by Marlon James
“A boy?”
“Yes,” said the man.
“Is he hungry?”
“We feed him berries, and hog milk. A little blood,” said the woman. They both sounded like children.
For a long time walking all I saw was Kava’s back. I smelled the baby’s dried vomit before he got to him, sitting up on a dead anthill, flower in his mouth, his lips and cheek red. Kava kneeled before the baby, and the little man and woman jumped off his shoulder. Kava took up the baby in his arms and asked for water. Water, he said again, and looked at me. I remembered that I was carrying his waterskins. He poured some in his palm and fed the child. The little man and woman both carried over a gourd with a little hog’s milk left. I was over Kava’s shoulder when the baby smiled, two top teeth like a mouse’s, gums everywhere else.
“Mingi,” he said.
“What does that mean?”
He started walking, with the baby, not answering me. Then he stopped.
“The gods had no watchful eye on him,” the little man said. “We could not …” He did not finish.
I didn’t see until we passed the sweet stink of it. Two little feet peeking out of the bush, the bottoms of the feet blue. Flies raising nasty music. The last meal threatened to come up through my mouth. The sweet stink followed us even when we had gone very far. A bad smell, like a good one, can follow you into tomorrow. Then it rained a little and the trees sent the smell of fruit down to us. Kava hid the baby’s face with his hand. He spoke before I asked.
“Do you not see his mouth?”
“His mouth is a baby’s mouth, like every other baby’s mouth.”
“Too old to be such a fool,” Kava said.
“You don’t know my age and neither—”
“Quiet. The boy is mingi, also the dead girl. In his mouth, you saw two teeth. But they were on the top, not bottom; that is why he is mingi. A child whose top teeth come before bottom teeth is a curse and must be destroyed. Or else that curse spreads to the mother, the father, the family and brings drought, famine, and plague to the village. Our elders declared it so.”
“The other one. Were his teeth also—”
“There are many mingi.”
“This is the talk of old women. Not the talk of cities.”
“What is a city?”
“What are the other mingi?”
“We walk now. We walk more.”
“Where?”
The Leopard jumped out of the bush and the little people ran behind Kava. He growled, looked behind him, and roared. I thought he wanted Kava to hand him the baby.
The Leopard crouched down on the ground, then rolled on his back, and stretched and shook like he had a sickness. He growled again like a dog hit with a stone. His front legs grew long but the back legs grew longer. His back widened and sucked up his tail. The fur vanished but he was still hairy. He rolled until we saw a man’s face, but eyes still yellow and clear like sand struck by lightning. Hair on his head black and wild, going down his temple and his cheek. Kava looked at him as if in the world one always sees these things.
“This is what happens when we move too late,” the black Leopard said.
“The baby would still be dead, even if we had run,” Kava said.
“I mean late by days; we are two days late. This one’s death is on our hands.”
“All the more to save this one. Let us move. The green snakes have already caught his scent. The hyenas caught the scent of the other.”
“Snakes. Hyenas.” The black Leopard laughed. “I will bury that child. I am not following you until I do.”
“Bury her with what?” Kava asked.
“I will find something.”
“Then we wait,” Kava said.
“Do not wait sake of me.”
“I do not wait because of you.”
“Five days, Asani.”
“I come when I come, cat.”
“I waited five days.”
“You should have waited longer.”
The black Leopard growled so loud I thought he would change back.
“Go bury the girl,” Kava said.
The black Leopard looked at me. I think that was the first time he noticed I was here. He sniffed, turned his head away, and went back into the bush.
Kava answered a question before I asked it.
“He is just like any other in the bush. The gods made him, but they forget who the gods made first.”
But that was not one of the questions I wanted to ask.
“How did you come upon each other?”
Kava still watched where the Leopard left in the bush.
“Before the Zareba. I had to prove that the boy with no mother is worthy of becoming a man, or die the boy. He must go out past the bush, slip past Gangatom warriors in open fields. He must not come back without the skin of a great cat. Listen to what come to pass. I was in the yellow bush. I heard a branch crack and a baby cry and I saw that Leopard holding a baby at the neck. With his teeth he’s holding him. I draw my spear and he growls and drop the baby. I am thinking I will save this baby, but the baby start bawling and will not quiet until the Leopard pick him up again with his teeth. I throw my spear, I miss, he is on me and even as I blink I see a man about to punch me. He says, You are just a boy. You will carry the baby. So I carried him. He found me the skin of a dead lion and I took it back to the chief.”
“The beast just says carry this mingi child and you carry him?” I asked.
“What was mingi? I didn’t know until we came to she,” Kava said.
“That is not … Who is she?”
“She is who we come to meet.”
“And since then you sneak off near the end of every moon and bring mingi children to this she? Your answer leaves more questions.”
“Then ask what you want to know.”
I was quiet.
We waited until the Leopard came back, in the shape of a man with the frown gone from his face. Now he walked behind us, sometimes so far back that I thought he went off on his own, sometimes so close I could feel him sniff me. On him I smelled the leaves he ran through and the fresh wet of dew, the dead scent of the girl and the fresh musk of the grave dirt under his fingernails. The sun was almost ready to go.
