Black Leopard, Red Wolf

by Marlon James

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  He tore it from my head, my face, my eyes, something that also went in my mouth that felt like silk and had no taste. The silk off my eyes, I could see it wrapped around me, tight and shiny, though I could see my skin through it. A butterfly wrapped in a cocoon. My hands, my feet, none could move no matter how I tried to kick, stomp, tear, or roll. I was stuck to the trunk of a weak branch bending with me. This made me think of Asanbosam, Sasabonsam’s brother with no wings, hopping up and down on his tree branches full of rotting women and men. Except nothing rotted here. I thought this good until I heard him above me and saw that he preferred his meat fresh. He bit off a little monkey’s head and the tail dropped limp. He saw me looking up at him only when all was gone but the tail, which he sucked into his mouth with a wet, slithering sound.

  “Honk honk honk, that be all they do. Me, me not even was hungry. Know this pretty ape, when mami kipunji come looking for baby kipunji I going be eating her too. Make a mess, such a mess these kipunji, make a mess, they swing over looking for fruit and make such a mess in me house, yes they be making it and making it, and shit all over the leaves, shitting it, yes they shitting it and my mami-mami she going say, she would say, not going say for mami-mami, she be dead—oh, but she say keep a clean house or the wrong woman going want you, that be what she say kippi-lo-lo that be what she say.”

  He started to climb down the tree trunk, crouching like a spider, so low that his belly rubbed the bark. First I thought no ghommid was ever this big. Shoulders like a thin man with all muscle, but his upper arm was as long as a tree branch and his forearm stretched longer, so that his whole arm was longer than all of me. And legs as long as his arms. This is how he came down to me, stretching his right hand out straight and digging into the bark with his claws, lifting his right leg and bending it over his back, over his shoulder and head, and grabbing the trunk. Then his left hand and his left foot, his belly rubbing the trunk. He crawled down, right above my head, crawled backways, lifted himself up to the waist, and twisted his body around, almost a full twist, and reached for the last branch sticking out, first left hand, then right, and then left foot and right, still twisted at the waist so that right below his waist was his buttocks, not his crotch. He swung one arm over as if it would break and scratched his back. He crouched on the branch in front of me and his knees went past his head and his arms almost touched the ground. And between his legs, a hairy sheath like that of a dog, and from it came the juice he shot in my face. The juice hit the tree trunk across and turned to silk. He crawled over to that trunk and shot another silk line back to the branch. Then, crawling on both lines, he weaved a pattern with his hands and toes until he built something strong enough to sit on, which he did. Skin gray and covered in scars and marks like river folk, so light you could see the blood rivers along his limbs. Bald head with a sprout of hair on top, white eyes with no black, teeth yellow, and sharp, and poking out of his mouth.

  “Take a story and give me, yes? Take a story and give me.”

  “I know no monster of your sort.”

  He belched and laughed like a hiss. He looked at me and wiped off his laugh.

  “Take a story and—”

  He swung both legs behind his shoulders and his sheath shot wet silk high up in the trees. He grabbed the web with his arms and pulled her down, the mother monkey. She honked and honked and he held her right above his face. Face-to-face, the mother monkey whimpering in fear. She was smaller than my arm. He split his mouth open and bit her head off. Then he chewed up the rest of her and sucked in the tail. He looked at me again as he licked his lips.

  “Take a story and give me, yes? Take a story and give me.”

  “I had heard that those like you, you are the ones who give stories. And lies. And tricks.”

  “Those like me. Like me? Nobody like me. No no no no. I will have story. I have no more of my own. Take a story and give me to feed, yes? Or I going feed on something else.”

  “You are the trickster and storyteller. Are you not one of Nan Si? And this is one of your tricks?”

  He jumped over on me, his toes digging into the tree, his arms grabbing branches, his crotch right in front of my face. He bent his head so low that I thought he was about to lick himself, but stared right at me.

