“We in these lands know of him bewitching girls, but never a boy. His head I will smash myself, before he can whip his wings. Those wings bring thunder, do you know?”
“What do you mean?”
“He flaps his wings and a storm blows with lightning and thunder, harder and wickeder than the wind Sogolon makes with magic.”
“Then we shall clip his wings. I will tell you of the others later.”
“And of wings, what of the man with black wings?”
“The Aesi? He also seeks for the child, and he will not rest till he finds him. But he knows neither where we are, who has the boy, nor of the ten and nine doors, or he would have used them. This is simple. We save the child and hand him back to his mother, who lives in a mountain fortress.”
“Why?”
“She is the sister of the King.”
“Confusing, is what this is.”
“I make it simple.”
“Like me?”
“No. No, Sadogo. You are not simple. Listen to me, this is not about being simple. There are things I have been told that I have no words how to tell you, that is all. But know, this child is part of a bigger thing. A truly bigger thing, and when we find him, if we keep him safe, it will echo through all the kingdoms. But we must find him before these men do kill him. And we must find him before the Aesi, for he too will kill him.”
“You said it was foolish to believe in magic boys. I remember.”
“And I still believe it to be foolish.”
I stood up and looked over the wall. The prefect was gone.
“Sadogo, I like simple. I like knowing this is what I will eat, this is what I will earn, this is where I shall go, and this is who I shall fuck. And that is still how I choose to move in this world. But this boy. It is not even that I care so much as it is we are in so deep. Let us finish it.”
“Is that all that drives you?”
“Should there be more?”
“I don’t know. But I am tired of my hands called to fight when I don’t know what to fight for. The Ogo is not the elephant, or the rhinoceros.”
“I don’t know what to tell you. There is the money. And there is something I suspect, that this child, this boy, has something to do with what is right in this world. And as much as I don’t care for this boy or even this world, yet still I move in it.”
“You care for nothing in this world?”
“No, I do not. Yes, I do. I do not know. My heart jumps and skips and plays with me. Shall I tell you something, dear Ogo?”
He nodded.
“I am no father and yet I have children. I have no child here, yet they are around me. And I know them less than I know you, but I see them in dreams and I miss them. There is one, a girl, I know she hates me, and it bothers me, because I see with her eyes and she is right.”
“Children?”
“They live with the Gangatom, one of the river tribes, at war with my own.”
“You have this girl and others?”
“Yes, others, one as tall as a giraffe.”
“You have them live with the Gangatom, though you are Ku and they war with the Ku. The Ku will kill you.”
“As you say it, yes.”
“You make me think, this ‘man is simple’ is no bad thing.”
I laughed.
“You may be speaking truth there, dear Ogo.”
“You said the boy might be in Nigiki or Wakadishu.”
“They use the same doors we used to escape the Darklands, but they use them in reverse. We had word of an attack on a household at the foot of the Hills of Enchantment that beat even their sacred magics. Twenty and four days ago, almost a moon. They spend seven to eight days in one place, killing and feeding, which means they have used the door to Nigiki. From Nigiki they kill and go to Wakadishu.”
“They’re almost there.”
“They are there already. It takes five days to get to Wakadishu on foot, maybe six, and they are on foot. My guess is that no beast can stomach the filth of them, so no horses. If they are in Wakadishu they will only be there for another two days, maybe three. Then they walk to the next door, the one we came through on the way to Dolingo.”
“Shall we not meet them there?”
“They will go through the citadel. They will want to feed, and who can resist such noble stock as the Dolingon? Besides, Sadogo, our numbers are few. We might need help.”
“So we cut them off?”
“Yes, we cut them off.”
He clapped his hands and it echoed across the sky. Then he spread them and I walked right to him as if to embrace. He flinched a little, not sure what I was doing. I wrapped my arms around him, my head in his armpit, and inhaled deep and long.
“What are you doing?” he said.
“Trying to remember you,” I said.
Sadogo then asked me if I thought the girl was pretty.
“Venin, I told you her name,” he said.
“She is pretty as girls go, I think, but her lips are too thin as is her hair, and she is only a little darker than the prefect, whose skin is hideous. Do you think her pretty?”
“I feel like half of an Ogo. My mother died when she had me, which is fine for she would have lived to curse me and my birth. But I feel like not the Ogo in many things.”
“You are right and you are true, dear Ogo. And yes she is pretty.”
The rest of my words I left to my own head, which might have been a crude joke. He nodded and pressed his lips together, satisfied with my answer, and lowered his head on his rugs.
Downstairs, I passed the room with the prefect. “It is yet early, but good night, Tracker,” he said as I walked by.
“Night,” was all that came out of my mouth.
I only then noticed the old man had stopped playing and was in the room, staring at darkness, maybe. I went down to the ground floor and waited for Sogolon.
Your old man, he was singing.”
The girl had come in first, huffing and panting. Sogolon grabbed her hand and the girl pushed her away and pinned her against the wall. I jumped up but the girl let go, growled, and started up the stairs. Sogolon closed the door.
“Venin,” she said.
The girl cursed back in that language I did not know. Sogolon replied in the same tongue. I knew that Sogolon tone: I am here to speak and you are here to listen. I imagined the girl wishing her a thousand fucks from a man covered in warts, or something just as vicious. She cursed all the way up two flights and slammed the door shut.
“Nobody in this house know what night is for,” Sogolon said.
“Fucking? Or working witch magic? Sleep is for the old gods and who follow him, Sogolon. Your old man was singing.”
“A lie.”
“No great stake in lying to you, old woman.”
“But great sport, maybe. You was right there in the room when only today he refuse to sing. The songs stay inside him mouth and none come out since Kwash Netu was King.”
“I know what I heard.”
“He don’t sing in thirty years, maybe more, but he sing in front of you?”
“Truth, his back was to me.”
“A silent griot don’t just open him mouth.”
“Maybe he was biding time for you to leave.”
“Your sting already duller than a moon ago. Maybe somebody giving him something new to sing about.”
“He was not singing about me.”
“How you know that?”
“Because I am nothing. Do you not agree?”
“I speaking to him when he wake.”
“Maybe he sung about himself? Ask him that.”
“He not answering that.”
“You didn’t ask.”
“A griot never going explain a song, only repeat it, maybe with something new, otherwise he would give the explaining not the song. Nothing about the King?”
“No.”
“Or the boy?”
“No.”
“Then for what else he be singing?”
“Maybe what all men sing about. Love.”
She laughed.
“Maybe some people in this world still need it.”
“Do you?” she said.
“Nobody loves no one.”
“The King before this one, Kwash Netu, was never one for learning. Why he would need to? This be something most people don’t know about kings and queens. Even back in many an age, learning was for something. I learn the black arts to use for and against. You learn from the palace of wisdom, so that you rest in a better place than your father. You learn a weapon to protect yourself. You learn a map so that you is master of the journey. In everything, learning is to take from where you be to where you like to go. But a king already there. That be why the King and the Queen can be the most ignorant in the kingdom. And this King mind as blank as sky until somebody told him that some griots sing songs older than when he was a boy. Can you think it? He never believe that any man would put to memory anything that happen before he born, for that is how kings raise their boys.