by Marlon James
“I can smell your bitch koo from here,” he said.
“Eat your food. The rats know you going to eat them and won’t come out anymore.”
“You know what I going to eat? I going to chew around my own ankle, rip off the skin, rip out the flesh, rip out the bone, until this shackle falls off, and then I going come for you, and cut you deep in your chest, so that he will smell you and come for me, and I will say, Master, look what I prepared for you. And here is what he will do. He will drink from you, and I will watch. Then I will drink from him.”
“You have claws like him? Teeth? All you have is dirty fingernails to shame your mother,” she said.
“Fingernails going to claw into your pox face and dig out your witch eyes. And then I … I … please, please unshackle me. It cuts and it itches, please, by all that is of the gods, please. Please, sweetness. I am nothing, I have nothing … I yes, yes, yes yes yes yes yesyesyes!”
He turned to the wall behind him and ran straight into the corner. I heard his head hit the wall. He fell back on the ground. Nsaka Ne Vampi looked away. Was she crying, I wanted to know. Lightning coursed through him again and he trembled, in a fit. We watched until it passed, and he stopped banging his head on the floor. He stopped panting and breathed slow. Only then, still lying on the floor, did he look at the Leopard and me.
“I know you. I have kissed your face,” he said.
I said nothing. I wondered why Leopard brought me here. If this came from his head or hers. That to see him there, hate left me. That is not full truth. Hate there was, but the hate before was of him and for him, like love. This hate was at a pathetic, wretched thing that I still wanted to kill, the way you come across a near-dead animal eating shit, or a raper of women beaten near to death. He was still looking at me, looking for something in my face. I stepped to him, and Nsaka Ne Vampi drew a knife. I stopped.
“Do you not hear? Do you not hear him calling? His sweet voice, so much pain he is in. So much pain. Agony. Oh he suffers so,” Nyka said.
Nsaka Ne Vampi looked at the Leopard and said, “He has been saying that for nights.”
“The vampire is wounded,” I said.
“Tracker?” Leopard said.
“I threw flame on him and he caught fire. Burst into flames, Nyka.”
“You tried to kill him, yes you did, but my lord, he will not die. No one shall kill him, you shall see, and he will kill you, all of you, even you, woman, you shall all see it. He will—”
Lightning crackled through him again.
“Khat is the only thing that calms him,” she said.
“You should kill him,” I said, and walked out.
“I remember your lips!” he shouted as I walked out.
I almost got to the door when a hand grabbed my wrist and pulled me back. Nsaka Ne Vampi, with the Leopard coming up behind her.
“Nobody is killing him,” she said.
“He is already dead.”
“No. No. What you are doing is lying. You lie because there is great hate between you.”
“There is no hatred between us. There is only the hatred I had for him. But now I don’t even have hate, I have sadness.”
“He can’t put pity to use.”
“Not for him, I have disgust for him. I have pity for me. Now that he is dead I cannot kill him.”
“He is not dead!”
“He is dead in every way that dead is dead. The lightning in him is all that stops him from stinking.”
“You think you can tell me how he is.”
“Of course. There was a woman. The one you all followed in your glorious chariot? Give us tidings, woman. Did she lead you all into a trap? Here is a weird thing. From what I hear Ipundulu turns mostly children and women, so why did he change Nyka instead of killing him?”
“He has turned soldiers and sentries,” she said.
“And Nyka is neither.”
Nsaka Ne Vampi sat down by the door. It irritated me that she thought I would stay and hear her story.
“Yes, how easy it looked. How we rode, how proud we were when we left behind you and the fools with you. Such fools, especially that old woman. Going to Kongor, why? Why when his lightning slave runs north? I was glad when we left, glad to get him away from you.”
“Is that what he is? A lightning slave? Why did you take me here, Leopard?”
Leopard looked at me, blank, saying nothing.
“Here is truth,” I said. “Years I have thought about this. Years. His ruin. I hated him so much that I would kill the man who ruined him before me. Now I have nothing.”
“He said you led him to a pack of hyenas, but he escaped.”
