by Marlon James
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 y
ou 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 b
lazes 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.
