Mark this: The journey to his kingdom was much longer than the journey to his dead lands. Days passed before we met the Itaki at the riverbank, but she was no old woman, only a little girl, skipping in the water, who looked at me in the sly way of women four times her age. When the Queen met her King, she quarreled and cussed and beat him so hard, I knew that it would be mere days before he drowned himself again.
I know the thought that just ran through you. And all stories are true.
Above us is a roof.
TWO
When I left my father’s house, some voice, maybe a devil, told me to run. Past houses and inns and hostels for tired travelers, behind mud and stone walls as high as three men. Street led to lane and lane led to music, drinking, and fighting, which led to fighting, drinking, and music. Seller women were closing shops and packing away stalls. Men walked by in the arms of men, women walked by with baskets on their heads, old people sat in doorways, passing night as they did day. I walked right into another man and he did not curse, but smiled wide with gold teeth. You are as pretty as a girl, he said. I fled along the aqueduct, trying to find the east gate, the way to the forest.
Day riders with spears, in flowing red robes, black armour, and gold crowns topped with feathers, mount horses dressed in the same red. At the gate, seven riders were approaching, and the wind was a wolf. Quarrels done for the day, their horses galloped past me, leaving a cloud of dust. Then the sentries started closing the gate and I ran out, down the Bridge That Has a Name Not Even the Old Know. Nobody noticed.
I walked through open lands that stretched on like the sand sea. That night I walked past a dead town with walls crumbling. The empty hall I slept in had no door and one window. Behind was a hill made from the rubble of many houses. No food, and the water in the jars tasted rank. Sleep came to me on the floor to the sound of mud walls crumbling around the town.
And my eye? What of it?
Oh but it were a mouth, the tales it would tell you, inquisitor. Your lips broke open the first time you saw it blink. Write what you see; be it witchcraft, be it white science, my eye is whatever you think it is. I have no guise. I have no look. My face is a forehead wide and round, like the rest of my head. Brows that hang so far over my eyes they give them shade. A nose sloped like a mountain. Lips that feel as thick as my finger when I rub them with red or yellow dust. One eye that is mine and one that is not. I pierced my ears myself, thinking of how my father wore a turban to hide his. But I have no look. That is what people see.
Ten days after I left my father’s house I came to a valley, still wet from rain that fell a moon before. Trees with leaves darker than my skin. Ground that held you for ten paces only to swallow you on your next step. Dens of the slitherers, cobra and viper. I was a fool. I thought you learned the old ways by forgetting the new. Walking through the bush I told myself that though every sound was new, none was frightening. That the tree was not betraying where I tried to hide. The heat under my neck was not fever. The vines were not trying to jump my neck and strangle me until I died. And hunger and what passed for hunger. Pain hitting against my belly from the inside until it was tired of hitting. Looking for berries, looking for young tree bark, looking for monkeys, looking for what monkeys eat. More madness. I tried to eat dirt. I tried to follow snakes following rats through the brush. I felt something big following me. I climbed over a rock and wet leaves hit my face.
I woke up in a hut, cool like the river. Fire burning inside, but the heat was in me.
“The hippopotamus is invisible in water,” a voice said.
Either the hut was dark or I was blind; I did not know.
“Ye waren wupsi yeng ve. Why did you not heed the warning?” he said.
The hut still loomed dark, but my eye saw a little more.
“The viper has no quarrel with anyone, not even foolish boys. Oba Olushere, the cool and gentle snake, is the most dangerous.”
My nose led me into the forest. I saw no viper. Two nights before, when he found me shivering under the crying tree, he was so sure I was near dead that he dug a hole. But then I coughed green juice throughout the night. And there I was lying on a mat in a hut that smelled of violet, dead bush, and burning shit.
“Answer from the heart. What are you doing in the deep bush?”
I wanted to tell him that I had come searching for myself, but those were the words of an idiot. Or like something my father would say, but back then I still thought there was a self to lose, not knowing that one never owns the self. But I’ve said this before. So I said nothing and hoped that my eyes could speak. Even in the dark I could tell he was staring at me. Me and my wild ideas about the bush where men ran with lions, and ate from the land, and shat by the tree, and had no art among them. He came out of the dark corner and slapped me.
“The only way to inside your head is I cut open and look, or you speak it out.”
“I thought—”
“You think men of bush and river grunt and bark like dogs. That we don’t wipe the ass when we shit. Maybe we rub it on our skin. I talking to you as man.”
You, inquisitor, are a man who collects words. You collect mine. You have verse for a cool morning, verse for the noon of the dead, verse for war. But the setting sun does not need your verse and neither does the running cheetah.
This wise man did not live in the village, but near the river. His hair was white from ash and milk cream. The only time I witnessed my father undress, I saw dot scars like stars in a circle on his back. This man had a circle of stars on his chest. He lived alone in the hut he built with wild branches for the wall and bush for the roof. He rubbed the walls with black rock dust until they shone, then drew patterns and paintings, one of a white creature with arms and legs tall as trees. I have never seen the like.
“And a good thing that is, for you would not be alive to tell me of it,” he said.
I fell asleep, woke up, fell asleep, woke up, and saw a great white python wrapping around a trunk, woke up and saw the snake fade against the wall. Sunlight came in, lit up the walls, and I saw we were in a cave. The walls shaped like candlewax melting on candlewax. In the dimness, parts of it looked like a screaming face, or elephant legs, or a young girl’s slit.
The wall, when I rubbed my hand against it, felt like yam skin. Near the opening was soft with shrubs sticking out like loose hairs. I rose and this time did not fall. Wobble I did, like a man soaked in palm wine, but I stepped outside. I staggered and pressed against the rock for balance, but this was not rock. Nothing like stone. Tree bark. But too wide, too big. I looked as high as I could look and walked as far as I could walk. Not only was sun still behind the branches and leaves, but this trunk was without end. By the time I walked around it, I forgot where it began. Only at the top were there branches, stubby like baby fingers and sticking out in a web of twigs and leaves. Little leaves, thick like skin, and fruit as big as your head. I heard little feet scrambling up and down, a baboon and her child.