“He said much, this Nyka. What did he say of my eye? That I plucked it from a dead dog, and shoved it in my face? Poor Nyka, he could have been a griot, but would cheat history.”
“You hate him so.”
“Hate? This is what I did when I could not find him. I hunted down his sister and his mother. I would kill them both. Found both of them. Do you hear me, Nyka, I found them. Even had words with the mother. I should have killed them, but I did not, do you know why? Not because the mother told me all the ways she failed him.”
“I will have him back,” Nsaka Ne Vampi said.
“Ipundulu’s witch is dead. There is no back.”
“What if we kill him, the Ipundulu? You said he was injured and weak. If we kill him, Nyka will come back to me.”
“Nobody has ever killed an Ipundulu, so how in a thousand fucks would any soul know?”
“What if we killed him?”
“What if I don’t care? What if I lose no sleep over your man dead? What if I feel deep sorrow, such deep sorrow for not killing him myself? What if I didn’t give a thousand fucks for your ‘we’?”
“Tracker.”
“No, Leopard.”
“This is a tickle for you. This gives you joy.”
“What gives me joy?”
“Seeing him so low.”
“You would think so, would you not? I despise him and even a deaf god hears I have no love for you. But no, this does not tickle me. As I said, it disgusts me. He is not even worth my ax.”
“I will have him back.”
“Then get him back, so I can kill an actual man, instead of what you have in there.”
“Tracker, she comes with us. She will go for the lightning bird, while we get the child,” the Leopard said.
“You know who he is, Leopard. The other one who travels with the boy. We killed his brother. You and I. Remember the flesh eater in the bush, the forest of enchantment when we stayed with the Sangoma, do you yet remember? The one who strung me in that tree with all those bodies? We were but boys then.”
“Bosam.”
“Asanbosam.”
“I remember. The stench of that thing. Of that place. We never found his brother.”
“We never looked.”
“I’ll bet he dies from the arrow, just like his brother.”
“Four of us and we couldn’t kill him.”
“Maybe you four—”
“Don’t assume what you don’t know, cat.”
“Listen to both of you. Talking like I vanished from the room,” Nsaka Ne Vampi said. “I will join you to get the boy and I will kill this Ipundulu. And I will have my Nyka back. Whatever he is to you, he is not to me and that is all I have to say.”
“How many times has he broken your heart? Four? Six?”
“I am sorry for all he is to you. But he is none of those things to me.”
“So you’ve said. But those things he is to you, he was to me once as well.”
She looked at me as I looked at her. Us understanding each other.
“If you still want him after all this, if you want us, we will be waiting,” she said.
Then we heard the thump of Nyka running into the wall again and Nsaka Ne Vampi sighed.
“Wait outside for me,” I said to the Leopard. She shut her eyes and sighed when he bumped into the wall again. I wondered how wo
uld she fight with Nyka making her tired.
“He also made me love him once, this is what he does,” I said. “Nobody works harder at getting you to love him, and nobody works harder to fail you once you do.”
“I am my own woman and feel for myself,” she said.
“Nobody needs Nyka. Not what he is.”
“He is this because of me.”
“Then his debt is paid.”
“You said he betrayed you. He was the first man to not betray me.”
“How do you know?”
“Because he’s still alive, unlike all the other men who betrayed me. One used to farm me out as his slave every night for men to do as they wished. I was ten and four. When he and his sons weren’t raping me himself. They sold me to Nyka one night. He put a knife in my hand and put the hand to his throat, and said do as you wish this night. I thought he was speaking a foreign tongue. So I went to the master’s room and slit his throat, then I went to his sons’ room and killed them all. What a terrible thing to lose a father and all your stepbrothers, the town people said. He let the town think he murdered them and fled in the night.”
“Sogolon had a story like yours.”
“What do you think makes the sisters of Mantha, sisters?”
“You were—”
“Yes.”
“You’re not showing him love. You’re repaying a debt.”
“I find girls who are about to become me, and save them from the men doing the coming. Then I take them to Mantha. They are who I owe. Nyka I always said I owed him nothing.”
