Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Dark Star Trilogy)

THREE

Here are the things I have seen.

Three days and four nights in Kava’s house. My uncle made no fuss. He was the man of this house in sun and in moon, and thought I looked at his wives with the same open mouth and loose tongue they looked at me. Truth, my uncle’s house was large enough that we could go a quartermoon and never meet. But I could smell out what he hid from his women—expensive rugs from the city under the cheap ones, precious skins from great cats under cheap skins of zebra, gold coins and fetishes in pouches that stunk of the animal whose skin it was cut from. His greed made him squeeze in on himself to hide everything, which made him smaller even with his big belly.

But Kava’s hut.

He had cloths and skins on the ground that were garments when I pulled them up. Black dust in a gourd for shining walls fresh. Jars of water, jars for churning butter, a gourd and a knife for drawing cow blood. This was a home still run by a mother. I never asked if his parents were buried right under him, or maybe his father left him with his mother so he learned woman’s work, since he never went to hunt.

I did not want to go back to my uncle, and I would not talk to voices in trees, who never gave me anything but now demanded something. So I stayed at Kava’s hut.

“How do you live alone?”

“Boy, ask what you want to ask.”

“Fuck the gods, then tell me what I want to know.”

“You want to know how I live so good without mother and father. Why the gods smile on my hut?”

“No.”

“The same breath carrying news of your father tell you he is dead. I cannot—”

“Then don’t,” I said.

“And your grandfather is a father of lies.”

“So.”

“Like any other father,” he said, and laughed. He said this also: “These elders, they say it and sing with foul mouths that a man is nothing but his blood. Elders are stupid and their beliefs are old. Try a new belief. I try a new one every day.”

“What do you mean?”

“Stay with family and blood will betray you. No Gangatom looking for me. But I envy you.”

“Fuck the gods, what is there to envy?”

“To know family only after they are gone is better than to watch them go.”

He turned in to the dark corner of his hut.

“How did you know the ways of woman and man?” I asked.

He laughed.

“Watching the new men and women in the bush. Luala Luala, the people above the Gangatom, have man who live with man like a wife, and woman who live with woman like a husband, and man and woman with no man or woman, who live as they choose, and in all these things there is no strangeness,” he said.

How did he know since he was not yet a man, I did not ask. In the mornings we went to river rocks and painted what sweat washed away in the night. In the night I knew him as he knew me, when he wanted to sleep, his belly touching my back when he breathed. Or face beside face, his hand between my legs scooping my balls. We would wrestle and tumble and grab and jerk each other until lightning struck inside both of us.

You are a man who knows pleasures, inquisitor, though you look selfish with yours. Do you know how it feels, not in the body but in the heart, when you have made a man strike lightning? Or a woman, since I have done so with many. A girl whose inner boy in the fold of her flesh was not cut out is blessed twice by the god of pleasure and plenty.

Here is my belief. The first man was jealous of the first woman. Her lightning was too powerful, her screams and moans loud enough to wake up the dead. That man could never accept that the gods would gift the weaker woman with such riches, so before every girl becomes a woman, man sets up to steal it, cut it away, and throw it in the bush. But the gods put it there, hid it deep so that no man would have business going to find it. Man will pay for this.

I have seen more than these things.

The day was out, but the sun was hiding. Kava said we go into the bush and shall not be back for more than a moon. I thought good, for everything in me was growing sick from the thought of family. Of anything Ku. I thought if I stayed here much longer I would turn myself into a Gangatom, and start killing until there was a hole in the village as big as the hole I see when I close my eyes. A dead thing never lies, cheats, or betrays, and what was a family but a place where all three bloom like moss. “As long as it takes for my uncle to miss me, then,” I said.

I hoped it was a hunt. I wanted to kill. But I was still afraid of the viper, and Kava stepped through bowing trees and kneeling plants and dancing flowers as if he knew where to go. Twice I was lost, twice his white hand pushed through thick leaves and grabbed me.

“Keep walking and shed your burden,” Kava said.

“What?”

“Your burden. Let nothing stop you and you will shed it like snakeskin.”

