“How do you know the elder was looking for anything?”
“You are not the only one with big, fat friends, prefect.”
“Do you itch, Tracker?”
“What?”
“Itch. You scratched your chest seven times now. I would guess you are those river types who shun clothes. Luala Luala, or Gangatom?”
“Ku.”
“Even worse. Yet you say writ as if you know what it is. You might have even been looking for it.”
He sat back down on the stool, looked at me, and laughed. I could not remember anyone, man, woman, beast, or spirit who irritated me so. Not even Leopard’s boy.
“Basu Fumanguru. How many enemies had he in this city?” I asked.
“You forget I am the one to ask questions.”
“Not any wise ones. I think you should jump to that time of the night when you torture me for the answers you want.”
“Sit down. Now.”
“I could—”
“You could, had you your little weapons. I will not ask again.”
I sat back down.
He walked around me five times before he stopped and sat down again, pulling his stool next to me.
“Let us not talk of murder. Do you even know which part of the city you were in? You would have been detained merely for casting strange looks. So what took you to the house? A three-year-old murder or something you knew would still be there, untouched, even unspoilt? I will tell you what I know of Basu Fumanguru. He was loved by the people. Every man knows of his clashes with the King. Every woman knows of his clashes with his fellow elders. They killed him for some other reason.”
“They?” I asked.
“What happened to those bodies could not have been by one man, if done by man at all, and not some beast bewitched.”
He looked at me so long and so quiet that I opened my mouth, not to speak, just to look as if I was going to.
“I have something to show you,” he said.
He left the room. I heard flies. I wondered how they questioned the Ogo, or if they just left him alone to unspool how many he has killed in as many years. And what about me? Was all this the Ogudu, or did the forest itself leave something in me, waiting to strike? Something other than a reminder of my loneliness? Also this. What a strange thought to be had right here, when a prefect is trying to trap me into whatever charge he long thought to make up.
He walked back in and threw something at me so quick that I caught it before I knew what it was. Black and stuffed soft with feathers, wrapped in the same aso oke cloth that I had shoved into this curtain I was wearing. I was ready this time when it came, everything that came with a smell I now knew.
“A doll,” he said.
“I know what it is.”
“We found it three years ago near the body of the youngest boy.”
“A boy can play with dolls.”
“No child in Kongor would have been given one. Kongori think it’s training children in the way of worshipping idols—a terrible sin.”
“And yet every house has statues.”
“They just like statues. But this doll belonged to no one in that house.”
“Fumanguru was not Kongori.”
“An elder would have respected their traditions.”
“Maybe the doll belonged to the killer.”
“The killer is one year old?”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying there was one more child in that house. Maybe whoever killed the family came for the child. Or something else, much more wild,” he said.
“That does sound wild. The child, a poor relation?”
“We spoke to all family.”
“So did Belekun the Big. Maybe you asked questions together?”
“Are you saying the elders are doing their own investigation?”
“I say you and I are not the only ones who went messing around dead Fumanguru’s house. Whatever they sought, I don’t think they found it. This is not feeling like an interrogation anymore, prefect.”
“It stopped being so when we entered the room, Tracker. And I told you my name is Mossi. Now do you want to tell me how you just appeared in this city? There’s no record of your entry, and Kongor is nothing if not a place of records.”
“I came through a door.”
He stared at me, then laughed. “I will remember to ask next time I see you.”
“You will see me again?”
“Time is but a boy, sir Tracker. You are free to go.”
I walked to the door.
“The Ogo as well. We have run out of words to describe his killings.”
He smiled. He had rolled up his tunic right above his thigh—better for running, and battle.
“I have a question,” I said.
“Only one now?”
I wish he were not so eager to show me he is quick-witted. Few things I hated more than to have a sentence cut off by somebody throwing wit. Again, something about him, not offensive but more irritating than a cut underfoot.
“Why do Seven Wings assemble? Here. Now,” I asked.
“Because they cannot be seen in Fasisi.”
“What?”
“Because they would raise suspicion in Fasisi.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Not the answer you want, so here is another. They await instructions from the King.”
“Why?”
“Wherever you came from, have they no news there?”
“Not what you are about to tell me.”
“You seem sure I’m about to tell you. There is no news. But rumors of war, there have been for moons now. No, not war, occupation. Have you not heard this, Tracker? The mad King in the South has gone mad again. After ten and five years of sense, his head is again taken by devils. Last moon he sent four thousand men to the borders of Kalindar and Wakadishu. The South King mobilizes an army, the North King mobilizes mercenaries. As we say in Kongor: We cannot find the body, but we smell the stench. But alas, war or no, people still steal. People still lie. People still kill. And my work is never done. Go get your Ogo. Until we meet again. You can give me the story of your single dim eye.”
I left this man to go irritate someone else.
I did not want to confront the Leopard. Nor did I want to see Sogolon before I could unravel whatever secret she was weaving. I looked at the Ogo and thought of a time, perhaps soon, when I would need a person to hear me pull the darkness out of my own heart. Besides, neither of us knew the way back to the man’s place and there were too many homes in this city that smelled like his. The Ogo’s mouth was still trembling with killings to confess, words to say, a curse to rinse from his skin. The route had many trees and only two houses, one with faint flickering light. I saw a rock up ahead and, when we got to it, sat down.
“Ogo, tell me of your killings,” I said.
He spoke, shouted, whispered, yelled, screamed, laughed, and cried all night. The next morning, when there was light to see our walk home, the Leopard and Fumeli were gone.
FOURTEEN
The Ogo told me of all his killings, one hundred, seventy and one.
Know this, no mother survives the birth of an Ogo. The griot tells stories of mad love, of women falling for giants, but these are the stories we tell each other under masuku beer. An Ogo birth comes like hail. Nobody can tell when or how and no divination or science can tell it. Most Ogo are killed at the only time they can be killed, just after birth, for even a young Ogo can rip the breast off the poor woman he suckles, and crush the finger that he grips. Some raise them in secret, and feed them buffalo milk, and raise them for the work of ten plows. But something in the head snaps at ten and five years and the Ogo becomes the monster the gods fated him to become.
But not always.
So when Sadogo came out of his mother and killed her, the father cursed the son, saying he must have been the product of adultery. He cursed the mother’s body to a mound outside the village, leaving her to vulture and crow, and would have killed the child or left him exposed in the hollow of an ako tree had word not spread that an Ogo was among them born in the village. A man came two days later, when the man’s hut still stunk of afterbirth, shit, and blood, and bought the baby for seven pieces of gold and ten and five goats. He gave the Ogo a name so in that way he would be regarded as a man and not a beast, but Sadogo had forgotten it. When he was ten and two in years, Sadogo slew a lion who had developed a taste for man flesh. Killed him with one punch straight into the skull, and this was before a smith forged him gloves made out of iron.