by Marlon James
“Sadogo!”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”
“I’ll carry the boy.”
The ten and nine doors, surely you have heard of them.
“Another trick.”
“Who do you talk to?” Sadogo said.
“A minor demon who will not be quiet.”
“I worked for slavers once,” Sadogo said.
“Not now, Sadogo.”
“I . . . do not know why . . . my head keeps rolling out to sea. But I have seen many days working for a slaver. I stopped a slave revolt once all by my own, with these hands you see here. They said I could kill five and not affect their profits so I killed five. I don’t know why I did it. I know why I killed them but . . . my head goes out to sea, I do not know why I was in a slaver’s employ. . . . Did you know there are no female Ogos . . . or I have found none in all the lands I have seen. . . . Know this, Tracker . . . why do I wish to tell you, why do I wish to tell you so? I have never . . . ever . . . never been with a woman, for who can the Ogo mate with that he does not kill . . . and if this does not kill her . . .”
He lifted up his skirt. Long and thick like my entire arm.
“And if this does not kill her, giving birth to an Ogo surely will. I do not know my mother, just as no Ogo knows. The King of the South tried to breed a race of Ogo to fight in the last war. He kidnapped girls . . . some very young . . . some not childbearing age . . . wickedness, witchcraft, noon magic. Not a single Ogo he produced, but monsters now roam. We are not a race . . . we are a mishap.”
“Grab the Leopard, Sadogo,” I said.
The Ogo stooped, still wobbly, scooped the Leopard by the waist, and slung him over his right shoulder. Fumeli, as light as I thought he would be, I slung over my right and picked up his bow. The Ogo went to the door and stopped.
“The mad monkey . . .”
“Sadogo, there is no mad monkey. The Anjonu was trying to trick you.”
Kafin ka ga biri, biri ya ganka.
“The mad monkey . . .”
“Sadogo, do—”
“The mad monkey . . . outside.”
Before you see the monkey, the monkey has seen you.
The scream again. A long EEEEEEEEEEE that screeched through the leaves. I went to the door. The creature was maybe two hundred paces away and moving very fast. Faster than a galloping horse and coming to the door. His arms flailing about, his legs hopping long leaps, his knees almost hitting his chin. Sometimes he stopped and pushed his nose in the air, catching a smell on the wind, then looked our way and dashed again, gnashing and spitting. His thick tail swishing, whipping away. Skin like a man’s, but also green like rot. He ran headfirst, two eyes popping, the right small, the left bigger and smoking. He screamed again and the ghost of birds flew off. Too fast. Ripped cloth flapped all over him.
“The door, Sadogo, the door!”
Sadogo threw off the Leopard, slammed the door, and dropped the three bolts across it. A bang hit the door like a lightning bolt. Sadogo jumped. The creature EEEEEEEEEEE’d again, threatening to deafen every soul close.
“Shit,” I said.
The walls of the hut were stick leaves and dry shit. The creature would punch a hole right through it as soon as he saw that he could. It banged and banged and the old wood started to crack. He EEEEEEEEEEE’d again and again. Sadogo picked up the Leopard.
“The door,” he said.
I thought he was pointing to the front door, but he nodded at the back. The creature punched a hole through the front door and pushed his face against it. Face shaped like that of a man bred with a devil. His left eye really did smoke. Nose punched in like an ape’s and long, rotten teeth. He snarled and spat through the hole, then pulled away. I could hear his feet, his footsteps quicker and louder, running, right into the door. The hinges broke, but did not break off. His face pushed through the hole again. EEEEEEEEEEE. He ran off to charge again.
Sadogo grabbed each lock and ripped them off the back door. The mad monkey rammed into the wood and his whole head burst through. He tried to pull himself but was stuck. Now he looked up at us and yelled and screamed and snarled and I could hear his tail whip against the hut. We turned to the back door and all the locks Sadogo had ripped out appeared again.
“He will get through the door the third time,” I said.
“What kind of magic is this . . . what kind of magic?” Sadogo said.
I stood next to Sadogo and studied this door. There was magic, but my nose was no help in unraveling its making. I whispered an incantation I never remembered hearing before. Nothing. Nothing like the house back in Malakal. Something from the Sangoma’s tongue, not mine. I whispered it again so close my lips kissed the wood. A flame sparked at the top right corner and spread around the entire frame. When the flames vanished, so had the locks.
Sadogo went past me and pushed it open. A white light shot through. The mad monkey EEEEEEEEEEE’d. I wanted to stay and fight him but I had two asleep and one about to fall down in a blink.
“Tracker,” Sadogo said.
The light lit the whole room white. I picked up Fumeli. The Ogo took the Leopard and stepped through first, then I hobbled behind. A crash behind us caused me to turn just as the front door broke off. The mad monkey charged in screaming, but as his chipped fangs reached for the back door, it slammed itself shut, leaving us in darkness and quiet.
“What is this place?” Sadogo asked.
“The forest. We are in the for—”
I went back to the door behind us. What could it be but a mistake to do so, but I opened it anyway, just a little, and looked inside. A dusty room, with stone tiles, and from floor to wall stood books, scrolls, papers, and parchments. No broken door. No mad monkey. At the end of this new room, another door that Sadogo pushed open.
Sun. Children ran and stole, market women yelled and sold. Traders eyed a good deal, slavers squeezed red slave flesh, buildings squat and fat, buildings skinny and looming, and far off a great tower I knew.
“Are we in Mitu?” Sadogo said.
“No, my friend. Kongor.”
3
ONE CHILD MORE THAN SIX
Ngase ana garkusa ura a dan garkusa inshamu ni.
—
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.