“The day I heard I have a brother is the day I lost a brother. The day I learned I had a father is the day I lost a father. The day I heard I had a grandfather was the day I heard he was a coward who fucks my mother. And I hear nothing of her. How do I shed such skin?”

“Keep walking,” he said.

We walked through bush, and swamp, and forest, and a huge salt plain with hot cracked white dirt until daylight ran away from us. Every moment in the bush jolted me and I fell asleep and jumped awake all night. The next day, after some long walking, and me complaining about long walking, I heard footsteps above me in the trees and looked up. Kava said he had followed us since we turned south. I did not know we were heading south. Up above us in the tree was a black leopard. We walked and he walked. We stopped and he stopped. I clutched my spear but Kava looked up and whistled. The Leopard jumped down in front of us, stared hard and long, growled, then ran off. I said nothing, for what could be said to someone who had just spoken to a Leopard? We went farther south. The sun moved to the center of the gray sky but the jungle was thick with leaves and bush, and cold. And birds with their wakakakaka and kawkawkawkaw. We came upon a river, gray like sky and moving slow. New plants popped out of a fallen tree that bridged one side of the river to the other. Halfway across there rose out of the water two ears, eyes, nostrils, and one head as wide as a boat. The hippopotamus followed us with her eyes. Her jaws swung open wide, her head split in two, and she roared. Kava turned around and hissed at her. She sunk back under the river. Sometimes we caught up to the Leopard, and he would run off farther into the forest. He waited for us whenever we fell too far back. Though the bush got colder, I sweated more.

“We climb,” I said.

“We climb from before the sun gone west,” he said. We are on a mountain.

You only need to be told down is up for down to change. I was not walking south, I was walking up. The mist came down on the ground and floated through the air. Twice I thought it was spirits. Water dripped from leaves and the ground felt damp.

“We are not far,” he said, right before I asked.

I thought we were searching for a clearing, but we went deeper in the bush. Branches swung around and hit me in the face, vines wrapped around my legs to pull me down, trees bent over to look at me and each line in their barks was a frown. And Kava started talking to leaves. And cursing. The moonlight boy had gone mad. But he was not talking to leaves but to people hiding underneath them. A man and a woman, skin like Kava’s ash, hair like silver earth, but no taller than your elbow to your middle finger. Yumboes, of course. Good fairies of the leaves, but I did not know then. They were walking on branches until Kava grabbed a branch and they climbed his arms up to his shoulders. Both of them had hair on their backs, and eyes that glowed. The male sat on Kava’s right shoulder, the female on the left. The man reached into a sack and pulled out a pipe. I stayed behind until my jaw came back up to my mouth, watching tall Kava, two halflings, one leaving a thick trail of pipe smoke.

“A boy?”

“Yes,” said the man.

“Is he hungry?”

“We feed him berries, and hog milk. A little blood,” said the woman. They both sounded like children.

For a long time walking all I saw was Kava’s back. I smelled the baby’s dried vomit before he got to him, sitting up on a dead anthill, flower in his mouth, his lips and cheek red. Kava kneeled before the baby, and the little man and woman jumped off his shoulder. Kava took up the baby in his arms and asked for water. Water, he said again, and looked at me. I remembered that I was carrying his waterskins. He poured some in his palm and fed the child. The little man and woman both carried over a gourd with a little hog’s milk left. I was over Kava’s shoulder when the baby smiled, two top teeth like a mouse’s, gums everywhere else.

“Mingi,” he said.

“What does that mean?”

He started walking, with the baby, not answering me. Then he stopped.

“The gods had no watchful eye on him,” the little man said. “We could not …” He did not finish.

I didn’t see until we passed the sweet stink of it. Two little feet peeking out of the bush, the bottoms of the feet blue. Flies raising nasty music. The last meal threatened to come up through my mouth. The sweet stink followed us even when we had gone very far. A bad smell, like a good one, can follow you into tomorrow. Then it rained a little and the trees sent the smell of fruit down to us. Kava hid the baby’s face with his hand. He spoke before I asked.

“Do you not see his mouth?”

