Two years later I went to see my mingi children. I came from Malakal, taking a different route than used by Ku. Giraffe Boy was now as tall as an actual giraffe, his legs reaching my head; his face, a little older but still young. He saw me first when I entered the Gangatom township. The albino, I did not know was the oldest until I saw that he grew the most, thick in muscle and a little taller in height, and very handsome. I couldn’t tell if he really grew up in the quick or had I only now noticed. Even as he ran to me, the women’s eyes followed him. The twins were in the bush hunting. The boy with no legs got even more fat and round, and rolled himself everywhere. You will be useful in war, I said to him. Are you all warriors now? The albino nodded while the boy with no legs giggled and rolled right into me, knocking me over. I did not see Smoke Girl.
And then after a moon I went walking with Giraffe Boy and said, Smoke Girl, does she hate me still? He did not know how to answer me, because he had never known hate. Every man who comes into her life leaves, he said as we walked back to his home. At the door, the women raising him said, The chief is dying and the man to be the next chief has bad feelings for all Ku, even one who lives with other people in houses of stone.
You don’t need their names.
As for the Leopard, five years passed before I met him at Kulikulo Inn. He was at a table, waiting for me.
“I need you to help me find a fly,” he said.
“Then consult the spider,” I said.
He laughed. The years had changed him, even if he looked the same. His jaw was still strong, his eyes, light pools where you saw yourself. Whiskers and wild hair that made him look more lion than panther. I wondered if he was still as quick. For long I wondered if he aged as a Leopard or as a man. Malakal was a place of civil butchery, and not a city for werefolk. But Kulikulo Inn never judged men by their form or their dress, even if they wore nothing but dust or red ochre spread with cow fat, as long as their coin was strong and flowed like a river. Still, he pulled skins from a sack and wrapped something coarse and hairy about his lap, then draped shiny leathers over his back. This was new. The animal had learned the shame of men, the same man who once said that the Leopard would have been born with skirts if he was supposed to wear any. He asked for wine and strong drink that would have killed a beast.
“No embrace for the man who saved your life more times than a fly blinks?”
“Does the fly blink?”
He laughed again and jumped from his stool. I took his hands, but he pulled away and grabbed me, pulling in tight. I was ready to say this feels like something from boy lovers in the east until I felt myself go soft in his arms, weak, so weak I barely hugged back. I felt like crying, like a boy, and I nodded the feeling out of me. I pulled away first.
“You have changed, Leopard,” I said.
“Since I sat down?”
“Since I saw you last.”
“Ay, Tracker, wicked times have left their mark. Are your days not wicked?”
“My days are fattening.”
He laughed. “But look at you, talking to the cat of change.” His mouth was quivering, as if he would say more.
“What?” I asked.
He pointed. “Your eye, you fool. What kind of enchantment is that? Will you not speak of it?”
“I have forgotten,” I said.
“You have forgotten there is a jackal’s eye in your face.”
“Wolf.”
He moved in closer and I smelled beer. Now I was looking at him as deep as he was looking at me.
“I am already waiting for the day you finally tell this one to me—lusting for it, I am. Or dreading it.”
I missed that laugh.
“Now, Tracker. I found no boys for sport in your city. How do you make do with night hunger?”
“I quench my thirst instead,” I said, and he laughed.
It was true that in those years I lived as monks do. Other than when travels took me far and there were comely boys, or not as comely eunuchs, who though not pretty were more skilled in love play. And even women would sometimes do.
“What have you been doing the last few years, Tracker?”
“Too much and too little,” I said.
“Tell me.”
These are the stories I told the Leopard as I drank wine and he drank masuku beer at Kulikulo Inn.
One year I lived in Malakal, before I moved to Kalindar, the disputed kingdom at the border with the South. Home of great horse lords. Truly, the place was more a set of stables with lodging for men to fuck, sleep, and conspire. No matter which side you came from, the city could only be reached by hard land journey. War-loving people, bitter and vengeful in hate, passionate and vigorous in love, who despised the gods and challenged them often. So of course I made it home.
So in Kalindar was a Prince with no princedom, who said his daughter was kidnapped by bandits on the trail north. This is what they wanted in ransom: silver, the weight of ten and seven horses. Hear this, the Prince sent his servant to get me, which he tried to, in a way keeping with the Prince’s foul manners. I sent him back missing two fingers.