  “This is what you wish, I can see it. Killing or dying, either death the same. You welcome either, you want both. I can give it to you. But who is Nan Si?”

  “What are you?”

  “Tell me you see my pale tone, hunter. I am like the one you came in with.”

  “Did you kill him?”

  “He leave you.”

  “Not for the first time.”

  “He don’t know that you gone. This forest has plenty enchantments.”

  “So has every forest.”

  “Know that I am not of the forest, I am not of the Nan Si. Not one, no, not one. I was a man of great breadth with knowledge of science and mathematics.”

  “White science and black math. You were a white scientist. Now you are a was.”

  He nodded, too hard and too long.

  “What did you push?”

  “What was already in the mind. Beyond the fetish priest, and beyond the prophet. Beyond the seer. Even beyond the gods! True wisdom is never without, it is within, was always within. Within always.”

  “And now you are a beast, eating monkeys and their mothers, and making webs out of your cum.”

  “There was fear in you. It is gone, gone, gone. I so hunger for a tale. None of these beasts speak. None have magic.”

  “I seek a flying beast and his boy.”

  “A flying beast? Will you kill him? Will you do it slow? What shall you do with them?”

  “He came past you.”

  “No beast come past here.”

  “This is a forest, and Sasabonsam rests in forest.”

  “This is a forest of life, and he is among the dead things of the world.”

  “So you know him.”

  “Never said I didn’t.”

  He grabbed something above my head and put it in his mouth.

  “I will meet them. In the field or the swamp. Or the sand sea. Or here.”

  I tried to pull my hands but the silk squeezed tighter. I yelled at the white scientist. I jerked forward, trying to pop my cocoon off the tree, but it would not budge. He smiled, watching my struggle. He even grinned when I jerked. I cursed him again.

  “Let me kill him, him and the boy, and I will return for you to kill me. Smash my head open and suck the brain out. Cut me open and show me what first you will eat. Do what you wish. I swear it.”

  He went back to the branch.

  “Kamikwayo is what some called me.”

  “Where did you practice white science?”

  “Practice? Practice is for the student.”

  “The white scientists of Dolingo enter men’s heads so they desire unnatural things.”

  “Dolingon are butchers. A meat shop with all of them. Meat shop! I was neither scientist nor witchman. I was an artist. The greatest student to leave the University of Wakadishu—not even the wisest seers, and teachers, and masters could teach me, for I was wiser than them all. They said, You, Kamikwayo, must devote the rest of your days to the life of the mind. That is what they said, I was there when they said it. Go to the Wakadishu palace of wisdom. I studied the spider to get the secret of his delicious web. You are a small mind, perhaps Gangatom, so you cannot think as the scientist, but think of the web, think of how far it stretches before it breaks. Think it, think it, think it now. I said to all of them, Think of rope that can stick to the man the way web sticks to the fly. Think of armour soft as cotton but can block the spear, and even the arrow. Think of a bridge across the river, the lake, the swamp. Think of all these things and more things if we could make the web just like the spider. Hear thi
s, river man. This scientist could not make the web. I mixed so many spiders, I squeezed their bellies, I taste the thing in my mouth to tell the ingredients apart, but still it slipped away from me like a slimy thing. Slip away! But I worked day and night, and night into day, until I make a potion, I make a glue like the sap from the tree and I take a stick and stretched it like a long line of spit, and it dried, and it cooled and it was solid. And I called my brothers and said, Lo! I made the web. And they were amazed. And they said we have not seen anything of the like in all science and mathematics, brother. And then it cracked, and then it broke, and they laughed, how they laughed, and one said it broke on the floor just as I am broke in the mind, and they laughed even more, and they shamed me and went away to their quarters to sleep and talk of potions to make a woman forget they raped her.

