Black Leopard, Red Wolf (Dark Star Trilogy)

FOUR

Kava and Leopard have been saving mingi children for ten and nine moons.

The Leopard did not sleep on the house floor, not even when he was a man. Each evening he climbed farther up the tree, and fell asleep between two branches. He changed to man mid-sleep—I have seen it—and did not fall out. But there were nights when he would go far out searching for food. One night was a full moon—twenty-eight days since I left the Ku. I waited until the Leopard was long gone and followed his scent. I crawled on branches twisting north, rolled down branches twisting south, and ran along branches that stretched flat, east to west, like a road.

When I found him, he had just dragged it up between the branches with his teeth, and his head never looked so powerful. The antelope he killed with that grip still around its neck. The air heavy with fresh kill. He bit the base of the back leg and ripped it away for the softer flesh near the belly. Blood splashed his nose. The Leopard bit off more flesh, chewed and swallowed quick, like a crocodile. The carcass almost slipped his clutch when he saw me, and we stared at each other so long that I started to think that maybe this was a different leopard. His teeth ripped away red meat, but his eyes stayed on me.

The witch went up to the top hut at night, the house with no doors. I was sure that she entered from a hatch in the roof and I wanted to see for myself. Dawn was coming up. Kava was somewhere under a pile of sleeping children, himself asleep. The Leopard went out to finish what was left of the antelope. The mist came in thicker and I couldn’t see the steps at my feet.

“These are the things that must happen to you,” said a voice I had not heard before. A little girl.

I jumped, but nobody stood before or behind me.

“You might as well come up,” another voice said. The woman.

“You have no door,” I said.

“You have no eyes,” she said.

I closed my eyes and opened them, but the wall was still the wall.

“Walk,” she said.

“But there is no—”

“Walk.”

I knew that I was going to hit the wall, and I would curse her and the baby who was probably still sucking her breast, because perhaps he was not a baby at all, but a blood-sucking obayifo with light coming from his armpits and asshole. Eyes closed, I walked. Two steps, three steps, four and no wall hit my forehead. When I opened my eyes, my feet were already in the room. It was much bigger than I thought, but smaller than the hut below. On the wood floor, carved everywhere, were marks, incantations, spells, curses; I knew now.

“A witch,” I said.

“I am Sangoma.”

“Sounds like a witch.”

“You know many witches?” she asked.

“I know you smell like a witch woman.”

“Kuyi re nize sasayi.”

“I am not an orphan in the world.”

“But you live the difficult life of a boy no man will claim. I hear your father is dead and your mother is dead to you. What does that make you? As for your grandfather.”

“I swear by god.”

“Which one?”

“I tire of verbal sport.”

“You sport like a boy. You have been here more than one moon. What have you learned?”

I made silence between us. She still had not shown herself. She was in my head, I knew. All this time, the witch was far away and threw her voice to me. Maybe the Leopard had finally eaten his way to the heart of the antelope and promised it to her. Maybe the liver too.

Something gentle hit my head, and someone giggled. A pellet hit my hand and bounced, but I didn’t hear it hit the floor. Another hit my arm and bounced again, bounced high with no sound. Too high. The floor looked clear. I caught the third just as it hit my right arm. The child giggled again. I opened my hand and a small clump of goat shit leapt from it, jumped high and did not come down. I looked up.

Somebody had shined that clay ceiling with graphite. The woman was hanging from the ceiling. No, standing on it. No, attached to it looking down on me. But her robe stayed in place even with the gentle wind. Her dress covered the breasts. Truth, she stood on the ceiling the way I was right there standing on the floor. And the children, all the children were lying on the ceiling. Standing on the ceiling. Chasing after each other over and under, around and around, hissing and screaming, jumping but landing back on the ceiling.

And what children? Twin boys, each with his own head, his own hand and leg but joined at the side and sharing a belly. A little girl made of blue smoke chased by a boy with a body as big and round as a ball, but no legs. Another boy with a small shiny head and hair curled up like little dots, a little body but legs as long as a giraffe. And another boy, white as the girl from yesterday but with eyes big and blue as a berry. And a girl with the face of a boy behind her left ear. And three or four children who looked like any mother’s children, but they were standing upside down on a ceiling, looking at me.

The witch moved towards me. I could touch the top of her head.

“Mayhaps we stand on the floor and you stand on the ceiling,” she said.

As soon as she said it, I broke from the floor and stuck out my hands quick before my head hit the ceiling. My head spun. The smoke child appeared in front of me, but I was not scared or surprised. There was no time to think it, but think I did, that even a ghost child is a child first. My hand went right through her and stirred some of her smoke. She frowned and ran away on air. The joined twins rose from the floor and ran over to me. Play with us, they said, but I said nothing. They stood there looking at me, the one striped loincloth covering both of them. The right child wore a blue necklace; the left one, green. The boy with long legs bent over me, his legs straight, in loose, flowing pants like what my father wore, in that colour I did not know. Like red in deep night. Purple, she said. The long-legged boy spoke to the twins in a tongue I did not know. All three laughed until the witch called them away. I knew who these children were, and that is what I said to her. They were mingi in the full flower of their curse.

“You ever go to the palace of wisdom?” she said, one arm to her side, the other around a child who did not wish for her nipple. I passed this palace every day, and walked in more than one time. Its doors were always open, to say wisdom is open to all, but its lessons I was too young for. But I said, “Where is this palace?”

“Where is the palace? In the city you ran from, boy. Pupils ponder the real nature of the world, not the foolishness of old men. The palace where they build ladders to reach the stars, and create arts that have nothing to do with virtue or sin.”

“There is no such palace.”

“Even women go to study the wisdom of masters.”

“Then as there are gods there is no such place.”

“Pity. One day of wisdom would teach you that a child don’t carry a curse, not even one spirit-born to die and born again. Curse come from the witch’s mouth.”

“You a witch?”

“You afraid of witches?”

“No.”

“Be afraid of your bad lies. What kind of woman you going to undress with such a salty mouth?”

She looked at me for a very long time.

“How come I miss it before? My eyes going blind from the sight of shoga boys.”

“My ears going tired from the words of witches.”

“They should be tired of you being a fool.”

