She walked as people who think they are followed walk. Looking ahead when she reached the mouth of each lane, looking behind when she reached the foot of it. Slipping from shadow to shadow, as she moved down a still street. Floating overhead the raw burn of opium, and flowing on the ground, the overspill of shit water. She tripped and grabbed her cargo tight, ready to brace for the fall rather than let it go. The sky had a ceiling in this place, a hundred paces high in some parts, with holes burrowed through to let in the white light of the sun and the silver light of the moon. She stooped below a torch beside a door, shifted underneath, stood up again, and scraped her back along the wall like a crab, to the corner.
The Malangika. The tunnel city, somewhere west of the Blood Swamp but east of Wakadishu, about three hundred paces below the ground and as big as a third of Fasisi. Hundreds of years ago, before people wrote accounts, the first people from above had a quarrel with the gods of sky over rain, and the gods of earth gave them this place to hide from sky wrath. They dug wide and deep, and the caverns rose high to hold buildings of three, four, and even five floors. Columns from chopped-down trees and stone to brace the tunnels so that they never collapsed, though two sections collapsed twice. Throughout the tunnels, builders carved out holes above to let the sun and moon light the street, like the lamps of Juba. People in the Malangika were the true first ones to unlock the secret of metals, some say. But they were selfish and greedy, and became the first blacksmith kings. They died holding on to their iron and silver. And some working other kinds of art and craft dug even deeper. But the people of this city soon died out, and the city itself was forgotten. And only in a place forgotten could a new city arise, a city with no notice, a city that was a market. A place that sold what could not be sold aboveground, not even at night. The secret witches market.
The market cleared out. Somebody had woven powerful magic to make everyone forget the street. Most lanes showed the backside of inns where nobody stayed, taverns where nobody left, and sellers of things of all kinds of uses. But in this lane darkness hung low. She walked many steps before stopping, looking around as two spirits pulled themselves from a wall and came at her. Another rose out of the ground, stumbling as if drunk. In the quick, she pulled the amulet from between her breasts. The spirits squealed and backed away; the ground spirit went back under. All the way down the lane, she held out the amulet, and voices squawked, muttered, and hissed. Their hunger was huge, but not bigger than the fear of the nkisi around her neck. Through the mist, at the end of the lane, she pressed herself against a fresh mud wall on the right, then turned around the corner right into my blade.
She jumped. I grabbed her hand, yanked it behind her back, pressing my knife to her neck. She tried to scream but I pressed the knife harder. Then she started to utter a whisper I knew. I whispered something back and she stopped.
“I am protected by a Sangoma,” I said.
“You pick here to rob a poor woman? You pick this place?”
“What is it you carry, girl?” I asked.
For she was a girl and thin, her cheeks hungry. Her hand, which I still held, was near down to bone, something I could break with just a twist.
“Curse you if you make me drop it,” she said.
“What shall you drop?”
“Take your eyes out of my bosom, or take my purse and go.”
“Money is not what I look for. Tell me what you carry or I will stab it.”
She flinched, but I knew what it was before the dried milk vomit smell came to me, and before it gurgled.
“How many cowries buys a baby in the Malangika?”
“You think I selling my baby? What kind of witch sell her own baby?”
“I don’t know. What kind of witch buys one, that I know.”
“Let me go or I going scream.”
“A woman’s scream in these tunnels? That is every street. Tell me how you come by the baby.”
“You deaf? I say—”
I twisted her arm behind her back, right up almost to her neck, and she screamed, and screamed again, trying to not drop the child. I released her hand a little.
“Go slip back in your mother cunt,” she said.
“Whose baby?”
“What?”
“Who is the mother of the baby?”
She stared at me, frowning, thinking of something to say that would make a lie out of the sound of this baby waking up and hating the rough cloth he was wrapped in.
“Mine. Is mine. Is my own baby.”
“Not even a whore would take her child to the Malangika unless she goes to sell it. To a—”
“I not no whore.”
I let her go. She turned away from me as if to run, and I pulled one of the axes from my back.
