“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 would 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.”