“Took you long to get to this. Be warned, the pleasure women in this city gave up on being boys a long time ago. Nothing there but the scars of a eunuch.”
“Ugh, eunuchs. Better an abuka with no holes, no eyes, no mouth than a eunuch. I thought one became this to swear off fucking, but curse the gods, there they are, infesting every whorehouse, making the blood boil of every man who just wants to lie on his back for a change. I wish we could find the child right now.”
“I know who we could find right now.”
“What, who?”
“The slaver.”
“Gone to the coast to sell his new slaves.”
“He is not even four hundred paces from here and only one of his men travels with him.”
“Fuck the gods. Well it’s been said that you have—”
“Do not say it.”
We dipped into an alley and took two small torches.
He followed me past a tower with seven floors and a thatch roof, one with three floors and another four floors high. We passed a small hut where lived a witch, for nobody wanted to live above or below a witch; three houses painted in the grid patterns of the rich; and another building of mysterious use. We had left roads and gone northwest, right at the edge of the fourth wall, and not far from the North fort. I was a savannah dog, picking up too much flesh, living and dead, and burned by lightning.
“Here.”
We stopped at a house four floors high, the taller buildings beside it throwing moon shadow. No door stood in front and the lowest window was as high as three men foot-to-shoulder. One window near the top and in the center, dark with what looked like flickering light. I pointed to the house, then the window.
“He is here.”
“Tracker, a problem you have,” he said and pointed up. “Are you now crow to my Leopard?”
“All the birds in the ten and three kingdoms and a crow is what you call me?”
“Fine, a dove, a hawk—how about an owl? You better fly quick because this place has no door.”
“There is a door.”
The Leopard looked at me hard, then walked as far around the house as he could.
“No, you have no door.”
“No, you have no eyes.”
“Ha, ‘you have no eyes.’ I listen to you and hear her.”
“Who?”
“The Sangoma. Your words fall just like hers. You think like her too, that you’re clever. Her witchcraft is still protecting you.”
“If it were witchcraft it wouldn’t be protecting me. She threw something on me that binds craft; this I was told by a witchman who tried to kill me with metals. It’s not as if one feels it on the skin or in the bones. Something that remains even after her death, which again makes it not witchcraft, for a witch’s spells all die with her.”
I walked right up to the wall as if to kiss it, then whispered an incantation low enough that not even his Leopard ears could hear.
“If it were witchcraft,” I said.
I shuddered and stepped back. This always made me feel the way I do when I drink juice of the coffee bean—like thorns were under my skin pushing through, and forces in the night were out to get me. I whispered to the wall, This house has a door and I with the wolf eye will open it. I stepped back and without my torch the wall caught fire. White flame raced to four corners in the shape of a door, consumed the shape, crackled and burned, then put itself out, leaving a plain wooden door untouched by scorch.
“Whoever is here is working witch science,” I said.
Mortar and clay steps took us up to the first floor. A room empty of man smell, with an archway setting itself off in the dark. Blue moonlight came through the windows. I knew stealth, but the cat was so quiet I looked behind me twice.
People were talking harshly above us. The next floor up had a room with a locked door, but I smelled no people behind it. Halfway up the steps the smells came down on us: scorched flesh, dried urine, shit, the stinking carcasses of beasts and birds. Near the top of the steps sounds came down on us—whispers, growls, a man, a woman, two women, two men, an animal—and I wished my ears were as good as my nose. Blue light flashed from the room, then flickered down to dark. No way we could climb the last steps without being seen or heard, so we stayed halfway. We could see in the room anyway. And we saw what flickered blue light.
A woman, an iron collar and chain around her neck, her hair almost white but looking blue as light flickered through the room. She screamed, yanked at the chain around her neck, and blue light burst within her, coursing along the tree underneath her skin that one sees when you cut parts of a man open. Instead of blood, blue light ran through her. Then she went dark again. The light was the only way we could make out the slaver in dark robes, the man who fed him dates, and somebody else, with a smell I both remembered and couldn’t recognize.
Then somebody else touched a stick and it burst into flame like a torch. The chained woman jumped back and scrambled against the wall.
A woman held the torch. I had never seen her before, was sure of it even in the dark, but she smelled familiar, so familiar. Taller than everybody else in the room, with hair big and wild like some women above the sand sea. She pointed the torch to the ground, to the stinking half carcass of a dog.
“Tell me true,” the slaver said. “How did you get a dog up into this room?”
The chained woman hissed. She was naked and so dirty that she looked white.
“Move in close and I tell you true,” she said.
The slaver moved in close, she spread her legs, her finger spreading her kehkeh, and shot a streak of piss that wet his sandals before he could pull away. She started to laugh but he cracked his knuckles and punched the cackle out of her mouth. The Leopard jumped and I grabbed his arm. It sounded as if she was laughing until the tall woman’s torch shined on her again as tears pooled in her eyes. She said, “You you you you you all go. You all must go. Go now, run run run run run because Father coming, he coming on the wind don’t you hear the horse go go go you he won’t kiss the head of you unclean boys, go wash wash wash wash wash wash wash—”
The slaver nodded and the tall woman shoved the torch right up to her face. She jumped back again and snarled.
“Nobody comes! Nobody comes! Nobody comes! Who are you?” the woman said.
The slaver moved in to strike her. The chained woman flinched and hid her face, begging him not to strike her anymore. Too many men striking her and they strike her all the time and she just want to hold her boys, the first and the third and the fourth, but not the second, for he does not like when people hold him, not even his mother. I still held on to the Leopard’s arm and could feel his muscles shift and his hair grow under my fingers.
“Enough with that,” the tall woman said.
“This is how you get her to talk,” the slaver said.
“You must think she is one of your wives,” she said.
The Leopard’s arm stopped twitching. She wore a black gown from the northern lands that touched the floor, but cut close to show she was thin. She stooped down to the woman in chains, who still hid her face. I couldn’t see it but knew the chained woman was trembling. The chains clanged when she shook.
“These are the days that never should have happened to you. Tell me about her,” the tall woman said.
The slaver nodded to his date feeder and the date feeder cleared his throat and began.
“This woman, her story, very strange and sad. It is I who am talking and I will—”
“Not a performance, donkey. Just the story.”
I wish I could have seen his scowl but his face was lost to the dark.
“We don’t know her name, and her neighbors, she scared them all away.”
“No she did not. Your master here paid them to leave. Stop wasting my time.”
“As if I give two shakes of a rat’s ass about your time.”
She paused. I could tell nobody expected that to come out of his mouth.
“This always his ways?” she said to the slaver. “Maybe you tell me the story, slave monger, and maybe I cut his tongue out.”
The date feeder pulled a knife from under his sleeve and flipped the handle to her.
“How this for sport? I give you the knife and you try,” he said.
She did not take it. The woman in chains was still hiding her face in the corner. The Leopard was still. The tall woman looked at the date feeder, with a curious smile.
“He has chat, this one. Fine, out with your story. I will hear it.”
“Her neighbor, the washerwoman, say her name is Nooya. And nobody knows her or claims her so Nooya be her name, but she don’t answer to it. She answer to him. Nobody living to tell the story but she, and she not telling. But this is what we know. She live in Nigiki with her husband and five children. Saduk, Makhang, Fula—”
“The shorter version, date feeder.”
The tall woman pointed at him. She did not take her eye off the woman in chains.
“One day when the sun past the noon and was going down, a child knock on her door. A boy child, who look like he was five and four years in age.”