“Can’t trust any man, anywhere,” I said. She flinched when she saw I heard.
“My gratitude for waiting in a city that does you ill,” I said.
“Not for you I do it. Not even for the goddess.”
“Should I ask who?”
“Too many children in Kongor don’t have an end to they story. That older than two hundred years, that older than when I was a child. So let this be the one child who story have an ending, no matter how grim, and not be another one that wash up with no head when the floodwater roll back.”
“You lost a child? Or were you the child?”
“I should have make distance between me and this city. Make distance four nights after you didn’t show. Last time I walk these roads a man of good breeding pay five man to steal me so he can show me what an ugly woman was for. Right there in Torobe. Couldn’t beat him wife because she from royal blood, so he bond me for that.”
“Kongori masters have always been cruel.”
“Low-wit donkey, the man was not my master, he was my kidnapper. A man would know the difference.”
“You could have run to a prefect.”
“A man.”
“A magistrate.”
“A man.”
“An elder with a kind ear, an inquisitor, a seer.”
“Man. Man. Man.”
“Justice could have come for your kidnapper.”
“Justice did come. When I learn a spell and the wife pregnancy devour her from the inside. Something else go up inside the man.”
“A spell.”
“My knife.”
“When you last pass through Kongor?”
“Amadu debt to me doubling just by me coming back.”
“When last, Sogolon?”
“I already tell you.”
Noise bounced up to the window, but it had order, and rhythm, beat and shuffle, the clap of sandals and boots, the trot of hooves on hard dirt, and people who oohed to other people’s aahs. I joined her by the window and looked out.
“Coming from all corners of the North and some from the South border. The border men wear a red scarf on the left arm. Do you see them?”
The street stretched behind the house, several floors below. Like most of Kongor, it was built of mud and stone, mortar to stop the rains from beating the walls away, though the side wall looked like the face of man who suffered pox. Six floors high, ten and two windows across, some with wood shutters, some open, some with a platform outside for plants but not people to stand, though children stood and sat on many. Indeed the whole house looked like a large honeycomb. Like all buildings in Kongor, this looked finished by hand. Smoothed by palms and fingers, measured by the old science of trusting the god of skill and creation to measure what is good weight and what is good height. Some of the windows were not in line, but up and down like a pattern, and some were taller than others, and not perfect in shape, but smooth, and done with either the care of a master or the crack of a master’s whip.
“This house belong to a man from the Nyembe quarter. He be in my debt for many things and many lives.”
I followed Sogolon’s eyes as she looked down from the window. In the winding snake of a street, men approached. Groups of three and four walking so in step it looked like marching. Coming from the east, men on white and black horses with red reins, the horses not covered head to tail like the stallions of Juba. Two men passed below us, side by side. The one closer to the street wore a helmet of lion hair, and a black coat trimmed in gold with splits to the sides, with a white robe underneath. He carried a longsword in his belt. The second man kept his head bald. A black shawl draped his shoulders, covering a loose black tunic and white trousers, and a shiny red sheath for a scimitar. Three men on horseback went back up the snake street, all three in black wraps to hide their faces, chain mail, black robes over legs in armour, with a lance in one hand and the bridle in the other.
“Whose army assembles?”
“No army. Not King’s men.”
“Mercenaries?”
“Yes.”
“Who? I spend little time in Kongor.”
“These be the warriors of the Seven Wings. Black garments on the outer, white on the inner, like their symbol the black sparrow hawk.”
“Why do they assemble? There is no war, or rumor of war.”
She looked away. “None in the Darklands,” she said.
Still looking at the mercenaries gathering, I said, “We came out of the forest.”
“The forest don’t lead into the city. The forest don’t even lead to Mitu.”
“There are doors, and there are doors, witch.”
“These sound like doors I know.”
“Wise woman, do you not know everything? What kind of door closes on itself and is no more?”
“One of the ten and nine doors. You talk of it in your sleep. I didn’t know of a door in the Darklands. You smell it out?”
“And now you have mirth too.”
“How you know there be a door in the Darklands?”
“I just knew.”
She whispered something.
“What?” I said.
“Sangoma. It must be the Sangoma’s craft on you why you can see even when you eyes blind. Nobody know how the ten and nine doors come to pass. Though old griots say each make by the gods. And even the elder of elders will look at you and say, Fool, nothing never go so in all the worlds above and below sky. Other people—”
“You speak of witches?”
“Other people will say that it is the roads of the gods when they travel this world. Step through one and you in Malakal. Step through one in the Darklands and look: You in Kongor. Step through another and you even in a South kingdom like Omororo, or out in the sea or mayhaps a kingdom not of this world. Some men spend till they gray just to find one door, and all you do is sniff one out.”
“Bibi was of Seven Wings,” I said.
“He was just an escort. You smelling a game that nobody playing.”
“Seven Wings works for whoever pays, but nobody pays more than our great King. And here they assemble outside this lookout.”
“You tracking small matters, Tracker. Leave the big things to the big people of the world.”
“If this is why I woke myself I will go back to sleep. How are the Leopard and the Ogo?”
“Gods give them good fortune, but they recover slow. Who is this mad monkey? He rape them?”
“Strange how I never thought to ask that. Maybe he was going to suck their souls, and lick their feelings.”
“Ba! Your sour mouth tire me out. The Ogo of course stand because he never fall.”
“That is my Ogo. Does the girl still ride with you?”
“Yes. Two days I slap out this foolishness about running back to Zogbanu.”
“She is dead weight. Leave her in this city.”
“What a day when a man tell me what to do. Will you not speak of the child?”
“Who?”
“The reason we come to Kongor.”
“Oh. In these twenty and nine days gone, what news have you of the house?”
“We did not go.”
This “we” I left for another day. “I do not believe you,” I said.
“What a day when I care what a man believe.”
“What a day when these days come. But I am tired, and the Darklands took my fight. Did you go to the house or no?”
“I bring peace to a girl that monsters breed to make breakfast of her flesh. Then I wait for usefulness to return to you. The boy not more missing.”
“Then we should go.”
“Soon.”
I wanted to say that nobody seemed too earnest in completing our mission and finding this boy, nobody meaning her, but she went to the doorway and I noticed there was no door, only a curtain.
“Who owns this house? Is it an inn? A tavern?”
“I say again. A man with too much money, and too many favors he owes me. He meet us soon. Now he running around like a headless chicken, trying to build another room, or floor, or window, or cage.”
She was already beyond the curtain when she looked back.
“This day is already given. And Kongor is a different city at night. See to your cat and giant,” she said. Only then did my head remember that she was saying she was over three hundred years old. Nothing said old more than an old woman thinking she was even older.