“His mouth is a baby’s mouth, like every other baby’s mouth.”

“Too old to be such a fool,” Kava said.

“You don’t know my age and neither—”

“Quiet. The boy is mingi, also the dead girl. In his mouth, you saw two teeth. But they were on the top, not bottom; that is why he is mingi. A child whose top teeth come before bottom teeth is a curse and must be destroyed. Or else that curse spreads to the mother, the father, the family and brings drought, famine, and plague to the village. Our elders declared it so.”

“The other one. Were his teeth also—”

“There are many mingi.”

“This is the talk of old women. Not the talk of cities.”

“What is a city?”

“What are the other mingi?”

“We walk now. We walk more.”

“Where?”

The Leopard jumped out of the bush and the little people ran behind Kava. He growled, looked behind him, and roared. I thought he wanted Kava to hand him the baby.

The Leopard crouched down on the ground, then rolled on his back, and stretched and shook like he had a sickness. He growled again like a dog hit with a stone. His front legs grew long but the back legs grew longer. His back widened and sucked up his tail. The fur vanished but he was still hairy. He rolled until we saw a man’s face, but eyes still yellow and clear like sand struck by lightning. Hair on his head black and wild, going down his temple and his cheek. Kava looked at him as if in the world one always sees these things.

“This is what happens when we move too late,” the black Leopard said.

“The baby would still be dead, even if we had run,” Kava said.

“I mean late by days; we are two days late. This one’s death is on our hands.”

“All the more to save this one. Let us move. The green snakes have already caught his scent. The hyenas caught the scent of the other.”

“Snakes. Hyenas.” The black Leopard laughed. “I will bury that child. I am not following you until I do.”

“Bury her with what?” Kava asked.

“I will find something.”

“Then we wait,” Kava said.

“Do not wait sake of me.”

“I do not wait because of you.”

“Five days, Asani.”

“I come when I come, cat.”

“I waited five days.”

“You should have waited longer.”

The black Leopard growled so loud I thought he would change back.

“Go bury the girl,” Kava said.

The black Leopard looked at me. I think that was the first time he noticed I was here. He sniffed, turned his head away, and went back into the bush.

Kava answered a question before I asked it.

“He is just like any other in the bush. The gods made him, but they forget who the gods made first.”

But that was not one of the questions I wanted to ask.

“How did you come upon each other?”

Kava still watched where the Leopard left in the bush.

“Before the Zareba. I had to prove that the boy with no mother is worthy of becoming a man, or die the boy. He must go out past the bush, slip past Gangatom warriors in open fields. He must not come back without the skin of a great cat. Listen to what come to pass. I was in the yellow bush. I heard a branch crack and a baby cry and I saw that Leopard holding a baby at the neck. With his teeth he’s holding him. I draw my spear and he growls and drop the baby. I am thinking I will save this baby, but the baby start bawling and will not quiet until the Leopard pick him up again with his teeth. I throw my spear, I miss, he is on me and even as I blink I see a man about to punch me. He says, You are just a boy. You will carry the baby. So I carried him. He found me the skin of a dead lion and I took it back to the chief.”

“The beast just says carry this mingi child and you carry him?” I asked.

“What was mingi? I didn’t know until we came to she,” Kava said.

“That is not … Who is she?”

“She is who we come to meet.”

“And since then you sneak off near the end of every moon and bring mingi children to this she? Your answer leaves more questions.”

“Then ask what you want to know.”

I was quiet.

We waited until the Leopard came back, in the shape of a man with the frown gone from his face. Now he walked behind us, sometimes so far back that I thought he went off on his own, sometimes so close I could feel him sniff me. On him I smelled the leaves he ran through and the fresh wet of dew, the dead scent of the girl and the fresh musk of the grave dirt under his fingernails. The sun was almost ready to go.

