I did not want to talk to Fumeli. I would punch whatever rudeness came from his mouth.
“I will call him Red Wolf now—that is what he told me,” Bibi said.
“Who?”
“Nyka.”
“He mocks the red ochre I used to rub on my skin, saying only Ku women wear red,” I said.
“Truth for your ears? I have never seen a man in that colour,” Bibi said.
Bibi stopped, his brow furrowed, and looked at me as if trying to catch something he missed, then shook it out.
“And wolf?” he asked.
“You have not seen my eye?”
I knew his look. It said, There is a little that you are not telling me, but I care not enough to press it.
“What is that smell on the witch? I cannot place it,” I said.
He shrugged.
“Tell me something else, Sadogo,” I said to the Ogo.
This is true: The Ogo did not stop talking until evening caught us. And then he talked about the night catching us. I forgot about Fumeli until he hissed, and paid no attention until he hissed a third time. We came to a fork in the trail, a path left and a path right.
“We go left,” I said.
“Why left? This is the trail Kwesi take?”
“This is the trail I take,” I said. “Go your own way if you wish, just untie your horse from Bibi.” I heard the dull clump of hooves on mud and branches cracking.
I did not wait for him to say anything. The trail was narrow but there was a path and the sun was almost gone.
“No bat, no owl, no chirping beast,” Fumeli said.
“What twig is up your asshole now?”
“The boy is right, Tracker. No living thing moves through this forest,” Bibi said. One hand on the bridle, the other gripped his sword.
“Where is your great nose now?” Fumeli said.
I set it down in my mind right there. Never again would this boy be correct on anything. But both of them were right. I knew many of the animal smells of the montane grasslands, and none passed by my nose. And the scents of the forest that I did smell—gorilla, kingfisher, viper-skin—were too far away. No living thing but trees conspiring in circles and river water rushing down rocks. The Ogo was still talking.
“Sadogo, quiet.”
“Huh?”
“Hush. Movement in the bush.”
“Who?”
“None. That is what I say, there is no movement in the bush.”
“I was the one to say it first,” said Fumeli.
Was he worth me turning around so he could see my scowl? No.
“Many people say you have a nose, not I. What does your precious nose smell now?”
A neck as thin as his, thin as a girl’s, I could snap with no effort. Or I could let the Ogo break him in many pieces. But when I took in a deep breath, smells did come at me. Two that I knew, one I had not come across in many years.
“Grab your bow and draw an arrow, boy,” Bibi said.
“Why?”
“Do it now,” he said, trying to whisper harshly. “And dismount.”
We left the horses by a brook. The Ogo dipped into his bag and pulled out two shiny gauntlets, which I have only seen on the King’s knights. His fingers were now shiny black scales and his knuckles, five spikes. Bibi pulled his sword.
“I smell an open fire, wood, and fat,” I said. Bibi covered his mouth, pointed at us, then pointed at his mouth.
I said nothing else, now that I knew what we would find, judging from the smell. The sour stink of hair, the saltiness of the flesh. Soon we could see the fire and the light slipping through the forest. There it was, stuck on a spit, cooking above the fire while the fat dripped into the flames and burst. A boy’s leg. Farther off, hanging from a tree, was the boy looking at his leg, a rope tied around the stump. They had cut off his right leg all the way to the thigh and his left leg to the knee. His left arm was cut off at the shoulder. They hung him in the tree by rope. They also hung a girl, who seemed to have all four limbs. Three of them sat a good distance from the fire, a fourth off in the bush, but not far, crouched to shit.
We rushed them before we could see them, before they could see us. Hatchets out, I aimed for the first one’s head, but it bounced off. Fumeli shot four arrows; three bounced off, one struck the second one’s cheek. The Ogo punched the third straight into the tree. Then he punched a hole through his chest and the tree. Bibi swung his sword and struck the third in the neck but it lodged there. He pushed him off the blade with his foot, then stabbed him in the belly. The first one charged straight at me, holding nothing in his hands. I dipped out of his reach and something knocked him over. On the ground I jumped on him and hacked straight into the soft flesh of the face. The nose. I chopped again and again until his flesh splashed on me. The thing that knocked him over growled before changing back to a man.
“Kwesi!” Fumeli shouted, and ran to him, then stopped. Fumeli touched him on the shoulder. I wanted to say, Go behind the tree and fuck if you wish. None of us remembered the last of them shitting in the bush until the girl tied up in the tree screamed. He came at us waving his arms, his claws shining in the firelight. He roared louder than a lion, but something cut the roar. Even he was confused that his own mouth closed up on him, until he looked down to his chest and saw a spear bursting right through it. He whimpered his last and fell facedown.
Sogolon stepped over his body and approached us. I lit a dry stick and waved it over the beast nearest the fire. A snap. Ogo had broken the one-limb boy’s neck. It was for the best that he died quick, and nobody said different. The girl, as soon as we lowered her down, started screaming and screaming until Sogolon slapped her twice. She was covered in white streaks but I knew all the marks of the river tribes and these were none of them.
“We are offerings. You should not have come,” she said.
“You are what?” the Leopard said.
I was very happy to see him as a man again and not sure why. It still irritated me to talk to him.
“We are the glorious offerings to the Zogbanu. They leave alone our villages that are on their lands and let us plant crops. I was raised for this—”
“No woman is raised for man to use,” said Sogolon.
I pulled the spear out of the last one and rolled him over with my foot. Horns large, curved, and pointed to a sharp tip like a rhinoceros’s sprouted all over his head and neck, with smaller horns on his shoulders. They pointed in all directions, these horns, like a beggar with locks thickened by dirt. Horns wide as a child’s head and long as a tusk, horns short and stumpy, horns like a hair, gray and white like his skin. Both brows grew into horns and his eyes had no pupils. Nose wide and flat with hair sticking out of the nostrils like bush. Thick lips as wide as the face and teeth like a dog’s. Scars all over his chest, maybe for all his kills. A belt holding up a loincloth on which hung child skulls.
“What kind of devil is this?” I asked.
Bibi crouched and turned its head. “Zogbanu. Trolls from the Blood Swamp. I saw many during the war. Your last King even used some as berserkers. Each one worse than the one before.”
“This is no swamp.”
“They are roving. The girl is not from here either. Girl, where do they go?”
“I am the glorious offering to the Yeh—”
Sogolon slapped her.
“Bingoyi yi kase nan,” the girl said.
“They eat man flesh,” Sogolon said.
That’s when we all looked at the leg cooking on the spit. Sadogo kicked it over.
“They are traveling?” I asked.
“Yes,” Bibi said.
“But she just said she was a sacrifice so that they would share their land,” I said.
“Not nomads,” the Leopard said.
He walked right up to me, but looked at Bibi. “And they are not traveling, they are hunting. Somebody told them a bounty of flesh would be coming through these woods. Us.”
The girl screamed. No, it was not a scream, there was no fear in it. It was a call.