more men came to see, and bet. And since the well was small and could never hold all, they placed more wood beams across the top so more men could see, and the master charged three times, four times, five times, then battle by battle even if they paid before, for the chance to see and bet on the sorrowful Ogo.
“Look upon him, look how his face never changes,” they would say.
He faced them all, he killed them all, and soon the lands were running out of Ogos. But the girl in the bucket who collected the bets, she was a slave with eyes sad as his. She brought food though many Ogos tried to rape her. One grabbed her one night and said, Watch how it grows, and pushed her down, and as he climbed on top, Sadogo’s hand grabbed his ankle, yanked him out of his cell, swung him like a club, and slammed him into the ground over and over and over until there was no sound from this Ogo. Through all this the girl said nothing, but the master said, “Curse you to the gods, sad one, surely that giant was worth more than that foolish little girl.”
Sadogo turned to him. “Do not call us giants,” he said.
The girl would come and sit by his cell. She sang verse but not to him. That last one is from lands north, then east, she said.
“We should go there,” she said.
No man is bound to me and I am bound to no man,” the master said when Sadogo said he would soon leave. “Killing has made you rich. But where shall you go? Where is there home for the Ogo? And if there is a home, good Ogo, do you not think someone here would have left for it?”
That evening she came to him and said, I have spoken my fill of verses. Give me new words. He walked to the bars that were not locked and said:
Bring words to voice and
Meat to this verse
Coal and ash
Flicker a flame
Brilliant
She stared at him through the bars.
“What I tell you is a true word, Ogo, you have an awful voice, and that is terrible verse. The griots do get their gifts from the gods.” Then she laughed. “Give me this word. What they call you?”
“I am called nothing.”
“What does your father call you?”
“A curse from the demons who fucked my whore of a wife and killed her.”
She laughed again.
“I laugh, but it makes me very sad,” she said. “I come here because you are not like the rest.”
“I am worse. Three times as many I have killed, compared to the bravest fighter.”
“Yes, but you are the only one who does not look at me like I am next.”
He walked right up to the bar and pushed at it, opened it a little. She shifted a little, tried not to look as if she jumped.
“Truly, I will kill anything. Cut past my skin to find my heart and it will be white. White like nothingness.”
She looked at him. He was almost three times her height.
“If you were for true heartless, you would not have known it. Lala is my name.”
When he told the master that he wished to leave, he did not tell him that he wanted to go north, then east, for whoever speaks such verses that the girl recites will not care that he towers over the biggest of men. He did not ask to buy Lala, but he did plan to take her. But the master learned that this new thinking was the doing of his bet collector. For sure they are not lovers, for not even the hugest of women can take an Ogo, and she is small as a child and frail as a stick. This Ogo was growing close to her head and speaking like her.
The next morning Sadogo woke up to see the blue Ogo, in the middle of the courtyard, pull himself out of her body, leaving her smashed, ripped, and wrecked in a full moon of her own blood. Sadogo did not run to her, he did not cry, he did not leave his cell, he did not speak of it to the master.
“I will pit you against him finally so you can avenge her,” he said.
Later that night, another slave girl came to his cell and said, Look at me, I am now the wagers maid. They will lower me in the bucket.
“Tell the old men it would be foolish to