SIX
This.
You wish that I read this.
Check the account for yourself, you say. Make my mark where it says different from what happened. I don’t need to read; you write as Ashe wishes. Ashe is the everything, life and death, morning and night, good luck and bad tidings. What you in South think is a god but is where the gods come from.
But do I believe it?
A smart question. Fine, I will read it.
Testimony of the Tracker on this the ninth day. A thousand bows to the elders’ pleasure. This testimony is written witness, given appeal to the gods of sky who stand in judgment with lightning and viper venom. And as is the elders’ pleasure, the Tracker gives account both wide and far, since great many years and moons have passed from the loss of the child to the death of the same one. This is the middle of the Tracker’s many tales, meaning which be true and which be false I shall leave to the judgment of the elders, alone in the counsel of the gods. The Tracker’s account continues to perplex even those of uncommon mind. He travels deep in strange lands, as if telling tales to children at night, or reciting nightmares to the fetish priest for Ifa divination. But such is the pleasure of the elders, that a man should speak free, and a man should speak till the ears of the gods are filled with truth.
He goes into the sight, smell, and taste of one memory, with perfect recall of the smell in the crack of a man’s buttocks, or the perfume of Malakal virgins in bedchambers coming out of windows he walked underneath, or the sight of the glorious sunlight marking the slow change of seasons. But of spaces between moons, a year, three years, he says nothing.
This we know: The Tracker in the company of nine, including one more who still lives and one not accounted for, went searching for a boy. Kidnapped, he has alleged. The boy at the time was alleged to be the son or ward of a slaver from Malakal.
This we know: They set out first from Malakal at the beginning of the dry season. The search for the boy took seven moons. A success, the child they found and returned, but four years later he was lost again and the second search, in smaller company, took one year and culminated with the boy’s death.
At the request of the elders, the Tracker has spoken in detail of his upbringing, and with clear speech and fair countenance has recounted a few details of the first search. But he will speak only of the end of the second search, and refuses to give testimony of the four years in between, where it is known that he took up residence in the land of Mitu.
This is where I, your inquisitor, set a different bait. He had come, that ninth morning, to talk of the year he reunited with the mercenary called Leopard. Indeed, he had said before that it was the Leopard that came to him with the offer to search for the child. But a lie is a house carefully built on rotten stilts. A liar often forgets the beginning of his tale before he gets to the end, and in this way one will catch him. A lie is a tale carefully told if allowed to be told, and I would seek to break his untruth by asking him to tell a different part of the tale. So I asked him not of the first search or the second, but of the four years in between.
INQUEST: Tell me of the year of our King’s death.
TRACKER: Your mad King.
INQUEST: Our King.
TRACKER: But the mad one. Forgive me, they are all mad.
INQUEST: Tell me of the year of our King’s death.
TRACKER: He is your king. You tell me.
INQUEST: Tell me of —
TRACKER: It was a year, as years go. There were days, there were nights with nights being the end of day. Moons, seasons, storms, drought. Are you not a fetish priest who gives such news, inquisitor? Your questions grow stranger by the day; this is true talk.
INQUEST: You remember the year?
TRACKER: The Ku don’t name years.
INQUEST: Do you remember the year?
TRACKER: It was the year your most excellent King shat his most excellent life out in the most excellent shit pit.
INQUEST: Speaking ill of the King is punishable by death in the South Kingdom.
TRACKER: He’s a corpse, not a king.
INQUEST: Enough. Tell me of your year.
TRACKER: The year? My year. I lived it full and left all of it behind when it ended. What more is there to know?
INQUEST: You have nothing else?
TRACKER: I fear that you would find greater tales among those of us dead, inquisitor. Of those years I have nothing to report but steadiness, boredom, and the endless request of angry wives to find their unsatisfied husbands—
INQUEST: Did you not retire those years?
TRACKER: I think I am the best to remember my own years.
INQUEST: Tell me of your four years in Mitu.
TRACKER: I spent no four years in Mitu.
INQUEST: Your testimony on the fourth day said after the first search you left for the village of Gangatom and from there, Mitu. Your testimony on the fifth day began, When he found me in Mitu I was ready to leave. Four years remain unaccounted for. Did you not live it in Mitu?
[Note: The sandglass was a third from being empty when I asked him this question. He looked at me as men do when they contemplate petulance. An arch in his eyebrow, a scowl in his face, then a blankness, a drop in the corner of his lips, and his eyes wet, as if he went from anger at my question to something else at the thought of an answer. The sandglass was empty before he spoke again.]
TRACKER: I know of no place named Mitu.
INQUEST: You? The Tracker who claims to have been to so many kingdoms, to the place of flying beasts, and the land of talking monkeys and lands not on the maps of men, but you have no knowledge of an entire territory?
TRACKER:Take your finger out of my sore.
INQUEST: You forget which of us gives the orders.
TRACKER: I have never set foot in Mitu.
INQUEST: A different answer from I know of no place named Mitu.
TRACKER: Tell me how you wish this story to be told. From the dusk of it to the dawn of it? Or maybe as a lesson, or praise song. Or should my story move as crabs do, from one side to the next?
INQUEST: Tell the elders, who shall take this writing as your very own speech. What happened, your four years in Mitu?
I will describe his face without impression or judgment. His eyebrows raised higher than before, he opened his mouth but did not speak. It is my impression that he growled or cursed in one of the northern river tongues. Then he jumped from his chair, knocking it over and pushing it away. He leapt at me, yelling and screaming. I barely shouted out for the guard before his hands grabbed my throat. Truly it is my conviction that he would have strangled me until dead. And still he squeezed tighter, pushing me backward on my chair until we both fell to the ground. I daresay his breath was foul. Stab him I did, with writing stick into his hand and at the top of his shoulder, but I can say in testimony that I was indeed leaving this world and doing so with haste. Two guards came from behind and struck him in the back of the head with clubs until he fell on top of me, and even then his grip did not relax, until they struck him a third time.