The darkchild scurry past me and the baby, but something catch up in his nose, for he lower himself down to the ground, his bulb twitching, and most of his legs still sticking up like stilts. He stop and sniff. He turn around to face me and sniff again. I unsettling him, I know it. I clutch the baby harder, trying to not look in his red eyes but trying to not make it look as if I trying. The smell tricking him. Maybe if I stay it will start maddening him because he can’t remember. But Olu’s not remembering don’t stop him from being haunted by what he don’t remember. And the Aesi might think his forgetting magic work on everyone, but not everybody he wipe clean. And people like me he don’t wipe at all. The witchfinder yell something, perhaps his name, and the darkchild leap off. They invade another house three doors down and make it shake.
No form of the Aesi they find in Ibiku, not even after torturing many women and men and killing three. Since everybody who fail the King end up dead, maimed, or banished to prison, everybody is waiting to see what happen to the Sangomin. But nothing happen. The search for the Aesi whet their taste for terror, and with this King they do what they fancy to whoever they please. People in Ugliko used to take it for a joke until they start preying on Ugliko. People of the court take it as a joke until the random moon when they turn into prey. Grumbling turn to outcry turn to crying out to the King. But Kwash Moki do nothing.
Telling each other stories bring more light to the room than anything else in moons. I never at ease when I look at him and see a man’s face. I know it was the first I ever see, but it was a false face. No, not false, just a veil. He ease into his shape as he sink into the linens, the gold hair sprouting slow, the mighty nose growing from between his eyes, the white whiskers above his lips, the yellow beard below his chin, the forest rippling across his chest, the two flesh-ripping teeth making points in his smile.
Kwash Moki lose interest in keeping lions close. Keme won’t call it demotion or transfer, only that he now have freedom to be with all the children—we stop counting the number.
Kwash Moki taking counsel from the Aesi’s White Guard, who even the silly waiting ladies of court know have limited sense when they not driving themselves stupid with taking up the Aesi’s lust for young girls. Is a season of rape that descend on Fasisi, and all because the King have no interest in it. We forbid Matisha from walking alone on the street at night, but soon forbid her from day too. Matisha huff and puff and the puff blow a stool across the room. I stop worrying about her after that.
* * *
—
The years count me off as twenty and two when the Aesi try to take me but take my son. But I been living as a woman longer than that. No name woman, one name woman, a woman with children living with a lion. We go on four more years until I say to Keme one morning, after every pot, pan, urn, and jug lift itself up and fall, that this still not settled. Our son still not sleeping peacefully so that he can wake up with the ancestors. And he not going to sleep until we bury him true. He not the only one who don’t sleep in four years, for Ndambi walk the corridors and the outside like she haunted. So one night Keme come home with a woman I never see before. Old or young, I couldn’t tell, for in the moonlight, scar and wrinkle look the same on a woman’s face. And black, the woman wearing black so she could sink into the night, and tell us to do the same. That was it, I say to myself, that we need only one witness not from family to make a rite public. Bezila nathi, they mourn with us. Finally. We don’t dig my lion up but we rake up the dirt and pour fresh libations. She speak a chant in a language I didn’t know and write runes in the air that burn for a few blinks before they blow away. I cry loud and long like it was the night he dead, but this cry was different, this was like the cry after the baby push itself out, the cry because the burden going and you joyful that it finally leaving, but mournful as well, for there is nothing left to carry. I look at Ndambi whimpering the whole time, and know that she would sleep that night. I look at my children and name them one by one under my breath, for I know the breath was blowing goodness into their lives and whatever this is—call it family—it was going to endure. Even if this whole North empire fall down.
3
MOON WITCH
Ban zop an tyok kanu rao kut
SEVENTEEN
Tail of scorpion. Blood of woman in her third moon. We might as well begin in the Sunk City. In the South lands, north of Marabanga and the Black Lake but west of Masi and south of Go. No griot sing its story, nobody know the city’s true name, or who used to live there, and no verse about it survive that anybody know.
The story is this, that for ages the Sunk City stand tall and reach high until sink it did indeed do, below the dirt and beyond memory. Time run and pass, pass and run, age sit on top of age, and the land take back what the city take away, so much that it is a rain forest now, under rule of deceiving bush, aloof trees, night cats, and the backbreaker tribe of gorillas. Hear this, nobody supposed to be walking through the forest, for parts of it darker than the Darklands, but look how this is where I walking, over ferns and under trees, cutting through mist, and creeping under branches that look like the ragged legs of a giant scorpion. Deeper in the green I leap off the back of the pygmy hippopotamus, whack away the thieving hands of monkeys, and dodge the slap of a leaf that would leave an army of ants on my face.
Been living in this here bush for longer than the elephant can count, but I don’t call it home. I still can’t say if this place find me or I find it. All I know was that I had to get out of Omororo even if by foot was the only way. I don’t want to talk about Omororo. Just so it go that one day there was me, waking up below the hundred-man-high monument that everybody call the thrusting cock, right at the neck of the city, and not knowing how it come to be. Memory cut a whole chunk out of me and turn me into a fool. How somebody can rest their head in a city far north to wake up a half a year’s journey south was mystery that would drive anyone mad. I still think madness did have its way with me. And when I did get out of Omororo, and after six moons return to the place I call home, home done gone. Nothing left to do but go back to fucking Omororo. I couldn’t go back. But telling myself that there is nothing in me left for that city to take didn’t stop me from going. From feeling that all I had to do was get back to the place where I lose everything and I will find out why.
But the past go as it wish, refusing to tell me why it leave me this way. Life right before I wake up in that city all those years ago was so clear to me. People too. But I didn’t know why I set out for a city in enemy territory, and not knowing why was pushing me from being a woman who reason to a woman who rip off her clothes, scratch her skin, and bawl. The why. I didn’t have a why. I didn’t know why I was there, I didn’t know why I walk away from everything, and why everything walk away from me.