“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