Kava is like most men; he carries two smells. One when the sweat runs down his back and dries, the sweat of hard work. And one that hides under the arms, between the legs, between the buttocks, what you smell when close enough to touch with lips. The black Leopard had only the second smell. Never had I seen it before, a man whose hair was black cotton. On his back and legs when he passed me to take the baby from Kava. His chest, two little mountains, his buttocks big, legs thick. He looked as if he would crush the child in his arms, but licked dust off the baby’s forehead. Only birds spoke. There we were, a man white like the moon, a Leopard who stood as a man, a man and a woman tall as a shrub, and a baby bigger than them both. Darkness was spreading herself. The little woman hopped from Kava to the Leopard, and sat on his arm, laughing with the baby.
A voice inside me said they were some sort of blood kin and I was the stranger. Kava told no one who I was.
We came up to a small, wild stream. Large rocks and stones marked the banks, green moss covering them like a rug. The stream cackled and sprayed mist up into the branches, ferns and bamboo stalks hanging over. The Leopard placed the baby on a rock, crouched right by the banks, and lapped the water. Kava filled his waterskins. The little man played with the baby. I was surprised he was awake. I stood by the Leopard but he still took no notice. Kava stood farther down, looking for fish.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“I told you.”
“This is not the mountain. We went around, then down several paces ago.”
“We will get there in two more days.”
“Where?”
He crouched down, cupped some water, and drank it.
“I want to go back,” I said.
“There is no going back,” he said.<
br />
“I want to go back.”
“Then go.”
“Who is the Leopard to you?”
Kava looked at me and laughed. A laugh that said, I am not even a man yet, but you give me man problems. Maybe the woman in me was rising. Maybe I should have grabbed my own cock skin and smashed it off with a rock. This is what I should have said. I did not like the man-Leopard. I did not know him to dislike him, but disliked him anyway. He smelled like the crack of an old man’s ass. This is what I would have said. Do you talk without speaking? Do you know each other as brothers? Do you sleep with your hand between his legs? Shall I stay awake till the moon is fat and even the night beasts sleep to see if he comes to you—or will you go to the Leopard and lie on top of him, or him on top of you, or maybe he is like one of those my father liked in the city, who put men in their mouths?
The baby, sitting up, laughed at the little man and woman making faces and jumping up and down like monkeys.
“Name him.”
I turned around. The Leopard.
“He needs a name,” he said.
“I don’t even know yours.”
“I don’t need one. What did your father name you?”
“I don’t know my father.”
“Even I know my father. He fought a crocodile, and a snake and a hyena only to drive himself mad with man envy. But he chased after the antelope faster than a cheetah. Have you done that? Bit deep with your sharpest teeth so that the warm blood bursts into your mouth and the flesh is still throbbing with life?”
“No.”
“You are like Asani then.”
“My uncle calls him Kava, and all in the village.”
“You burn food, then eat it. You eat ash.”
“Will you leave tonight?”
“I shall leave when I feel to. We sleep here tonight. In the morning we take the baby across new lands. I will find food, though it will not be much since all the beasts heard our approach.”
I knew I was going to stay awake that night. I saw Kava and the Leopard walk off, the flames rising and blocking my view. I told myself that I was going to stay awake and watch them. And I did. I moved so close to the flame that it nearly singed my brow. I went to the river, now cold enough to shake bone, and threw water on my face. I stared through the dark, followed the white spots of Kava’s skin. I curled my fingers into a fist so hard that my nails dug into the palm. Whatever those two would do, I was going to see and I was going to shout, or hiss, or curse. So when the Leopard stirred me awake, I jumped, shocked that I had fallen asleep. Kava threw water on the fire, just as I rose.
“We go,” the Leopard said.
“Why?”
“We go,” he said, and turned away from me.
He changed to a cat. Kava wrapped the baby in cloth and slung him on the Leopard’s back. He did not wait. I rubbed my eyes and opened them again. The little man and woman were back on Kava’s shoulder.
“One owl talk to me,” the little woman said. “A day behind in the bush. Them say you read wind? No so? He say you have a nose.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Somebody, they following us,” she said.
“Who?”
“Asani, he saying you have a nose.”
“Who?”
“Asani.”
“No, who is following us?”
“They moving by night, not by day,” Kava said.
“He said I have a nose?”
“He saying you were a tracker.”
Kava was already walking away when he said, We go. Farther off into the darkness, Leopard jumped from tree to tree with a baby strapped on his back. Kava called me over.
“We need to move,” he said.
All around was dark, night blue, green, and gray; even the sky had few stars. But then the bush began to make sense. Trees were hands pushing out of the earth and spreading crooked fingers. The curling snake was a path. The fluttering night wings belonged to owls, not devils.
“Follow the Leopard,” Kava said.
“I don’t know where he went,” I said.
“Yes, you do.”
He rubbed his right hand across my nose. The Leopard came to life right in my face. I could see him and his trail, ripe as his skin through the bush. I pointed.