“Try to run and this will split the back of your head before you reach fifty paces. Test me if you wish.”
She looked at me and rubbed her arm.
“I look for a man. A special man, special even in the Malangika,” I said.
“I don’t mess with no man.”
“And yet you just said this is your baby, so messed with a man, you did. He is hungry.”
“He not no concern for you.”
“But hungry he is. So feed him.”
She pulled the cloth from the baby’s head. I smelled baby vomit and dried piss. No shea butter, no oil, no silks, nothing that graces a baby’s precious buttocks. I nodded and pointed my ax at her breasts. She pulled her robe and the right breast slipped out, thin and lanky above the baby’s face. She shoved the breast into the baby’s mouth and it started sucking, pulling so hard she winced. The baby spat out her breast, and cried into a scream.
“You have no milk,” I said.
“He not hungry. What you know about raising a child?”
“I raised six,” I said. “How were you going to feed him?”
“If you didn’t interfere, we would reach home long time now.”
“Home? The nearest village is three days away on foot. Can you fly? The child would starve by then.”
She dug into her dress for the pouch, and tried to pull it open with both hands while still holding the child.
“Look here, dog-fucker or whatever you be. Take the coin and go buy yourself a girl so you can kill and eat her liver. Leave me be, me and my child.”
“Hark those words. I would say raise your child around better folks, but it is not your child.”
“Leave me be!” she shouted, and pulled the pouch open. “Here, see it here. Take it all.”
She held it out, but then dashed it. I swung my ax to knock it out of the way and it hit the wall and fell to the ground. Little vipers came out and grew big. She ran but I chased her, gained on her, grabbed her hair and she screamed. She dropped the baby. I pushed her hard, and picked up the child as she staggered to a fall. She shook her head and wobbled as I pulled the boy out of the nasty cloth. His body, dark as tea, she had marked with white clay. A line around the neck. A line at each joint in the arms and legs. A cross at his navel, and circles around his nipples and his knees.
“What a night you were planning for yourself. You are no witch, not yet, but this would have made you one, maybe even a powerful one, instead of someone’s apprentice.”
“Get you cock sting by a scorpion,” she said, sitting up.
“On the art of cutting up a child, you have no expertise, so he drew where to cut. The man who sold you the baby.”
“All coming out of your mouth is wind.”
The boy wiggled in my arms.
“Men in the Malangika, they sell wretched things, unspeakable things. Women do this too. But a baby, alive, untouched, is no easy thing to find. This is not bastard or foundling. Only the purest child could give you the most powerful magic, so you bought yourself the purest child. Stolen from a noblewoman. And no easy thing to buy, three days from the nearest city. So you must have given him something of great value. Not gold, or cowries. You gave him another life. And since merchants can only appreciate things of value, that life must have been valuable to you. A son? No, a daughter. Child brides go for even more than the newborn here.”
“A thousand fucks—”
“I have long passed a thousand fucks. Where is the master who sold you this baby?”
Still on the ground, she scowled at me, even as she rubbed her forehead with her right hand. I stepped on her left hand and she yelled.
“If I ask again, it will be after I chop this hand off.”
“You bastard son of a whoring North wolf bitch. Cut the hand off a defenseless woman.”
“You just defended yourself with a spell of vipers. Which of his feet was for the amulet, left or right?”
“What plenty you know about witch and witchmen. You must be the real witch.”
“Or maybe I kill witches. For money, yes. One can always use money. But really for sport. The merchant, where is he?”
“Fool, he shift whereabouts every night. No elephant remember the way there, no crow can find him.”
“But you bought the child this night.”
I stomped harder on her hand and she yelled again.
“The midnight street! Go to the end, and turn right past the dead tree, then down the three sets of steps, deep in the dark. So dark that you can’t see, only feel. He in the house of a witchman with the heart of an antelope rotting on the door.”
I stepped off her hand and she grabbed it, cursing me under her breath.
“No good going come to you. Before you meet him, you going meet two.”
“What charity, giving me warning.”
“Warning not going save you. Me telling you not going mean a thing.”