The Prince’s second servant bowed and asked me to please the Prince with my appearance. So I went to his palace, which was just five rooms, each stacked on the other, in a courtyard overrun with chickens. But he had gold. He wore it on his teeth and stringed it through his eyebrows and when the privy boy passed by, he carried a shit pot of pure gold.
“You, the man who took my guard’s fingers, I have use for you,” he said.
“I cannot find a kingdom you have not lost,” I said. The Kalindar have no double tongue, so the remark went right back out to sea.
“Kingdom? I don’t need kingdom finding. Bandits kidnapped my daughter, your Princess, five days ago. They have demanded a ransom, silver the weight of ten and seven horses.”
“Will you pay it?”
The Prince rubbed his bottom lip, still looking in the mirror.
“First I need trustful word that your Princess is still alive. It has been said that you have a nose.”
“Indeed. You wish that I find her and bring her back?”
“Listen to the way he speaks to princes! No. I only wish you find her and give me good report. Then I shall decide.”
He nodded to an old woman, who threw a doll at me. I picked it up and smelled her.
“The price is seven times ten gold pieces,” I said.
“The price is I spare your life for your insolence,” he said.
This Prince with no princedom was as frightening as a baby crying over shitting itself, but I went searching for the Princess, because sometimes, the work is its own pay. Especially when her scent took me not to the north roads, or the bandit towns, or even a shallow grave in the ground, but less than a morning’s walk from her father’s little palace. In a hut near a place that used to be a busy market for fruit and meat, but is now wild bush. I found her at night. She and her woman-snatchers, one of whom was reeling from a slap to the side of his head.
“Ten and seven horses? Is that all I am to you, ten and seven? And in silver? Was your birth so low that you think this is what I am worth?”
She cussed and snarled for so long that it began to bore me, and still she cussed. I could tell the kidnapper was coming to think mayhaps he should pay the Prince to take her back. I smelled the shape-shifter’s gift on him, a cat like the Leopard. A Lion, perhaps, and the other men lying about were his pride and the woman by the fire looking at them both with a scowl was his mate until this princess. All of them squeezed into a room with the Princess yapping like cockatoo. This was the plan: that the Lion and his pride kidnap the Princess and demand a sum. A sum which her father would gladly pay because his daughter is worth more than silver and gold. The ransom, the Princess would use to pay mercenaries to overthrow this Prince, who had no princedom to overthrow. At first I thought she was like those boys and girls kidnapped too young, who in the midst of captivity start to show loyalty to their captors, even love. But then she said, “I should have picked Leopards; at least they have cunning.” The head Lion man roared so loud it frightened people in the street.
“I think I know how this story ends,” the Leopard said. “Or maybe I just know you. You told the Prince his daughter’s plot, then slipped away as quiet as you came.”
“Good Leopard, what would be the fun in that? Besides, my days were long and business slow.”
“You were bored.”
“Like a god waiting for man to surprise him.”
He grinned.
“I went back to the Prince and gave good report. I said, Good Prince, I have yet to find the bandits, but on my way, I did pass by a house near the old market, where men were conspiring to take your crown.”
“What? Are you sure of it? Which men?” he asked.
“I did not look. Instead I hurried back to you. Now I will go find your daughter,” I said.
“What should I do with these men?”
“Have men sneak up to the house like thieves in the night and burn it to the ground.”
The Leopard stared at me, ready to pull the story out of my mouth.
“Did he?”
“Who knows? But next moon I saw the daughter at her window, her head a black stump. Then I cursed Kalindar and moved back to Malakal.”
“That is your story? Tell me another.”
“No. You tell me of your travels. What does a Leopard do in new lands where he cannot hunt?”
“A Leopard finds flesh wherever he can find it. And then there is flesh he eats! But you know how I am. Beasts like us were never made for one place. But nobody traveled as far as I. Boarded a ship I did, eager I was. I went to sea, then boarded another ship and it went farther out to sea for moons and moons.”
He climbed up in the chair and stooped on the seat. I knew he would.
“I saw great sea beasts, including one that looked like a fish but could swallow an entire ship. I found my father.”