by Marlon James
“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.”
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.
On the path two bodies blocked the way, a boy and the albino girl, each with a spear stuck in the back. Everywhere was red from the blood of children, and the huts were on fire. The lower hut had caved into a huge mound of ash and smoke, and the middle, weak from burned beams, split in two. One half fell into the rubble of the lower hut. The tree swayed, black and naked, all its leaves burning off. Fire raged in the top hut. Half of the roof was burning, half of the wall black and smoking. I leapt for the first step and it broke under me. Falling, tumbling, I was still rolling when the Leopard jumped up safer steps and ran straight into the hut. He had kicked a hole into the back wall, still safe from flames, and kept kicking till it was big enough. He came out a cat, holding a boy by the neck of his shirt, but the boy did not move. Leopard nodded towards the hut, telling me there were more in there.
Inside the flames were screaming, laughing, jumping leaf to leaf, wood to wood, cloth to cloth. On the floor, the boy with no legs, holding on to the boy with giraffe legs, and screaming for him to move. I pointed to the opening and picked up Giraffe Boy. The boy with no legs rolled through the opening and I looked around for anybody I had missed.
The Sangoma was on the ceiling, still, her eyes wide open, her mouth in a silent scream. A spear went right through her chest, but something pinned her flat to the ceiling as if it was the floor, and it was not the spear. Witchwork. There was only one person I could think of who could do witchwork. Somebody had broken through her enchantments and made it all the way to her floor. Fire hopped on her dress and she burst into flames.
I ran out with the boy.
The twin boys came out of the bushes, their eyes wide open and mouths loose. A look I knew would never leave them, no matter how many moons. The Leopard pulled away a dead boy to see another, an albino, alive and under him. He screamed and tried to run but stumbled and the Leopard grabbed him. I placed Giraffe Boy on the grass when blue Smoke Girl appeared, trembling so hard she was breaking into two, three, four girls. Then she ran off, vanished, reappeared at the edge of the forest. She vanished, and appeared in front of me again, yelling quiet. She ran off again, stopped, ran, vanished, app
eared, stopped, and looked at me until I saw that she wanted me to follow.
I heard them before I saw them. Hyenas.
Off behind a fallen tree three of them were fighting over a piece of flesh, scowling, ripping, biting each other to get a grip, and swallowing chunks whole. I shut it out, any thought of what they could be eating. Four more had chased a little boy right up a tree, snarling and laughing, mocking before the kill. Smoke Girl appeared right in front of the boy and frightened the pack. They backed away but not far enough for the boy to run. I climbed a tree fifty paces away, and jumped from branch to branch, tree to tree as I saw the Leopard do. From one branch high I jumped to one low, then swung back up to a branch on high. I scrambled down one branch and leapt onto another, slid down the trunk that split in two like a slingshot, through leaves slapping me in the face, jumped and grabbed another branch that bent from my weight and then threw me up.
The hyenas were cackling, setting up order, deciding who should kill him. And that tree was tall with thin branches, not in talk with the trees around it. I jumped from a branch on top, grabbed another, swung from it, and landed in the tree, breaking all the branches around me, scraping my legs and left cheek and swallowing leaves. The four hyenas moved in closer and Smoke Girl tried to hold the boy. Large hyenas, the biggest in the pack. Female. I threw a dagger and missed a paw. One jumped back, right into my second throw, which struck her head. One ran off, two stayed and snarled and cackled.
A hatchet in each hand, a knife in my mouth, I jumped from on high, down right in front of one of the remaining two, and double-chopped her face quick, yanking, chopping, yanking, chopping until blood and flesh splashed my face and blinded me. She knocked me over and bit into my left hand, tearing at it, crushing it, making me gnash teeth and frightening the boy. The second tried to bite my feet. I stabbed the first hyena in the neck. Pulled out and stabbed again. Stabbed again. Stabbed again. It fell. The hyena snapping at my feet moved in to bite. I swung my good hand and the knife sliced across her face, bursting one eye open. She squealed and ran off. Two other hyenas bit into the little flesh left by the others and took off.
