Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Dark Star Trilogy)

TWENTY-THREE

I want it known that you made me do this. I want to see it written in a tongue that I recognize. Show me. I will not speak until you show me. How will you write it? Will you note what I said, or just say, The prisoner said this? Stop talking about truth—I fed you truth all along, but as I said before, what you want is story. I have given you many, but I will give you a final one. Then you can talk to her and send us to burn.

In this story I see her. She walked like somebody was following her.

Why do you stop me?

Did you not hear the griot?

The Leopard came to visit me and seduced me with talk of adventure. Of course he was all cunning—he is a leopard. And I went with him to find a fat and stupid man who sold gold and salt and smelled of chicken shit, who had vanished. But he had not vanished. Fuck the gods, inquisitor, which story do you wish to hear? No I will not tell you both. Look at me.

I will not tell you both.

So.

She walked as people who think they are followed walk. Looking ahead when she reached the mouth of each lane, looking behind when she reached the foot of it. Slipping from shadow to shadow, as she moved down a still street. Floating overhead the raw burn of opium, and flowing on the ground, the overspill of shit water. She tripped and grabbed her cargo tight, ready to brace for the fall rather than let it go. The sky had a ceiling in this place, a hundred paces high in some parts, with holes burrowed through to let in the white light of the sun and the silver light of the moon. She stooped below a torch beside a door, shifted underneath, stood up again, and scraped her back along the wall like a crab, to the corner.

The Malangika. The tunnel city, somewhere west of the Blood Swamp but east of Wakadishu, about three hundred paces below the ground and as big as a third of Fasisi. Hundreds of years ago, before people wrote accounts, the first people from above had a quarrel with the gods of sky over rain, and the gods of earth gave them this place to hide from sky wrath. They dug wide and deep, and the caverns rose high to hold buildings of three, four, and even five floors. Columns from chopped-down trees and stone to brace the tunnels so that they never collapsed, though two sections collapsed twice. Throughout the tunnels, builders carved out holes above to let the sun and moon light the street, like the lamps of Juba. People in the Malangika were the true first ones to unlock the secret of metals, some say. But they were selfish and greedy, and became the first blacksmith kings. They died holding on to their iron and silver. And some working other kinds of art and craft dug even deeper. But the people of this city soon died out, and the city itself was forgotten. And only in a place forgotten could a new city arise, a city with no notice, a city that was a market. A place that sold what could not be sold aboveground, not even at night. The secret witches market.

The market cleared out. Somebody had woven powerful magic to make everyone forget the street. Most lanes showed the backside of inns where nobody stayed, taverns where nobody left, and sellers of things of all kinds of uses. But in this lane darkness hung low. She walked many steps before stopping, looking around as two spirits pulled themselves from a wall and came at her. Another rose out of the ground, stumbling as if drunk. In the quick, she pulled the amulet from between her breasts. The spirits squealed and backed away; the ground spirit went back under. All the way down the lane, she held out the amulet, and voices squawked, muttered, and hissed. Their hunger was huge, but not bigger than the fear of the nkisi around her neck. Through the mist, at the end of the lane, she pressed herself against a fresh mud wall on the right, then turned around the corner right into my blade.

She jumped. I grabbed her hand, yanked it behind her back, pressing my knife to her neck. She tried to scream but I pressed the knife harder. Then she started to utter a whisper I knew. I whispered something back and she stopped.

“I am protected by a Sangoma,” I said.

“You pick here to rob a poor woman? You pick this place?”

“What is it you carry, girl?” I asked.

For she was a girl and thin, her cheeks hungry. Her hand, which I still held, was near down to bone, something I could break with just a twist.

“Curse you if you make me drop it,” she said.

“What shall you drop?”

“Take your eyes out of my bosom, or take my purse and go.”

“Money is not what I look for. Tell me what you carry or I will stab it.”

She flinched, but I knew what it was before the dried milk vomit smell came to me, and before it gurgled.

“How many cowries buys a baby in the Malangika?”

“You think I selling my baby? What kind of witch sell her own baby?”

