On a day I didn’t count, I climb out of the bed. I walk but not far. I bend over and feel kiluma leaves pop and think it is the skin on my back. The next day I make a great error turning at my waist and more than the leaves pop. When I clutch my sides I see that I gone from four fingers to two. All the healing couldn’t stop my fingers from fusing together. I fling away my hand with fury, as if I could fling the thing off. The rest of my body I don’t dare look at. Not once. We bathe you in every healing herb, every tonic, every ground magic, everything to make your skin stretch and move, but you still burned girl, she say. You hair not coming back. Your skin going always be like charcoal. The burning smell branded in your mind, it never going leave your nose. But there is still something we can do.
The Nnimnim woman offer me a spell and I take it. Two of her kind come to my room that night. No, this is not possession, this is something else, they say. Who do I want to look like? It can be anybody.
“An old Mitu woman,” I say.
They describe the woman to me. Jaw more square than mine, cheekbones higher and wider, forehead big and flat with tracks, nose straight and pushing out, like a sand sea woman. Wide shoulders, lanky and strong like a running messenger, hair braided with dry fruit, hard flowers, bones, tusks, and long feathers of the hawk. Then they mark white clay down my breasts, down to my belly, and with wet fingers, divide the clay into stripes. Another woman wrap ripped leather around my hips. Every soul that look at you will see the woman you describe. That is how all we see you. But the enchantment won’t deceive any kind of mirror, not glass, not iron or copper, nor the puddle nor the river. Nothing that woman use to look at their face. This is how everybody will see you, but you will never see yourself.
More women come into the room as it get lighter. And still more women, or perhaps I was seeing them all for the first time. You don’t remember me, one of them say. She wear a band around the eyes that her husband take away from her. After you right the wrong done to me, the women teach me how to see, with my fingers, my ears, and my nose, she say as she paint clay on my skin with grace. After my father kill my mother he take to raping me, say another. The night you come, he was heading to my sister’s bed. You don’t know me, for then I was no woman, say yet another. I call each of those women my sisters since then, you remember us? The girls kidnapped in that caravan headed to Marabanga. They was taking us out to sea to sell us off as wife and concubines. We was seven and eight. Each night they take away one of us to test the goods and that girl would never return. That night you swoop down on we roof was the night I know the gods didn’t forget us.
“Every woman in this room touched by the Moon Witch, step forward,” the Nnimnim woman say, and every woman in the room look at me and approach the bed and surround it. They take their time and let the quiet shuffle do the talking. Some look like faces I supposed to remember, some look like faces I used to know. Many of them old, some of them older than the child they was when they see the Moon Witch. Woman with the gele of the East on her head, woman with the ighiya of the South on her. Woman in white like nuns, woman in rainbow like Queens. Mother and daughter and sister and woman with no one. Woman with one eye, one ear, one leg, no legs, woman other women holding up. Woman from the top of Mantha and from the bottom of Marabanga. Ghosts of women who come back from the otherworld to see the Moon Witch, and a crabby one who say, Boy she did love that silver. Some with mouths pack to the brim with words waiting to explode, some nodding quietly, their eyes saying, We see you, sister. Woman who steal a touch of my shoulder, forehead, woman who grab my hand until another pull my hand into theirs. They pack the room right up to the doorway, and still more was outside, waiting to squeeze themselves in. A girl worm through them to touch me and say, They couldn’t move my mother, so she send me.
“Moon Witch still flying through the trees,” say another. “Now plenty women righting the wrongs. Plenty in North and South saying, Moon Witch, she is me.”
* * *
—
Healing, restoring, remembering, feeling myself take one year. Then I leave. The Nnimnim woman see me trying to write on parchment with my fused fingers. I give up, grab the stick like an ape, and scrape the words. She ask me what I planning to do but my look was the answer.
“No peace in revenge,” she say.
“The vengeful not looking for peace,” I say.
* * *
—
Mitu. You want to know how I find him. How I find them. Is not like any of them was trying to hide. Is not like the slaver didn’t pay him what was owed enough for him to believe that the road ahead was the comfortable life, and the comfortable life was for him. Is not like they didn’t all assume I long dead. Is not like I couldn’t find where they living after I threaten to cut this man’s throat, then chop off a finger and promise him that I will come back for more if word ever set loose that I was looking for this man. He fearful but still he laugh, too long for the laughter to be about me. Talk, fat man, I say, and talk he do. His tongue was a stream, oh. About how the Tracker and them sniff the boy all the way to Kongor, where they was hiding out in the flooded section of Old Tarobe. And of course, the Ishologu just a husk with nobody to work a healing spell, since he long ago kill his witch. All but one of his group dead, yet he still head to Kongor, which mean he is the one with knowledge of the ten and nine doors. Cornered animal. Wounded animal. Dangerous animal, but a beast going nowhere. That is when the Tracker send pigeon to the slaver with a note for three times the money, or he, the magistrate, the Leopard, and the bowman was going take off and leave the boy, or worse, save the boy but hand him over to the Aesi. The Tracker seem to be many things, but liar was not one of them, say the slaver. So when he say he already in communication with the Aesi, we believe him. So they save the boy, but lose the Ogo. He take the Ogo’s share.
A riverboat on lower Ubangta take me there. I ask around for the two men living like brothers, then wink and say, But really like husband and wife, and that was all I need to say. Nothing about the Tracker’s thin body or the magistrate’s sand skin. He long ago charm the women in the market, who say, He used to have hair like a horse and hark his fearsome children, but then he say we bountiful in wit and bosom, so we love him now, oh. He, Mossi. The two men and the six mingi children who live in the baobab tree beyond the city. Beyond the great central outpost, beyond the villages but above the river. From down by the river I watch them. The Tracker’s nose don’t worry me, for I no longer smell like Sogolon.