by Marlon James
“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 branc
h, 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.”
FIVE
The Leopard chopped off Asanbosam’s head, wrapped it in sukusuku leaves, and shoved it in the sack. We left the way I came, weapons out, ready for whichever beast would show itself that night.
“What will you do with the head?” I asked.
“Stick it on a wall so I can scratch my ass when it itches.”
“What?”
He said no more. Four nights we were on foot, around forests that would have been quicker going through, and two-faced animals who would have smelled the Asanbosam’s flesh and alerted his brother. At just a morning’s distance from Sangoma’s huts a smell came to me, and the Leopard too. Smoke, ash, fat, skin. He growled and I shouted, Go. I grabbed the bow, the weapons, and the sack and ran. When I came to the stream, a little boy was floating in it, facedown. The Leopard jumped into the water and fished him out, but an arrow had pierced his heart. We knew the boy. Not one from the top hut, but still mingi. There was no time to bury him, so the Leopard placed him back in the river, faceup, closed his eyes, and let him go.
