“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 begging 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.