eunuch. I knew I did not have much time, for whoever sent him was either awaiting his return or followed him here. He had no fragrance other than sweat of the horse he rode on whatever journey led him to be lying dead on Miss Wadada’s floor. I turned him over and traced the glyphs on his back to remember. Two thoughts came to me, one just gone and one now come. Now come: that there was no blood, though where the knife stabbed him, blood usually bursts forth like a hot spring. Just gone: that the man really had no smell. The only scent coming from him was his horse, and the white clay from the wall he’d climbed.

I rolled him over again. Two glyphs on his chest matched the note. A crescent moon with a coiled serpent, the skeleton of a leaf on its side, and a star. Then his chest rumbled, but it was not the rattle of the dead. Something hitting against each bone of his ribs, pumping up his chest and his heart, making his eyes pop open. Then his mouth, but not like he was opening it, but as if someone was pulling his jaws apart, wider and wider until the corners of his lip began to tear. The rumble shook him all the way to his legs, which hammered into the floor. I jumped back and stood up. Ripples rose from his thighs, moved up to his belly, rolled under his chest, and then escaped through his mouth as a black cloud that stank of flesh much longer dead than the man. It swirled like a dust devil, getting wider and wider, so wide that it knocked over some of Ekoiye’s statues. The spinner closed in tight on itself and turned to the window. In the spin of cloud and dust it formed and then broke apart back into dust, the bones of two black wings. It might have been a trick of poor light, or the sign of a witch. The spinning cloud left through the window. Back on the ground the man’s skin turned gray, withering like a tree trunk. I stooped. He still had no scent. I touched his chest with one finger and it caved in, then his belly, legs, and head crumbled into dust.

Here is truth. In all the worlds I have never seen such craft or science. Whoever sent the assassin would certainly be coming now. The man, or spirit, or creature, or god behind such a thing would not be stopped by two daggers, or two hatchets.

His name, Basu Fumanguru, walked into my thoughts right then. Not only did they kill him, but they that did so wanted him to remain dead. I had questions, and Bunshi would be the one to answer them. She left the child with an enemy of the King, but many men challenge the King in great halls and in notices and writs, and they are not killed for it. And if the child was marked for death, why not kill him before? I have heard nothing that would push anyone to get rid of Fumanguru that would not have done so before, certainly no King. As a man he was no more than a chafe on the inside of the leg. Then the thought you knew you would be left with, but denied because one would never wish to be left with such a thought, announced itself. This Bunshi said the Omoluzu came to kill Fumanguru and she saved his child as his dying wish. But it was not his child. Somebody told Ekoiye to send word as soon as someone came asking of Fumanguru, because somebody knew one day a man would come to ask. Somebody has been waiting for this, for me, for someone like me all along. They were not after Fumanguru.

They were after the child.