“My sister forgot her entirely. She was too young. She forgot our language, our land, our names. The teachers called her Baby Charlotte, and she introduced herself as Baby.” Another shrug. “She was happy.” Jane paused, the muscles of her jaw hard as marbles, and I heard the unsaid I was not.
“So you ran. Where did you go?”
Her jaws unclenched. “Away. I had no place to go. I returned to the mission twice on my own, because I got sick or hungry or tired, and once tied behind an officer’s horse because I’d been caught stealing buns from the barracks. The fourth time I was older, nearly fourteen. I made it much farther.” I saw myself briefly at fourteen—uncertain, lonely, wearing pressed linen skirts and practicing my penmanship—and found I could not imagine running alone through the African bush at that age. Or any age. “I made it all the way home, except it wasn’t home anymore. There was just a big ugly house with shingles and chimneys, and little blond children playing out front. A black woman in a white apron was watching them.” She shrugged again; I began to see them as practical gestures, designed to shed the weight of resentment threatening to settle on her shoulders. “So I kept running. South, where the highlands fold up into valleys and mountains. Where the trees are dry and wind-burnt and food is scarce. I grew thin. The cattle herders watched me pass and said nothing.”
I made a sound, a sort of disbelieving tsk, and Jane spared me a pitying look. “The empire had arrived by then, with its borderlines and deeds and railroads and Maxim guns. I was not the only motherless, feral child running through the bush.”
I was silent. I thought of Mr. Locke’s lectures on Progress and Prosperity. There were never any orphan girls or stolen farms or Maxim guns in them. Bad, lying beneath my chair with his splinted leg sticking stiffly out from his body, shifted so that his head was more completely covering my foot.
Jane continued. “I found the ivory door and went through. I thought at first I had died and passed into the world of spirits and gods.” Her lips parted in an almost-smile, and her eyes crimped with some new emotion—longing? Homesickness? “I was in a forest so green it was almost blue. The door I’d come through was behind me, set among the exposed roots of a vast tree. I wandered away from it, deeper into the woods.
“I know now how foolish that was. The forests in that world are full of cruel, creeping things, many-mouthed monsters with a bottomless hunger. It was mere luck—or God’s will, as the mission workers would have it—that I found Liik and her Hunters before anything else found me. It didn’t feel all that lucky at the time: I stepped around a tree trunk and found an arrowhead inches from my face.”
I covered my gasp with a cough, hoping to sound less like a small child listening to a campfire story. “What did you do?”
“Not a damn thing. Surviving is often a matter of knowing when you’re beat. I heard rustling behind me and knew others were emerging, that I was surrounded. The woman holding the bow was hissing at me in a language I didn’t know. Apparently I didn’t look like much of a threat—a hungry girl-child, wearing a white cotton shift with the collar torn off—because Liik lowered her weapon. Only then could I get a proper look at them all.”
The hard lines of Jane’s face softened, just a little, warmed by fond reminiscence. “They were women. Muscled, golden-eyed, impossibly tall, with a kind of rolling grace that made me think of lionesses. Their skin was mottled and spotted and their teeth when they smiled were sharp. I thought they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen.
“They took me in. We couldn’t understand one another but their instructions were simple ones: follow, eat, stay, skin this creature for dinner. I patrolled with them for weeks, maybe months, and learned many things. I learned to creep through the woods in silence, and to oil bowstrings with fat. I learned to eat meat raw and blood-warm. I learned that all the ogre-stories I’d ever heard were true, and that monsters lurked in the shadows.”
Her voice had gone rhythmic, nearly hypnotic.
“I learned to love Liik and her Hunters. And when I saw them change—their skins sloughing and shifting, their jaws lengthening, their bows clattering forgotten to the forest floor—I was envious, rather than afraid. I’d been powerless my whole life, and the shape of the leopard-women as they leapt into battle was the shape of power written on the world.” I didn’t think I’d ever heard such emotion in Jane’s voice; not when a book ended poorly or the coffee was burned or a party guest said something scathing behind their gloved hand. Hearing it now felt almost intrusive.
“The patrol ended, eventually, and the women took me home: a village surrounded by fruit trees and farmlands, hidden in the cauldron of a dead volcano. Their menfolk greeted them in the streets with fat babies on their hips and fresh beer in clay pots. Liik spoke to her husbands and they looked at me with pity in their eyes. They led me to Liik’s home and fed me, and I spent that night and the next and the ones after that sleeping in a pile of soft furs surrounded by the gentle snoring of Liik’s children. It felt”—Jane swallowed, and her voice sounded briefly constricted—“like home.”
There was a small silence. “So you stayed there? In the village?”
Jane smiled, crooked and bitter. “I did. But Liik and her Hunters did not. I woke one morning to find that all of them had gone back to the forests, to the patrol, and left me behind.” She’d gone very brusque; how much had that second abandonment hurt? “I knew enough of the language by then to understand what the husbands were telling me: the forest was no place for a creature like me. I was too small, too weak. I should stay in the village and raise babies and grind tisi-nuts into flour and be safe.” Another crooked smile. “But by then I was very good at running away. I stole a bow and three skins of water and made my way back to the ivory door.”
“But—”
“Why?” Jane rubbed her finger along the wood grain of the table. “Because I didn’t want to be safe, I suppose. I wanted to be dangerous, to find my own power and write it on the world.”
I looked away, down to Bad now growling phantom-growls in his sleep. “So you left the leopard-women’s world. Where did you go?” People never got to stay in their Wonderlands, did they? Alice and Dorothy and the Darlings, all dragged back to the mundane world and tucked into bed by their handlers. My father, stranded in this dull reality.
Jane gave a great, scornful ha. “I went straight to the nearest British outpost, stole a Lee-Metford rifle and as much ammunition as I could carry, and went back through my ivory door. Two weeks later I walked back into the village, my rifle over my shoulder and a stinking, blood-crusted skull under my arm. I was hungry and thin again, my cotton shift was a tattered wrap around my waist, I’d broken two ribs in the battle—but I could feel my eyes burning with pride.” They were doing so now, gleaming dangerously through the cabin shadows.
“I found Liik in the village street and rolled the ogre skull at her feet.” The gap between her front teeth winked as her smile widened. “And so I patrolled with the leopard-women for the next twenty-two years. I had twelve kills to my name, two husbands and a hunt-wife, and three names in three languages. I had an entire world, full of blood and glory.” She leaned toward me, eyes fixing on mine like a black hunting cat, invisible tail lashing. Her voice when she spoke again was lower, rougher. “I would have all of that still, if your father had not arrived in 1909 and closed my door forever.”