by Marlon James
“Make it quick, little fool. You are only the first,” the young one said.
“Maybe we help them,” the old one said, and grinned.
The young one cackled. She grabbed my left foot and the old one grabbed my right, pulled them up and spread them wide. I was so weak. I screamed, and screamed again, but they howled each time to drown me out. The hyena came out of the dark. Male. He came right up to me and sniffed their piss. The hyena jumped between my legs and tried to push himself into me. They laughed and the old one said, You be soft and they be quick. The hyena kept shifting until his wet stinking body was in me. The boy the not-Ogo raped told me that the worst was when the gods gave you new sight so you see yourself and say this is the thing that is happening to you. The hyena kept shifting and thrusting, and forcing it past my screams, loving everything coming out of my mouth, pushing in more. Then he jumped off me. The young one laughed and the old one said, You be soft and they be quick. Another came in when he was done. And one after that. And another one.
Day seven, I saw that I was still a boy. There were men stronger, and women too. There were men wiser, and women too. There were men quicker, and women too. There was always someone or some two or some three who will grab me like a stick and break me, grab me like wet cloth, and wring everything out of me. And that was just the way of the world. That was the way of everybody’s world. I who thought he had his hatchets and his cunning, will one day be grabbed and tossed and thrown in with shit, and beaten and destroyed. I am the one who will need saving, and it’s not that someone will come and save me, or that nobody will, but that I will need saving, and walking forth in the world in the shape and step of a man meant nothing. The strong female piss made them all take me for female. The smell faded when the last one was still in me. He lunged at my throat but they kicked him away.
Somebody was in the hole. Coming at me in the dark. I could see myself as the gods see me, cowering and cringing, but still unable to stop myself. Somebody dragged something along the ground. It was still day and some light came down from above. The middle one came into the light pulling the hind leg of a dead thing. In the light the wet skin glimmered. Half still beast, a hind leg on the left, a woman’s foot on the right. A belly of spotty fur, dead hands spread out, the right one still a paw, the left one claws, not fingernails. The nose and mouth still pushed out of the young one’s face. Still holding her hind leg, the middle one dragged her back into the dark.
Day eight or nine or ten, I lost count of days, and ways to mark them. They let me out in open savannah. I could not remember them letting me out, just being out. The savannah grass was tall but already brown for dry season. Then I saw the old one and the middle one far off, but I knew it was them. I heard the rest, rumbling through the bush and then charging. The whole clan. I ran. With every step my mind said, Stop. This is the end of you. Any end is a good end. Even this. They strangled prey before ripping them apart. They gave themselves a thrill tearing flesh while the animal was still alive. I didn’t know which was true or false, which might be why I ran. The rumble of them as they came closer and closer, while I burned and bled down my legs, and my legs forgot how to run. Three of them, male, jumped out of the bush and knocked me down. Their growls in my ears, their spit burned my eyes, their bites cut into my legs. Many more jumped in, blocking the sky with dark, and then I woke up.
I woke up in sand. The sun was already halfway across the sky and everything was white. No hole, no bush, no bones all about, and no smell of hyena nearby. Sand all around. I did not know what to do, so I started to walk away from the sun. How did I get here and why did they let me go? I have never learned why. I thought I was in a dream, or perhaps the last few days were a dream, until I touched my left eye and felt cloth. Then I thought they never wanted to kill me, only leave me lame, for there was dignity in a kill and shame in not being worth even that. The sun burned my back. She was angry at me turning my back to her? Then kill me already. I was tired of it all, man and beast threatening to kill me, sucking my want to live, but never killing me. I walked until there was nothing to do but walk. I walked through day and night. Cold swept across the sand and I fell asleep. I woke up in the back of a cart of pigs and chickens. Fasisi we go, said an old man as he whipped his two donkeys. Maybe the man was kind, maybe he planned to sell me into slavery. Whatever the reason for his kindness, I jumped from the cart as we rode over rough, uneven road, and watched him continue, not aware that I was gone.
I knew Nyka was not in Fasisi. His scent was already out of town, many days away, in Malakal, perhaps. But he left my room as it was, which surprised me. Did not even take the money. I took what I needed and left everything else.
The closer I got to Malakal the stronger it was, his scent, though I told myself I was not looking for him, and I would not kill him when I found him. I would do much worse. I would search for his mother, whom he claims to hate but always speaks of, and kill her, and switch her head with an antelope’s, sewing them to each other’s bodies. Or I would do something so evil and vengeful it was beyond me being able to think of it. Or I would leave him alone, and go away for years, and let him go fat in the thought of me long dead, and then strike. But as soon as I was walking streets he walked, and stopping at places he stopped, I knew he was in Malakal. In a day I knew the street. Before the sun went down I knew the house. Before night, the room.
