“Grab the Leopard, Sadogo,” I said.
The Ogo stooped, still wobbly, scooped the Leopard by the waist, and slung him over his right shoulder. Fumeli, as light as I thought he would be, I slung over my right and picked up his bow. The Ogo went to the door and stopped.
“The mad monkey …”
“Sadogo, there is no mad monkey. The Anjonu was trying to trick you.”
Kafin ka ga biri, biri ya ganka.
“The mad monkey …”
“Sadogo, do—”
“The mad monkey … outside.”
Before you see the monkey, the monkey has seen you.
The scream again. A long EEEEEEEEEEE that screeched through the leaves. I went to the door. The creature was maybe two hundred paces away and moving very fast. Faster than a galloping horse and coming to the door. His arms flailing about, his legs hopping long leaps, his knees almost hitting his chin. Sometimes he stopped and pushed his nose in the air, catching a smell on the wind, then looked our way and dashed again, gnashing and spitting. His thick tail swishing, whipping away. Skin like a man’s, but also green like rot. He ran headfirst, two eyes popping, the right small, the left bigger and smoking. He screamed again and the ghost of birds flew off. Too fast. Ripped cloth flapped all over him.
“The door, Sadogo, the door!”
Sadogo threw off the Leopard, slammed the door, and dropped the three bolts across it. A bang hit the door like a lightning bolt. Sadogo jumped. The creature EEEEEEEEEEE’d again, threatening to deafen every soul close.
“Shit,” I said.
The walls of the hut were stick leaves and dry shit. The creature would punch a hole right through it as soon as he saw that he could. It banged and banged and the old wood started to crack. He EEEEEEEEEEE’d again and again. Sadogo picked up the Leopard.
“The door,” he said.
I thought he was pointing to the front door, but he nodded at the back. The creature punched a hole through the front door and pushed his face against it. Face shaped like that of a man bred with a devil. His left eye really did smoke. Nose punched in like an ape’s and long, rotten teeth. He snarled and spat through the hole, then pulled away. I could hear his feet, his footsteps quicker and louder, running, right into the door. The hinges broke, but did not break off. His face pushed through the hole again. EEEEEEEEEEE. He ran off to charge again.
Sadogo grabbed each lock and ripped them off the back door. The mad monkey rammed into the wood and his whole head burst through. He tried to pull himself but was stuck. Now he looked up at us and yelled and screamed and snarled and I could hear his tail whip against the hut. We turned to the back door and all the locks Sadogo had ripped out appeared again.
“He will get through the door the third time,” I said.
“What kind of magic is this … what kind of magic?” Sadogo said.
I stood next to Sadogo and studied this door. There was magic, but my nose was no help in unraveling its making. I whispered an incantation I never remembered hearing before. Nothing. Nothing like the house back in Malakal. Something from the Sangoma’s tongue, not mine. I whispered it again so close my lips kissed the wood. A flame sparked at the top right corner and spread around the entire frame. When the flames vanished, so had the locks.
Sadogo went past me and pushed it open. A white light shot through. The mad monkey EEEEEEEEEEE’d. I wanted to stay and fight him but I had two asleep and one about to fall down in a blink.
“Tracker,” Sadogo said.
The light lit the whole room white. I picked up Fumeli. The Ogo took the Leopard and stepped through first, then I hobbled behind. A crash behind us caused me to turn just as the front door broke off. The mad monkey charged in screaming, but as his chipped fangs reached for the back door, it slammed itself shut, leaving us in darkness and quiet.
“What is this place?” Sadogo asked.
“The forest. We are in the for—”
I went back to the door behind us. What could it be but a mistake to do so, but I opened it anyway, just a little, and looked inside. A dusty room, with stone tiles, and from floor to wall stood books, scrolls, papers, and parchments. No broken door. No mad monkey. At the end of this new room, another door that Sadogo pushed open.
Sun. Children ran and stole, market women yelled and sold. Traders eyed a good deal, slavers squeezed red slave flesh, buildings squat and fat, buildings skinny and looming, and far off a great tower I knew.
