by Marlon James
She pointed to Bunshi, but I kept looking past her. I didn’t even hear what she said after, because of the scent coming up the stairs. The scent I caught earlier, which I thought was Bunshi, but I had never met her and she was right, she did not smell like Omoluzu. This scent was coming closer, someone carrying it, and I knew I hated it, more than I have hated anything in years, more than I have hated men I have known but killed anyway. He was coming up the stairs, coming closer, I could hear the patter of his feet and with each step my fury was bursting into flames.
“You are late,” Nsaka Ne Vampi blurted. “Everyone is—”
I cut her words off with the hatchet that I flung straight past her face to lodge in the door.
“God’s fuck! You barely missed me, friend,” he said, stepping into the doorway.
“I wasn’t trying to miss,” I said, and threw the second one straight for his face. He dodged but it grazed his ear.
“Tracker, what the—”
I ran and jumped on him; we fell back on the stairs and rolled down the steps. My hands around his neck and squeezing until either his neck snapped or his breath died. Rolling down the steps, skin bruising, blood shedding, his, mine, the steps, the loose mortar. Me losing earth, him losing voice, rolling and rolling and hitting the floor below, the force of the fall and him kicking me in the chest. I fell back and he was upon me. I kicked him off and pulled a knife, but he knocked it out of my hand and punched me in the belly, then the face, then the cheek, then my chest but I blocked his hand, pushed away the knuckle, punched him under the chin, again across the left eye. The Leopard ran down as Leopard and changed maybe, I didn’t see, I kept my eyes on him. He ran, and jumped, and kicked, I dodged and swung up my elbow and hit him square in the face and he was down, head hit the ground first. I jumped on him and punched his left cheek then right, then left, and he hit me in the ribs twice and I fell off, but rolled out of the way of his knife as he stabbed the floor. I kicked his kick, and kicked his kick again and scrambled up as he scrambled up, and the Leopard knew better than to pull me back or stop me, and looking at the Leopard I didn’t see him come up behind and swing for the back of my head and hit and it got wet and I fell to my knees, and he swung his hand back to hit me again and I kicked his feet and he fell. I got on him again and swung my hand back to punch him again, his face running blood, looking like a dark juicy fruit bruised open, and a blade pushed itself against my throat.
“I will cut your head off and feed it to crows,” Nsaka Ne Vampi said.
“I smell him all over you,” I said.
“Take your hands off his neck. Now,” she said.
“No—”
The arrow shot straight through her hair. The Leopard’s boy was a floor below, another arrow in the bow, pulled tight and ready. Nsaka Ne Vampi raised her hands. A wild gust of blue wind hit the floor and blew us away from each other in the quick. The Leopard and I hit the wall hard and Nsaka Ne Vampi rolled away.
Nyka laughed on top of it, as he tried to pull himself up. He spat at the wind, which howled louder, pinning me against the wall. Her voice was on top of it, the old woman’s. A spell set loose on the floor. The wind died as soon as it came, and we were separated from each other, across the room. Bunshi came down the steps, but the old woman stayed above.
“Them you expect to find this boy?” Sogolon said.
“You two know each other,” Bunshi said.
“Black mistress, have you not heard? We are old friends. Better than lovers since I shared his bed for six moons. And yet nothing came to pass, eh, Tracker? Did I ever tell you I was disappointed?”
“Who is this man?” Leopard asked me.
“But he told me so much about you, Leopard. He never gave any word about me?”
“This son of a leprous jackal bitch is nothing, but some call him Nyka. I swore to every fucking god that would hear me that when I saw you next, if that day ever came, I would kill you,” I said.
“That day is not today,” Nsaka Ne Vampi said. She had two daggers out.
“I hope for your sake you make him pull out when he fucks you. Even his seed is poison,” I said.
“This reunion does not move well, I think. There is thunder under your brow,” Nyka said.
“Tracker, let’s—”
“Let’s what, cat?”
“Whatever you are looking for, today is not the day to find it,” he said.
