Black Leopard, Red Wolf

by Marlon James

  “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 d
ivided 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 nam
e.”

  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.