What a sight we must be in Juba!
But that is not the story
For Tracker stagger ten times before we get to the gate.
And Mossi hold him up ten times strong
So they get to the door
and a girl open the door who look like him
that is what me and Mossi think
And she don’t say nothing, but she let them in
and jump out of the way when the Ball Boy
roll through, and the Giraffe Boy had to duck
and in a blue room
she sit
looking old and weak but her eyes look young
When did he die? Tracker ask.
When a grandfather was supposed to die, she say.
And he look at her like he have something to say
And his mouth quiver like he have something to say
And Mossi start to move we out of the room
like he have something to say
But Tracker stagger again and this time he fall
And she stoop down and touch his cheek
One of your eyes didn’t come from me, she say
and what come out his mouth was a wail
And he wail for his mother
And he wail for his mother
And night come for day
And day come for night
And still he wail.
Hear me now,
I stay in the monkeybread tree ten and nine moons.
The day I was leaving the children cry,
and Mossi hang his head down low
and even the Wolf Eye said, But why do you leave your home?
But a man like me, we are like the beast,
we must roam,
or we die.
Listen to me now.
The day before I leave,
A black Leopard come to the tree.
Stop him.
Stop him now. Stop him or I will find a way to end everything this very night. And then you will know nothing about how anything ended.
I will tell you what happened next.
I will tell you everything.
TWENTY-THREE
I want it known that you made me do this. I want to see it written in a tongue that I recognize. Show me. I will not speak until you show me. How will you write it? Will you note what I said, or just say, The prisoner said this? Stop talking about truth—I fed you truth all along, but as I said before, what you want is story. I have given you many, but I will give you a final one. Then you can talk to her and send us to burn.
In this story I see her. She walked like somebody was following her.
Why do you stop me?
Did you not hear the griot?
The Leopard came to visit me and seduced me with talk of adventure. Of course he was all cunning—he is a leopard. And I went with him to find a fat and stupid man who sold gold and salt and smelled of chicken shit, who had vanished. But he had not vanished. Fuck the gods, inquisitor, which story do you wish to hear? No I will not tell you both. Look at me.
I will not tell you both.
So.
She walked as people who think they are followed walk. Looking ahead when she reached the mouth of each lane, looking behind when she reached the foot of it. Slipping from shadow to shadow, as she moved down a still street. Floating overhead the raw burn of opium, and flowing on the ground, the overspill of shit water. She tripped and grabbed her cargo tight, ready to brace for the fall rather than let it go. The sky had a ceiling in this place, a hundred paces high in some parts, with holes burrowed through to let in the white light of the sun and the silver light of the moon. She stooped below a torch beside a door, shifted underneath, stood up again, and scraped her back along the wall like a crab, to the corner.
The Malangika. The tunnel city, somewhere west of the Blood Swamp but east of Wakadishu, about three hundred paces below the ground and as big as a third of Fasisi. Hundreds of years ago, before people wrote accounts, the first people from above had a quarrel with the gods of sky over rain, and the gods of earth gave them this place to hide from sky wrath. They dug wide and deep, and the caverns rose high to hold buildings of three, four, and even five floors. Columns from chopped-down trees and stone to brace the tunnels so that they never collapsed, though two sections collapsed twice. Throughout the tunnels, builders carved out holes above to let the sun and moon light the street, like the lamps of Juba. People in the Malangika were the true first ones to unlock the secret of metals, some say. But they were selfish and greedy, and became the first blacksmith kings. They died holding on to their iron and silver. And some working other kinds of art and craft dug even deeper. But the people of this city soon died out, and the city itself was forgotten. And only in a place forgotten could a new city arise, a city with no notice, a city that was a market. A place that sold what could not be sold aboveground, not even at night. The secret witches market.
The market cleared out. Somebody had woven powerful magic to make everyone forget the street. Most lanes showed the backside of inns where nobody stayed, taverns where nobody left, and sellers of things of all kinds of uses. But in this lane darkness hung low. She walked many steps before stopping, looking around as two spirits pulled themselves from a wall and came at her. Another rose out of the ground, stumbling as if drunk. In the quick, she pulled the amulet from between her breasts. The spirits squealed and backed away; the ground spirit went back under. All the way down the lane, she held out the amulet, and voices squawked, muttered, and hissed. Their hunger was huge, but not bigger than the fear of the nkisi around her neck. Through the mist, at the end of the lane, she pressed herself against a fresh mud wall on the right, then turned around the corner right into my blade.
She jumped. I grabbed her hand, yanked it behind her back, pressing my knife to her neck. She tried to scream but I pressed the knife harder. Then she started to utter a whisper I knew. I whispered something back and she stopped.
“I am protected by a Sangoma,” I said.
“You pick here to rob a poor woman? You pick this place?”
“What is it you carry, girl?” I asked.
For she was a girl and thin, her cheeks hungry. Her hand, which I still held, was near down to bone, something I could break with just a twist.
“Curse you if you make me drop it,” she said.
“What shall you drop?”
“Take your eyes out of my bosom, or take my purse and go.”
“Money is not what I look for. Tell me what you carry or I will stab it.”
She flinched, but I knew what it was before the dried milk vomit smell came to me, and before it gurgled.
“How many cowries buys a baby in the Malangika?”
“You think I selling my baby? What kind of witch sell her own baby?”
“I don’t know. What kind of witch buys one, that I know.”
“Let me go or I going scream.”
“A woman’s scream in these tunnels? That is every street. Tell me how you come by the baby.”
“You deaf? I say—”
I twisted her arm behind her back, right up almost to her neck, and she screamed, and screamed again, trying to not drop the child. I released her hand a little.
“Go slip back in your mother cunt,” she said.