I made one step towards her and the children stopped and glared at me. All the smiles gone.

“Children cannot help how they are born, they had no choice in it. Choosing to be a fool, though …”

The children went back to being children, but I heard her above the noise of play.

“If I were a witch, I would have come to you as a comely boy since that is the way inside you, false? If I were a witch, I would summon a tokoloshe, fool him that you are a girl and have him rape you while invisible each night. If I were a witch, every one of these children would have been killed, cut up, and sold in the Malangika witches market. I am not a witch, fool. I kill witches.”

Three nights after the first moon, I woke up to a storm in the hut. But there was no rain and the wind dashed from one part of the room to the other, knocking over jars and water bowls, rattling shelves, whipping through sorghum flour, and disturbing some of the children awake. On the rug, Smoke Girl was shaking out of her own shape. Moaning, her face solid as skin, then fading into smoke, about to vanish. Out of her face popped another face that was all smoke, with terror eyes and a screaming mouth, shaking and grimacing as if forcing herself out of herself.

“Devils trouble her sleep,” Sangoma said as she ran over to Smoke Girl.

Two times the Sangoma grabbed her cheeks, only for the skin to turn to smoke. She screamed again, but this time we heard. More children woke up. Sangoma was still trying to grab her cheek, yelling for her to wake up. She started to slap the girl, hoping that she would turn from smoke to skin long enough. Her hand hit her left cheek and the girl woke up and bawled. She ran straight to me and jumped up on my chest, which would have knocked me over were she any heavier than air. I patted her on the back and went right through her, so I patted again, gentle. Sometimes she was solid enough to feel it. Sometimes I could feel her little hands holding my neck.

The Sangoma nodded at Giraffe Boy, who was also awake, and he stepped over sleeping children to get to the wall, where she had covered something with a white sheet. He grabbed it, she handed me a torch, and we all went outside. The girl was asleep, still gripping my neck. Outside was still deep dark. Giraffe Boy placed the figure on the ground and pulled away the sheet.

It stood there looking at us like a child. Cut from the hardest wood and wrapped in bronze cloth, with a cowrie in its third eye, feathers sticking out of its back, and tens of tens of nails hammered into its neck, shoulders, and chest.

“Nkisi?” I asked.

“Who show you one,” the Sangoma said, not as a question.

“In the tree of the witchman. He told me what they were.”

“This is nkisi nkondi. It hunts down and punishes evil. The forces of the otherworld are drawn to it instead of me; otherwise I would go mad and plot with devils, like a witch. There is medicine in the head and the belly.”

“The girl? She just had troubled sleep,” I said.

“Yes. And I have a message for the troubler.”

She nodded at Giraffe Boy, who pulled out a nail that had been hammered in the ground. He took a mallet and hammered it into the nkiski’s chest.

“Mimi naomba nguvu. Mimi naomba nguvu. Mimi naomba nguvu. Mimi naomba nguvu. Kurudi zawadi mara kumi.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

Giraffe Boy covered the nkisi, but we left it outside. I held the girl to put her down and she was solid to the touch. The Sangoma looked at me.

“Do you know why nobody attacks this place? Because nobody can see it. It is like poison vapor. The people who study evil know there is a place for mingi. But they do not know where it is. That does not mean they cannot send magics out on the air.”

“What did you do?”

“I returned the gift to the giver. Ten times over.”

From then I would wake up in blue smoke, the girl lying on my chest, sliding down my knee to my toes, sitting on my head. She loved sitting on my head when I was trying to walk.

“You are blinding me,” I would say.

But she just giggled and it sounded like breeze between leaves. I was annoyed and then I was not and then I just took it as it was, that at nearly all times there was a blue cloud of smoke on my head, or sitting on my shoulders.

Once, me and Smoke Girl went with Giraffe Boy out into the forest. We walked for so long that I did not notice we were no longer in the tree. In truth I was following the boy.

“Where do you go?” I asked.

“To find the flower,” he said.

“There are flowers everywhere.”

“I go to find the flower,” he said, and started skipping.

“A skip for you is a leap for us. Slow, child.”

The boy shuffled but I still had to walk swift.

“How long have you lived with the Sangoma?” I asked.

“I do not think long. I used to count days but they are so many,” he said.

“Of course. Most mingi are killed just days after birth, or right after the first tooth shows.”

“She said you will want to know.”

“Who, Sangoma?”

“She said he will want to know how I am mingi but so old.”

“And what is your answer?”

He sat down in the grass. I stooped and Smoke Girl scampered off my head like a rat.

“There is it. There is my flower.”

He picked up a small yellow thing about the size of his eye.

“Sangoma saved me from a witch.”

“A witch? Why would a witch not kill you as a baby?”

“Sangoma says that many would buy my legs for wicked craft. And a boy leg is bigger than a baby leg.”

“Of course.”

“Did your father sell you?” he said.

“Sell? What? No. He did not sell me. He is dead.”

I looked at him. I felt a need to smile at him, but I also felt false doing so.

“All fathers should die as soon as we are born,” I said.

He looked at me strange, with eyes like children who heard words parents should not have said.

“Let us name a stone after him, curse it, and bury it,” I said. Giraffe Boy smiled.

Say this about a child. In you they will always find a use. Say this as well. They cannot imagine a world where you do not love them, for what else should one do but love them? Ball Boy found out I had a nose. Kept rolling into me, almost knocking me over, and shouting, Find me! then rolling away.

“Keep eye sh—” he shouted, rolling over his mouth before saying shut.

I did not use my nose. He left a trail of dust along the dry mud path, and squashed grass in the bush. He also hid behind a tree too narrow for his wide ball of a body. When I jumped behind and said, I see you, he looked at my open eye and burst into crying, and bawling and screaming. And wailing, truly he did wail. I thought the Sangoma would come running with a spell and the Leopard would come running ready to rip me apart. I touched his face, I rubbed his forehead.

“No no no … I will … you hide again … I will give you … a fruit, no a bird … stop crying … stop crying … or I …”

He heard it in my voice, something like a threat, and cried even louder. So loud that he scared me more than demons. I thought to slap the cry out of his mouth but that would make me my grandfather.