Kava is like most men; he carries two smells. One when the sweat runs down his back and dries, the sweat of hard work. And one that hides under the arms, between the legs, between the buttocks, what you smell when close enough to touch with lips. The black Leopard had only the second smell. Never had I seen it before, a man whose hair was black cotton. On his back and legs when he passed me to take the baby from Kava. His chest, two little mountains, his buttocks big, legs thick. He looked as if he would crush the child in his arms, but licked dust off the baby’s forehead. Only birds spoke. There we were, a man white like the moon, a Leopard who stood as a man, a man and a woman tall as a shrub, and a baby bigger than them both. Darkness was spreading herself. The little woman hopped from Kava to the Leopard, and sat on his arm, laughing with the baby.

A voice inside me said they were some sort of blood kin and I was the stranger. Kava told no one who I was.

We came up to a small, wild stream. Large rocks and stones marked the banks, green moss covering them like a rug. The stream cackled and sprayed mist up into the branches, ferns and bamboo stalks hanging over. The Leopard placed the baby on a rock, crouched right by the banks, and lapped the water. Kava filled his waterskins. The little man played with the baby. I was surprised he was awake. I stood by the Leopard but he still took no notice. Kava stood farther down, looking for fish.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I told you.”

“This is not the mountain. We went around, then down several paces ago.”

“We will get there in two more days.”

“Where?”

He crouched down, cupped some water, and drank it.

“I want to go back,” I said.

“There is no going back,” he said.

“I want to go back.”

“Then go.”

“Who is the Leopard to you?”

Kava looked at me and laughed. A laugh that said, I am not even a man yet, but you give me man problems. Maybe the woman in me was rising. Maybe I should have grabbed my own cock skin and smashed it off with a rock. This is what I should have said. I did not like the man-Leopard. I did not know him to dislike him, but disliked him anyway. He smelled like the crack of an old man’s ass. This is what I would have said. Do you talk without speaking? Do you know each other as brothers? Do you sleep with your hand between his legs? Shall I stay awake till the moon is fat and even the night beasts sleep to see if he comes to you—or will you go to the Leopard and lie on top of him, or him on top of you, or maybe he is like one of those my father liked in the city, who put men in their mouths?

The baby, sitting up, laughed at the little man and woman making faces and jumping up and down like monkeys.

“Name him.”

I turned around. The Leopard.

“He needs a name,” he said.

“I don’t even know yours.”

“I don’t need one. What did your father name you?”

“I don’t know my father.”

“Even I know my father. He fought a crocodile, and a snake and a hyena only to drive himself mad with man envy. But he chased after the antelope faster than a cheetah. Have you done that? Bit deep with your sharpest teeth so that the warm blood bursts into your mouth and the flesh is still throbbing with life?”

“No.”

“You are like Asani then.”

“My uncle calls him Kava, and all in the village.”

“You burn food, then eat it. You eat ash.”

“Will you leave tonight?”

“I shall leave when I feel to. We sleep here tonight. In the morning we take the baby across new lands. I will find food, though it will not be much since all the beasts heard our approach.”

I knew I was going to stay awake that night. I saw Kava and the Leopard walk off, the flames rising and blocking my view. I told myself that I was going to stay awake and watch them. And I did. I moved so close to the flame that it nearly singed my brow. I went to the river, now cold enough to shake bone, and threw water on my face. I stared through the dark, followed the white spots of Kava’s skin. I curled my fingers into a fist so hard that my nails dug into the palm. Whatever those two would do, I was going to see and I was going to shout, or hiss, or curse. So when the Leopard stirred me awake, I jumped, shocked that I had fallen asleep. Kava threw water on the fire, just as I rose.

“We go,” the Leopard said.

“Why?”

“We go,” he said, and turned away from me.

He changed to a cat. Kava wrapped the baby in cloth and slung him on the Leopard’s back. He did not wait. I rubbed my eyes and opened them again. The little man and woman were back on Kava’s shoulder.

“One owl talk to me,” the little woman said. “A day behind in the bush. Them say you read wind? No so? He say you have a nose.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Somebody, they following us,” she said.

“Who?”

“Asani, he saying you have a nose.”

“Who?”

“Asani.”

“No, who is following us?”

“They moving by night, not by day,” Kava said.

“He said I have a nose?”

“He saying you were a tracker.”