“I don’t know. What kind of witch buys one, that I know.”

“Let me go or I going scream.”

“A woman’s scream in these tunnels? That is every street. Tell me how you come by the baby.”

“You deaf? I say—”

I twisted her arm behind her back, right up almost to her neck, and she screamed, and screamed again, trying to not drop the child. I released her hand a little.

“Go slip back in your mother cunt,” she said.

“Whose baby?”

“What?”

“Who is the mother of the baby?”

She stared at me, frowning, thinking of something to say that would make a lie out of the sound of this baby waking up and hating the rough cloth he was wrapped in.

“Mine. Is mine. Is my own baby.”

“Not even a whore would take her child to the Malangika unless she goes to sell it. To a—”

“I not no whore.”

I let her go. She turned away from me as if to run, and I pulled one of the axes from my back.

“Try to run and this will split the back of your head before you reach fifty paces. Test me if you wish.”

She looked at me and rubbed her arm.

“I look for a man. A special man, special even in the Malangika,” I said.

“I don’t mess with no man.”

“And yet you just said this is your baby, so messed with a man, you did. He is hungry.”

“He not no concern for you.”

“But hungry he is. So feed him.”

She pulled the cloth from the baby’s head. I smelled baby vomit and dried piss. No shea butter, no oil, no silks, nothing that graces a baby’s precious buttocks. I nodded and pointed my ax at her breasts. She pulled her robe and the right breast slipped out, thin and lanky above the baby’s face. She shoved the breast into the baby’s mouth and it started sucking, pulling so hard she winced. The baby spat out her breast, and cried into a scream.

“You have no milk,” I said.

“He not hungry. What you know about raising a child?”

“I raised six,” I said. “How were you going to feed him?”

“If you didn’t interfere, we would reach home long time now.”

“Home? The nearest village is three days away on foot. Can you fly? The child would starve by then.”

She dug into her dress for the pouch, and tried to pull it open with both hands while still holding the child.

“Look here, dog-fucker or whatever you be. Take the coin and go buy yourself a girl so you can kill and eat her liver. Leave me be, me and my child.”

“Hark those words. I would say raise your child around better folks, but it is not your child.”

“Leave me be!” she shouted, and pulled the pouch open. “Here, see it here. Take it all.”

She held it out, but then dashed it. I swung my ax to knock it out of the way and it hit the wall and fell to the ground. Little vipers came out and grew big. She ran but I chased her, gained on her, grabbed her hair and she screamed. She dropped the baby. I pushed her hard, and picked up the child as she staggered to a fall. She shook her head and wobbled as I pulled the boy out of the nasty cloth. His body, dark as tea, she had marked with white clay. A line around the neck. A line at each joint in the arms and legs. A cross at his navel, and circles around his nipples and his knees.

“What a night you were planning for yourself. You are no witch, not yet, but this would have made you one, maybe even a powerful one, instead of someone’s apprentice.”

“Get you cock sting by a scorpion,” she said, sitting up.

“On the art of cutting up a child, you have no expertise, so he drew where to cut. The man who sold you the baby.”

“All coming out of your mouth is wind.”

The boy wiggled in my arms.

“Men in the Malangika, they sell wretched things, unspeakable things. Women do this too. But a baby, alive, untouched, is no easy thing to find. This is not bastard or foundling. Only the purest child could give you the most powerful magic, so you bought yourself the purest child. Stolen from a noblewoman. And no easy thing to buy, three days from the nearest city. So you must have given him something of great value. Not gold, or cowries. You gave him another life. And since merchants can only appreciate things of value, that life must have been valuable to you. A son? No, a daughter. Child brides go for even more than the newborn here.”

“A thousand fucks—”

“I have long passed a thousand fucks. Where is the master who sold you this baby?”

Still on the ground, she scowled at me, even as she rubbed her forehead with her right hand. I stepped on her left hand and she yelled.

“If I ask again, it will be after I chop this hand off.”

“You bastard son of a whoring North wolf bitch. Cut the hand off a defenseless woman.”

“You just defended yourself with a spell of vipers. Which of his feet was for the amulet, left or right?”