Leopard had gone right, then down fifty paces, crossed the stream by jumping from one tree to the next, then went south. Stopped to piss at four trees to confuse whoever was following us. I knew I had the nose, as Kava said, but I never knew that it could follow. Even as the Leopard got far he was still right under my nose. And Kava, and his smells and the little woman, and the rose she rubbed in her folds, and the man, and the nectar he drank, and the bugs he ate, too much of the bitter when he needed the sweet, and the waterskins, and the water inside that still smelled of buffalo, and the stream. And more, and more than that, and even more, enough to drive me to some kind of madness.
“Breathe everything out,” Kava said.
“Breathe everything out.
“Breathe everything out.”
I exhaled long and slow.
“Now breathe in the Leopard.”
He touched my chest and rubbed around the heart. I wished I could see his eyes in the dark.
“Breathe in the Leopard.”
And then I saw him again with my nose. I knew where he was going. And whoever spooked the Leopard was beginning to spook me. I pointed right.
“We go this way,” I said.
We ran all night. Beyond the stream and the branches bent over it, we ran through trees with grand roots, roots that rose above the ground and snaked the lands in tangles and curls. Right before dawn I mistook one for a sleeping python. Trees taller than fifty men standing on shoulders, and as soon as the sky changed, the leaves turned into birds that flew away. We came up the grasslands, with shrubs and weeds that reached above our knees, but no trees. We came upon salt lands in a low valley with white dirt that blinded us with light and crunched under our feet, with no animals as far as one could see, which meant those following us could see us. I said nothing. The grasslands stretched from last of the night to first of the day, where everything was gray. That Leopard scent in front like a line, or a road. Twice we came close to see him, running on all fours with the baby tied to his back. Once, three Leopards ran alongside him, and left us alone. We passed elephants and lions and scared a few zebras. We passed through a thicket of trees with few leaves, like the bones of trees, and their whispers were louder. And still we ran.
Morning peeked as if about to change her mind. The fourth day since Kava and I set out. The little woman said whoever was following slept by day and hunted at night. So we walked. Past a forest of killed trees the air went wet again, thick as it went down the nose into the chest. The trees had leaves again and the leaves were getting darker, bigger. We came upon a field of trees larger than anything I had ever seen in the world. I would have run out of men to count. They weren’t even trees, but the crooked fingers of buried giants sticking out of the ground and covered in grass, branches, and green moss. Giant stalks bursting out of the ground and reaching into the sky, giant stalks curling into the ground like an open fist. I walked past one and beside it I was a mouse. The ground was mounds and little hills; nowhere was level. Everywhere looked as if another giant finger was going to push through the ground, followed by a hand and an arm and a green man taller than five hundred houses. Green and green-brown and dark green, and a green that was blue, and a green that was yellow. A forest of them.
“The trees have gone mad,” I said.
“We come close,” Kava said.
Mist split the light into blue, green, yellow, orange, red, and a colour I did not know was purple. One hundred or 101 paces down, the trees all bent in one direction, almost braiding together. Trunks growing north and south, east-west, shot up, reached down, twisting into and out of each other, then down on the ground again, like a wild cage to hold something in or keep something out. Kava jumped on one of the trunks,
bent so low that it was almost flat with the ground. The branch was as wide as a path, and the dew on the moss made it slippery. We walked all the way on one trunk and jumped down to another bending below it, moving up again, and jumping from trunk to trunk, going up high, then down low, then around so many times that only on the third time did I notice we were upside down but did not fall.
“So these are enchanted woods,” I said.
“These are hot-tempered woods, if you don’t shut up,” he said.
We passed three owls standing on a branch, who nodded at the little woman. My legs burned when we finally broke into sky. The clouds were thin as cold breath and the sun, yellow and hungry. In front of us, it floated on the mist. Truth, it stood on branches but the walls were set against the trunk, and had the same flowers, and moss. A house set in the tree with colours of the mountain. I couldn’t tell if they built the tree around the branches or if the branches grew in to protect it. Truth, there were three houses, all wood and clay with thatch roofs. The first was small as a hut, no bigger than a man six heads tall. Children were running around it, and crawling into the little hole in the front. Steps curled around the house and led to the one above it. Not steps. Branches set straight, and forming steps as if the trees played their part.
“These are enchanted woods,” I said.
The branch steps led to a second house, larger with a huge opening instead of a door, and a thatch roof. Steps came out of the roof and led to a smaller house with no openings, no doors. In and out of the second house came children, laughing, yelling, crying, screaming, oohing and aahing. Naked and dirty, covered in clay, or wrapped in robes too big for them. At the opening of the second house the Leopard looked out. A naked little boy grabbed his tail and he swung around and snarled, then licked the boy’s head. More children ran out to greet Kava. They attacked him all at once, grabbing a leg or an arm, one even climbed up his slippery back. He laughed and stooped to the floor so they could run all over him. A baby crawled over his face, smearing the white clay. I think that was the first time I saw his face.