Kava was already walking away when he said, We go. Farther off into the darkness, Leopard jumped from tree to tree with a baby strapped on his back. Kava called me over.

“We need to move,” he said.

All around was dark, night blue, green, and gray; even the sky had few stars. But then the bush began to make sense. Trees were hands pushing out of the earth and spreading crooked fingers. The curling snake was a path. The fluttering night wings belonged to owls, not devils.

“Follow the Leopard,” Kava said.

“I don’t know where he went,” I said.

“Yes, you do.”

He rubbed his right hand across my nose. The Leopard came to life right in my face. I could see him and his trail, ripe as his skin through the bush. I pointed.

Leopard had gone right, then down fifty paces, crossed the stream by jumping from one tree to the next, then went south. Stopped to piss at four trees to confuse whoever was following us. I knew I had the nose, as Kava said, but I never knew that it could follow. Even as the Leopard got far he was still right under my nose. And Kava, and his smells and the little woman, and the rose she rubbed in her folds, and the man, and the nectar he drank, and the bugs he ate, too much of the bitter when he needed the sweet, and the waterskins, and the water inside that still smelled of buffalo, and the stream. And more, and more than that, and even more, enough to drive me to some kind of madness.

“Breathe everything out,” Kava said.

“Breathe everything out.

“Breathe everything out.”

I exhaled long and slow.

“Now breathe in the Leopard.”

He touched my chest and rubbed around the heart. I wished I could see his eyes in the dark.

“Breathe in the Leopard.”

And then I saw him again with my nose. I knew where he was going. And whoever spooked the Leopard was beginning to spook me. I pointed right.

“We go this way,” I said.

We ran all night. Beyond the stream and the branches bent over it, we ran through trees with grand roots, roots that rose above the ground and snaked the lands in tangles and curls. Right before dawn I mistook one for a sleeping python. Trees taller than fifty men standing on shoulders, and as soon as the sky changed, the leaves turned into birds that flew away. We came up the grasslands, with shrubs and weeds that reached above our knees, but no trees. We came upon salt lands in a low valley with white dirt that blinded us with light and crunched under our feet, with no animals as far as one could see, which meant those following us could see us. I said nothing. The grasslands stretched from last of the night to first of the day, where everything was gray. That Leopard scent in front like a line, or a road. Twice we came close to see him, running on all fours with the baby tied to his back. Once, three Leopards ran alongside him, and left us alone. We passed elephants and lions and scared a few zebras. We passed through a thicket of trees with few leaves, like the bones of trees, and their whispers were louder. And still we ran.

Morning peeked as if about to change her mind. The fourth day since Kava and I set out. The little woman said whoever was following slept by day and hunted at night. So we walked. Past a forest of killed trees the air went wet again, thick as it went down the nose into the chest. The trees had leaves again and the leaves were getting darker, bigger. We came upon a field of trees larger than anything I had ever seen in the world. I would have run out of men to count. They weren’t even trees, but the crooked fingers of buried giants sticking out of the ground and covered in grass, branches, and green moss. Giant stalks bursting out of the ground and reaching into the sky, giant stalks curling into the ground like an open fist. I walked past one and beside it I was a mouse. The ground was mounds and little hills; nowhere was level. Everywhere looked as if another giant finger was going to push through the ground, followed by a hand and an arm and a green man taller than five hundred houses. Green and green-brown and dark green, and a green that was blue, and a green that was yellow. A forest of them.

“The trees have gone mad,” I said.

“We come close,” Kava said.

Mist split the light into blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and a colour I did not know was purple. One hundred or 101 paces down, the trees all bent in one direction, almost braiding together. Trunks growing north and south, east-west, shot up, reached down, twisting into and out of each other, then down on the ground again, like a wild cage to hold something in or keep something out. Kava jumped on one of the trunks, bent so low that it was almost flat with the ground. The branch was as wide as a path, and the dew on the moss made it slippery. We walked all the way on one trunk and jumped down to another bending below it, moving up again, and jumping from trunk to trunk, going up high, then down low, then around so many times that only on the third time did I notice we were upside down but did not fall.