“Please,” I said. “Please. I will give you all my porridge.”

He stopped crying in the quick.

“All?”

“I will not even taste a dipped finger.”

“All?” he asked again.

“Go hide again. I swear this time I shall only use my nose.”

He started laughing as quickly as he cried before. He rubbed his forehead against my belly, then he rolled off quick like a lizard on hot clay. I closed my eyes and smelled him out, but walked right past him five times, shouting, Where is this boy? with him giggling as I shouted, I can smell you.

In seven days we would have been living with the Sangoma for two moons. I asked Kava, Will none from Ku come looking for us? He looked at me as if his look was an answer.

Hear now, priest. Three stories about the Leopard.

One. A night fat with heat. Sometimes I woke up when the smell of men from a place I’ve been got stronger, and I knew they approached, on horse, on foot, or in a pack of jackals. Sometimes I woke up to a scent getting weaker, and I knew they were leaving, fleeing, walking away, or finding somewhere to hide. Kava’s scent getting weaker and the Leopard’s as well. No moon in the night but some of the weeds lit up a trail in the dark. I ran down the trees and my foot hit a branch. Hit my ass, hit my head, rolling, tumbling down like a boulder cut loose. Twenty paces in the bush, there they were under a young iroko tree. The Leopard, belly flat on the grass. He was not a man; his skin was black as hair and his tail whipped the air. He was not Leopard; his hands grabbed a branch, and thick buttocks slapped against Kava, who was fucking him with fury.

How much I hated Kava, and whether it was the hole of the woman at the tip of my manhood that made me hate, even if between my legs was a tree branch, and that my hate had nothing to do with the woman since at the tip of me was not a woman for that was old wisdom, which was folly, even the witchman said so.

That I wanted to hurt the Leopard and be the Leopard. How I smelled the animal and how that smell got stronger, and how much people change smell when they hate, and fuck, and sweat, and run from fear and how I smell it, even when they try to mask it.

What witchery do you work today, inquisitor? What shall you know?

Shoga? Of course I knew. Does such a man not always know? This is the third time I have said the name and yet you do not know it? As for us shoga men, we found inside ourselves another woman that cannot be cut out. No, not a woman, something that the gods forgot they made, or forgot to tell men, maybe for the best. Will you hear me, inquisitor, that whenever he touches it, rubs it hard or soft, or jerks it when inside me, that I will stay here, and spurt seed on the wall over there. Hit the ceiling. Hit the top of the tree, spray across the river to the other side and hit a Gangatom in the eye.

So you do laugh, inquisitor.

This is not the first you have heard of shoga men. Call them with poetry as we do in the North; men with the first desire. Like the Uzundu warriors who are fierce for they have eyes for only each other. Or call them vulgar as you do in the south, like the Mugawe men who wear women’s robes so you do not see the hole you fuck. You look like a basha, a buyer of boys. And why not? Boys are pretty beasts; the gods gave us nipples and holes and it’s not the cock or the koo, but the gold in your purse that matters.

Shoga fight your wars, shoga guard your bride before marriage. We teach them the art of wife-being and house making and beauty and how to please a man. We will even teach the man how to please his wife so that she will bear him children, or so that he will rain all over her with his milk every night. Or she will scratch his back and curl her toes. Sometimes we will play tarabu music on kora, djembe, and talking drum, and one of us will lie as woman, and another will lie as man and we show him the 109 positions to please your lover. You have no such tradition? Maybe that is why you like your wives young, for how would they know if you are a dismal lover? Me and Kava only used our hands. I thought it was not strange, maybe because I still carried the woman on the tip. I once asked the witchman to cut it off, after my uncle forbade it. He looked at me with all his wisdom gone, and nothing left but puzzlement, a wrinkle between his brows, and his eyelids squeezing like a man losing vision. He said, “Do you wish for one eye as well, or maybe one leg?”

“It was not the same,” I said.

“If the god Oma, who made man, wanted you cut to reveal such flesh he would have revealed it himself,” he said. “Maybe what you need to cut away is the foolish wisdom of men who still make walls with cow shit.”

Two. The next day Leopard kicked me in the face and woke me up. I opened my eyes and looked at his face, his wild shrub hair and eyes, white with a tiny black dot in the center. I was more afraid of the man than the Leopard. His big head and shoulders a warning that he can still carry up a tree beasts three times as heavy. He stepped on my chest, a bow slung over his right shoulder and a quiver of arrows in his left hand.

“Wake up. Today you will learn how to use a bow,” he said.

He took me from the house, down the twisting trunks to another field that felt far away. We passed the little iroko tree where he let Kava fuck him. Beyond that, and beyond the sound of the little river, to another field of trees, so tall they scraped the sky and branches like spider legs all tangled together. Behind him the hair on his head went down to his neck, across his back, and down to a point and disappeared above his buttocks. Hair sprouted back on his thigh and went down to his toes.

“Kava said when he first saw you, he tried to kill you with a spear.”

“What a storyteller he is,” the Leopard said, and kept walking.

We stopped in a clearing, a tree about fifty paces away from us. The Leopard took off his bow.

“Are you his and is he yours?” I asked.

“What Sangoma says about you is true,” he said.

“That woman can go lick between the ass cheeks of a leper.”

He laughed.

“You’ll be asking of love next,” he said.

“Well, do you have love for the man, and does the man love you?”

He looked straight at me. Either he just grew whiskers, or I just saw them.

“Nobody loves no one,” he said.

He turned away and nodded at the tree. The tree spread its arms to welcome him and exposed a hole right near where the heart would be, a hole that I could see right through. The Leopard already had the bow in his left hand, the string in his right, an arrow between his fingers. Before I even saw him raise the bow, draw the string, release the arrow that went through the hole in the tree with no sound, he had already drawn and shot another. He drew and shot another, then handed me the bow. I thought it would have been light, but it was about as heavy as the baby in the forest.

“Follow my hand,” he said, and held it right to my nose.

He moved left and my eyes followed him. His arm went too far and I turned my neck to see if he was about to slap me, or some other little evil. Then he moved his hand right and I followed him with my eyes until I couldn’t see it.

“Hold it with your left hand,” he said.

“Your arrow,” I said.

“What of it?”

“It shines like iron.”

“It is iron.”

“All the Ku arrows are bone and quartz.”

“The Ku still kill children whose top teeth grow first.”

This is how the Leopard taught me to kill with bow and arrow. Hold the bow on the side of the eye you use less. Draw the bow from the side of the eye you use more. Spread your feet until they are shoulder wide. Use three fingers to hold the arrow on the string. Raise and draw the bow, pull the string to your chin, all in the quick. Aim for the target and release the arrow. The first arrow went up into the sky and almost struck an owl. The second struck a branch above the hole. The third, I don’t know what it struck but something squealed. The fourth struck the trunk near the ground.

“She is getting annoyed with you,” he said. And pointed to the tree. He wanted me to retrieve the arrows. I pulled the first out of the branch and the little hole closed up. I was too scared to pull out the second, but the Leopard growled and I yanked it quick. I turned to run but a branch hit me flat in the face. The branch wasn’t there before. Now the Leopard laughed.

“I can’t aim,” I said.

“You can’t see,” he said.

I couldn’t see without blinking, couldn’t draw without shaking, I couldn’t point without shifting to the wrong leg. I could release the arrow, but never when he said so and the arrows never hit anywhere I pointed. I thought of aiming for the sky just so it would strike the ground. Truth, I did not know the Leopard could laugh this much. But he would not leave until I shot an arrow through the hole in the tree, and every time I struck the tree, it slapped me with a branch that was either always there or never there. Night sky was heavy before I shot an arrow through the target. He grabbed arrows and started walking, his way of saying we were done. We went down a path that I did not recognize, with rock and sand and stone covered in wet moss.

“This used to be a river,” he said.

“What happened to it?”

“It hates the smell of man and flows under the earth whenever we approach.”

“Truly?”

“No. It’s the end of rainy season.”

I was about to say that he has been living with the Sangoma for too long, but didn’t. Instead I said, “Are you a Leopard that changes to man or a man that changes to Leopard?”

He walked off, stepping through the mud, climbing the rocks in what used to be a river. Branches and leaves blocked the stars.

“Sometimes I forget to change back.”

“To man.”

“To Leopard.”

“What happens when you forget?”

He turned around and looked at me, then pressed his lips and sighed.

“There’s no future in your form. Smaller. Slower, weaker.”

I didn’t know what to say other than “You look faster, stronger, and wiser to me.”

“Compared to whom? You know what a real Leopard would have done? Eaten you by now. Eaten everyone.”

He didn’t frighten me, nor did he intend to. Everything he stirred was below my waist.

“The witch tells better jokes,” I said.

“She told you she was a witch?”

“No.”

“Do you know the ways of witches?”

“No.”

“So you either speak through your ass or fart through your mouth. Be safe, boy. You would have made a terrible meal. My father changed and forgot how to change back. Spending the rest of his life in the misery of this shape.”

“Where is he now?”

“They locked him in a cell for madmen, when a hunter came upon him as a man fucking a cheetah. He escaped, boarded a ship, and sailed east. Or so I heard.”

“You heard?”

“Leopards are too cunning, boy. We can only live alone; leave it up to us we’d steal each other’s kill. I have not seen my mother since I could kill an antelope myself.”

“And you don’t kill the children. That is a surprise.”

“That would make me one of you. I know where my mother keeps. I have seen my brothers, but where they run is their business and where I run is mine.”

“I had no brothers. Then I came to the village to hear I had one but the Gangatom killed him.”

“And your father became your grandfather, Asani told me. And your mother?”

“My mother cooked sorghum and kept her legs open.”

“You could have a family of one and still drive them apart.”

“I don’t hate her. I have nothing for her. When she dies I will not mourn, but I will not laugh.”

“My mother suckled me for three moons and then fed me meat. That was enough. Then again I’m a beast.”

“My grandfather was a coward.”

“Your grandfather is the reason you’re alive.”

“Better to give me something to be proud of instead.”

“For you have no pride already. What would the gods say?”

He came up to me, close enough for me to feel his breath on my face.

“Your face has gone sour,” he said.

He stared deep into me as if trying to find the lost face.

“You left because your grandfather is a coward.”

“I left for other reasons,” I said.

He turned away and spread his arms wide as he walked, as if talking to the trees, not me.

“Of course. You left to find purpose. Because waking, eating, shitting, and fucking are all good things, but none of them is a purpose. So you searched for it, and purpose took you to the Ku. But your Ku purpose was to kill people you don’t even know. My word stands. There is no future in your form. And here we are. Here you are, and Gangatom women wash their children right across that river. You could go kill a few. Right a wrong. Even please the gods and their vile sense of balance,” the Leopard said.

“You blaspheming the gods?”

“Blaspheming means you believe.”

“You don’t believe in gods?”

“I don’t believe in belief. No, that is false. I do believe there will be antelope in the woods and fish in the river and men will always want to fuck, which is the only one of their purposes that pleases me. But we talk of yours. Your purpose is to kill Gangatom. Instead you run to a Gangatom woman’s house and play with mingi children. Asani I could read in one day, but you? You are a mystery to me.”

“What did you read about Asani?”

“You can walk away from it.”

“I have walked away from it.”

“But it’s still in your heart. Men killed your father and brother and yet it’s your own family that makes you angry.”

“I so tire of people trying to read me.”

“Stop spreading open like a scroll.”

“I am alone.”

“Thank the gods, or your brother would be your uncle.”

“That is not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. You are alone. But it makes your heart sick to be alone. We do not have this in common. Learn not to need people.”

I could smell the huts above us.

“Do you like fucking better as man or beast?” I said. He smiled.

“There is salt in that question!”

I nodded.

“I like his chest on my chest, his lips on my neck, looking at him as he enjoys me. He likes when my tail whips his face.”

“Is that what you read of him?”

“I read feet that have taken him as far as he can go.”

“He has love for you and you for him?”

“Love? I know hunger, fear, and heat. I know when hot blood spills into your mouth when you bite down in the flesh of fresh kill. Asani, he was just a man who walked into my territory that I could just as well kill. But he found me on a night with a red moon.”

“I do not understand.”