I was so furious, all I could feel was heat, and all I could see was red.
“You didn’t even do it for gold. Not even silver,” I said.
“Still such a fool. Some tasks are their own reward. Nothing means nothing and nobody loves no one, isn’t that what you love to say? Yet you are the one with all this feeling, and you trust it above everything else, even your nose. Fool for love, fool for hate. Still think I did it for money?”
“Leave now, or I swear I won’t care who I kill to get to you,” I said.
“You leave instead,” the old woman said. “But stay, Leopard.”
“Where he goes, I go,” the Leopard said.
“Then both of you leave,” the old woman said.
Nsaka Ne Vampi took Nyka upstairs, her eyes on me the whole time.
“Get out,” Bunshi said.
“I was never in,” I said.
* * *
—
Deep in the night, I woke up to my room still dark. I thought I was rising from troubled sleep but she had gone into my dream to wake me up.
“You knew you would follow me,” she said.
The thickness of her form trickled down the windowsill. She rose into a mound, stretched as high as the ceiling, then shaped herself into a woman again. Bunshi stood by the window, sitting in the frame.
“So you are a god,” I said.
“Tell me why you wish him dead.”
“Will you grant me the wish?”
She stared at me.
“I don’t wish him dead,” I said.
“Oh?”
“I wish to kill him.”
“I will have the tale.”
“Oh you will, will you. Very well. This is what passed between me and Nyka.”
Nyka was like a man coming back from things I was yet to go through. It was two years since I last saw the Leopard, and I was living in Fasisi, taking any work I could find, even finding dogs for stupid children who thought they could keep dogs, and who cried when I brought the animal’s just-buried carcass back to the father who killed it. Indeed, a roof over my head was the only reason I bedded women, since they were more agreeable to me staying the night than men, especially when I was searching for their husbands.
A noblewoman who lived for the day when she would finally be called to court, but who in the meantime fucked one man for every seven women she smelled on her husband’s breath, said this to me as I came at her from behind in the marriage bed and thought of Uwomowomowomowo valley boys smooth in skin: It has been said you have a nose. Both man and wife spilled perfume on the rugs to hide the smell of others they brought to bed. Later she looked at me and I said, Do not worry, I will please myself. What do you wish from my nose? I asked. My husband has seven mistresses. I do not complain for he is a painful, terrible lover. But he has gone stranger of late, and he was already very strange. I feel he has taken an eighth mistress, and that mistress is either a man or a beast. Twice has he come home with a smell that I did not recognize. Something rich, like a burning flower.
I did not ask how she heard of me, or what were her wishes when I found him, only how much she would pay.
“A boy’s weight in silver,” she said.
I said, This sounds like a good offer. What would I know of good or bad offers? I was young. Give me something of his, for I have never seen your husband, I said. She grabbed what looked like a white rug and said, This is what he wears under his garment. Are you married
to a man or a mountain? I said. The cloth was twice as wide as the span of my arm and still carried the trace of his sweat, shit, and piss. I did not tell her there were two different shits in this cloth, one from him and another from him pleasuring someone’s ass. As soon as I smelled him I knew where he was. But I knew where he was when she said burning flower.
“Be careful. Many mistake him for Ogo,” she said.
Only one thing smelled of burning flower. Only one thing smelled like something rich burned away.
Opium.
It came from the merchants in the East. Now there were secret dens in every city. Nobody I knew who had taken it had a tomorrow. Or a yesterday. Just a now, in a den with smoke, which made me wonder if this man was opium’s seller or slave or a thief of men under opium.
The smell of the husband and the opium led me to the street for artists and masters of craft. Fasisi streets had no plan. A wide street twisted into a narrow lane, burped into a river with just a rope bridge, then another lane again. Most of the houses had thatch roofs and walls built of clay. On the highest hill in the delta, the royal compound sat behind thick walls guarded by sentries. I tell you, it was a mystery why this, the least magnificent of the northern cities, was the capital of the empire. Nyka said this is the city that reminded the King of where we came from and to never go back, but he does not yet enter this story. Fasisi smiths are the masters of iron, if not manners. And iron is what made this backward town conquer the North two hundred years ago.
