“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?”
She nodded at the boy with the long legs. He went to the far end of the room and came back with a bamboo-weaved tray.
“During my ithwasa, my master told me that I would see far. Too far,” the Sangoma said.
“Close your eyes, then.”
“You need to respect your elders.”
“I will, when I meet elders I can respect.”
She laughed. “With so much leaving your front hole, no wonder you wish for something to enter the back.”
She was not going to see me offended. Or hear me, or smell me. Or give news to the moonlight boy or the Leopard. Not even for the blink of an eye.
“What do you want?”
“Look at the bones. I throwing them every night for a moon and twenty nights, and always they land the same. The hyena bone lands first, meaning that I should expect a hunter. And a thief. Right after the first night you come.”