“No you do not. As for territory …” He walked from one tree to the next, and the next, marking the ground with piss. He walked up to the tree that took us up and wet the base.

“Hyenas,” he said.

I jumped. “Hyenas are coming?”

“Hyenas are here. They watch us from afar. Wouldn’t you … no, you don’t know their smell. They know who lives up this tree. So is that the way with you? Once you know the scent you can follow it anywhere?”

“Yes.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I could find my grandfather right now, with my eyes closed, even with him being seven or eight days away. And either of his three mistresses, including one who moved to another city. Sometimes there are too many and my mind skips and goes dark and comes back with everything at once, as if I woke up in the city square and everyone is screaming at me in a language I don’t know. When I was young I had to cover my nose, almost killing myself when they got too loud. I still go mad sometimes.”

He stared at me for a long time. I looked away at the weeds glowing in the dark and tried to make out shapes. When I turned back to him, he was still looking at me.

“And the smells you don’t know?” he said.

“A fart might as well be from a flower.”

Third story.

It took the night for me to know we had been with the Sangoma two moons.

“Ten and seven years I studied in the ithwasa, the initiation to become Sangoma,” she said.

I went to the top hut this and every morning when I felt her calling me. Smoke Girl ran up my legs and chest and sat on my head. Ball Boy bounced around me. Sangoma was feeling the beads of a necklace she had buried three nights before, and whispering a chant. The boy she used to suckle kept running into the wall, walking backward, running into the wall, again and again, and she did not stop him. The day before she told the Leopard to take me out and teach me archery. All I learned was that I should try something else. Now I throw the hatchet. Even two at the same time.

“Ten and seven years of purity, humbling myself before the ancestors, learning divination and the skill of the master I called Iyanga. I learned to close my eye and find things hidden. Medicine to undo witchcraft. This is a sacred hut. Ancestors live here, ancestors and children, some of them ancestors reborn. Some of them, just children with gifts. Just as you are a child with gifts.”

“I am not—”

“Modest, true. That much is plain, boy. You are also neither patient, wise, nor even very strong.”

“Yet you had Kava and the Leopard bring this boy of no quality here. Should I leave?” I turned to go.

“No!”

That was louder than she meant, and we both knew it.

“Do as you wish. Go back to your grandfather posing as your father,” she said.

“What do you want, wit—Sangoma?”

She nodded at the boy with the long legs. He went to the far end of the room and came back with a bamboo-weaved tray.

“During my ithwasa, my master told me that I would see far. Too far,” the Sangoma said.

“Close your eyes, then.”

“You need to respect your elders.”

“I will, when I meet elders I can respect.”

She laughed. “With so much leaving your front hole, no wonder you wish for something to enter the back.”

She was not going to see me offended. Or hear me, or smell me. Or give news to the moonlight boy or the Leopard. Not even for the blink of an eye.

“What do you want?”

“Look at the bones. I throwing them every night for a moon and twenty nights, and always they land the same. The hyena bone lands first, meaning that I should expect a hunter. And a thief. Right after the first night you come.”

“That knowledge passed me.”

“Why be blessed with eyes? I know two who could use them more than you.”

“Woman—”

“I never finish. Use the nose the gods gave you, or you will not notice the viper next time.”

“You want my nose?”

“I want a boy. Seven nights now he gone. The bones tell me, but I was thinking no boy would run too far from good food.”

“Good is not what—”

“Don’t cross me, boy. He stop believing like a child, stop believing what I tell him all these moons. Child thief he call me! But such is the way—which child wants to know his own mother leave him to the wild dogs? Child thief he call me, then go off to find his mother. He even struck me when I wouldn’t move out the way. My children were too shocked, or they would have killed him for true. He jumped the tree and run south.”

I looked around. I knew some of these children could kill me in the quick.

“You will have back the boy.”

“The boy can climb into his mother shrivel-up koo and sew the life string to his belly for all I care. But he steal something precious to me.”

“A jewel? Proof that you are a woman?”

“Cursed a day it going to be when your mind catch up to your mouth. The gallbladder of the goat they sacrifice at my initiation ceremony. It has been in my hair from then. He left at morning, but took it the night before, while I was sleeping.”

“Stole it from your own head.”

“I was sleeping, I say.”

“I thought enchanted beings slept light.”

“What do you know of enchanted beings?”

“That anything wakes them.”

“Must be why you go wandering at night.”

“I don’t—”

“Hope you find what you looking for. Enough. I will have it back. You talk of witches. Without it, witches will know of this place. You may not care for children, but you will care for gold coin.”

“No need for gold in the vill—”

“You will never return to that village.”

She looked at me, the scar pattern around her eyes making them fierce.

“Take the coins and find the boy,” she said.

“Why wouldn’t I just ta—”

She slapped me in the face with a loincloth. The funk rushed to my nose before I could breathe.

“Because I know how that nose work, boy. You never going to stop looking for who leave the smell, or it will drive you mad.”

She was right. I did not know I could hate her more.

“Take the coins and find the boy.”

She sent the Leopard and me. He has a nose too, she said. I thought she was going to send me with Kava. The Leopard looked neither pleased nor displeased. But right before we left, I saw them on the roof of the third hut, Kava waving his hands up and down like a madman, the Leopard looking as he always does. Kava threw a stick and the Leopard jumped him quick as lightning, his hand around Kava’s throat. The Leopard released him and walked away. Kava laughed.

“Watch where that fucking cat takes you,” Kava said to me when I saw him not long after.

I was filling wineskins with water by the river. This is what happened. After I filled them, I looked for red mud and white clay. When I found clay, I drew a white line and divided my face. Then another right along my brow. Then red lines on my cheeks and tracing my ribs, which I was seeing more, but it did not worry me the way it would have my mother.

“He takes me nowhere. I go to find the boy,” I said.

“Watch where that fucking cat takes you,” he said again.

I said nothing. I tried to mark behind my knees. Kava came up behind me and scooped up white clay. He rubbed it on my buttocks all the way down to my knees and down to my calves.

“Leopards are cunning. Do you know of their ways? You know why they run alone? Because they will betray even their own kind, and for a kill even the hyenas won’t touch.”

“Did he betray you?”

Kava looked up at me but said nothing. He was painting my thighs. I wanted him to stop.

“After you two find the boy, he will go on to southern lands. The grasslands are drying up and the prey is foul.”

“If he wants.”

“He has been a man too long. Hunters will kill him in two nights. The game is wilder, beasts that will rip him in two. Out there the hunters have poison arrows and they kill children. There are beasts bigger than this tree, blades of grass that love blood, beasts that will r—”

“Rip him in two. What do you want him to do?”

Kava washed his hands of clay and started to mark a pattern on my legs.

“He will leave with me, and forget this woman and her cursed children. It was his idea to save them, and lead them here, not mine. Whether they lived or died was the gods’ business. Who lives at the top?” he asked.

“I don’t—”

“She takes food up there every day. Now she takes you.”

“Jealous.”

“Of you? My blood is the blood of chiefs!”

“It was not a question.”

He laughed. “You want to play with her dark arts, do as you wish. But the Leopard comes with me. We are going back to the village. Between us we kill the people responsible for the death of my mother.”

“You said wind killed your kin. You said—”

“I know what I said, I was there when I said it. The Leopard said he will set out once you two find the boy. Tell him that you will not go.”

“And then?”

“I will make him see,” Kava said.

“There is no future in your form.”

“What?”

“Somebody told me that a few days ago,” I said.

“Who? Nobody passes this place. You’re growing as mad as that bitch. I’ve seen you, on the roof of that hut, holding up air and playing with it like a child. She infects this place. What news have you of the boy? That he fled because he was ungrateful? Did she call him a thief? Maybe a killer?”

He stood up and looked at me.

“So she did. Do you think as a man, or does she rule all your thoughts? The boy escaped,” he said.

“This is no prison.”

“Then why he run off?”

“He thinks his mother cries for him at night. That he is not mingi.”

“And who says he lies? Sangoma? No child here knows any different. Sangoma living in the trees for years and years, so where are the children who come of age? You and the animal hunt him down to bring him back. What will you do when he says no, I will not come back?”

“I hear you now. You think the Leopard is a fool for her too.”

“Leopard is no fool. He does not care. She says go east, he goes east, as long as there is fish and the warthogs are fat. Nothing is in that heart.”

“What blazes in yours.”

“You two fucked in the forest,” he said.

I looked at him.

“He said he taught you archery. The fucking beast was feeding me verse.”

I thought about leaving him with the mystery of it, or telling him we did not and never would to give him ease, but also thinking fuck the gods and his need for ease.

“He will never love you,” Kava said.

“Nobody loves no one,” I said.

He punched me in the face—right on the cheek—and knocked me down in the mud. He jumped me before I got up. Knees on my arms pinning me down, he punched me in the face again. I kneed him in the ribs. He yelled and fell off. But I was coughing, gasping, crying like a boy, and he jumped me again. We rolled and my head hit a rock and the sky went gray and black and the mud was sinking and his spit was hitting my eye but I could not hear him, only see the back of his throat. We rolled into the river and his hands grabbed my neck, pushing me underwater, pulling me up, pushing me under, water rushing into my nose. The Leopard leapt on his back and bit him in the neck. The force knocked them both in the river. I pulled myself up to see the Leopard still on Kava’s neck, about to toss him like a doll, and I yelled. The Leopard dropped him but growled. Kava staggered backways into the river and touched his neck. His hand came away with blood. He looked at me, then at the Leopard, who was still walking in circles in the river, still marking that this is where you shall not pass. Kava turned, ran up the banks and into the bush. The noise brought out the Sangoma, who came down with Giraffe Boy and Smoke Girl, who appeared in front of my eyes and vanished again. The Leopard was back to a man and he walked past the Sangoma, back to the hut.

“Don’t forget why I sent for you,” she said to me.

She threw me a thick cloth when I stepped out of the river. I thought it was to dry myself, but the boy’s scent was all over it.

“That boy could be in my nose for moons.”

“Then you better make haste and find him,” she said.

We took one bow, many arrows, two daggers, two hatchets, a gourd tied to my hip with a piece of the cloth inside, and set out before first light.

“Are we finding the boy or killing him?” I said to the Leopard.

“He’s seven days ahead. These are if someone finds him first,” he said behind me, trusting my nose, even though I did not. The boy’s smell was too strong in one spot, too weak in the other, even if his path was set right before me. Two nights later his trail was still ahead of us.

“Why didn’t he go north, back to the village? Why go west?” I asked.

I stopped and the Leopard walked past me, turned south, and stopped after ten paces. He stooped down to sniff the grass.

“Who said he was from your village?” he asked.

“He did not go south, if you’re trying to pick up the boy.”

“He’s your charge, not mine. I was sniffing out dinner.”

Before I said more, he was on all paws and gone into the thicket. This was a dry area, trees skinny as stalks, as if starving for rain. The ground red and tough with cracked mud. Most of the trees had no leaves, and branches sprouted branches that sprouted branches so thin I thought they were thorns. It looked like water had made an enemy of this place, but a water hole was giving off scent not far away. Near enough that I heard the splash, the snarl, and a hundred hooves stampeding away.

Leopard got to me before I got to the river, still on four paws, a dead antelope in his mouth. That night he watched in disgust as I cooked my portion. He was back on two legs but eating the antelope leg raw, ripping away the skin with his teeth, sinking into the flesh and licking the blood off his lips. I wanted to enjoy flesh the way he enjoyed flesh. My burned and black leg disgusted me as well. He gave me a look that said he could never understand why any animal in these lands would eat prey by burning it first. He had no nose for spices and I had none to put on the meat. A part of the antelope was not cooked and I ate it, chewed it slow, wondering if this was what he ate when he ate flesh, warm and easy to pull apart, and if the feeling of iron spilled in your mouth was a good one. I would never like it. His face was lost in that leg.

“The trees are different,” I said.

“Different kind of forest. The trees are selfish here. They share nothing under the earth; their roots send nothing to other roots, no food, no news. They will not live together, so unless rain comes they will die together. The boy?”

“His scent is north. It grows neither strong nor weak.”

“Not moving. Asleep?”

