Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Day eight or nine or ten, I lost count of days, and ways to mark them. They let me out in open savannah. I could not remember them letting me out, just being out. The savannah grass was tall but already brown for dry season. Then I saw the old one and the middle one far off, but I knew it was them. I heard the rest, rumbling through the bush and then charging. The whole clan. I ran. With every step my mind said, Stop. This is the end of you. Any end is a good end. Even this. They strangled prey before ripping them apart. They gave themselves a thrill tearing flesh while the animal was still alive. I didn’t know which was true or false, which might be why I ran. The rumble of them as they came closer and closer, while I burned and bled down my legs, and my legs forgot how to run. Three of them, male, jumped out of the bush and knocked me down. Their growls in my ears, their spit burned my eyes, their bites cut into my legs. Many more jumped in, blocking the sky with dark, and then I woke up.

I woke up in sand. The sun was already halfway across the sky and everything was white. No hole, no bush, no bones all about, and no smell of hyena nearby. Sand all around. I did not know what to do, so I started to walk away from the sun. How did I get here and why did they let me go? I have never learned why. I thought I was in a dream, or perhaps the last few days were a dream, until I touched my left eye and felt cloth. Then I thought they never wanted to kill me, only leave me lame, for there was dignity in a kill and shame in not being worth even that. The sun burned my back. She was angry at me turning my back to her? Then kill me already. I was tired of it all, man and beast threatening to kill me, sucking my want to live, but never killing me. I walked until there was nothing to do but walk. I walked through day and night. Cold swept across the sand and I fell asleep. I woke up in the back of a cart of pigs and chickens. Fasisi we go, said an old man as he whipped his two donkeys. Maybe the man was kind, maybe he planned to sell me into slavery. Whatever the reason for his kindness, I jumped from the cart as we rode over rough, uneven road, and watched him continue, not aware that I was gone.

I knew Nyka was not in Fasisi. His scent was already out of town, many days away, in Malakal, perhaps. But he left my room as it was, which surprised me. Did not even take the money. I took what I needed and left everything else.

The closer I got to Malakal the stronger it was, his scent, though I told myself I was not looking for him, and I would not kill him when I found him. I would do much worse. I would search for his mother, whom he claims to hate but always speaks of, and kill her, and switch her head with an antelope’s, sewing them to each other’s bodies. Or I would do something so evil and vengeful it was beyond me being able to think of it. Or I would leave him alone, and go away for years, and let him go fat in the thought of me long dead, and then strike. But as soon as I was walking streets he walked, and stopping at places he stopped, I knew he was in Malakal. In a day I knew the street. Before the sun went down I knew the house. Before night, the room.

I waited until I was stronger. The rest came from hate. He paid his innkeeper to lie for him and had taught him how to make poisons. So when I came into the innkeeper’s kitchen, he tried to act as if he was not startled. I did not ask for Nyka. I said to him, I am going upstairs to kill him. And I will kill you before you can reach the poison in your cabinet. He laughed and said, Do what you want, I care not for him. But he pulled a dart out of his hair and threw it at me. I dodged; it hit the wall behind me and started to smoke. He ran but I grabbed him by the same hair and pulled him back. Here is how you will not reach, I said, and placed his right hand on the counter and chopped it off. He screamed and ran off. The innkeeper made it to the door, even opened it halfway, before my hatchet struck the back of his head. I left him there in the doorway and went upstairs. His smell was everywhere, but he refused to show himself. Nyka might have been a thief and a liar and a betrayer of men but he was no coward. The scent was strongest in the cupboard and it was not a dead smell. I opened the cupboard and all of Nyka was hanging on a hook. His skin. But just his skin, what was left of it. Nyka shed his skin. I have seen men, women, and beasts with strange gifts but never one who could shed like a snake. And with the skin gone, he left the scent behind too. Somehow he is a new man now.

“Then how did you know it was him coming up the steps?” Bunshi asked.

“He always chewed khat. Keeps him alive, he used to say. You might ask if I ever wondered why the hyenas let me go. I have not. Because to wonder is to think of them, and I have not thought of them until you came through my window. He did not even notice my eye. My eye, he did not even notice.”