Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“Of course. You left to find purpose. Because waking, eating, shitting, and fucking are all good things, but none of them is a purpose. So you searched for it, and purpose took you to the Ku. But your Ku purpose was to kill people you don’t even know. My word stands. There is no future in your form. And here we are. Here you are, and Gangatom women wash their children right across that river. You could go kill a few. Right a wrong. Even please the gods and their vile sense of balance,” the Leopard said.

“You blaspheming the gods?”

“Blaspheming means you believe.”

“You don’t believe in gods?”

“I don’t believe in belief. No, that is false. I do believe there will be antelope in the woods and fish in the river and men will always want to fuck, which is the only one of their purposes that pleases me. But we talk of yours. Your purpose is to kill Gangatom. Instead you run to a Gangatom woman’s house and play with mingi children. Asani I could read in one day, but you? You are a mystery to me.”

“What did you read about Asani?”

“You can walk away from it.”

“I have walked away from it.”

“But it’s still in your heart. Men killed your father and brother and yet it’s your own family that makes you angry.”

“I so tire of people trying to read me.”

“Stop spreading open like a scroll.”

“I am alone.”

“Thank the gods, or your brother would be your uncle.”

“That is not what I mean.”

“I know what you mean. You are alone. But it makes your heart sick to be alone. We do not have this in common. Learn not to need people.”

I could smell the huts above us.

“Do you like fucking better as man or beast?” I said. He smiled.

“There is salt in that question!”

I nodded.

“I like his chest on my chest, his lips on my neck, looking at him as he enjoys me. He likes when my tail whips his face.”

“Is that what you read of him?”

“I read feet that have taken him as far as he can go.”

“He has love for you and you for him?”

“Love? I know hunger, fear, and heat. I know when hot blood spills into your mouth when you bite down in the flesh of fresh kill. Asani, he was just a man who walked into my territory that I could just as well kill. But he found me on a night with a red moon.”

“I do not understand.”

“No you do not. As for territory …” He walked from one tree to the next, and the next, marking the ground with piss. He walked up to the tree that took us up and wet the base.

“Hyenas,” he said.

I jumped. “Hyenas are coming?”

“Hyenas are here. They watch us from afar. Wouldn’t you … no, you don’t know their smell. They know who lives up this tree. So is that the way with you? Once you know the scent you can follow it anywhere?”

“Yes.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“I could find my grandfather right now, with my eyes closed, even with him being seven or eight days away. And either of his three mistresses, including one who moved to another city. Sometimes there are too many and my mind skips and goes dark and comes back with everything at once, as if I woke up in the city square and everyone is screaming at me in a language I don’t know. When I was young I had to cover my nose, almost killing myself when they got too loud. I still go mad sometimes.”

He stared at me for a long time. I looked away at the weeds glowing in the dark and tried to make out shapes. When I turned back to him, he was still looking at me.

“And the smells you don’t know?” he said.

“A fart might as well be from a flower.”

Third story.

It took the night for me to know we had been with the Sangoma two moons.

“Ten and seven years I studied in the ithwasa, the initiation to become Sangoma,” she said.

I went to the top hut this and every morning when I felt her calling me. Smoke Girl ran up my legs and chest and sat on my head. Ball Boy bounced around me. Sangoma was feeling the beads of a necklace she had buried three nights before, and whispering a chant. The boy she used to suckle kept running into the wall, walking backward, running into the wall, again and again, and she did not stop him. The day before she told the Leopard to take me out and teach me archery. All I learned was that I should try something else. Now I throw the hatchet. Even two at the same time.

“Ten and seven years of purity, humbling myself before the ancestors, learning divination and the skill of the master I called Iyanga. I learned to close my eye and find things hidden. Medicine to undo witchcraft. This is a sacred hut. Ancestors live here, ancestors and children, some of them ancestors reborn. Some of them, just children with gifts. Just as you are a child with gifts.”

“I am not—”

“Modest, true. That much is plain, boy. You are also neither patient, wise, nor even very strong.”

“Yet you had Kava and the Leopard bring this boy of no quality here. Should I leave?” I turned to go.

“No!”

That was louder than she meant, and we both knew it.

“Do as you wish. Go back to your grandfather posing as your father,” she said.

“What do you want, wit—Sangoma?”