Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“We will have manners, boy bitch. I have not yet decided if I should let you pass this door.”

“Good thing I won’t bother to wait,” I said, and walked past him.

“Your nose leads you to my house this morning, what a thing. Just another way you were always more like a dog than a man. Don’t sit your smelly self on my good rugs and rub your stinking skin on it and—milk a god’s nipple and what evil is that in your eye?”

“You talk too much, Belekun the Big.”

Belekun the Big was indeed large, with a massive waist and flabby thighs, but very thin calves. This too was known of him: Violence, the hint of it, the talk of it, even the slightest flash of rancor made him flush. He almost refused to pay me when I came back without a living girl, but did so when I grabbed those little balls through his robes and pressed my blade against them until he promised me triple. This made him a master of double-talk; my guess was it made him think himself not responsible for whatever nasty business he paid people to do. The King, it has been said, has no eye for riches, something the elders more than made up for. In Belekun’s welcome room he kept three chairs with backs that looked like thrones, cushions of every pattern and stripe, and rugs in all the colours of the rain serpent, with green walls covered in patterns and marks and columns that went all the way to the ceiling. Belekun dressed himself like his walls, in a dark green and shiny agbada outer robe with a white pattern on the chest that looked like a lion. He wore nothing underneath, for I smelled his ass sweat on the seat of his robes. He wore beaded sandals on his feet. Belekun threw himself down on some cushions and rugs, waking up a pink dust. He still did not invite me to sit. Laid out on a plate beside him were goat cheese and miracle berry, and a brass goblet.

“You truly are a hound now.”

He chuckled, then laughed, then laughed into a brutal cough.

“Have you had miracle berry before lime wine? It makes the whole thing so sweet, it is as if a flower virgin spurted in your mouth,” Belekun said.

“Tell me about your brass goblet. Not from Malakal?”

He licked his lips. Belekun the Big was a performer, and this show was for me.

“Of course not, little Tracker. Malakal went from stone to iron. No time for the fineries of brass. The chairs are from lands above the sand sea. And those drapes, only precious silks bought from eastern light traders. I am not confessing to you, but they cost me as much as two beautiful slave boys,” he said.

“Your beautiful boys who didn’t know they were slaves before you sold them.”

He frowned. Somebody once warned me about loving to grab fruit low to the ground. He wiped his hand on the robe. Shiny, but not silk, for were it silk he would have told me.

“I seek news of one of you, Basu Fumanguru,” I said.

“News of the elders be only for the gods. What be they to you that you should know? Fumanguru is—”

“Fumanguru is

? I heard he was.”

“News of the elders be only for the gods.”

“Well you need to tell the gods he is dead, for news on the drum did not reach the sky. You, though, Belekun …”

“Who seeks to know of Fumanguru? Not you, I remember you as just a carrier.”

“I think you remember more than that, Belekun the Big,” I said, and brushed my bulge on the way to grabbing my bracelet.

“Who is it that will know of Fumanguru?”

“Relations near the city. It seems he has some. They will hear what became of him.”

“Oh? Family? Farmer folk?”

“Yes, they are folk.”

He looked up at me, his left eyebrow raised too high, goat cheese lodged in the corner of his mouth.

“Where is this family?”

“They are where they should be. Where they have always been.”

“Which is?”

“Surely you know, Belekun.”

“Farming lands are to the west, not Uwomowomowomowo, for there are too many bandits. Do they farm the slopes?”

“What is their livelihood to you, elder?”

“I only ask so that we may send them tribute.”

“So he is dead.”

“I never said he was alive. I said he is. We are all is, in the plan of the gods, Tracker. Death is neither end nor beginning, nor is it even the first death. I forget which gods you believe in.”

“Because I don’t believe in any, elder. But I will send them your very best wishes. Meanwhile they wish for answers. Buried? Burned? Where is he and his family?”

“With the ancestors. We should all share their good fate. That is not what you wish to know. But yes, all of them, dead. Yes they are.”

He bit into some more cheese and some miracle fruit.

“This cheese and miracle fruit, Tracker, it is like sucking a goat’s teat and sweet spices come out.”

“All of them are dead? How did this happen, and why do people not know?”