I stopped at an inn whose name meant “Light from a Woman’s Buttocks” in my language. They locked the windows shut but left the door open. Inside, many men lay wherever there was floor, on their backs, their eyes here but gone, their mouths leaking drool, their owners uncaring as the remnants of embers tipped from pipe bowls and burned out on their robes. A woman in the corner stood over a large pot that smelled of soup missing peppers and spices. Truth, it smelled more like the hot water used to skin an animal. Some of the men moaned, but most kept quiet, as if in sleep.
I passed a man smoking tobacco under a torch. He sat on a stool and leaned his back against the wall. Thin face, two large earrings, strong chin, though that might have been the light. The front half of his head he shaved, leaving the back to grow long. Goatskin cape. He did not look at me. From another room came music, which was odd, since nobody in this hall would notice. I stepped over men who did not move, men who could see me but had eyes only for the pipe. The burning-flower smell of opium was so thick that I held my breath. One never knew. Upstairs a boy screamed and a man cursed. I ran upstairs.
For someone not an Ogo this husband was as huge as one. He stood there, taller than the doorway, taller than the tallest cavalry horse. Naked, and raping a boy. I could only see his legs dangling, lifeless. But he was bawling. His two giant hands grabbed the boy’s buttocks while he forced himself. The wife did not want him dead, I thought, but said nothing about wanting him whole.
I pulled two throwing daggers, little ones, and flung them at his back. One cut across his shoulder. The husband yelled, dropped the boy, and turned around. The boy landed on his back and didn’t move. I watched him, waited too long. The husband was upon me, all muscle and skin, his shoulders massive like an ape’s, his hand grabbing my entire head. He picked me up like a doll and threw me across the room. He growled as he had while raping. The boy rolled over and grabbed one of the rugs. The man, like a buffalo, charged at me. I dodged and he ran right into the wall, cracking it and almost bursting right through. I grabbed a hatchet to chop his heel, but he reached back and kicked me all the way to the wall on the other side. It slammed the breath out of my mouth and I fell. The boy scrambled, stepping on my legs as he ran out. The man pulled his head out of the wall. His skin dark, wet from sweat, hairy like a beast’s. He batted away a line of spears leaning on the wall. Truly I knew men who were big and men who were fast but no man who was both. I pulled myself up and tried to run but his hand was around my neck again. He cut my breath off, and that wasn’t enough. He would crush my bone. I couldn’t reach knife or hatchet. I punched, thumped, scratched his arms, but he laughed as if I was the boy he was raping. He glared at me and I saw his black eyes. My sight was going dark and my spit ran down his hand. He even had me off the floor. Blood was ready to burst out of my eyes. I barely saw the man from downstairs break a clay jar on the man’s back. The husband swung around and the man threw something yellow and rank in his eyes. The not-Ogo dropped me and fell to his knees, screaming and rubbing his eyes as if about to scratch them out. Air rushed into me and made me fall to my knees as well. The man grabbed my arm.
“Is he blind?” I asked.
“Maybe for the next few blinks, maybe for a quartermoon, maybe forever, you can never tell with bat piss.”
“Bat piss? Did you s—”
“A giant is just as dangerous blind, young boy.”
“I’m not a boy, I’m a man.”
“Die as a man, then,” he said, and ran out. I ran after him. He laughed all the way out the door.
He said his name was Nyka. No family name, no house of origin, no place he called home, and no home he was running from. Just Nyka.
We hunted together for a year. I was good at finding everything but business. He was good at finding everything but people. I should have known but he was right, I was a boy. He made me wear robes, which I did not like, for they made fighting difficult, but people in some cities took me for his slave when I wore only a wrap. Most towns we went to, nobody knew of this Nyka. But everywhere we went where somebody knew him, they wanted to kill him. In a bar in the Uwomowomowomowo valley I saw a woman walk right up to him and slap him twice. She would a third time, but he caught her hand. She pulled a knife with the other and grazed his chest. Later that night my hand was between my legs as I heard them fuck across the room.
