“You can’t see,” he said.
I couldn’t see without blinking, couldn’t draw without shaking, I couldn’t point without shifting to the wrong leg. I could release the arrow, but never when he said so and the arrows never hit anywhere I pointed. I thought of aiming for the sky just so it would strike the ground. Truth, I did not know the Leopard could laugh this much. But he would not leave until I shot an arrow through the hole in the tree, and every time I struck the tree, it slapped me with a branch that was either always there or never there. Night sky was heavy before I shot an arrow through the target. He grabbed arrows and started walking, his way of saying we were done. We went down a path that I did not recognize, with rock and sand and stone covered in wet moss.
“This used to be a river,” he said.
“What happened to it?”
“It hates the smell of man and flows under the earth whenever we approach.”
“Truly?”
“No. It’s the end of rainy season.”
I was about to say that he has been living with the Sangoma for too long, but didn’t. Instead I said, “Are you a Leopard that changes to man or a man that changes to Leopard?”
He walked off, stepping through the mud, climbing the rocks in what used to be a river. Branches and leaves blocked the stars.
“Sometimes I forget to change back.”
“To man.”
“To Leopard.”
“What happens when you forget?”
He turned around and looked at me, then pressed his lips and sighed.
“There’s no future in your form. Smaller. Slower, weaker.”
I didn’t know what to say other than “You look faster, stronger, and wiser to me.”
“Compared to whom? You know what a real Leopard would have done? Eaten you by now. Eaten everyone.”
He didn’t frighten me, nor did he intend to. Everything he stirred was below my waist.
“The witch tells better jokes,” I said.
“She told you she was a witch?”
“No.”
“Do you know the ways of witches?”
“No.”
“So you either speak through your ass or fart through your mouth. Be safe, boy. You would have made a terrible meal. My father changed and forgot how to change back. Spending the rest of his life in the misery of this shape.”
“Where is he now?”
“They locked him in a cell for madmen, when a hunter came upon him as a man fucking a cheetah. He escaped, boarded a ship, and sailed east. Or so I heard.”
“You heard?”
“Leopards are too cunning, boy. We can only live alone; leave it up to us we’d steal each other’s kill. I have not seen my mother since I could kill an antelope myself.”
“And you don’t kill the children. That is a surprise.”
“That would make me one of you. I know where my mother keeps. I have seen my brothers, but where they run is their business and where I run is mine.”
“I had no brothers. Then I came to the village to hear I had one but the Gangatom killed him.”
“And your father became your grandfather, Asani told me. And your mother?”
“My mother cooked sorghum and kept her legs open.”
“You could have a family of one and still drive them apart.”
“I don’t hate her. I have nothing for her. When she dies I will not mourn, but I will not laugh.”
“My mother suckled me for three moons and then fed me meat. That was enough. Then again I’m a beast.”
“My grandfather was a coward.”
“Your grandfather is the reason you’re alive.”
“Better to give me something to be proud of instead.”
“For you have no pride already. What would the gods say?”
He came up to me, close enough for me to feel his breath on my face.
“Your face has gone sour,” he said.
He stared deep into me as if trying to find the lost face.
“You left because your grandfather is a coward.”
“I left for other reasons,” I said.
He turned away and spread his arms wide as he walked, as if talking to the trees, not me.
“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?”