“What plenty you know about witch and witchmen. You must be the real witch.”

“Or maybe I kill witches. For money, yes. One can always use money. But really for sport. The merchant, where is he?”

“Fool, he shift whereabouts every night. No elephant remember the way there, no crow can find him.”

“But you bought the child this night.”

I stomped harder on her hand and she yelled again.

“The midnight street! Go to the end, and turn right past the dead tree, then down the three sets of steps, deep in the dark. So dark that you can’t see, only feel. He in the house of a witchman with the heart of an antelope rotting on the door.”

I stepped off her hand and she grabbed it, cursing me under her breath.

“No good going come to you. Before you meet him, you going meet two.”

“What charity, giving me warning.”

“Warning not going save you. Me telling you not going mean a thing.”

I rubbed the baby’s belly. He was hungry. One of these merchants—sellers, witchmen, or witches—must have had some goat’s milk. I would kick down the next door, ask for goat’s or cow’s milk, and chop off hands until a hand brought me some.

“Say, hunter,” she said. Still on the ground, the witch started hiking up her skirt.

“What use the baby be to you? What use he be to the mother? You never going find them, and them never going find you. Put the baby to use. Think, good hunter, what I can give you when I come into my power. You want coin? You want the finest merchants to just look at you and give you fine silks and their plumpest daughter? I can do that. Give me the little baby. He so sweet. I can smell the good he going to do. I can smell it.”

She stood up and held out her hands for the child.

“Here is what I shall give you. I will give you a count to ten before I throw this ax and split the back of your head open like a nut.”

The young witch cursed and screwed her face, like the man whose opium you took away. She turned to go, then spun back and shouted for her baby.

“One,” I said.

“Two.”

She ran off.

“Three.”

I flung my ax, sending it spinning after her. She ran past four doors before she heard the whir coming. The witch turned around and it struck her in the face. She landed flat on her back. I went over and pulled the ax out of her head.

I passed two lanes and went down a third that carried fragrance. The fragrance was not real and neither was the lane. A street for the wicked but foolish, a street to lure people through doors from which they would never return. So I knocked on the third door I passed, the one the fragrance came from. An old woman opened the door, and I said, I smell milk here and I will have it. She pulled out a breast, squeezed it hard, and said, Any milk you get drink it, ash boy. Ten paces down, a fat man in a white agbada opened his door to my ax. Milk, I said. Inside was not inside and his house had no roof. Goats and sheep ran around bleating, eating, and shitting and I did not ask what he used them for. I placed the child on a table.

“I will be back for the child,” I said.

“Which voice in this house say you can leave him?”

“Feed him milk of the goat.”

“You leave a boy child with me? Many a witch come and many a witch go looking for baby skin. What to stop me from fatting up me purse?”

The fat man reached for the child. I chopped his hand off. He screamed and cussed and wailed and bawled in a tongue I didn’t know. I took the hand.

“I will return your hand in three flips of the time glass. If the child is gone I will use your own hand to find you and cut you to pieces, one piece a day.”

Midnight street was called so because at the mouth of it was a sign marked MIDNIGHT. This is how anyone coming would see me. Wearing nothing but white clay, from neck to ankles, my hands and feet. Straps for axes and sheaths for knives. Around my eyes, dark so the weak would see a man of bones coming for them. I was nothing.

Ten and five paces, the air grew colder, and heavier. Out of this strange air I stepped, then walked forward again until sour dew touched my face. The enchantment left my mouth a whisper, and after that I waited. And waited. Something scurried behind me and I pulled my knives quick, then turned around to see rats running away. So I waited longer. I was about to start walking when above me the air crackled and sparked, then burst in a flame that raced in a circle the span of my arms, and went out. The air was less heavy and sour, but the road looked the same. Not one of the ten and nine doors, but just a door. Seven steps in, the floor vanished. I tried to jump back but fell in, spun, and stabbed the knives into the dirt around me. Below my feet, only air. The drop could have been to the center of the world, or into a pit of spikes or snakes. I pulled myself up, ran back, dashed to the edge, leapt into the air, missed the landing, and slammed into the side, stabbing the dirt to not fall in again.