“Are we in Mitu?” Sadogo said.
“No, my friend. Kongor.”
ELEVEN
Leave the dead to the dead. That is what I tell him.”
“Before or after we went in the Darklands?”
“Before, after, dead is dead. The gods tell me to wait. And look—you alive and unspoiled. Trust the gods.”
Sogolon looked at me with neither smile nor sneer. The only way she could care less would be to try.
“The gods had to tell you to wait?”
I woke up when the sun sailed to the middle of the sky and forced shadows underfoot. Flies buzzed about the room. I slept and woke three times before the Leopard and Fumeli woke once, and the Ogo could cast off the sluggishness of the Ogudu. The room, dim and plain, walls the brown-green colour of fresh chicken dung, with sacks packed on top of each other all the way to the ceiling. Tall statues leaning against each other, sharing secrets about me. The floor smelled of grain, dust, perfume bottles lost in the dark, and rat shit. On the two side walls facing each other, tapestries ran to the ground, blue Ukuru cloth with white patterns of lovers and trees. I lay on the floor, above and under blankets and rugs of many colours. Sogolon stood by the window, in that brown leather dress she always wore, looking out.
“You leave your whole mind back in the forest.”
“My mind is right here.”
“Your mind not here yet. Three times now I say to you that journey around the Darklands take three days, and we take four.”
“Only one night passed in the forest.”
Sogolon laughed like a wheeze.
“So we come three days late,” I said.
“You lost in that forest for twenty and nine days.”
“What?”
“A whole moon come and go since you gone into bush.”
And perhaps this, like the last two times she said it, was where I threw myself back down on the rugs, stunned. Everything not dead had twenty-nine days—a whole moon—to grow, including truth and lies. People on voyages have long returned. Creatures born got old, others died, and those dead withered to dust in that time. I have heard of great beasts who go to sleep for cold seasons, and men who fall ill and never rise, but this felt like someone stole my days and whoever I should have been in them. My life, my breath, my walk, it came to me why I hate witchcraft and all magic.
“I have been in the Darklands before. Time never stopped then.”
“Who was keeping time for you?”
I knew what she meant behind the witch double-speak. What she said, not out loud, the word inside the word, was who in the world would care for me that they would count my days gone? She looked at me as if she wanted an answer. Or at least a half-wit answer she could reply to with a full-wit mockery. But I stared at her until she looked away.
“A whole moon come and go since you gone into the bush,” she said again, but soft as if not to me. She looked out the window.
“Trust for the gods be the only reason why I here for a moon in Kongor. If it was my will over the gods, this whole place and every man in it would burn. Can’t trust no man in Kongor.”
“Can’t trust any man, anywhere,” I said. She flinched when she saw I heard.
“My gratitude for waiting in a city that does you ill,” I said.
“Not for you I do it. Not even for the goddess.”
“Should I ask who?”
“Too many children in Kongor don’t have an end to they story. That older than two hundred years, that older than when I was a child. So let this be the one child who story have an ending, no matter how grim, and not be another one that wash up with no head when the floodwater roll back.”
“You lost a child? Or were you the child?”
“I should have make distance between me and this city. Make distance four nights after you didn’t show. Last time I walk these roads a man of good breeding pay five man to steal me so he can show me what an ugly woman was for. Right there in Torobe. Couldn’t beat him wife because she from royal blood, so he bond me for that.”
“Kongori masters have always been cruel.”
“Low-wit donkey, the man was not my master, he was my kidnapper. A man would know the difference.”
“You could have run to a prefect.”
“A man.”
“A magistrate.”
“A man.”
“An elder with a kind ear, an inquisitor, a seer.”
“Man. Man. Man.”
“Justice could have come for your kidnapper.”
“Justice did come. When I learn a spell and the wife pregnancy devour her from the inside. Something else go up inside the man.”
“A spell.”
“My knife.”
“When you last pass through Kongor?”
“Amadu debt to me doubling just by me coming back.”
“When last, Sogolon?”