Why did you not kill her?” Leopard asked outside.
“Who?”
“Nyka’s mother. Why didn’t you?”
“Instead of killing her, I would tell her of his death. Slowly. In every detail, right down to how it sounds to hack off his neck in three chops.”
“Leave, both of you,” she said.
Walking back to the lord’s house, Leopard said, “Your eyes still don’t know when your lips lie.”
“What?”
“Just now. All that show about Nyka’s mother. That’s not why you didn’t kill her.”
“Really, Leopard, tell me.”
“She was a mother.”
“And!”
“You still wish for the like.”
“I had the like.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Now you speak for me?”
“You are the one who just said ‘had.’”
“Why did you take me there?”
“Nsaka Ne Vampi asked the King sister. Tracker, I think she was hoping for your pity.”
“She didn’t ask for it.”
“Did you think she would?”
“She wants the fruit to stay on the branch and be in her mouth at the same time.”
“Forgiveness, Tracker.”
“I don’t care. I don’t care about Nsaka Ne Vampi, or this queen, and no matter how many moons pass, I still don’t care for this boy.”
“Fuck the gods, Tracker, of what do you care?”
“When do we leave for Gangatom?”
“We will.”
“Our children are as bound to you as to me. How can you let them sit there?”
“Our children? Oh, so now you think you can judge me. Before the King sister told you about white scientists, when last you saw them? Said a word? Even thought of them?”
“I think of them more than you know.”
“You said nothing like this last time we spoke. Anyway, what good is your thinking? Your thinking brings no child close.”
“So what now?”
We turned down the same road as before, walked the streets. Two men looking like guards passed by on horseback. We jumped into a doorway. The old woman in the doorway looked at me and frowned, as if I was exactly who she was expecting. The Leopard looked his least Leopard, even the whiskers were gone. He nodded for us to go.
“Tomorrow night, we get this boy once and for all. The day after, we go to the river lands and get our children. The day after that, who in all the fucking gods knows?” Leopard said.
“I have seen these white scientists, Leopard. I have seen how they work. They do not care about the pain of others. It’s not even a wickedness; they are just blind to it. They just glut on the conceit of their wicked craft. Not what it means, only how new it will look. I have seen them in Dolingo.”
“The King sister still has men, she still has people who believe in her cause. Let her help us.”
I stopped. “We forget someone. The Aesi. His men must have followed us to Kongor. The doors, he knows of them even if he doesn’t use them.”
“Of course, the door. I have no memory.”
“Doors. Ten and nine doors and the bloodsuckers have been using them for years. That is why the boy’s smell can be in front of me one blink, half a year away the next.”
“Did he follow you through this door, the Aesi?”
“I just said no.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then the son of a hyena bitch either hunts you in Mitu or Dolingo, or maybe the poor fool and his troops got what he was looking for by whatever the gods shat out in the Mweru. Nobody from the King is in Kongor, Tracker—no royal caravan, no battalion. The town crier announced the King’s leaving the day we came.”
“You forgave the boy?” I asked.
“Weather changed quick on this conversation.”
“You wish I go back to white scientists cutting up and sewing our children?”
“No.”
“So is Fumeli not with us?”
“Would he dare go someplace else?” He laughed.
“We should have chosen a different road,” I said.
“You’re as suspicious as Bunshi.”
“I am nothing like Bunshi.”
“Let us not talk of her. I want to know what happened in Dolingo. And of this prefect who has your eyes bewitched.”
“You want to know if I have relations with this prefect.”
“‘Relations’? Mark you and your words. The man has knocked all coarseness out of you. A most magnificent fuck—or is he more?”
“This is talk you enjoy, Leopard, not me.”
“Fuck the gods, Tracker. ‘This is talk you enjoy.’ You enjoyed it much when it was I talking about men’s journeys to and from my ass. I have told you everything and you have told me nothing. This prefect, I better watch him. He’s taken up some space in you. You didn’t even see it until I said so.”
“Stop talking about this, or I shall leave.”
