Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“And so would you be if your mother believed in the old ways,” she said before I saw her. Her voice loud and coarse, as if in her throat was sand. A few children ran off with the Leopard. I saw her robes next, robes like I haven’t seen since the city, yellow and with a pattern of green snakes and flowing, so the snakes looked alive. She came down the steps and into the room, which really was a hall, an open space with a wall to the front and back, and the sides open to the branches, leaves, and sky mist. The robes reached right under her plump breasts and an infant boy was sucking the left one. The red-and-yellow head wrap made her head look to burst in flames. She looked older, but when she came in closer I saw a look I would see more than once, of a woman not aged but ravaged. The boy was sucking hard with its eyes closed. She grabbed my chin and looked at my face, tilted her head and peered into my eyes. I tried to hold her stare, but looked away. She laughed and let go, but still stared at me. Beads upon beads, a valley of necklaces right down to her nipples. A ring hanging from a pierced bottom lip. A double pattern of dot scars from her left cheek curling up to her brow and down the right. I knew the mark.

“You are Gangatom,” I said.

“And you don’t know who you are,” she said. She looked down at my feet all the way up to my head, which was getting wild but not as wild as the Leopard’s. She looked at me as if I was answering questions without opening my mouth.

“But what can you know, running around with these two boys?”

She smiled. Both were still playing with children. A baby was on the Leopard’s back and Kava was making noises and crossing his eyes for a girl whiter than river clay.

“You have never seen the like,” she said.

“An albino? Never.”

“But you know the name. City learning,” she huffed out.

“I carry some stink from the city?”

“Yours is the place where a child born with no colour is a curse from the gods. Disease comes to the family, and barrenness comes to the women. Better toss her out for the hyena, and pray for another child.”

“I’m from no place. Crocodiles on the hunt have more noble hearts than you people of the bush.”

“And where do noble hearts live, boy, in the city?”

“Boy is what my father calls me.”

“Mother of gods, we have a man among us.”

“Nobody delivers a child to the hyena or the vulture. You call the collector of children.”

“And what your collector do with them in your precious city? How they make use of a girl like her?” she said, and pointed at the girl, who giggled. “First they send messages with birds in the sky and drums on the ground, maybe even with note on leaf or on paper to those who would read. Saying look we have caught an albino child. Who these people? Talk to me, little boy. Do you know which people?”

I nodded.

“Sorcerers, and merchants that sell to sorcerers. For the whole child, your collector can fetch a good price. But for real fortune he auctions each part to highest bidder. The head for the swamp witch. The right leg for the barren woman. The bones grounded to a grain, so that your grandfather’s cock will stay hard for several women. The fingers for amulets, the hair for whatever a witchman tells you. A good collector of babies can make fifty more for her parts than she would by just selling the whole child. And double for the albino. Your collector even cuts the baby into pieces himself. The witches pay more if they know the baby was still alive for part of it. Fear blood sauces their brews. So that the noblewomen of your city can keep your noblemen, and so that your concubines never bear children for their masters. That is what they do with little girls like her in the city where you come from.”

“How do you know I come from the city?”

“Your smell. Living with Ku won’t mask it.”

She did not laugh, though I thought she would. That city was not mine to defend. Those streets and those halls brought nothing but disgust in me. But I did not like her speaking as if she had been waiting for years for a man she could laugh at. It was growing tiresome, men and women looking at me once and thinking they knew my kind, and of my kind there was not much to know.

“Why did Kava bring me here?”

“You think I tell him to bring you?”

“Games are for boys.”

“Then leave, little boy.”

“Except you told him to bring me here. What do you want, witch?”

“You call me witch?”

“Witch, crone, scar-speckled Gangatom bitch, pick the one you like.”

She smiled quick to hide the scowl, but I saw it.

“You care for nothing.”

“And a crone with a boy sucking a tit with no milk will not change that.”