“Mayhaps. But if he stays, we find him tomorrow.”

“Sooner than I thought. This could be your life if you wish it.”

“You wish to go on when we find him?”

He threw down the bone and looked at me. “What else did Asani tell you before he tried to drown you?” he said.

“You will send me back with the boy, but will not return.”

“I said I might not return, not will not.”

“Which is it?”

“That depends on what I find. Or what finds me. What is it to you?”

“Nothing, nothing at all.”

He grinned, stood up, and came over beside me. The fire threw harsh lines on his face and lit up his eyes. “Why do you go back?”

“She wants her bladder.”

“Not the cursed Sangoma, the village. Why do you go back to the village?”

“My family is there.”

“You have no one there. Asani told me all that awaits you is a vendetta.”

“That is still something, is it not?”

“No.”

He looked to the fire. His mouth goes sick from the sight of cooking, but he made the fire. From the gourd I pulled the piece of cloth carrying the boy’s scent. These were not trees he could sleep in, even if he preferred to sleep off the ground.

“Come with me,” he said.

“Where?”

“No. I mean come with me after this. After we find the boy. She has no interest in him; she wants her foul bladder to place in her foul hair. We find him, scare him, send him back. We go west.”

“Kava wants—”

“Is Asani lord over anyone here?”

“Something came to pass between you two.”

“Nothing came to pass. That is the stick between us. He passes you in years, but in every other way he is the man younger. Gambles with lives, and kills for sport. The disgusting features of your form.”

“Then stop changing into it. You raise no cry over the disgusting acts you like.”

“Name the like. You think in this kind of moon, you can judge me, little boy? There are lands where men who love men get their cocks cut off, and are left to bleed to death. Besides, I do as gods do. Of all the terrible features of your form, shame is the worst.”

I knew he was looking at me. I was staring into the flames but could feel him turn his head. The night wind was sending a fragrance I did not know. Ripeness from fruit, maybe, but nothing was fruitful in this bush. This made me remember something and I was surprised that I only now remembered it.

“What happened to them who were following us?”

“Who?”

“The night we came to the Sangoma. The little woman said somebody was following us.”

“She is always fearing something or someone is after her.”

“You believed it too.”

“I don’t believe in fear, but I believe in her belief. Besides, there are at least ten and six enchantments to throw off hunters and wanderers.”

“Like vipers?”

“No, those are always real,” he said with a wicked smile.

He reached over and grabbed my shoulder.

“Go be with pleasant dreams. Tomorrow we find the boy.”

I jumped out of sleep, to my feet, hungry for air. It wasn’t air. I darted left and right as if I had lost something, as if somebody stole from me. It woke up the Leopard. I walked left, right, north, and south, covered my nose and breathed in deep, but still nothing. I almost walked into the dying fire before Leopard grabbed my hand.

“I’m nose-blind,” I said.

“What?”

“His smell, it is lost to me.”

“Do you mean he’s—”

“Yes.”

He sat in the dirt.

“We should still get her bladder,” he said. “Let us continue north.”

It took us till dusk to get out of that forest. The thicket, smelling the fresh funk of us, would not let us go, slapping and whipping us across our chests and feet, sticking out little branches to grab our hair, scattering thorns in the dirt to prick our feet, and signaling to vultures flying overhead to swoop low. We, two animals, fresh meat, did not interest them. We crossed the savannah and neither the antelopes, egrets, nor warthogs took notice. But we headed to another thicket that looked empty. Nobody went in, not even two lions who looked at the Leopard and nodded.

The new thicket was already dark. Tall trees but thin with branches reaching upward, which would break from the Leopard’s weight. Trunks peeling skin, showing age. We stepped on bones scattered all over the ground. I jumped when the scent hit me.

“He is here,” said the Leopard.

“I don’t know his death smell.”

“There are other ways to know,” he said, and pointed at the ground.

Footprints. Some small like a young man’s. Others large but like handprints left in grass and mud. But some of them gone wild as if walking, then running, then running mad. He walked past me for a few steps and stopped. I thought he would change but instead he opened the sack and threw me the hatchets. Then he grabbed an arrow and pulled his bow.

“All this for a stinking gallbladder?”

The Leopard laughed. Truth, he was more pleasant than Kava.

“I’m starting to think Kava speaks true about you,” I said.

“Who said he spoke false?”

Truth, I shut my mouth and just stared at him, hoping he would change what he just said.

“The boy was kidnapped. Sangoma took him herself. She stole him from her own sister. Yes there is a story, little boy. Do you know why she has such malice for witches? Her sister was one. Is one. I don’t know. Her sister’s story is that Sangoma is a child thief who takes babies from their mothers and trains them in wicked arts. Sangoma’s story is that her sister is a dirt witch and that is not her boy, since all dirt witches are barren from all the potions they drank for powers. She stole the child and was set to sell his parts in the Malangika, the secret witches market. Many sorceresses would give plenty coin for a baby’s heart, cut out that day.”

“Which story do you believe?”

“The one where a dead child is not one of my choices. No matter. I’ll circle around. He will not escape.”

He ran off before I could say I hated this plan. I do have a nose, as people say. But it was useless when I did not know what I smelled.

I stepped over a thick shrub and went in. Few paces in and the ground was drier, like sand and the dirt stuck to my feet. I climbed over a massive skeleton, the tusks telling me it was a young elephant, with four of his ribs crushed. Turn back and let him scare the boy out, my mind told me, but I kept walking. I passed a gathering of bones, like an altar, a stepped mound, and pried two small trees apart to step through. Above nothing stirred, no fowl, no snake, no monkey. Quiet is the opposite of sound, not the absence of it. This was absence.

I looked behind me and could not remember from where I came. I walked around the tree, stepping on shrubs and wild bush, when something cracked behind me. Nothing but smells, pungent and foul. A foulness that came from rot. Man rot. But nothing was in front of me, nothing behind. Yet I felt the boy was here. I wanted to call his name.

