Black Leopard, Red Wolf

I stood next to Sadogo and studied this door. There was magic, but my nose was no help in unraveling its making. I whispered an incantation I never remembered hearing before. Nothing. Nothing like the house back in Malakal. Something from the Sangoma’s tongue, not mine. I whispered it again so close my lips kissed the wood. A flame sparked at the top right corner and spread around the entire frame. When the flames vanished, so had the locks.

Sadogo went past me and pushed it open. A white light shot through. The mad monkey EEEEEEEEEEE’d. I wanted to stay and fight him but I had two asleep and one about to fall down in a blink.

“Tracker,” Sadogo said.

The light lit the whole room white. I picked up Fumeli. The Ogo took the Leopard and stepped through first, then I hobbled behind. A crash behind us caused me to turn just as the front door broke off. The mad monkey charged in screaming, but as his chipped fangs reached for the back door, it slammed itself shut, leaving us in darkness and quiet.

“What is this place?” Sadogo asked.

“The forest. We are in the for—”

I went back to the door behind us. What could it be but a mistake to do so, but I opened it anyway, just a little, and looked inside. A dusty room, with stone tiles, and from floor to wall stood books, scrolls, papers, and parchments. No broken door. No mad monkey. At the end of this new room, another door that Sadogo pushed open.

Sun. Children ran and stole, market women yelled and sold. Traders eyed a good deal, slavers squeezed red slave flesh, buildings squat and fat, buildings skinny and looming, and far off a great tower I knew.

“Are we in Mitu?” Sadogo said.

“No, my friend. Kongor.”

ELEVEN

Leave the dead to the dead. That is what I tell him.”

“Before or after we went in the Darklands?”

“Before, after, dead is dead. The gods tell me to wait. And look—you alive and unspoiled. Trust the gods.”

Sogolon looked at me with neither smile nor sneer. The only way she could care less would be to try.

“The gods had to tell you to wait?”

I woke up when the sun sailed to the middle of the sky and forced shadows underfoot. Flies buzzed about the room. I slept and woke three times before the Leopard and Fumeli woke once, and the Ogo could cast off the sluggishness of the Ogudu. The room, dim and plain, walls the brown-green colour of fresh chicken dung, with sacks packed on top of each other all the way to the ceiling. Tall statues leaning against each other, sharing secrets about me. The floor smelled of grain, dust, perfume bottles lost in the dark, and rat shit. On the two side walls facing each other, tapestries ran to the ground, blue Ukuru cloth with white patterns of lovers and trees. I lay on the floor, above and under blankets and rugs of many colours. Sogolon stood by the window, in that brown leather dress she always wore, looking out.

“You leave your whole mind back in the forest.”

“My mind is right here.”

“Your mind not here yet. Three times now I say to you that journey around the Darklands take three days, and we take four.”

“Only one night passed in the forest.”

Sogolon laughed like a wheeze.

“So we come three days late,” I said.

“You lost in that forest for twenty and nine days.”

“What?”

“A whole moon come and go since you gone into bush.”

And perhaps this, like the last two times she said it, was where I threw myself back down on the rugs, stunned. Everything not dead had twenty-nine days—a whole moon—to grow, including truth and lies. People on voyages have long returned. Creatures born got old, others died, and those dead withered to dust in that time. I have heard of great beasts who go to sleep for cold seasons, and men who fall ill and never rise, but this felt like someone stole my days and whoever I should have been in them. My life, my breath, my walk, it came to me why I hate witchcraft and all magic.

“I have been in the Darklands before. Time never stopped then.”

“Who was keeping time for you?”

I knew what she meant behind the witch double-speak. What she said, not out loud, the word inside the word, was who in the world would care for me that they would count my days gone? She looked at me as if she wanted an answer. Or at least a half-wit answer she could reply to with a full-wit mockery. But I stared at her until she looked away.

“A whole moon come and go since you gone into the bush,” she said again, but soft as if not to me. She looked out the window.

“Trust for the gods be the only reason why I here for a moon in Kongor. If it was my will over the gods, this whole place and every man in it would burn. Can’t trust no man in Kongor.”

“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?”