digging into the tree, his arms grabbing branches, his crotch right in front of my face. He bent his head so low that I thought he was about to lick himself, but stared right at me.
“This is what you wish, I can see it. Killing or dying, either death the same. You welcome either, you want both. I can give it to you. But who is Nan Si?”
“What are you?”
“Tell me you see my pale tone, hunter. I am like the one you came in with.”
“Did you kill him?”
“He leave you.”
“Not for the first time.”
“He don’t know that you gone. This forest has plenty enchantments.”
“So has every forest.”
“Know that I am not of the forest, I am not of the Nan Si. Not one, no, not one. I was a man of great breadth with knowledge of science and mathematics.”
“White science and black math. You were a white scientist. Now you are a was.”
He nodded, too hard and too long.
“What did you push?”
“What was already in the mind. Beyond the fetish priest, and beyond the prophet. Beyond the seer. Even beyond the gods! True wisdom is never without, it is within, was always within. Within always.”
“And now you are a beast, eating monkeys and their mothers, and making webs out of your cum.”
“There was fear in you. It is gone, gone, gone. I so hunger for a tale. None of these beasts speak. None have magic.”
“I seek a flying beast and his boy.”
“A flying beast? Will you kill him? Will you do it slow? What shall you do with them?”
“He came past you.”
“No beast come past here.”
“This is a forest, and Sasabonsam rests in forest.”
“This is a forest of life, and he is among the dead things of the world.”
“So you know him.”
“Never said I didn’t.”
He grabbed something above my head and put it in his mouth.
“I will meet them. In the field or the swamp. Or the sand sea. Or here.”
I tried to pull my hands but the silk squeezed tighter. I yelled at the white scientist. I jerked forward, trying to pop my cocoon off the tree, but it would not budge. He smiled, watching my struggle. He even grinned when I jerked. I cursed him again.
“Let me kill him, him and the boy, and I will return for you to kill me. Smash my head open and suck the brain out. Cut me open and show me what first you will eat. Do what you wish. I swear it.”
He went back to the branch.
“Kamikwayo is what some called me.”
“Where did you practice white science?”
“Practice? Practice is for the student.”
“The white scientists of Dolingo enter men’s heads so they desire unnatural things.”
“Dolingon are butchers. A meat shop with all of them. Meat shop! I was neither scientist nor witchman. I was an artist. The greatest student to leave the University of Wakadishu—not even the wisest seers, and teachers, and masters could teach me, for I was wiser than them all. They said, You, Kamikwayo, must devote the rest of your days to the life of the mind. That is what they said, I was there when they said it. Go to the Wakadishu palace of wisdom. I studied the spider to get the secret of his delicious web. You are a small mind, perhaps Gangatom, so you cannot think as the scientist, but think of the web, think of how far it stretches before it breaks. Think it, think it, think it now. I said to all of them, Think of rope that can stick to the man the way web sticks to the fly. Think of armour soft as cotton but can block the spear, and even the arrow. Think of a bridge across the river, the lake, the swamp. Think of all these things and more things if we could make the web just like the spider. Hear this, river man. This scientist could not make the web. I mixed so many spiders, I squeezed their bellies, I taste the thing in my mouth to tell the ingredients apart, but still it slipped away from me like a slimy thing. Slip away! But I worked day and night, and night into day, until I make a potion, I make a glue like the sap from the tree and I take a stick and stretched it like a long line of spit, and it dried, and it cooled and it was solid. And I called my brothers and said, Lo! I made the web. And they were