“It stopped being so when we entered the room, Tracker. And I told you my name is Mossi. Now do you want to tell me how you just appeared in this city? There’s no record of your entry, and Kongor is nothing if not a place of records.”
“I came through a door.”
He stared at me, then laughed. “I will remember to ask next time I see you.”
“You will see me again?”
“Time is but a boy, sir Tracker. You are free to go.”
I walked to the door.
“The Ogo as well. We have run out of words to describe his killings.”
He smiled. He had rolled up his tunic right above his thigh—better for running, and battle.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Only one now?”
I wish he were not so eager to show me he is quick-witted. Few things I hated more than to have a sentence cut off by somebody throwing wit. Again, something about him, not offensive but more irritating than a cut underfoot.
“Why do Seven Wings assemble? Here. Now,” I asked.
“Because they cannot be seen in Fasisi.”
“What?”
“Because they would raise suspicion in Fasisi.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Not the answer you want, so here is another. They await instructions from the King.”
“Why?”
“Wherever you came from, have they no news there?”
“Not what you are about to tell me.”
“You seem sure I’m about to tell you. There is no news. But rumors of war, there have been for moons now. No, not war, occupation. Have you not heard this, Tracker? The mad King in the South has gone mad again. After ten and five years of sense, his head is again taken by devils. Last moon he sent four thousand men to the borders of Kalindar and Wakadishu. The South King mobilizes an army, the North King mobilizes mercenaries. As we say in Kongor: We cannot find the body, but we smell the stench. But alas, war or no, people still steal. People still lie. People still kill. And my work is never done. Go get your Ogo. Until we meet again. You can give me the story of your single dim eye.”
I left this man to go irritate someone else.
I did not want to confront the Leopard. Nor did I want to see Sogolon before I could unravel whatever secret she was weaving. I looked at the Ogo and thought of a time, perhaps soon, when I would need a person to hear me pull the darkness out of my own heart. Besides, neither of us knew the way back to the man’s place and there were too many homes in this city that smelled like his. The Ogo’s mouth was still trembling with killings to confess, words to say, a curse to rinse from his skin. The route had many trees and only two houses, one with faint flickering light. I saw a rock up ahead and, when we got to it, sat down.
“Ogo, tell me of your killings,” I said.
He spoke, shouted, whispered, yelled, screamed, laughed, and cried all night. The next morning, when there was light to see our walk home, the Leopard and Fumeli were gone.
FOURTEEN
The Ogo told me of all his killings, one hundred, seventy and one.
Know this, no mother survives the birth of an Ogo. The griot tells stories of mad love, of women falling for giants, but these are the stories we tell each other under masuku beer. An Ogo birth comes like hail. Nobody can tell when or how and no divination or science can tell it. Most Ogo are killed at the only time they can be killed, just after birth, for even a young Ogo can rip the breast off the poor woman he suckles, and crush the finger that he grips. Some raise them in secret, and feed them buffalo milk, and raise them for the work of ten plows. But something in the head snaps at ten and five years and the Ogo becomes the monster the gods fated him to become.
But not always.
So when Sadogo came out of his mother and killed her, the father cursed the son, saying he must have been the product of adultery. He cursed the mother’s body to a mound outside the village, leaving her to vulture and crow, and would have killed the child or left him exposed in the hollow of an ako tree had word not spread that an Ogo was among them born in the village. A man came two days later, when the man’s hut still stunk of afterbirth, shit, and blood, and bought the baby for seven pieces of gold and ten and five goats. He gave the Ogo a name so in that way he would be regarded as a man and not a beast, but Sadogo had forgotten it. When he was ten and two in years, Sadogo slew a lion who had developed a taste for man flesh. Killed him with one punch straight into the skull, and this was before a smith forged him gloves made out of iron.
When Sadogo killed another lion, who was a shape-shifter, the man said, “A killer you surely are, a killer you surely must be. There is no stopping what the gods make you, there is no reshaping how the gods shape you. You must swing the ax, you must draw the bow, but decide who you kill.”
The man had many to kill in those years and Sadogo grew strong and fearsome, letting his hair grow—for who would tell him to cut it?—and not washing, for who would tell him to wash? And the man who fed him and gave him leathers to wear and taught him killing science would point to a man working his lands and say, Look at this man. He had every chance to be strong, yet chooses to be weak. In that way he shames the gods. The future of his lands and his cows is with me, so send him to his ancestors. In this way he raised the Ogo. Beyond good or evil, beyond just and unjust, only desiring his master’s desire. And he raised himself that way, to think of only what he wanted, what he desired, and who stood in the way, slumping, seething, whining, bawling, begging to be killed.
Sadogo killed everyone as directed by the master. Family, friend turned foe, rivals, men who would not sell land, for the master saw himself a chief. He killed, and killed, and killed again, and the day when he went into the hut of a stubborn man who sold his millet instead of giving it as tribute, and broke the necks of his entire family, including three children, he saw himself in the shiny iron shield on the wall, the last little girl dangling like a limp doll from his hands. So tall that his head was above the shield and it was his monstrous arms and that little girl. And he was not a man, but a beast wearing beast skin, doing something that not even beasts do. Not a man who had heard the griots speak poetry to the master’s wife and wished that he could sing himself. Not the man who would let the butterfly and the moth land on his hair and leave them there, sometimes to die, and in his hair they would still remain, like bright yellow jewels. He was lower than a butterfly, he was the killer of children.
Back at the master’s house the master’s wife came to him and said, He beats me every night. If you kill him you can have some of his coin and seven goats. And he said, This man is my master. And she said, There is no master and no slave, only what you want, what you desire, and what stands in your way. And when he wavered, she said, Look at how I am still comely, and she did not lie with him for that would be madness, for not only was he already big, but he had a young man’s vitality, ten times over, for he was a giant in every way, but she took him with the hands until he yelled, and burst a spray of man milk that hit her in the face and knocked her back four steps. He entered their chamber that night, when the master was on top of the wife, grabbed the back of his head and ripped it off, and the wife screamed, Murderer! Rapist of women! Help me! And he jumped through the window, for the master had many guards.
Second story.
Years grew old, years died, and the Ogo was executioner for the King of Weme Witu in the richest of the South Kingdoms, and who was in truth just a chief who answered to the King of all the South, who was not yet mad. He was called Executioner. There came a time when the King grew tired of wife number ten and four, and spread many lies about her loins spreading for many, like a stream split in two directions, and that she lay with many a lord, many a chief, many a servant, maybe a beggar, and had even been witnessed sitting on the flitting tongue of a eunuch. In this way the story ended. When many gave case against her, including two water maids who claimed to see her take a man in every hole one night, the night itself they could not remember, the court of elders and mystics, all of whom had new horses, and litters, and chariots provided by the King, condemned her to death. A quick death, at Sadogo the executioner’s sword, for the gods smiled on mercy.