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