by Marlon James
“Your brothers?”
“We are not blood.”
“You have no blood.”
She looked away from me. The Leopard, his eyes wide open, was listening like a child left in a bush of ghosts. She continued, “There are many ways to summon them. If you have someone’s blood, speak a curse and throw it up to the ceiling. But first you would need to be under a witch’s enchantment, or they will appear and kill you. Or you could call a witch to do it for you. They appear on the ceiling, people call them the roof walkers, and whether a witch summons them or they are lured by your blood, the hunger in them grows so big that they will hunt you like starving dogs. And the spell will never leave you. Nobody can escape them, and even if you do they will appear anytime you are under a roof, even for a blink. Many man, many woman, many young boy and girl sleep under stars because they will never be rid of Omoluzu.
“You were wondering, Tracker, how come they never followed you here? How long before you slept under a roof?”
“Near a year,” I said.
“Omoluzu cannot follow you out of the underworld if that is where they found you. And had they found you here, they cannot follow you there. But if I were you, I would not throw blood.”
“What did the Omoluzu do?” the Leopard said.
Bunshi stood up. Her robes billowed even though no wind blew. Outside a crash, some shouts, and some screams. People drunk on drink and sport, people drunk on the excitement of the coming King. Kwash Dara, the same king in her story.
“As I said before. They came on the Night of the Skulls. Fumanguru’s seven sons were long asleep and time was reaching deep night, the noon of the dead. All of them asleep, even the youngest, also called Basu. Asleep were the ground and garden slaves, but awake were the cooks milling grain, Basu’s youngest and oldest wives, and Basu, in his study, reading volumes from the Palace of Wisdom. This is what happened. An elder with friends at court sent a witch to speak a dark enchantment on the house, then paid a slave to gather the youngest wife’s menstrual blood. Omoluzu hunger is monstrous—it is the smell of blood that lures them, not the taste. This slave found her blood cloths, bundled them together, and in the dark when the other slaves were asleep, threw her mistress’s blood cloths up to the ceiling. The witch never told her to run, so she went to sleep. In the dark the rumble on the ceiling must have sounded like thunder far away. Thunder that even the light sleeper sleeps through.
“The Tracker can tell who they be. They fall from the ceiling the way I rise from the ground. They run on the ceiling as if tethered to sky. When they leap, they almost touch the floor, but land back on the ceiling so hard that you wonder if it not they who are on the ground and you who are in the air. And they have blades made of nothing on this earth. They rose and formed, and chopped up nearly every living slave save one. She ran out screaming that the dark has come to kill us. Tracker is right that I am like them. But I am not them. And yet I felt them, I felt them coming and knew they were near, but did not know which house until I heard Basu himself shout. Omoluzu chased the slave, who ran to Basu’s wife. The wife grabbed a torch, thinking of the great legends where light defeats darkness, but they surrounded them and chopped both their heads off.
“Omoluzu appeared in the grain room and killed the cooking slaves. They appeared in the children’s room and cut them up before any of them even woke. They were merciful with no one. When I climbed into the house it was too late, and still there was killing. I stepped into a hallway thick with blood. A man ran to me holding a baby, Basu holding young Basu. He looked like a man who knew death was chasing him. I could hear death rumble on the ceiling like thunder, like mortar was breaking apart. Black racing across the ceiling like darkness and coming after him. I say, Give me your child if you want him to live. I am his father, he says. I say, I cannot save both of you and fight them, and he says, You are just like them. But we share neither mother nor father, I say. I did not have time to convince him I was good or evil. I saw the darkness behind him take shape into three, then four, then six Omoluzu. Give me the boy, I said. He stared at his child long, then handed him to me. The baby was only one year born, I could tell. We were both holding him and he could not let him go.
“They are coming,” he said.
“They are here,” I said.
“He looked at me and said, This was the work of the King. Kwash Dara. This was the work of the court, this was the work of the elders, and my son is witness that this happened.
“Your son will not remember, I said.
“But the King will, he said.
“I flicked up my second finger and it became a blade. I pushed below my rib right here and cut it open. The father was afraid but I told him he need not fear, I make a womb for the boy. I cut my womb open the way midwives sometimes do when the baby is unborn and the mother is already dead. I pushed the baby through and my skin sealed him inside. The father was in terror, but seeing my belly big, as if with child, gave him some peace. Will he die in you? he said, and I said no. Were you a mother? this man Basu asked me, but I did not answer. I tell you true, there was a heaviness in me. I have never carried children. But maybe every woman is a mother.”