  “I tell you a true thing. I was beyond sad, beyond grief. This science was poisoning me, so I grabbed my bottles and drank the poison. I would sleep and never wake up. And then I did. I woke up with a fever in me that did not cool. I woke up and saw that I slept on the ceiling, not the bed on the floor. I rubbed my eyes and saw long gray monster’s hands come at my face. I cried, but my cry came out a shriek, and I fell to the floor. My arms so long, my legs so long, my face, oh my face, for I tell you more truth, I was the prettiest of the scientists, yes I was, men came at me with grosser propositions than they did concubines, saying, Pretty one, offer your hole, your mind is of no use. I cried, and I screamed and I wailed until I felt nothing. And nothing, nothing was the best. I liked nothing. By noon I loved my nothing. I crawled on the ceiling. I ate food while sitting on the wall and I did not fall. I thought I was going to piss, or cum, but it was a sweet and sticky thing that came out, and I could hang from the wall!

  “My brothers, they did not understand. My brothers all, they all have the failure of the nerves, they achieve nothing because they risk nothing. One shouted, Demon! and threw bottles at me, and even I did not know that I could duck so low that only my elbows and knees were in the air. I spurt web around his face until he could breathe no more. Now listen to this, for I not going to say it again. I killed the first one before he make alarm. The rest, they up in another room doing science on village girls, so I go up to the inner room, one hand carrying precious oil, the other carrying a torch. And I walked on the ceiling and kicked down the door, and one of them inside said, Kamikwayo, what is this madness? Get off the ceiling. And I thought something smart and final to say, something to follow with a wicked laugh. But I had no words, so I shattered the jug of oil, then I threw down the torch, and then I closed the door. Yes I did. How they howled, oh how they howled. The sound was pleasing to me. I ran to the bush, the great forest where I am free to ponder on big things and small things, but who is there to tell me great tales?”

  He pointed at me and grinned.

  “Good hunter, you pulled a story out of me. Now you shall tell me a tale. I go sick from the company of people, and yet I am so very lonely. Even that tells you how much I am alone for no lonely person says so. I know this is true, I know it. Take a story and give me, yes? Take a story and give me.”

  I looked at him, rubbing his legs together, his eyes wide and his hollow cheeks packed from a grin. He would have been an albino or a grown mingi had his white skin not taken on the pale gray of the white scientists.

  “Will you give me freedom if I tell you a story?”

  “Only if it gives me great mirth. Or great sadness.”

  “Oh, you must be moved. Otherwise you bite my head off and eat me in five bites,” I said.

  He looked at me, stunned. I think he said something about not knowing the monkey was my kin, but his web hole dripped silk.

  “No. I am a man and a brother. I am a man!”

  He hopped over to me and grabbed my neck. He snarled and growled, ripped the silk around me, tore my clothes, and scraped one of his claws against my neck.

  “Am I not a man? I ask you. Am I not a man?”

  His eyes went red and his breath was foul.

  “What kind of man eats other men? Am I not a man? Am I not a brother? Am I not man?”

  His voice rose louder and louder, like a shriek.

  “You are a brother. You are my brother.”

  “Then what is my name?”

  “Kami . . . Kami . . . Kami . . . Kola.”

  This is where he was most a man. I could not read his face. Monsters can never hide a face behind a face, but men can.

  “Take a story and give me.”

  “You wish for a story? I shall give you a story. There was a queen, and she had men and women who bowed to her like a queen. But she was no queen, only the sister of Kwash Dara, the North King. He exiled her to Mantha, the hidden fortress on the mountain west of Fasisi, breaking his father’s wish that she stay at court. But that father had broken with his father before that, for each generation has sent the eldest sister to Mantha before she could claim the rightful line to the throne. But that is not the story.”

  This King sister who thinks she is a queen, Lissisolo was her name. She plotted against the King with several men, and Kwash Dara, he punished her. He killed her consort and her children. He could not kill her, for great a curse it is for family blood to kill family blood, even bad blood. So he banished her to the hidden fortress, where she was to be a nun the rest of her life, but this King sister, she schemed. This King sister, she plotted. This King sister, she schemed more. She found one of the hundreds of princes with no kingdoms in Kalindar and took him as a husband in secret so that when she gave birth to a child he would be no bastard. She hid the child to save him from the anger of the King, for he was angry indeed when his spy told him of the marriage and the birth. And he set out to kill the child. But that is not the story.

