“Four. My father took them and gave them to my sister to raise. Better to keep my filth away from their memory.”
Fuck the gods, I thought. Fuck the gods.
“Then I sailed off course. Maybe it was the gods. There are children you think of.”
“Don’t you?”
“A night never passes.”
“This must be why loose wives dismiss us as soon as we burst. Sad talk of children.”
He smiled.
“Do you know of mingi?” I asked.
“No.”
“Some of the river tribes and even some places in great cities like Kongor kill newborns who are unworthy. Children born weak, or limbless, or with top teeth before bottom, or with gifts or forms strange. Five of those children strange in form we saved, but they return to me in dreams—”
“We?”
“Does not matter now. These five return to me in dreams and I have tried to see them, but they live with a tribe that is my tribe’s enemy.”
“How?”
“I gave them to my tribe’s enemy.”
“Nothing you ever say ends the way I think you would end it, Tracker.”
“After my tribe tried to kill me for saving mingi children.”
“Oh. You and these people, none of your rivers run straight. Take us finding this boy. There is no straight line between us and this boy, only streams leading to streams, leading to streams, and sometimes—and tell me if I lie—you get so lost in the stream that the boy fades, and with him the reason you search for him. Fades like that boy who just vanished in the ship.”
“You saw him?”
“Truth does not depend on me believing it, does it?”
“This is truth, there are times I forget who we are after. I don’t even think of the coin.”
“What compels you, then? Not reunite mother with child? You said that only a few days ago.”
He crawled over to me and shafts of light marked stripes on his skin. He rested his head in my lap.
“This is what you ask?”
“Yes, this is what I ask.”
“Why?”
“You know why.”
I looked at him.
“The further I go—”
“Yes?”
“The more I feel that I have nothing to go back to,” I said.
“This comes to you after how many moons?”
“Prefect, news such as this comes only one way: too late.”
“Tell me about your eye.”
“It is from a wolf.”
“Those jackals you call wolves? Maybe you lost a bet with a jackal. This is not jest, is it? Which question do you desire first: how or why?”
“A shape-shifting hyena bitch in her woman form sucked the eye out of my skull, then bit it off.”
“I should have asked why first. And after last night,” he said.
“What of last night?”
“You … nothing.”
“Last night was not a deposit on something else,” I said.
“No, that it was not.”
“Can we talk of something else?”
“We talk of nothing now. Except your eye.”
“A gang ripped my eye out.”
“A gang of hyenas, you said.”
“Truth does not depend on you believing it, prefect. I wandered that wilderness between the sand sea and Juba for several moons, I can’t remember how many, but I do remember wanting to die. But not before I killed the man responsible.”
Here is a short tale about the wolf eye. After this man betrayed me to the pack of hyenas, I couldn’t find him. After that I went roaming, and roaming, full and brimming with hate but with nowhere to let all this malcontent out. I went back to the sand sea, to the lands of beetles big as birds, and scorpions who stung the life out, and sat in a sand hole while vultures landed and circled. And then the Sangoma came to me, her red dress blowing though no wind blew, and her head circled by bees. I heard the buzz before I saw her, and when I saw her I said, This must be a fever dream, sun madness, for she was long dead.
“I expect the boy with the nose to not have the nose but did not think the boy with the mouth would no longer have a mouth,” she said. It came trotting beside her.
“You brought a jackal?” I asked.
“Do not insult the wolf.”
She grabbed my face, firm but not hard, and said words I did not understand. She grabbed some sand in her hand, spat in it, and kneaded it until the sand stuck together. Then she ripped off my patch and I jumped. Then she said, Close your good eye. She put the sand on my eye hole and the wolf came in closer. The wolf growled, and she whimpered, and she whimpered some more. I heard something like a stab and more growls from the wolf. Then nothing. Sangoma said, Count to ten and one before you open them. I started counting and she interrupted me.
“She will come back for it, when you are near gone. Look out for her,” she said.
So she lent me a wolf’s eye. I thought I would see far and long and make people out in the dark. And I can. But lose colour when I close my other eye. This wolf will one day come back and claim it. I couldn’t even laugh.
“I could,” Mossi said.
“A thousand fucks for you.”
“A few more before we dock will be fine enough. You might even turn into something of a lover.”
Even if he was joking, he annoyed me. Especially if he was joking, he annoyed me.
“Tell me more about witches. Why you hate them so,” he said.
“Who said I hate witches?”
“Your own mouth.”
“I fell sick in the Purple City many years ago. Sick near death—a curse some husband paid a fetish priest to put on me. A witch found me and promised me a healing spell if I did something for her.”
“But you hate witches.”
“Quiet. She was not a witch, she said, just a woman who had a child without a man, and this city can be wicked in its judgment of such things. They took her child, she said, and gave it to a rich but barren woman. Will you make me well, I asked, and she said, I will give you freedom from want, which did not sound like the same thing. But I followed my nose and found her child, took her away from that woman in the night, disturbing no one. Then I don’t know what happened, except I woke up the next morning, well, with a pool of black vomit on the floor.”
“Then why—”
“Quiet. It really was her child. But she had a smell about her. Tracked her down two days later in Fasisi. She was expecting someone else. Somebody to buy the two baby hands and one liver she left out on the table. Witches cannot work spells against me, though she tried. I chopped her in the forehead before she could chant, then hacked her head off.”
“And you have hated witches ever since.”
“Oh I’ve hated them from long before that. I hate myself for trusting one, is more the like. People always go back to their nature in the end. It’s like that gum from the tree, that no matter how far you pull it, snaps itself back.”
“Maybe you bear hatred for women.”
“Why would you say that?”
“I’ve never heard you speak good of a single one. They all seem to be witches in your world.”
“You don’t know my world.”
“I know enough. Perhaps you hate none, not even your mother. But tell me I lie when I say you always expected the worst of Sogolon. And every other woman you have met.”
“When have you seen me say any of this? Why do you say this to me now?”
“I don’t know. You can’t go inside me and not expect me to go inside you. Will you think on it?”
“I have nothing to think—”
“Fuck the gods, Tracker.”
“Fine, I shall think on why Mossi thinks I hate women. Anything more before I go on deck?”
“I have one thing more.”
We docked a day and a half later at noon. His forehead wound looked sealed, and none of us were sore, though we were all covered in scabs, even the buffalo. Most of that day I passed in the slave cabin, me fucking Mossi, Mossi fucking me, me loving Mossi, Mossi loving me, and me going above deck to check faces to see if anyone would start words with me. They either didn’t know or care—sailors are sailors everywhere—not even when Mossi stopped grabbing my hand to cover his shouts. The rest of the time Mossi gave me too many things to think about and it all came back to my mother, who I never, ever wanted to think about. Or the Leopard, who I had not thought of in moons, or what Mossi said that inside me is a hate for all women. It was a harsh thought and a lie, as I could not help that I have run into witches.
“Maybe you draw the worst to you.”
“Are you the worst?” I asked, annoyed.
“I hope not. But I think of your mother, or rather the mother you told me about who might not even be real, or if she is real, not as you say. You sound like fathers where I am from who blame the daughter for rape, saying, Had you not legs to run away? Had you not lips to scream? You think as they do that suffering from cruelty or escaping it is a matter of choice or means, when it is a matter of power.”
“You say I should understand power?”
“I say you should understand your mother.”