A crack again, and I turned around but did not stop walking. A wet thing touched my temple and cheek. A smell, that smell—rot. I touched my cheek and something came away, blood and slime, spit maybe. Entrails hung down like rope, another curled up below the ribs, smelling like man rot and shit. The skin ripped with tears, as if everything below had been cut away by a ragged knife. Some of the skin had peeled away at his side and his ribs poked out. Vines under his arms and around his neck held him up. The Sangoma said to look for a ring of little scars around his right nipple. The boy. Up in the tree were other men, and women, and children, all dead, most missing half their bodies, some their heads, some their hands, and fingers, their entrails all dangling out.

“Sasabonsam, brother from the same mother, he likes the blood. Asanbosam, that is me, I likes the flesh. Yes, the flesh.”

I jumped. A voice that sounded like a stench. I stepped back. This was the lair of one of the old and forgotten gods, back when gods were brutish and unclean. Or a demon. But all around me were dead people. My heart, the drum inside me beat so loud I could hear it. My drum beat out of my chest and my body trembled. The foul voice said, “Gods send us a fat one, yes he is. A fat one they send us.”

I likes the flesh

And bone

Sasa like blood

And seed. He send we you.

Ukwau tsu nambu ka takumi ba

I spun. No one. I looked in front, the boy. The boy’s eyes open, I did not notice before. Wide open, screaming at nothing, screaming for us being too late. Ukwau tsu nambu ka takumi ba. I knew the tongue. A dead thing does not lack a devourer. The wind shifted behind me. I spun around. He hung upside down. A huge gray hand grabbed my neck and claws dug into the skin. He squeezed the breath out of me and pulled me up into the tree.

I don’t know how long my mind was black. A vine snaked itself across my chest and around the trunk, around my legs and around my forehead, leaving my neck clean and belly open. The boy hung right across, looking at me, his eyes wide open, searching. His mouth still open. I thought it was his death pose, the last scream that did not come out, until I saw something in his mouth, black but also green. The gallbladder.

“Broke a tooth we is, when all we want is a little taste. Little, little taste.”

I knew his smell and I knew he was above me, but the scent would not stay. I looked up to see him fall, hand to his side as if he was diving fast, heading for the ground. Gray and purple and black and stink and huge. He dove past a branch but his feet caught it and the branch bounced. His feet, long with scales on the ankles, one claw sticking out of the heel and another jutting instead of toes, curved around the branch like a hook. He let go, dove, and caught another branch, low enough that his face was facing me. His purple hair ran along a strip in the center of his head. Neck and shoulders, muscle packed on top of muscle, like a buffalo. Chest like the crocodile’s underbelly. And his face. Scales above his eyes, nose flat, but nostrils wide with purple hair sticking out. Cheekbones high as if he was always hungry, skin gray with warts, two sharp shiny teeth sticking out of the corners of his mouth even when not talking, like a boar.

“We hear in lands where no rain, mother speak we and frighten children. You hear it? Tell we true, delicious, delicious.”

And this, his breath, fouler than corpse rot, fouler than the shit of the sick. My eyes followed his chest and the ridges of bones pushing under his skin, three on the left, three on the right. His thighs thick with muscle, tree trunks above skinny knees. He tied me up tight. I heard my grandfather talk of how he would welcome death when he knew it was coming, but right here I knew he was a fool. That was the kind of talk from someone who expected death to meet him in sleep. And I would scream how wrong this was, how unfair to see death coming, and how I will cry in an eternal sadness that he chose to kill me slow, to pierce me and all the while tell me how he delights in it. To chew away at my skin and chop my fingers, and each tear of flesh will be a new tear, and each pain will be a new pain and each fright will be a new fright, and I will watch his pleasure. And I will want to die quick because I suffer so, but I do not want to die. I do not want to die. I do not want to die.

“You no want to die? Young boy, you never hear of we? Soon soon soon soon soon you begging for it,” he said.

He took his hand, warts all over, hair on the knuckles, claws at the fingertips, and grabbed my chin. He yanked my jaw open and said, “Pretty teeth. Pretty mouth, boy.”

A body above dripped something on me. That was the first time I thought of the Leopard. The Leopard, who said he would go around the bush, but nobody knew the bush was seven moons wide. The shape-shifting son of a sniveling cat bitch will leave here. Asanbosam swung himself up and hopped away.

“He going be angry with us, he will. Angry, angry, so so angry. Don’t touch the flesh until I have my blood, he say. I am the oldest, he say. And he whip us terrible. Terrible. Terrible. But he gone and I hungry. And you know what worse? What worse and worse? He too eat the best flesh, like the head. Is fair? I ask fair?”

When he swung back down to face me, a hand, black skin rotting to green, was in his mouth. He bit the fingers off. He reached for me with his left hand and a claw dug into my forehead and drew blood.

“No fresh flesh in days,” he said. His black eyes opened wide, as if pleading with me.

“Many, many days.”

He put the arm in his mouth, chewing bit by bit until elbow flesh hung on his lips.

“Need his blood yes he do, so he say and he do. Leave them alive, he say.”

He looked at me, his eyes open wide again.

“But he never say leave you whole.”

He sucked in the little sliver of dead flesh.

“Cut bit of fle—”

The first arrow burst through his right eye. The second shot right into his scream and burst out the back of his neck. Third bounced off his chest. Fourth shot straight through the left eye. Fifth ran right through his hand as he reached for his eye. The sixth pierced the soft skin at his side.

His claw feet slipped off the branch. I heard him hit the ground. The Leopard jumped up from branch to branch, leaping from a weak one before it broke and landing on a strong one. He sat where the trunk split into branches, and stared at the bodies, his tail wrapping around a bunch of wilted leaves. He changed to man before I could rage at him for taking so long. Instead I bawled. I hated being a boy, my own voice telling me, A child is what you are. He went down for the sack and came back up with a hatchet. I fell into his arms and stayed there, crying. He patted my back and touched my head.

“We should leave. They travel in two, his kind,” Leopard said.

“His brother?”

“They live in trees and attack from above, but I have never heard of one this far from the coast. He is Asanbosam, the flesh eater. His brother, Sasabonsam, is the bloodsucker. He is also the smart one. We should leave now.”

“The gallbladder.”

“I grabbed it.”

“Where is it?”

“We should go.”

“I never saw you—”

He pushed me.

“Sasabonsam will soon return. He has wings.”