“Can’t say.”
“Sangomin. Yes. After you tell me to head south, with no guide, or no way, I just walk against the third star. The first one pick up my smell as soon as I cross Two Sisters River. Second one try to cook me in my own skin. That be him at bottom of the White Lake. Third one jump me just as I was leaving Kalindar. His headless body might still be running mad for all I know. Three of the Sangomin ambush me in two moons.”
“Where is this talk going?”
“This secret mission not so secret.”
Trick of the eye, perhaps, for she is black in black. But it look like she was backing away into the shadow.
“Didn’t know you was one for so much killing,” she say. Popele slip away from the matter as fast as it come and I let her, for now.
“Say the one who send me off to kill.”
“You not killing.”
“Still hiding behind words, oh. I only ending a life.”
“You not ending—”
“What you want, Popele?”
“I . . . I come to see what you need.”
“Sleep, sprite. I need sleep.”
Before I get to that Sangomin in Kalindar, she set a pigeon loose. What message this bird flee with I didn’t know, and not even the slow move of my knife across her throat would make her talk. I knew the body would horrify Popele just as I knew she would follow me and see it. She, who asking for a death but have no bravery for killing. But hear her reasoning on the edge of a knife, speaking from a belief I know she don’t hold. That if you kill him in the middle of the right season then it is not murder at all, for he is not a him to kill. She even think such thinking make sense. Folly with some wisdom in it. I tell her to do whatever she need to wash the blood off her hands, since the sight of it bother her even if the blood shedder get what he deserve. But yes, a pigeon that lead me to the Sangoma. After I fail to follow the smell of evil magic, the direction of arrows, and the false divination of fetish priest, I start to watch the birds. Near every pigeon in the sky was in service to somebody, and many in service to the Sangomin.
I let the wind (not wind) push me to great leaps, other times I ride a stolen horse. More than that I let wind show me the trail of those birds, which lead me to Kalindar. Sangomin don’t have a hierarchy of knowledge. That mean even the least of them know as much as the most. But they have hierarchy of wisdom. Is one thing to give the young learning, another thing to teach them how to guard it. By the time she tell me where exactly to find him—we already know he was living down South—neither hand was of any more use. Then I throw a flame to her dress and burn down her house.
Popele leave my room thinking this woman too far gone. Poor she, divine born and still didn’t know how much further I would soon go.
The night before this ship set sail, I sleep with both eye open, which mean I didn’t sleep. To board this ship I was to forget woman ways. I take the cloth I buy from the bazaar and wrap around me tight. I fill out waist and squeeze in hips and bind up breasts to deny they nature. I steal sandals from the man who sell me this brown leather cloak, and make a pledge to come back after this is all done to deal with him for giving his wife the scar right below her left eye. On my person, a belt from which hang a pouch of silver, cowrie, and ingot. Strapped around my thigh, a knife. In my two earlobes, two new plates as big as my palm, and hanging from my head down to my shoulder, a headdress of a loop of rope, few coil of iron, and two tusks that stick out from the hood to give me the look of a standing boar. When I make that Sangoma burn, she didn’t scream. She laugh. Once they sense me dead they going know you coming, she say.
Lish is a city of many faithful and many scared. I pass many a lodging with dimming fire, and many a window shut as tight as the door, then turn down the bazaar street, where everything shut up from stall to cart to shop, and nothing moving but mouse. I continue. Something just then disturb the air and I pull my new dagger. Walking past a perfume merchant, jasmine and myrrh follow me for ten steps. A knocking jump me, a wood bucket tumble, a cat chase and catch a mouse. He gnaw the prize and watch me as he pass by. I give it space, moving closer to the door of a fabric seller. The door, warm to the touch of my hand, strike me as strange, but then the door smile at me.