“You are not a woman,” I said.
“Quiet,” said the Leopard.
“The Sangoma said you had a mouth on you,” she said.
I didn’t ask how she knew.
“The Omoluzu had blades. I had blades too.”
“Of course you did.”
“Tracker, enough,” said the Leopard.
“One came for me, swung his one blade, but I had two.”
“That’s a scene for the griots, a pregnant-looking woman fighting shadow devils with two blades.”
“A scene indeed,” said the Leopard. I was starting to wonder about him. He was feeding on her story like someone starving, or like someone glutting, I could not tell.
“He swung at me and I ducked. I jumped up to the ceiling, their floor, and chopped his head off with my two blades. But I could not fight them all. Basu Fumanguru was brave. He pulled out a knife, but a blade came for him from the back and stabbed right through his belly. But their bloodlust was not satisfied. They could smell the family’s blood on the boy even with him inside me. One swung and cut me in the shoulder, but I swung around and cut his chest open. I ran and jumped through the same window I came through.”
“Not anywhere have I heard such a story. Not from the hawk, not even from the rhinoceros,” the Leopard said.
“It is a very good story. There were even monsters. None of it makes me want to help you,” I said.
She laughed. “If I was looking for noble men with the heart to help a child, I would never have called you. I really don’t care what you want. It is a task for which you will be paid four times more than the highest you have ever charged. In gold. What you like or want, whatever it is in your head means nothing to me.”
“I …” I had nothing to say.
“What of the child—after, I mean?” the Leopard said.
“I did not take him to his aunt. Omoluzu smells blood upon blood and would have, should whoever commanded them willed it, gone after any family. I took him to a blind woman in Mitu, who used to be loyal to the old gods. Without sight she would not know who the child was, or try to find out. She was with a child so could suckle him also, and keep him for a year.”
“Used to be loyal?”
“She sold him at the slave market in the Purple City, near Lake Abbar. A baby fetches great coin outside of Kongor, especially a male. She told me this as I started to slit her throat with this finger.”
“What wise choices in people you make.”
I knew from across the room, Nsaka Ne Vampi rolled her eyes. I did not look, but I knew.
“I tracked the child to a perfume and silver merchant who was going to take him to the East. It took me a moon and it was too late. He was late with his silver and merchants in Mitu sent mercenaries to find him. You know where they found him? At the border of Mitu.
They found flies but no stench of death. Somebody ransacked the caravan and killed everyone. Nobody touched the civet, or silver, or myrrh. Never found the boy; they took him.”
“The King?” I asked.
“The King would have had him killed.”
“So he is gone? Why not leave him gone?”
“You would have a child walking with murderers?” the old woman said.
“Because a child in the company of witches would fare much better,” I said. “What use is the boy to murderers?”
“They found use,” Bunshi said.
I remember what the date feeder said to the slaver in the lightning woman’s tower. About the little boy knocking on the woman’s door, crying that he was running from monsters, only to let them in as soon as her family fell asleep. I nodded at the Leopard, hoping he caught what they were not saying.
I couldn’t decide whether to sit down, stand up, or leave.
“A little boy survives roof walkers only to be sold into slavery, where he was kidnapped by who, witchmen? Devils? A society of boy-lover spirits starting out the child early? What will happen next, maybe Ninki Nanka the swamp dragon will smell them as they go through the bush and eat them all?”
“You don’t believe in such creatures?” Bunshi said. “Despite all you have seen and heard and fought with? Despite the animal beside you?”
“You don’t need belief in evil creatures when men flay their own wives,” I said. I turned and looked at the Leopard, who was still drinking in this story.
“But you do believe speaking clever is wise. Good. I am not paying for your belief. I am paying for your nose. Bring me back the boy.”
“Or proof of his corpse?”
“He is alive.”
“And when we find him, what then? You are asking us to go against the King?”
“I’m paying you to expose the King.”
“Proof that the King is behind a murder.”
“There is more to the story of the King than you know. And if you knew you could not bear.”
“Of course.”
“She’s not paying you to ask or to think. She’s paying you to smell,” said Nsaka Ne Vampi.
“How do you know they have not killed the child?”
“We know,” Bunshi said.
I almost said I know too, but looked at the Leopard. He glanced at me and nodded.
A door opened and shut. I thought it was Fumeli but it was not his smell. Nsaka Ne Vampi walked over to the doorway and looked out. She said, “In two days we ride for Kongor. Come or don’t come, it makes no difference to me. She’s the one that wants you.”
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 trouble
d 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.