“So these are enchanted woods,” I said.

“These are hot-tempered woods, if you don’t shut up,” he said.

We passed three owls standing on a branch, who nodded at the little woman. My legs burned when we finally broke into sky. The clouds were thin as cold breath and the sun, yellow and hungry. In front of us, it floated on the mist. Truth, it stood on branches but the walls were set against the trunk, and had the same flowers, and moss. A house set in the tree with colours of the mountain. I couldn’t tell if they built the tree around the branches or if the branches grew in to protect it. Truth, there were three houses, all wood and clay with thatch roofs. The first was small as a hut, no bigger than a man six heads tall. Children were running around it, and crawling into the little hole in the front. Steps curled around the house and led to the one above it. Not steps. Branches set straight, and forming steps as if the trees played their part.

“These are enchanted woods,” I said.

The branch steps led to a second house, larger with a huge opening instead of a door, and a thatch roof. Steps came out of the roof and led to a smaller house with no openings, no doors. In and out of the second house came children, laughing, yelling, crying, screaming, oohing and aahing. Naked and dirty, covered in clay, or wrapped in robes too big for them. At the opening of the second house the Leopard looked out. A naked little boy grabbed his tail and he swung around and snarled, then licked the boy’s head. More children ran out to greet Kava. They attacked him all at once, grabbing a leg or an arm, one even climbed up his slippery back. He laughed and stooped to the floor so they could run all over him. A baby crawled over his face, smearing the white clay. I think that was the first time I saw his face.

“A place like this was where the North King kept wives who couldn’t breed boys. Every child here is mingi,” he said.

“And so would you be if your mother believed in the old ways,” she said before I saw her. Her voice loud and coarse, as if in her throat was sand. A few children ran off with the Leopard. I saw her robes next, robes like I haven’t seen since the city, yellow and with a pattern of green snakes and flowing, so the snakes looked alive. She came down the steps and into the room, which really was a hall, an open space with a wall to the front and back, and the sides open to the branches, leaves, and sky mist. The robes reached right under her plump breasts and an infant boy was sucking the left one. The red-and-yellow head wrap made her head look to burst in flames. She looked older, but when she came in closer I saw a look I would see more than once, of a woman not aged but ravaged. The boy was sucking hard with its eyes closed. She grabbed my chin and looked at my face, tilted her head and peered into my eyes. I tried to hold her stare, but looked away. She laughed and let go, but still stared at me. Beads upon beads, a valley of necklaces right down to her nipples. A ring hanging from a pierced bottom lip. A double pattern of dot scars from her left cheek curling up to her brow and down the right. I knew the mark.

“You are Gangatom,” I said.

“And you don’t know who you are,” she said. She looked down at my feet all the way up to my head, which was getting wild but not as wild as the Leopard’s. She looked at me as if I was answering questions without opening my mouth.

“But what can you know, running around with these two boys?”

She smiled. Both were still playing with children. A baby was on the Leopard’s back and Kava was making noises and crossing his eyes for a girl whiter than river clay.

“You have never seen the like,” she said.

“An albino? Never.”

“But you know the name. City learning,” she huffed out.

“I carry some stink from the city?”

“Yours is the place where a child born with no colour is a curse from the gods. Disease comes to the family, and barrenness comes to the women. Better toss her out for the hyena, and pray for another child.”

“I’m from no place. Crocodiles on the hunt have more noble hearts than you people of the bush.”

“And where do noble hearts live, boy, in the city?”

“Boy is what my father calls me.”

“Mother of gods, we have a man among us.”

“Nobody delivers a child to the hyena or the vulture. You call the collector of children.”

“And what your collector do with them in your precious city? How they make use of a girl like her?” she said, and pointed at the girl, who giggled. “First they send messages with birds in the sky and drums on the ground, maybe even with note on leaf or on paper to those who would read. Saying look we have caught an albino child. Who these people? Talk to me, little boy. Do you know which people?”

I nodded.

