a lizard.
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