“Fuck the gods, if you are not the worst of the cats,” I said.
I held back a few paces, until I too lost myself in shadow. I saw the boy trying to go from stump to stump, ruin to ruin, crumbling wall to crumbling wall. Truth, I could have watched him for as long as it was dark. He fell deep in the ruins that were not that deep, and tried to walk himself out of them. As he began to run, his smell changed a little—it always does when fear or ecstasy takes over. He tripped over my foot and landed in the dirt. Perhaps my foot was waiting for him.
“What is your name?” I asked.
“No business it be for you to know,” he said, and stood up. He puffed his chest up and looked past me. He looked older than before, one of those who might be ten and five years, but were still ten in the mind. I looked at him, wondered what would be left when the Leopard no longer had use for him.
“I could leave you in these ruins and you will be lost until daylight. And where will your precious Leopard be then, tell me?”
“Is just brick and shit nobody want.”
“Careful. The ancestors will hear you, and then you will never leave.”
“All him friends fool as you?”
The first one I saw, I picked up and threw at him. He caught it in the quick. Good. But he dropped it as soon as he saw it was a skull.
“He don’t need you.”
I turned away, back to where I knew the gate would be.
“Where you going?”
“Back to drink some good soup from a bad woman. Tell your, whatever you call him, that you said he didn’t need me, so I left. That is if you can find your way out of the ruins.”
“Wait!”
I turned around.
“How I get out of this place?”
I walked past him, not waiting on him to follow. I stepped in cold ash, the fire long gone out. Sticking out of the dirt were pieces of white cloth, candlewax, rotten fruit, and green beads that might have been a necklace. Someone tried to reach an ancestor or the gods more than a moon ago. We made it out of the ruins and the last of the trees to the edge of the valley. Another night with no moon.
“What do they call you?” I asked.
“Fumeli,” he said to the ground.
“Guard your heart, Fumeli.”
“What that mean?”
I sat down on the rock. Foolishness it would be to try to go down to the valley in this dark, though I could smell the Leopard was halfway down already.
“We sleep till first light.”
“But he—”
“Will be right down there fast asleep until we wake him tomorrow.”
Two thoughts while I slept that night.
The Leopard says too many things that slip off him like water does oil, but sticks to me like a stain. Truth, there are times I feel like I should wash him out. I am always happy to see him, but never sad when he is gone. He asked me if I was happy and I still didn’t understand either the question or what knowledge he would get from an answer. Nobody smiles more than the Leopard but he speaks the same in happiness and sadness. I think both are faces he puts on before matters that strike deep, first in the heart. Happiness? Who needs happy when there is masuku beer? And spicy meat, good coin, and warm bodies to lie with? Besides, to be a man in my family is to let go of happiness, which depends on too many things one cannot control.
Something to fight for, or nothing to lose, which makes you a finer warrior? I have no answer.
I thought of the children more than I believed I would. Soon it was something I felt like a slight pound in the head, or a quickening of the heart, that even when I told myself it was gone, there was no worry, and I have done good by those children, or at least the best I could do, the feeling came that I had not. A dark evening becomes darker. I wondered if it was yet another one of the things the Sangoma left as a stain on me, or maybe it was a mild madness.
I woke up to the boy bent over me.
“Your other eye shine in the dark, like a dog,” he said. I would slap him but a new cut above his right eye glimmered with blood.
“How slippery the rocks are in the morning. Especially if you don’t know the way.”
The boy hissed. He picked up the Leopard’s bow and quiver. I wondered if any person ever made me shiver like the Leopard did this boy.
“And I do not snore,” I said, but he was already running down into the valley, until he stopped.
He walked, he sat on a rock and pondered, he waited until I was just paces behind him, and set off again. But not very far, for he didn’t know where to go.
“Rub his belly,” I said. “It pleases him. Great pleasure.”
“How do you know that? You must rub all sorts of men.”
“He is a cat. A cat loves that you rub his belly. Just like a dog. Is there nothing up in that head of yours?”
The ground turned red and damp, and green shrubs popped up like bumps. The farther down we walked, the larger the valley looked. It went straight to the end of the sky and beyond that. The wise ones said that the valley was once just a little river, a goddess that had forgotten she was a god. That little river snaked through the valley, washed away ground, dirt after dirt, stone after stone, deeper and deeper until by the time of this age of man, she had left valleys that dug so deep that man started to see the opposite, that it was not land lying so low, but mountain reaching so high. Looking up as we went down, and looking across the sky and the mist, we saw mountains pressed beside mountains, each one bigger than cities. So high that they took the colour of sky, not bush. It was enough to keep your eye to the sky and not the ground. The dirt as it reddened, the shrubs as they gave way to trees, the river clear like glass, and in it, fat nymphs, with broad heads and wide mouths, not hiding in the day, and knowing that they were not the prey this caravan hunts for.
The boy, whose name I already forgot, dashed after the Leopard as soon as we came down the mountain. Truth, I knew he was not his Leopard, and I knew the boy would make this cat very angry. He grabbed the Leopard’s tail, and he swung around and roared, crouched, and leapt at the boy. Another roar came from near the first caravan and the Leopard, pinning the boy, trotted away. The boy jumped up, brushed himself off before anyone noticed, and ran after his Leopard, sitting as a man on the grass, looking out to the river. He turned to me and smiled, but said nothing to the boy.
“Your bow and quiver. I bring it,” the boy said.
The Leopard nodded, looked at me, and said, “Shall we meet the slaver?”
The slaver had a tent at the front of his caravan. And the caravan, as long as a street in Malakal. Four wagons that I have seen only along the border of kingdoms north of the sand sea, among people who wander and never sow root. Horses pulled the first two, oxen pulled the last two. Purple and pink and green and blue, as if the most childish of goddesses painted them all. Behind the wagons, carts open and slatted together from wood. On the carts, women, thick to thin, some red from ochre, some shiny from shea butter and fat. Some wore only trinkets, some wore necklaces and goatskins in yellow and red, some in full robes, but most were naked. All captured and sold, or kidnapped from the river lands. None with the scars of the Ku or the Gangatom. Or the shaved teeth. Men from the East did not find those things beautiful. Behind these carts, men and boys, tall and thin like messengers, with no fat under the chin, just skin and muscle, long in arms, long in legs, many beautiful, and darker than the noon of the dead. Fit like warriors, for most were warriors who had lost in small wars, and would now do what soldiers who lose wars do. All wore irons locked around the neck and the feet, each man chained to the man in front of and behind him. There were fewer men with weapons than I thought I’d see. Seven, maybe eight men with swords and knives, only two carrying a bow, and four women with cutlasses and axes.