The path ended in a bank of bush. I turned right past the dead tree the witch spoke of, and came to a cliff with a drop, this time with steps cut into the dirt going down three flights. At the bottom, another path leading to the door of a hut cut into the rock, with two windows above, yellow with flickering light. My nose was searching for sour air, and each hand still gripped a knife. I sheathed them and pulled out an ax. Nobody had locked the door. Nobody was supposed to get this far. I stepped inside a house at least five times larger than it looked from outside, like the great halls I have seen men make on the inside of a baobab tree. Around the room books showed their backs on shelves, and scrolls and papers sat on tables. In glass jars everything that could come out of the body was kept in liquid. In a bigger jar with the water all yellow, a baby with his mother rope floating like a snake. At the right, cages one atop the other with birds of every colour. Not all of them were birds; some looked like lizards with wings, and one had the head of a meerkat.

In the middle of the room stood a man as small as a boy, but old, with a thick plank of glass strapped to his eyes, which made each eye look as large as a hand. I crept in, my feet kicking away papers covered in shit, some of it fresh. Something laughed from above me and I looked up to see swinging from a rope in the ceiling and hanging by the tail two mad monkeys. Face like a man, but green like rot. Two eyes white and popping, the right small, the left bigger. Not in clothes, but ripped cloth flapped all over them. Their noses punched in like an ape’s, and long jagged teeth when they smiled. One was smaller than the other.

The small monkey jumped down before I could pull my second ax. He leapt onto my chest. I pushed him away from my face as he tried to bite my nose off. Both of them EEEEEEEEEEEEEEE’d. The man ran into the other room. The small one whipped his tail around, trying to slash me, but I grabbed his neck with one hand and held the ax for him to slash his tail right into the blade. He shrieked and fell back, bawling. I pulled my second ax and hammered both at his body, but the larger monkey yanked him away with his tail. The bigger monkey threw a jar at me, I ducked and it smashed into the wall. He slapped the smaller monkey to shut him up. I ran over to a shelf as glass jars kept shattering around me. Then silence.

Near my foot, a wet hand lay. I grabbed it and threw it to my right. Jar after jar smashed against the wall. I grabbed my axes, jumped up, threw the first one. The large monkey dodged the first but ran into the second, which chopped his forehead. He fell against a shelf, pulling it down with him. The smaller one picked up his tail and ran off through a dark crevice between two shelves. I pulled away books and scrolls until I saw the stem of my ax. I hammered into the mad monkey’s head with both axes until his flesh hit my face.

In the room but behind me it was, the door where from the rotting heart of an antelope hung a cracked Ifa bowl.

Inside the room, the man sat with a woman, and child sat at the table. Both woman and boy styled their hair stranger than in any land I have been to, branches sticking out of their heads as with the deer, and dried dung holding hair and branches together. The woman looked at me with glowing eyes, and the child, a boy, perhaps, smiled as a flower popped open from one of the branches. The man looked up.

“You wearing nothing but white. Who do you mourn?” he said.

He saw me looking at the wife.

“She good with the fucky-fucky, but gods alive, she can’t cook. Can’t cook a shit. Me no know if me can offer none of this to you. Cook it too long, I tell you. You hear me, woman, you can’t cook it too long. Blink three time and peppered afterbirth is ready. You want a piece, my friend? It just come out of a woman from the Buju-Buju. She don’t care that she make the ancestors mad for not burying it.”

“Did the afterbirth come with a baby?” I asked.

He frowned, then smiled. “Strangers, they be coming to the doctor with jokes and jokes. No so, wife?”

The wife looked at him, then at me, but said nothing. The boy cut a piece of the afterbirth with his knife and shoved it in his mouth.

“So, you are here,” he said. “Who you is?”

“You sent two of yours to welcome me.”

“They welcome everybody. And since you is standing there, they—”

“Gone.”

I put away my axes and pulled the knives. They continued eating, trying to pretend I was gone, but kept looking in my direction, the woman especially.

“You the baby seller?”