I waited until I was stronger. The rest came from hate. He paid his innkeeper to lie for him and had taught him how to make poisons. So when I came into the innkeeper’s kitchen, he tried to act as if he was not startled. I did not ask for Nyka. I said to him, I am going upstairs to kill him. And I will kill you before you can reach the poison in your cabinet. He laughed and said, Do what you want, I care not for him. But he pulled a dart out of his hair and threw it at me. I dodged; it hit the wall behind me and started to smoke. He ran but I grabbed him by the same hair and pulled him back. Here is how you will not reach, I said, and placed his right hand on the counter and chopped it off. He screamed and ran off. The innkeeper made it to the door, even opened it halfway, before my hatchet struck the back of his head. I left him there in the doorway and went upstairs. His smell was everywhere, but he refused to show himself. Nyka might have been a thief and a liar and a betrayer of men but he was no coward. The scent was strongest in the cupboard and it was not a dead smell. I opened the cupboard and all of Nyka was hanging on a hook. His skin. But just his skin, what was left of it. Nyka shed his skin. I have seen men, women, and beasts with strange gifts but never one who could shed like a snake. And with the skin gone, he left the scent behind too. Somehow he is a new man now.
“Then how did you know it was him coming up the steps?” Bunshi asked.
“He always chewed khat. Keeps him alive, he used to say. You might ask if I ever wondered why the hyenas let me go. I have not. Because to wonder is to think of them, and I have not thought of them until you came through my window. He did not even notice my eye. My eye, he did not even notice.”
“Forward is the hyena, backward is a fox,” Bunshi said.
“A better friend, the hyena.”
“And yet he was the one who said, Only Tracker can find this boy. To find the boy, you must find the Tracker. I will not insult you by throwing more coin at your feet. But I need you to find this boy; agents for the King are already on the hunt because somebody told him the boy might still be alive. And they only need proof of death.”
“Three years is too late. Whoever took him he answers to.”
“Name your price. I know it is not in coin.”
“Oh, but it is in coin. Four times the four times you offered to pay.”
“Your tone makes me ask: What else?”
“His head. Cut off and shoved so hard on a stake that the tip bursts through the top.”
She looked at me in the dark and nodded once.
NINE
But everybody knows of your mad King, inqui
sitor. I say better a mad king than a weak one, and better a weak king than a bad one. What is evil anyway, a sad soul infected with devils who take his will, or a man thinking that of all his mother’s children he loves himself the best? You wish to know how I’ve come by two eyes when I just said I lost one. Here I thought your ears would have been pricked by our glorious Kwash Dara entering the story.
Do you know Bunshi? She never lies, but her truth is as slippery as her skin, and she twists it, shapes it, and lines it up straight beside you, like a snake does when she decides it is you she should eat. To tell true, I did not believe that the King had an elder’s family murdered. I wanted to go back to my room and ask the innkeeper if she had ever heard of the Night of the Skulls, and what happened to Basu Fumanguru, but I still owed her rent and, as I said, she had way too many notions on how I could pay other than in coin.
And yet what Bunshi said about the King lined up with the little I knew, and heard. That he increased taxes on both the local and the foreign, on sorghum and millet and the transport of gold, tripled the tax on ivory, but also of the import of cotton, silk, glass, and instruments of science and mathematics. Even the horse lords he taxed for every sixth horse, and hay came at a cost. But it was the aieyori, the land tax, that made men grimace and women fret. Not because it would be high, for it always was. But because these northern kings have a way that never changes, where each decision tells the keen observer what decision will come next. A king used an aieyori for only one reason, and that is to pay for war. Things that seem like water and oil were in truth something that was a mix of the two. The King demanding a war tax, in truth a tax to pay for mercenaries, and his chief opponent, maybe even enemy, the one who could turn the will of the people against him, now dead. Killed three years ago and vanished perhaps from the books of men. Certainly no griot have sung of the Night of the Skulls.
You look at me as if I know the answer to the question you have yet to ask. Why would our King want war, especially when it is your own, the shit eater of the South, who last started it? A smarter man could answer that question. Listen to me now.
That morning, after Bunshi left, I set out on my own, to the northwest of the third wall. I did not tell the Leopard. When I was walking away, the sun was just rising, and I saw Fumeli sitting in the window. I neither knew nor cared if he saw me. In the northwest slept many elders, and I was looking for one I knew. Belekun the Big. These elders were fond of describing themselves as if locked out of their own joke. There was Adagagi the Wise, whose stupidity was profound, and Amaki the Slippery, but who knew what that meant? Belekun the Big stood so tall that he lowered his head before walking through every door, though to tell truth, the doors were high enough. His hair was white and grained, and stiff like a head plate, with small flowers he liked to wear on top. He came to me three years ago, saying, Tracker, I have a girl you must find for me. She has stolen much coin from the elders’ treasury, after we showed her kindness by taking her in one rainy night. I knew he lied, and not because it had not rained in Malakal for nearly a year. I knew of the elders’ ways with young girls before Bunshi told me. I found the girl in a hut near the Red Lake, and told her to move to one of the cities of the midlands with no allegiance to North or South, maybe Mitu or Dolingo, where the order of elders had no eyes in the street. Then I went back to Belekun the Big and told him that hyenas got to the girl, and vultures left only this bone, an ape’s leg bone I threw at him. He leapt out of the way like a dancing girl.
So. I remembered where he lived. He tried to hide that he was annoyed to see me, but I saw the change in his face, quick as a blink, before he smiled.
