“Whose baby?”
“What?”
“Who is the mother of the baby?”
She stared at me, frowning, thinking of something to say that would make a lie out of the sound of this baby waking up and hating the rough cloth he was wrapped in.
“Mine. Is mine. Is my own baby.”
“Not even a whore would take her child to the Malangika unless she goes to sell it. To a—”
“I not no whore.”
I let her go. She turned away from me as if to run, and I pulled one of the axes from my back.
“Try to run and this will split the back of your head before you reach fifty paces. Test me if you wish.”
She looked at me and rubbed her arm.
“I look for a man. A special man, special even in the Malangika,” I said.
“I don’t mess with no man.”
“And yet you just said this is your baby, so messed with a man, you did. He is hungry.”
“He not no concern for you.”
“But hungry he is. So feed him.”
She pulled the cloth from the baby’s head. I smelled baby vomit and dried piss. No shea butter, no oil, no silks, nothing that graces a baby’s precious buttocks. I nodded and pointed my ax at her breasts. She pulled her robe and the right breast slipped out, thin and lanky above the baby’s face. She shoved the breast into the baby’s mouth and it started sucking, pulling so hard she winced. The baby spat out her breast, and cried into a scream.
“You have no milk,” I said.
“He not hungry. What you know about raising a child?”
“I raised six,” I said. “How were you going to feed him?”
“If you didn’t interfere, we would reach home long time now.”
“Home? The nearest village is three days away on foot. Can you fly? The child would starve by then.”
She dug into her dress for the pouch, and tried to pull it open with both hands while still holding the child.
“Look here, dog-fucker or whatever you be. Take the coin and go buy yourself a girl so you can kill and eat her liver. Leave me be, me and my child.”
“Hark those words. I would say raise your child around better folks, but it is not your child.”
“Leave me be!” she shouted, and pulled the pouch open. “Here, see it here. Take it all.”
She held it out, but then dashed it. I swung my ax to knock it out of the way and it hit the wall and fell to the ground. Little vipers came out and grew big. She ran but I chased her, gained on her, grabbed her hair and she screamed. She dropped the baby. I pushed her hard, and picked up the child as she staggered to a fall. She shook her head and wobbled as I pulled the boy out of the nasty cloth. His body, dark as tea, she had marked with white clay. A line around the neck. A line at each joint in the arms and legs. A cross at his navel, and circles around his nipples and his knees.
“What a night you were planning for yourself. You are no witch, not yet, but this would have made you one, maybe even a powerful one, instead of someone’s apprentice.”
“Get you cock sting by a scorpion,” she said, sitting up.
“On the art of cutting up a child, you have no expertise, so he drew where to cut. The man who sold you the baby.”
“All coming out of your mouth is wind.”
The boy wiggled in my arms.
“Men in the Malangika, they sell wretched things, unspeakable things. Women do this too. But a baby, alive, untouched, is no easy thing to find. This is not bastard or foundling. Only the purest child could give you the most powerful magic, so you bought yourself the purest child. Stolen from a noblewoman. And no easy thing to buy, three days from the nearest city. So you must have given him something of great value. Not gold, or cowries. You gave him another life. And since merchants can only appreciate things of value, that life must have been valuable to you. A son? No, a daughter. Child brides go for even more than the newborn here.”
“A thousand fucks—”
“I have long passed a thousand fucks. Where is the master who sold you this baby?”
Still on the ground, she scowled at me, even as she rubbed her forehead with her right hand. I stepped on her left hand and she yelled.
“If I ask again, it will be after I chop this hand off.”
“You bastard son of a whoring North wolf bitch. Cut the hand off a defenseless woman.”
“You just defended yourself with a spell of vipers. Which of his feet was for the amulet, left or right?”
“What plenty you know about witch and witchmen. You must be the real witch.”
“Or maybe I kill witches. For money, yes. One can always use money. But really for sport. The merchant, where is he?”
“Fool, he shift whereabouts every night. No elephant remember the way there, no crow can find him.”
“But you bought the child this night.”
I stomped harder on her hand and she yelled again.
“The midnight street! Go to the end, and turn right past the dead tree, then down the three sets of steps, deep in the dark. So dark that you can’t see, only feel. He in the house of a witchman with the heart of an antelope rotting on the door.”
I stepped off her hand and she grabbed it, cursing me under her breath.
“No good going come to you. Before you meet him, you going meet two.”
“What charity, giving me warning.”
“Warning not going save you. Me telling you not going mean a thing.”
I rubbed the baby’s belly. He was hungry. One of these merchants—sellers, witchmen, or witches—must have had some goat’s milk. I would kick down the next door, ask for goat’s or cow’s milk, and chop off hands until a hand brought me some.
“Say, hunter,” she said. Still on the ground, the witch started hiking up her skirt.
“What use the baby be to you? What use he be to the mother? You never going find them, and them never going find you. Put the baby to use. Think, good hunter, what I can give you when I come into my power. You want coin? You want the finest merchants to just look at you and give you fine silks and their plumpest daughter? I can do that. Give me the little baby. He so sweet. I can smell the good he going to do. I can smell it.”
She stood up and held out her hands for the child.
“Here is what I shall give you. I will give you a count to ten before I throw this ax and split the back of your head open like a nut.”
The young witch cursed and screwed her face, like the man whose opium you took away. She turned to go, then spun back and shouted for her baby.
“One,” I said.
“Two.”
She ran off.
“Three.”
I flung my ax, sending it spinning after her. She ran past four doors before she heard the whir coming. The witch turned around and it struck her in the face. She landed flat on her back. I went over and pulled the ax out of her head.
I passed two lanes and went down a third that carried fragrance. The fragrance was not real and neither was the lane. A street for the wicked but foolish, a street to lure people through doors from which they would never return. So I knocked on the third door I passed, the one the fragrance came from. An old woman opened the door, and I said, I smell milk here and I will have it. She pulled out a breast, squeezed it hard, and said, Any milk you get drink it, ash boy. Ten paces down, a fat man in a white agbada opened his door to my ax. Milk, I said. Inside was not inside and his house had no roof. Goats and sheep ran around bleating, eating, and shitting and I did not ask what he used them for. I placed the child on a table.
“I will be back for the child,” I said.
“Which voice in this house say you can leave him?”
“Feed him milk of the goat.”
“You leave a boy child with me? Many a witch come and many a witch go looking for baby skin. What to stop me from fatting up me purse?”
The fat man reached for the child. I chopped his hand off. He screamed and cussed and wailed and bawled in a tongue I didn’t know. I took the hand.
“I will return your hand in three flips of the time glass. If the child is gone I will use your own hand to find you and cut you to pieces, one piece a day.”