“I transact many a thing, always with a honest man heart.”

“An honest man’s heart must be why you are in the Malangika.”

“What you want?”

“When did your skin return to you?”

“You still talking nothing but foolishness.”

“I seek someone who does business in the Malangika.”

“Everybody do business in the Malangika.”

“But what he buys, you’re of a few who sell it.”

“So go check the few.”

“I have. Four before you, one after you. Four so far dead.”

The man paused, but just for a blink. The woman and child kept on eating. His face was to his wife but his eyes followed me.

“Not before my wife and child,” he said.

“Wife and child? This wife and this child?”

“Yes, don’t do—”

I threw both knives; one struck the woman in the neck, the other struck the boy in the temple. Both shook and jerked, shook and jerked, then their heads crashed on the table. The old man screamed. He jumped up, ran to the boy, and grabbed his head. The flower on his head wilted, and something black and thick oozed slow from his mouth. The old man wailed and screamed, and bawled.

“I seek someone who does business in the Malangika.”

“Oh gods, look!”

“You kill children now,” a voice I knew said.

“What he buys, you have been known to sell,” I said to the old man. “Sakut vuwong fa’at ba,” I said to the thought.

“Oh gods, my sorrow. My sorrow,” he cried.

“Merchant, if any god were to look, what would he say about you and your obscene family?”

“There were voices, you heard them say that we were an obscene family,” the voice I knew said.

“They were my one. They were my one.”

“They were white science. Both of them. Grow another one. Or two. You might even get a pair who can talk next time. Like a grass parrot.”

“I call black heart men. I tell them hunt you and kill you!”

“Mun be kini wuyi a lo bwa, old man. I brought weeping to the house of death. Do you know what I wish for?”

I came nearer. The woman’s face was rougher up close, as was the boy’s. Not smooth, but run through with lines and ridges, like vines intertwined.

“Neither is of flesh,” I said.

“They were my only one.”

I pulled my ax.

“You sound as if you wish to be with them. Shall I make this happen? Right—”

“Stop,” he said.

He cried to his gods. He may have really loved this woman. This boy. But not enough to join them.

“Not every man is fine in face such as yourself. Not every man can find love and devotion. Not every man can say the gods have blessed them. Some men even the gods find ugly, even the gods have said there shall be no hope for your blood. She smiled at me! The boy smiled at me! How dare you judge a man for refusing to die of loneliness. Gods of sky, judge this man. Judge what he done.”

“There is no sky. Mayhaps call gods under the earth,” I said.

He took his son in his arms and held him, shushing him as if the boy was crying.

“Poor merchant, you have never had the kiss of a beautiful woman, you say.” He looked up at me, his eyes wet, his lips quivering, everything about him saying sorrow. “Is this because you keep killing them?” I said.

The sorrow left his face and he went back to his seat.

“And the men too. You hunt them down. No, there is no blood on your hands. You are too much a coward to fetch your own kill, so you send men out. They put people under spells with potions, for you wish them whole, with no poison in them, for that taints the heart. Then you kill some, and sell them for all sorts of secret magicks and white science. Some you keep alive because the foot of a living man, or the liver of a living woman is worth five times more on the market. Maybe even ten. And what of the baby that you just bartered with a young witch?”

“What you want?”

“I seek a man who comes to you for hearts. Hearts of women. You sometimes give him hearts of men, thinking he will never know. He knows.”

“What your business with him?”

“No business of yours.”

“I sell gold dust, crafts from the river lands, and fruits from the North. I do not sell such things.”

“I believe you. You live in the Malangika because the rent you find agreeable. Is it one heart every nine nights or two?”

“Go let ten demons fuck you.”

“Every soul in Malangika has a wish for my asshole.”

He sat back down at the head of the table. “Leave me to bury my wife and child.”

“In the dirt? Do you not mean sow them?”

I stood beside him.

“You know the man I speak of. You know he is not a man. Skin white like kaolin, just like his cape with black trim. You have seen him once; you thought, Hark, his cloak looks like feather. You thought he was beautiful. They are all beautiful. Tell me where he lives.”