“Day has not yet decided what kind of day it seeks to be, but here is the Tracker, who has decided to come to my house. As it is, as it should be, as it—”
“Save the greeting for a more worthy guest, Belekun.”
“We will have manners, boy bitch. I have not yet decided if I should let you pass this door.”
“Good thing I won’t bother to wait,” I said, and walked past him.
“Your nose leads you to my house this morning, what a thing. Just another way you were always more like a dog than a man. Don’t sit your smelly self on my good rugs and rub your stinking skin on it and—milk a god’s nipple and what evil is that in your eye?”
“You talk too much, Belekun the Big.”
Belekun the Big was indeed large, with a massive waist and flabby thighs, but very thin calves. This too was known of him: Violence, the hint of it, the talk of it, even the slightest flash of rancor made him flush. He almost refused to pay me when I came back without a living girl, but did so when I grabbed those little balls through his robes and pressed my blade against them until he promised me triple. This made him a master of double-talk; my guess was it made him think himself not responsible for whatever nasty business he paid people to do. The King, it has been said, has no eye for riches, something the elders more than made up for. In Belekun’s welcome room he kept three chairs with backs that looked like thrones, cushions of every pattern and stripe, and rugs in all the colours of the rain serpent, with green walls covered in patterns and marks and columns that went all the way to the ceiling. Belekun dressed himself like his walls, in a dark green and shiny agbada outer robe with a white pattern on the chest that looked like a lion. He wore nothing underneath, for I smelled his ass sweat on the seat of his robes. He wore beaded sandals on his feet. Belekun threw himself down on some cushions and rugs, waking up a pink dust. He still did not invite me to sit. Laid out on a plate beside him were goat cheese and miracle berry, and a brass goblet.
“You truly are a hound now.”
He chuckled, then laughed, then laughed into a brutal cough.
“Have you had miracle berry before lime wine? It makes the whole thing so sweet, it is as if a flower virgin spurted in your mouth,” Belekun said.
“Tell me about your brass goblet. Not from Malakal?”
He licked his lips. Belekun the Big was a performer, and this show was for me.
“Of course not, little Tracker. Malakal went from stone to iron. No time for the fineries of brass. The chairs are from lands above the sand sea. And those drapes, only precious silks bought from eastern light traders. I am not confessing to you, but they cost me as much as two beautiful slave boys,” he said.
“Your beautiful boys who didn’t know they were slaves before you sold them.”
He frowned. Somebody once warned me about loving to grab fruit low to the ground. He wiped his hand on the robe. Shiny, but not silk, for were it silk he would have told me.
“I seek news of one of you, Basu Fumanguru,” I said.
“News of the elders be only for the gods. What be they to you that you should know? Fumanguru is—”
“Fumanguru is? I heard he was.”
“News of the elders be only for the gods.”
“Well you need to tell the gods he is dead, for news on the drum did not reach the sky. You, though, Belekun . . .”
“Who seeks to know of Fumanguru? Not you, I remember you as just a carrier.”
“I think you remember more than that, Belekun the Big,” I said, and brushed my bulge on the way to grabbing my bracelet.
“Who is it that will know of Fumanguru?”
“Relations near the city. It seems he has some. They will hear what became of him.”
“Oh? Family? Farmer folk?”
“Yes, they are folk.”
He looked up at me, his left eyebrow raised too high, goat cheese lodged in the corner of his mouth.
“Where is this family?”
“They are where they should be. Where they have always been.”
“Which is?”
“Surely you know, Belekun.”
“Farming lands are to the west, not Uwomowomowomowo, for there are too many bandits. Do they farm the slopes?”
“What is their liveli
hood to you, elder?”
“I only ask so that we may send them tribute.”
“So he is dead.”
“I never said he was alive. I said he is. We are all is, in the plan of the gods, Tracker. Death is neither end nor beginning, nor is it even the first death. I forget which gods you believe in.”
“Because I don’t believe in any, elder. But I will send them your very best wishes. Meanwhile they wish for answers. Buried? Burned? Where is he and his family?”
“With the ancestors. We should all share their good fate. That is not what you wish to know. But yes, all of them, dead. Yes they are.”
He bit into some more cheese and some miracle fruit.
“This cheese and miracle fruit, Tracker, it is like sucking a goat’s teat and sweet spices come out.”
“All of them are dead? How did this happen, and why do people not know?”
“Blood plague, but the people do know. After all, it was Fumanguru who angered the Bisimbi in some way—he must have, yes he did, of course he did—and they cursed him with infectious disease. Oh we found the source, who was also already dead, but nobody goes near the house for fear of the spirits of disease—they walk on air, you know. Yes they do, of course they do. How could we have told the city that their beloved elder or anyone died of blood plague? Panic in the streets! Women knocking down and trampling their own babies just to get out of the city. No, no, no, it was the wisdom of the gods. Besides, no one else had contracted the plague.”
“Or the death, it seems.”
“It seems. But what is this? Elders have no obligation to speak of the fate of elders. Not even to family, not even to the King. We tell them of death only as a courtesy. A family should regard an elder as dead as soon as he joins the glorious brotherhood.”