  This King sister, she lost the child, or men stole him, and she hired me and others to find the child. And we found him, captive to bloodsuckers, and a man with hands like his feet and wings like a bat, and breath like the stench of long-dead men, which gave his brother joy to eat, for he prefers the blood. And even as we returned the child, for there were several of us, there was something about this child, a smell that was there and not there. But men of the King were after the child and the King sister so we rode with them to the Mweru, where the prophecy said they would be safe, though another prophecy says no man can ever leave the Mweru. But that is not the story.

  I tell you true. Something about that boy would trouble the gods, or anyone who desires his heart always to be at peace. I was the only one who saw, but I said nothing. So he stayed in the Mweru with his mother, and with the personal guards of women and the rebel infantry of men who stood guard outside the lands, for no man who enters the Mweru leaves. And it so happened that the one demon we did not kill, the one with bat wings, the one they call Sasabonsam, he came for the boy and he snatched him, or so they said and will still say. And he flew away with the boy, who never screamed, though he could scream, never shouted, though he shouted at many things, never, ever raised alarm, though his mother was always expecting an intruder. You cannot push the person who jumped. And the bat man and the boy, they did much terrible sport. Much that is vile and disgusting, much that would outrage the lowest god and the wickedest witch. And one day they came upon a tree where . . . they came upon a place where love lived. The boy was with him, someone wrote in blood on sand. A beautiful hand wrote on the sand in blood. But that is not the story.

  For the man who lived in the house of love, he came upon the message written in blood, by one who was dead. And he was beyond words, but filled himself with grief and rage, for they were dead. They were all dead. Some of them only half was left. Some of them half-eaten, some of them drained of blood, and drained empty. And this man he cried, and this man he wailed, and this man he cursed the silence of the gods, then cursed them too. And this man, he buried them, but could not bury the one made of spirits, for though they could not kill her, the kil
ling ground made her go mad and she roams all the way to the sand sea, groaning a spirit song. And this man fell to his knees nine times in great grief, and profound dismay, and magnificent sorrow. And this man, after season upon season of grief, let that grief sink, and harden, and turn into rage, which sunk, and hardened, and turned into purpose. For he knew who the boy came with, or who came with the boy. He knew it was the beast whose brother the Leopard killed, though the beast came and took his revenge on him. He said to his friend, All these deaths are on your hands. And he sharpened his axes and dipped his knives in viper spit, and he set out for the Mweru, for that is where the boy came from and that is where he would go back to. Here is truth, the man did not think on this very long, for he was still beyond thought. Here is deeper truth. He would kill the boy and whoever protected him, and the bat and whoever stood in his way. He knew nothing of the ways of bats, but knew the ways of boys, and all boys make their way home to their mothers.

  This man rode one horse into the dirt, another one into the sand, one into bush, and one right into the Mweru. The night was open in all the lands, and outside the lands was the infantry. Who knows how many were lazy from food, or asleep? He came upon them, rode through them with a torch in his hand, kicking over pots and trampling one soldier, and they hurled spears and missed, and searched for arrows but were too tired or too drunk and shot at each other, and when a few roused themselves enough to grab spear, and bow, and clubs, they saw where he was headed, and stopped. For if death seems so sweet to him, who are we to stop him, one of them must have said.

  And what did this man wear other than rage and sadness? He rode the horse through the harsh soil of the Mweru, lighter than sand and thicker than mud, past springs that would boil off man flesh and stank of sulfur. Past fields where nothing grew and underfoot old bones of men cracked and broke. One of those lands where the sun never rose. He came upon a lake of black, brown, and gray that ate away at the shore and he rode around it, for who knew what creature lived in there? He wanted to shout at the lake that he would take any monster that came out for delaying him, but rode around.