“I say get out and go—”

I pressed his hand with mine and chopped his finger. He screamed. Tears ran rivers down his face. I grabbed his neck.

“Understand something, little man. Inside you there is fear, I know. And you should be scared of the lightning bird. He is a beast of great misery and will come for your heart, or turn you into a thing that will never know peace.”

I stood up and pulled him up until his eyes were almost level with mine.

“But know this. I will chop off your fingers, arms, legs, and feet, piece by piece, until you have no fingers, arms, legs, or feet. Then I will slice right around the top of your head and peel the scalp off. Then I will slice your cock into little strands so that it looks like a bush skirt. I will go over there, grab the torch, and seal each wound so you live. Then I will set fire to your tree-son and your vine-wife so that you can never grow them back. And that will be just the beginning. Do you understand, little man? Shall we play another game?”

“I … I never touch the living, never touch them, never, never, only the just dead,” he said.

I grabbed his hand, bleeding at the finger stumps.

“The road of blind jackals!” he shouted. “The road of blind jackals. Down where the tunnels all fall down and all sort of thing live in the rubble. West of here.”

“Any enchantments in the road, like the pit you wanted me to fall into?”

“No.”

“A witchman told me no man needs his right middle finger.”

“No!” he shouted, still bawling out his words. “There is no enchantment on that road, none from my craft. Why would it need it? No man go down that road unless he choosing to lose his life. Not even the witch, not even the ghost dog. Not even memory live there.”

“Then that is where I will find him and …”

Standing in this room and in the outer chamber as long as I did, the smells all became known to me. But I turned to leave and a new smell brushed my nose. As it always is, I did not know what it was other than it was not the others. An odor, a scent of the living. I dropped the merchant’s hand and walked over to a wall on the left, kicking away bottles with candles melting on top. The merchant said there was nothing there but the wall, and I turned to see him scoop his fingers into his hands. The smell was stronger at the wall. Piss, but fresh, the freshness of now. Things in it I knew from smell, wicked minerals, mild poisons. I whispered at the wall.

“Nothing there but the earth this hut cut out of. Nothing there, I say.”

Flame sparked at the top of the wall and split to both edges, came down the sides, joining at the bottom and burning a rectangle that disappeared to reveal a room. A room as large the one we were in, with five lamps hanging on the walls. On the floor, four mats. On the mats four bodies, one with no arms or legs, one cut open from neck to penis, his ribs poking out, one full in body but not moving, and another, his eyes open, his hands and legs bound by rope, and a cross mark across his chest in kaolin clay. The boy had pissed on his belly and chest.

“Them sick. You try find a medicine woman in the Malangika, you try.”

“You are harvesting them.”

“Not true! I—”

“Merchant, you bawl to the gods, scream and wail like a priestess secretly fingering herself, and yet there is a broken Ifa bowl on your door. Not only are the gods gone, you wish they never come back.”

“That is madness! Ma—”

My ax chopped his neck, blood splashed the wall, and his head fell and swung from a strip of skin. He fell onto his back.

“You have killed children,” the voice that knew me said.

“Begging does not stop killing if one has decided to kill,” I said.

Nothing walked this road of blind jackals but the fear to walk it. Two spirits did come to me screaming, looking for their bodies, but nothing struck fear in me anymore. Nothing was struck in me, not even sadness. Not even indifference. The two spirits both ran through me and shivered. They looked at me, screamed, and vanished. They were right to scream. I would kill the dead.

The entrance was so small that I crawled inside until I was again in a wide space, as high as before, but all around was dust, and bricks, cracked walls, broken wood, rotting flesh, old blood, and dried shit. Carved out of this was a seat like a throne. And there he was, sprawled on it, looking at the two rays of light that hit his legs and his face. The white wings, black at the tips, spread out and hanging lazy, his eyes barely open. A little bolt jumped off his chest and vanished. The Ipundulu, the lightning bird, looking as if he could not bother with this business of being Ipundulu. I stepped into something brittle that broke at my feet. Shed skin.

“Greetings, Nyka,” I said.