Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“He would have me give suckle. What mockery they would have sung had a griot lived in these lands. You will say what must there be in a land with no griot. Mark it, even though he was past six in years, and was a boy soon a man. He came to my breasts before he even looked at my face.”

The man turned to where the voice was coming from. Five torches lined a wall to his right, but lit nothing. Below it, dark and shadow, a throne maybe, but he could not see anything above two thin pillars, carved like birds.

“Give a man a free hand, he rub it all over you. Give a boy … Well, he would not be denied it. And what would the gods say, about a woman who denied her child food? Her boy? Yes, they have been blind and deaf, but which god will still not judge a mother for how she raised the future King? Look at me, what milk could be in these breasts?”

She paused as if waiting for an answer.

“And yet even full men, you all must suck the breast. And my precious boy. Come to the breast like he come to war. Should I tell you this, that he almost bit my nipples off? The left, then the right? Tore the skin, cut the flesh, and still he kept sucking. Well, I am a woman. I shouted at him and he would not stop, his eyes closed like how you men close when you cum. My boy, I had to grab his neck and strangle him until he stopped. My boy, he looked at me and he smiled. Smiled. His teeth red from my blood. From then I gave him a servant girl. She was not stupid in the head. She cut herself every night so that he could suck. Is there strangeness in this? Are we strange? You are Ku. You cut the cow’s throat to drink the blood, is there strangeness in such?”

The man said nothing. He grabbed the bars of the cage.

“What you think is all over your face. You look at me, with your disgust and your judgment. But do you know what it is to have child? What you would do for it?”

“I do not know. Perhaps abandon him to be killed. No, sold. No, stolen, and raised by vampires. And maybe always have someone to ask someone to ask someone find the little one, with lie after lie so that no one would even know that you had a son. Is that what it is like to have a child?”

“Quiet.”

“Finest of mothers you must be.”

“I will not let you near him.”

“Did you let him go or did you lose him again, fine mother?”

“You seem to think my son has done wickedness.”

“Your son is wickedness. A devil—”

“You know nothing. Devils are born. All the griots sing of this.”

“You have no griot. And devils are made. You make them. You make them by leaving them to anyone who fancies a—”

“You dare to know what goes on in my head? You judge me, a queen? Who are you to tell me what to do with my child? You have none. Not a single one.”

“Not a single one.”

“What?”

“Not a single one.”

And the man told her a story: