“Tracker, are you not offended by this?” he said.
“Offended? I’m not even surprised.”
“Our good friend the Leopard still doesn’t know that there is no black in man, only shades and shades of gray. My mother was not a kind woman and she was not a good woman. But she did say to me, Amadu, pray to the gods but bolt your door. The child has been gone three years.”
“Leopard, think. When we find him, we split coin two ways, not nine.”
The slaver clapped and the three men rushed in again, doing exactly as before, rubbing his feet, feeding him dates, and looking at me as if I would change into a Leopard too.
“I give you four nights to decide. This not going be no easy journey. There are forces, Tracker. There are forces, Leopard. They come in on wind at morning or sometimes in the highest sun, the hour of the blinding light of witches. Just as I wish him to be found, surely there are those who wish him to stay hidden. Nobody ever send word for ransom, and yet I know he is alive, even before the fetish priest consult the older gods who tell him this is so. But there are forces, you two. Ill wind rolling through the cities in the hot season, and taking what is not for them. Day robber, night thief, I can’t tell you what you will find. But we talking too much. I give you four nights. If yes be your answer, meet me at the collapsed tower at the end the street of bandits. You know this place?”
“Yes.”
“Meet me there after sunset and let that be your yes.”
He turned his back to us. Our business was done with him for the time. They came back to me just then, the woman he killed and the man he made a eunuch.
“Silly Tracker, surely you know how eunuchs are made? That man will surely die,” the Leopard said.
I asked the landlady to allow the Leopard stay in a room I knew was empty. I wore nothing when I spoke to her, so she said yes, of course, but now the rent is double, or you will return from one of your trips to find nothing in your room. But I have nothing, I said. The Leopard took the room after I told him that should he find some tree to sleep in as a beast, somebody would take a perfect shot from a bow and arrow and get him right through the ribs. And all the prey in the city belonged to one man or another, so one could not roam about and hunt them. And even if you did kill somebody’s goat or chicken, do not bring it back to the room. And even if you did bring it back to the room, do not spill even a drop of blood.
This annoyed the Leopard but he saw there was wisdom in it. I knew he would be in there pacing and pacing, knowing he could not growl. Trying to sleep in the window but knowing he could not, and smelling blood quicken under the flesh of prey down below in the animal pens. So he brought the boy up to his room. The third day he came up to my room, grinning and rubbing his belly.
“You look like you sneaked an impala into your room.”
“Quiet as it’s kept. I might have been the glutton lately.”
“The whole inn knows of your appetites.”
“You must be the one nun in the whorehouse. Fantastic beasts, fantastic urges, Tracker. Where go you today? I shall see your city.”
“You already saw the city.”
“I want it through your eyes, or rather your nose. I know there is something in this city waiting for us.”
I looked at him straight. “Go whoring on your own time, cat.”
“Tracker, who’s to say we can’t do both?”
“As you wish. Go wash.”
He poked out his tongue, long as a young snake, and licked both his arms.
“Done,” he said, and grinned. “Who shall we see? A man owing you coin, whose legs we shall break? To us each a leg!”
They say Malakal is a city built by thieves. Malakal is mountains and mountains are Malakal. The one place that was never conquered because it was the one city nobody ever dared to try. Just the trip up to the mountains would exhaust men and horses. Nearly every man here is warrior born and most of the women too. This was the King’s last stand against your Massykin people of the South, and that from here we turned back the war and beat you southerners back like the bitches you are. Truce was your idea, not ours. Nearly every city spreads wide, but Malakal reaches up to the sky instead, house on top of house, tower on top of tower, some towers so thin and high that they forgot steps, leaving you to get to the top by rope. The towers themselves stacked so close that they seemed to have collapsed on each other, and to the south of the first wall was one that did, but was still in use. Four walls enclosed the city, built each inside the other, four rings built around the mountains that rose out of each other. Men built the first wall over four hundred years ago, after old Malakal went to ruin. The fourth and last wall was still being built. Come to it straight and Malakal looks like four forts, each rising out of the one below it, and towers set on top of towers. But take the view of birds and you see great walls like spirals and within them roads shooting out like spider legs from mountain peak to flat land, with lookouts for warriors, and arrow slits for archers, and homes and inns, and workhouses, and trade houses, and poorhouses, and dark lanes for necromancers, thieves, and men seeking pleasures and boys and women giving them. From our windows you can see the Hills of Enchantment, where many Sangoma live, but they were too far away. The citizens came to wisdom early how to use space for yards with chickens to get fat, and fences to keep out dogs and mountain beasts. Down from the mountains is the quickest way to the slave routes in the valley and the gold and salt routes to the sea. Malakal produces nothing but gold, trades everything that can be enslaved, and demands tribute from all who pass through, for if you are in the North it is the only way to the sea.
Of course I speak of nine years ago. Malakal is nothing like that now.
“I cannot tell you if these are good times or bad times to be in the city because the King is coming,” I said to the Leopard as we went out.
His caravan was seen two days out and all of Malakal was expected to celebrate his tenth jubilee as Kwash Dara, the North King, the son of Kwash Netu, the great conqueror of Wakadishu and Kalindar. Of course he celebrates in the city most responsible for saving his royal backside so that he could still have his royal shit wiped away by servants. But the griots were already singing, Praise the King for saving the city of mountains. Men from Malakal weren’t even in his army; they were mercenaries who would have fought for the Massykin had they come with good coin first. But fuck the gods if the city was not going to put on great fabrics and feast. The black-and-gold flag of Kwash Dara was on everything. Even children were painting their faces gold and black. The women painted gold for the left breast, black for the right, both in the sign of the rhinoceros. Weavers made cloths, and men wore robes, and women wrapped their heads into large flower arrangements, all of it black and gold.
“Your city is putting on her good face,” he said.
“An elder told me that peace is a rumor, and we will be back at war with the South in less than a year.”
“So in war or peace, wives will want to know who fucks their husbands.”
“That is one of your better points, Leopard.”
I lived in town, which was a new thing for me. I have always been an edge man, always on the coast, always by the boundary. That way nobody knows if I have just come or was turning to leave. I kept only as much as I could pack in a sack and leave with in less than a time-glass flip. But in a place like here, where people are always coming and going, you could stay in the center that never moves and still vanish. Which is convenient for a man that men hate. My inn was far west, at the edge of the third wall. People within the third wall other people thought were rich, but that is not true. Most of those people lived within the second wall. Warriors and soldiers and traders bedding for the night stayed within the fourth, in forts at all four points of the city that kept the enemy out. I’m telling you this, inquisitor, because you have never been there and a man of your sort never will.