Black Leopard, Red Wolf

The rest of my words I left to my own head, which might have been a crude joke. He nodded and pressed his lips together, satisfied with my answer, and lowered his head on his rugs.

Downstairs, I passed the room with the prefect. “It is yet early, but good night, Tracker,” he said as I walked by.

“Night,” was all that came out of my mouth.

I only then noticed the old man had stopped playing and was in the room, staring at darkness, maybe. I went down to the ground floor and waited for Sogolon.

Your old man, he was singing.”

The girl had come in first, huffing and panting. Sogolon grabbed her hand and the girl pushed her away and pinned her against the wall. I jumped up but the girl let go, growled, and started up the stairs. Sogolon closed the door.

“Venin,” she said.

The girl cursed back in that language I did not know. Sogolon replied in the same tongue. I knew that Sogolon tone: I am here to speak and you are here to listen. I imagined the girl wishing her a thousand fucks from a man covered in warts, or something just as vicious. She cursed all the way up two flights and slammed the door shut.

“Nobody in this house know what night is for,” Sogolon said.

“Fucking? Or working witch magic? Sleep is for the old gods and who follow him, Sogolon. Your old man was singing.”

“A lie.”

“No great stake in lying to you, old woman.”

“But great sport, maybe. You was right there in the room when only today he refuse to sing. The songs stay inside him mouth and none come out since Kwash Netu was King.”

“I know what I heard.”

“He don’t sing in thirty years, maybe more, but he sing in front of you?”

“Truth, his back was to me.”

“A silent griot don’t just open him mouth.”

“Maybe he was biding time for you to leave.”

“Your sting already duller than a moon ago. Maybe somebody giving him something new to sing about.”

“He was not singing about me.”

“How you know that?”

“Because I am nothing. Do you not agree?”

“I speaking to him when he wake.”

“Maybe he sung about himself? Ask him that.”

“He not answering that.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“A griot never going explain a song, only repeat it, maybe with something new, otherwise he would give the explaining not the song. Nothing about the King?”

“No.”

“Or the boy?”

“No.”

“Then for what else he be singing?”

“Maybe what all men sing about. Love.”

She laughed.

“Maybe some people in this world still need it.”

“Do you?” she said.

“Nobody loves no one.”

“The King before this one, Kwash Netu, was never one for learning. Why he would need to? This be something most people don’t know about kings and queens. Even back in many an age, learning was for something. I learn the black arts to use for and against. You learn from the palace of wisdom, so that you rest in a better place than your father. You learn a weapon to protect yourself. You learn a map so that you is master of the journey. In everything, learning is to take from where you be to where you like to go. But a king already there. That be why the King and the Queen can be the most ignorant in the kingdom. And this King mind as blank as sky until somebody told him that some griots sing songs older than when he was a boy. Can you think it? He never believe that any man would put to memory anything that happen before he born, for that is how kings raise their boys.

“But this King didn’t know there was griots who sing songs of King before him. Who they be. What they do. Everything from the wicked work of Kwash Moki. The King didn’t even hear a song. The man at him side say, Most Excellent Majesty, there is a song that can rise against you. Then they round up nearly every man of song with verse from before Kwash Moki’s time and kill them. And who they couldn’t find to kill, they kill wife and son and daughter. Kill them and burn down they house and order all to forget that any song sing that way. Kill everyone in this man family, they do. He escape but even now he wondering why they didn’t kill him. They could have silence him without killing nine people to do it. But such is the way with these kings of North. I speak to him when he wake, that I know.”

Sobs woke me up before sun. First I thought it was wind, or something hanging on from a dream, but there he was across from the bed I slept in, the Ogo crouched in a corner by the south window, crying.

“Sadogo, what is—”

“It is like he thought if he walk on it he could ride it. That is how he looked. Could he ride it? Why didn’t he ride it?”

“Ride what, dear Ogo? And who?”

“The griot. Why didn’t he ride it?”

“Ride what?”

“The wind.”

I ran to my north window, looked out for a blink, then ran to the south window, which Sadogo crouched beside. I saw Sogolon and went down. She wore white this morning, not the brown leather dress she was always in. The griot was at her feet, limbs twisted like a burned spider’s, broken in too many places, dead. Her back was to me, and her robes flapped.

“Everybody still sleep?” she said.

“Except the Ogo.”

“He said he just walk past him and off the roof like he go down the road.”