Once we searched for a dead girl who was not dead. Her kidnapper kept her in a burial urn in the ground behind his house, and took her out whenever he wanted amusement. He gagged her mouth and bound her hands and feet. When we found him he had just put his children to sleep and left his wife to go around the back to do things to this girl. He pulled away loose plants and scooped away dirt, and took out the hollow stick that he stuck in the top of the urn so that she could breathe. But this night it was not her in the urn, but Nyka. He stabbed the man in the side and he staggered back yelling. I kicked him in the back and he fell. I took a club and knocked him out. He woke up tied to the tree near where he buried the girl. She was weak and could not stand. I put my hand on her mouth, telling her to stay quiet, and gave her a knife. We steadied her hand as she pushed the knife down into his belly, then chest, then belly again over and over. He screamed into the gag until he would scream no more. I would have the girl get satisfaction. The knife fell out of her hand and she lay next to the dead man, crying. Something changed in Nyka after that. We were liars and thieves but we were not killers.
I tell you all this because I want you to see him as I saw him. Before.
Business was drying up in Fasisi. I grew tired of the place and wives missing husbands every seven days. We were at the same inn we always went to split our profits. And drink palm wine or masuku beer or liquor the colour of amber, which set fire in the chest and made the floor slippery. The fat innkeeper with a frown line right above the wart above her brow came over.
“Pour us both the bottled fire,” Nyka said.
She produced two mugs and filled both halfway. She said nothing, not even when Nyka slapped her buttocks as she went back to the counter.
“Good fortune awaits in the city of Malakal, or the Uwomowomowomowo valley below,” I said.
“Good fortune you thinking? What if I am hungry for adventure?”
“North?”
“I think I shall see my mother,” he said.
“You said before, the second-greatest thing you two gave each other was distance. You have also said you
have no mother.”
He laughed. “That is still true.”
“Which?”
“How much bottled fire did you drink?”
“Which mug is yours?”
“You drank from it?” he asked. “Good. When last we talked of fathers, you said you fought yours. One day my father, he comes in from a day of not working, only scheming and plotting and going nowhere. Hitting us was sport. One time he hit my brother in the back of the head with the walking stick and my brother was simple after that. My mother made sorghum bread. He beat her too. One time he whipped her with the walking stick, and she hopped on one foot for two moons and limped after that. So yes, let us say that this was a night he comes home from drink and swings the cane and hits me in the back of the head. Then he kicks and beats me on the ground, knocks another tooth loose, shouting for me to get up and take more. One day we shall talk just of fathers, Tracker. So yes, let us say he swings the stick at my head, but he’s too slow, and I too fast, and I catch it. Then I grab the stick from him and swing it to his head. He falls, just like that, on the floor. I take the stick and beat him and beat him, and he holds up his hand, and I break all his fingers, and he holds up his arms, and I break his arms, and he holds up his head and I break his head till I heard crack, crack, crack and still I beat, and then I hear crunch, and then sloosh, slosh, and my mother screams, You killed my husband, you killed your brothers’ father. How will we eat? I burned him behind our hut. Nobody asked for him, because nobody liked him, and everybody rejoiced at the smell of his burning flesh.”
“And your mother?”
“I know my mother. She is right where I left her. And yet I will see her, Tracker. I leave in two days. Then we can go on whatever adventure you like.”
“You are the one always seeking adventure. Meet me in Malakal.”
“Meet me where you smell my scent. A lazy night this is, and we have fucked out the entire quarter. Drink some more.”
I drank and he drank until we tamed that fire in the chest, and then we drank more. And he said, Let us forget talk of fathers, friend. Then he kissed me on the mouth. This was nothing; Nyka kissed all and everyone, in greeting or parting.