Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Flame sparked at the top of the wall and split to both edges, came down the sides, joining at the bottom and burning a rectangle that disappeared to reveal a room. A room as large the one we were in, with five lamps hanging on the walls. On the floor, four mats. On the mats four bodies, one with no arms or legs, one cut open from neck to penis, his ribs poking out, one full in body but not moving, and another, his eyes open, his hands and legs bound by rope, and a cross mark across his chest in kaolin clay. The boy had pissed on his belly and chest.

“Them sick. You try find a medicine woman in the Malangika, you try.”

“You are harvesting them.”

“Not true! I—”

“Merchant, you bawl to the gods, scream and wail like a priestess secretly fingering herself, and yet there is a broken Ifa bowl on your door. Not only are the gods gone, you wish they never come back.”

“That is madness! Ma—”

My ax chopped his neck, blood splashed the wall, and his head fell and swung from a strip of skin. He fell onto his back.

“You have killed children,” the voice that knew me said.

“Begging does not stop killing if one has decided to kill,” I said.

Nothing walked this road of blind jackals but the fear to walk it. Two spirits did come to me screaming, looking for their bodies, but nothing struck fear in me anymore. Nothing was struck in me, not even sadness. Not even indifference. The two spirits both ran through me and shivered. They looked at me, screamed, and vanished. They were right to scream. I would kill the dead.

The entrance was so small that I crawled inside until I was again in a wide space, as high as before, but all around was dust, and bricks, cracked walls, broken wood, rotting flesh, old blood, and dried shit. Carved out of this was a seat like a throne. And there he was, sprawled on it, looking at the two rays of light that hit his legs and his face. The white wings, black at the tips, spread out and hanging lazy, his eyes barely open. A little bolt jumped off his chest and vanished. The Ipundulu, the lightning bird, looking as if he could not bother with this business of being Ipundulu. I stepped into something brittle that broke at my feet. Shed skin.

“Greetings, Nyka,” I said.

TWENTY-FOUR

You are the last of your kind, Nyka. One the Ipundulu chose to change rather than kill. Such honor he saves for those he enslaves and those he has fucked, so which are you?”

“Ipundulu can only be a man, no woman can be Ipundulu.”

“And only a body possessed by his lightning blood can be Ipundulu.”

“I told you. Ipundulu can only be a man. No woman can be Ipundulu.”

“That is not the part I asked you.”

“The last man he bit but did not kill, that man becomes the next Ipundulu, unless crossed by a mother witch, and he has no mother.”

“That part I know. Your dodge is neither skillful nor artful, Nyka.”

“He would rape and kill my woman. He had her by the neck, his claw already in her chest. I told him to take me instead. I told him to take me.”

He looked away.

“The Nyka I know would have fed him bits of his own woman himself,” I said.

“That Nyka you know. I don’t know this Nyka. And I do not know you.”

“I am—”

“Tracker. Yes, I know your name. Even witchmen and devils know it. They even whisper, Watch the Tracker. He has turned from red to black. Do you know what they mean? There is trouble all around you. I look at you and see a man darker than me.”

“All men are darker than you.”

“I see death as well.”

“What a deep thinker you have become, Nyka, now that you eat women’s hearts.”

He laughed, looking at me as if just seeing me. Then he laughed again, the cackle of the mad, or the cackle of one who had seen all the madness of the world.

“And yet I’m the one in this room with a heart,” he said.

His words did not upset me, but I thought right then of the me that it would have once struck. I asked him how he came to be this way, and this is what he told me.

That he and Nsaka Ne Vampi set off, not because of me, for he would have dealt with me, for such violent hate could exist only where there was still violent love beneath it. He and she set off, for he did not trust the fish woman and despised the Moon Witch, who was the one who made her sisters drive Nsaka Ne Vampi from the King sister guard.