“Now all we need is a woman for the Ogo who will not burst from just looking at his—”
“Leopard, watch me as I walk away.”
“Did this not make you think less of the children? Talk true.”
“Leaving I am.”
“Have no guilt, Tracker.”
“Now you accuse me.”
“No, I confess. I feel it too. Remember, they were my children before they ever smelled you coming. I was saving them from the bush from before you even knew you were Ku. I want to show you one more thing.”
“Fuck all the living and dead gods, what?”
“The boy.”
The Leopard took me down to near the end of the Gallunkobe/Matyube quarter, where the houses and inns thinned to a few. Past the slave shacks and the freemen quarters, to where the people worked as artisans of a different nature. Nobody came down this part of the street unless sending something to a grave of secrets or buying something that could only be bought in the Malangika. I smell necromancy on this street, I told him. We took a street that had sunk underwater halfway. These were the large houses of noblemen before flooding sent them north to the Tarobe quarter. Most of the houses had long been looted, or collapsed into soggy mud. But one house still stood, a third of it under the water, the turrets on the roof broken off, the windows gouged out and black, the side wall caving in, and the trees all around it dead. The front had no door, as if begg
ing to be raided, until Leopard said that was exactly how they wanted it. Any beggar foolish enough to seek shelter because of an open doorway would never be heard from again. We stood behind some dead trees a hundred paces away. In one of the dark windows blue light flashed for a blink. “This is what we will do,” said the Leopard.
“But first, tell me of Dolingo.”
The next night came quick, but wind on the river rippled slow. I wondered what was this black skin butter the Leopard gave me that did not wash off in the water. No moon, and no fire, light in homes hundreds of paces away. Behind me the wide river; in front, the house. I slipped under the water, feeling myself in the dark. My hand ran into the back wall, soaked enough that I could scoop chunks of mud out. I felt down until my hands went through what the water ate away, a hole as wide as my span. Only the gods knew why this building still stood. The water was colder, smellier, more thick with rotten things that I was glad I could not see, but I held my hands out, since it was far better for my hands to touch something wretched than my face. On the inside I stopped paddling and rose slow to the surface, first just my forehead and then just the ridge of my nose. Planks of woods floated past me, and other things that I could tell by smell that made me shut my lips tighter. It came straight for me, almost hitting the side of my face before I saw that it was the body of a boy, everything below the waist missing. I shifted out of the way and something below scraped across my right thigh. I clamped so hard on my teeth I nearly bit my tongue. The house kept silence thick. Above me, the roof that I knew was there but couldn’t see was thatch. The stairs to my right led to the floor above, but made as it was from mud and clay, steps had washed away. Above, blue light flickered. The Ipundulu. Blue lit up the three windows almost halfway from the roof, two small, one large enough to fit through. I could stand now on solid floor, but I crouched, not rising above my neck. Bobbing by the wall, not far from me, were the legs and buttocks of a man, and nothing else. The bodies in the tree came back to me, the stink and rot of them. Sasabonsam was not finished feeding on them, floating in the water in front of me. He was supposed to be the blood drinker, not the flesh eater. I retched and clapped my mouth. The Leopard was outside, climbing down from the roof, where he would enter through the middle window. I listened for him but he truly was a cat.
Somebody whimpered by the doorway. I dipped back down in the water. She whimpered again and waded into the water, carrying a torch that lit the water and the walls but threw too much shadow. The water not as high in the doorway as it was in the rest of the room, which slanted as if about to slide into the river. This was a merchant’s house I guessed, and this room a dining hall perhaps, wider than any room I have ever lived in. The Sasabonsam ran across my nose, also the Ipundulu, but the boy’s smell vanished. Wings flapped once above me, up in the ceiling. Ipundulu lit the room again, and I saw Sasabonsam, his wide wings slowing his jump down, his legs stretched out to grab the woman, which would probably kill her if his claws dug deep. He flapped his wings again, and the woman turned to the door, looking as if she heard the sound but thinking maybe it came from outside. She raised the torch, but did not look up. I saw him as he flapped again, lowering himself clumsily, thinking he moved with stealth.