“Sorcerers, and merchants that sell to sorcerers. For the whole child, your collector can fetch a good price. But for real fortune he auctions each part to highest bidder. The head for the swamp witch. The right leg for the barren woman. The bones grounded to a grain, so that your grandfather’s cock will stay hard for several women. The fingers for amulets, the hair for whatever a witchman tells you. A good collector of babies can make fifty more for her parts than she would by just selling the whole child. And double for the albino. Your collector even cuts the baby into pieces himself. The witches pay more if they know the baby was still alive for part of it. Fear blood sauces their brews. So that the noblewomen of your city can keep your noblemen, and so that your concubines never bear children for their masters. That is what they do with little girls like her in the city where you come from.”

“How do you know I come from the city?”

“Your smell. Living with Ku won’t mask it.”

She did not laugh, though I thought she would. That city was not mine to defend. Those streets and those halls brought nothing but disgust in me. But I did not like her speaking as if she had been waiting for years for a man she could laugh at. It was growing tiresome, men and women looking at me once and thinking they knew my kind, and of my kind there was not much to know.

“Why did Kava bring me here?”

“You think I tell him to bring you?”

“Games are for boys.”

“Then leave, little boy.”

“Except you told him to bring me here. What do you want, witch?”

“You call me witch?”

“Witch, crone, scar-speckled Gangatom bitch, pick the one you like.”

She smiled quick to hide the scowl, but I saw it.

“You care for nothing.”

“And a crone with a boy sucking a tit with no milk will not change that.”

The smile on her face vanished. Her frown made me bolder; I folded my arms. Like, I like. Dislike, I love. Disgust, I can feel. Loathing, I can grab in the palm of my hand and squeeze. And hatred, I can live in hatred for days. But the smug smile of indifference on someone’s face makes me want to hack it off. Both Kava and the Leopard stopped playing and looked at us. I thought she was going to drop the baby, and perhaps slap me. But she kept him close, his eyes still shut, his lips still sucking her nipple. She smiled and turned away. But not before my eyes said, Things are better this way, with understanding between us. You know me, but I know you too. I could smell everything about you before you came down those steps.

“Maybe you brought me here to kill me. Maybe you send for me because I am Ku and you are Gangatom.”

“You are nothing,” she said, and went back upstairs.

The Leopard ran to the edge of the floor and jumped into the tree. Kava was sitting on the floor, his legs crossed.

For seven days I stayed away from the woman and she stayed away from me. But children will be children and they will not be anything other. I found loose cloth made for children and wrapped my waist in it. Truth, I felt like the city was back in me and I failed at being a man of the bush. Other times I cursed my fussing and wondered had any man or boy fussed so over cloth. The fifth night I told myself it is neither clothed nor unclothed, but whatever I feel to do or not to do. The seventh night Kava told me of mingi. He pointed to each child and told me why their parents chose to kill them or leave them to die. These were lucky that they were just left to be found. Sometimes the elders demand that you make sure the child is dead, and the mother or father drowns the child in the river. He said this while sitting on the floor of the middle house as the children fell asleep on mats and skins. He pointed to the white-skinned girl.

“She is the colour of demons. Mingi.”

A boy with a big head tried to grab a firefly.

“His top teeth grew before the bottom. Mingi.”

Another boy was already asleep but his right hand kept reaching out and grabbing air.

“His twin starved to death before we could save both. Mingi.”

A lame girl hopping to her spot on the floor, her left foot bent in a wrong way.

“Mingi.”

Kava waved his hands, not pointing to anyone.

“And some born to women not in wedlock. Remove the mingi, remove the shame. And you may still marry a man with seven cows.”

I looked at the children, most sleeping. Wind slowed and the leaves swayed. I could not tell how much of the moon darkness had eaten, but the glow was bright enough to see Kava’s eyes.

“Where do the curses go?” I asked.

“What?”

“These children are all cursed. If you keep them here, you are keeping curse on top of curse. Is the woman a witch? Is she skilled in removing curses, curses that come out of the womb? Or is she just pooling them here?”

I cannot describe the look on his face. But my grandfather looked at me that way all the time, and all day, the day I left.

“Being a fool is a curse too,” he said.