This is what the women say, that she only help women (despite the men who beg, plead, command, or bribe). Each one reach one, who tell another, who claim to know her, or at least where in the Sunk City you can leave a message that she will get. Those who cannot leave a note whisper their desire and leave a down payment in silver. She don’t take gold or cowrie. You will feel like a fool, they say, whispering your business out in the wild, like you confessing a crime. But the gray parrots hear and they take the words to her as exactly as you say it. For if you come to the Moon Witch it is because you don’t have nowhere left to go and nobody left to help. It is because every other ending better than the one you living in, and you so desperate for deliverance that even a change to nothing is something. So yes, women come to her with a mountain of problems, and nine times out of ten, that problem is a man.
This is what the men say. Whether I drinking wahaba beer in a tavern in Masi or watching them lose themselves while I sip wine in an opium den in west Omororo, the men speak the same. The first moon, nothing. Six moons later one or two man talking about a string of murders in Masi and Marabanga and how this secret police don’t know murderer keeping secret from them. One year later two drunkards wondering if the gods have set vengeance on some men, but no women? Man losing their sleep and now afraid to walk alone down certain streets, but the women don’t feel unsafe at all. Now they be the ones walking alone or among their kind at night. Two years after that, they learn that their women keeping secrets, as if that was something new. Five years or six, seven men in Weme Witu form a search gang, to find out who is this killer of the new moon, that no sheriff think live. He among us, they say. He. Eight years in and it turn into song and joke, how some evil spirit or monstrous beast roaming the streets, and the country roads and the hillsides, and it is a tokoloshe grown too big, or an Eloko who learn to be crafty. It tempt me to take piece of their bodies just so they can ponder what creature this is to take that as a trophy. It take ten and one years for any man to notice that the women know. When a man say that to me, I ask him if that mean it take ten years for him to finally listen to his woman.
“Oh she never say nothing to me,” he say.
Certain man start to see that women know something. Or they know too little. Not that, care too little, for the prime desire of a woman must be for the safety of her man. Some of the women start to use it as a threat, saying, Hit me, cut me, even cheat me and I going pray for this Moon Witch to come. So I stop being a woman, stop being an instrument of revenge, and start to be folklore. Days come and gone, kings live and die, but the women, they keep it as a woman’s affair. Not a secret, just not for man’s knowledge. All but two, whose husband and father beat it out of them. The husband take himself to the Sunk City, but the gorillas deal with him before I even see. The father come to the forest dressed like a woman, and even whisper a request to the parrots. But he keep demanding to see me, which is something no woman ever demand. That one I let live, when the sight of mighty gorillas, one with the rotting head of the husband, make him piss and shit himself.
This is what the women say. That this here Moon Witch been haunting the Sunk City for over a century, so maybe she was a real woman once, but she is something else now. Sogolon would laugh at such talk, for nothing about this world worth living so long in it, but I don’t go by Sogolon. Everybody else in this forest get by with no name. A no name woman is what I was before all that happen, and that is what I return to, though the voice that sound like me say, Look how the people name you anyway, Moon Witch. Listen to what they say about you, that she run across the top of trees, sleep at the bottom of the lake, and while she put an entire river tribe to sleep, suck out the blood of their cows. They say other things too, that she eat Yumboes raw, have two holes where her breasts used to be, and kill all of her children. That she use mud and magic to coax a cock out of the ground so that it can fuck her, for her swampy koo will kill any man. And that breeze in the bush people hear is she warning them to think twice before coming in too close.
But come they continue to do. Soon word get sent from all over the South, from Nigiki, from Lish, from even the North. We find weselves in a situation where we need you. We have a need most peculiar. A man who beat his wife to death and now rape his daughters. A man who sell his sister to a slaver who paint her skin red and sell her to an ivory and salt merchant. A woman whose brother blind her, then leave her in the alley. Ten and seven rich men, whose wives wake to them dead in bed with their mouths stuffed with their own cocks. And man who did throw his wife from his window somehow get thrown from a roof. That man who hang his daughter because she rude is who people find in the market square hanging from a noose around his balls. Another who killed his sister’s family to get their land found upside down, his head buried in the dirt. And then the exploded heads, so many men with exploded heads and bellies, and three that witnesses say just blow up and popped into nothing but red mist. She always come in darkness and leave with no trace, just as night leave day. We hear to leave you silver and never leave you gold, that you would prefer a full wineskin before that. We hear that you is not just yourself but an army, otherwise how can you be in Weme Witu and the Storm Keys the same night? You, meaning me.
So, tail of scorpion and blood of woman in her third moon, which only certain kind of market will sell. Also, venom from the bush viper, sap of palmyra, and seeds of onaye. And stem and root of winter sweet. Shed all clothes, put on the loincloth from the skin of an animal killed with two knives, pound the ingredients into a paste, mix with water, and boil from sunrise to sunfall until nothing leave in the pot but that what is black and sticky. Then I dip in it the arrows and three small daggers, and scoop the rest into a small bottle. Somebody leave silver in the clearing and a note about a man in Go, which was a moon and few days by foot. This man take a piece of every woman he touch, first whores, then a tradesman’s daughter, and then a nun. And then another nun. Be clear that whatever the nuns was trying to gain, they didn’t need to both lose a finger and an ear, the note say. I see behind the double-talk in the words, not about killing him but restoring grace, and know that is the nuns who commission this kill. And that this man take more than a finger. Also this, they didn’t want blood, which is why I bring the poison. The arrows was for if he decide not to die nice—or if I say fuck the gods and fuck the nuns, you call on the Moon Witch because there is blood to let. I take the trail around the Wagono Mountains and in a moon I am outside the entrance to Go.
The sun take leave before I reach the gate, and Go is rumbling. This is the first I hear it, the sound of the land about to break away. Whoever have business within was already in, and who have business without by now long gone. The city already break from the ground to rise as high as a tall man. I can already see under it, the dirt and stones that rise and those that fall off, with the underneath looking like a tree that somebody just dig out to plant elsewhere. Already too high to jump, and Go is only rising higher. I run, trying to find something hanging off, hoping the wind (not wind) would give me a push, but of course nothing come. A man hear me cuss.
“Lingqekembe ezimbini zegolide. Unyuka ileli,” he say.
“I don’t speak your tongue.”
“Which tongue you want? North? We don’t speak North here.”
“And yet is North we speaking.”