in the dark, and rat shit. On the two side walls facing each other, tapestries ran to the ground, blue Ukuru cloth with white patterns of lovers and trees. I lay on the floor, above and under blankets and rugs of many colours. Sogolon stood by the window, in that brown leather dress she always wore, looking out.
“You leave your whole mind back in the forest.”
“My mind is right here.”
“Your mind not here yet. Three times now I say to you that journey around the Darklands take three days, and we take four.”
“Only one night passed in the forest.”
Sogolon laughed like a wheeze.
“So we come three days late,” I said.
“You lost in that forest for twenty and nine days.”
“What?”
“A whole moon come and go since you gone into bush.”
And perhaps this, like the last two times she said it, was where I threw myself back down on the rugs, stunned. Everything not dead had twenty-nine days—a whole moon—to grow, including truth and lies. People on voyages have long returned. Creatures born got old, others died, and those dead withered to dust in that time. I have heard of great beasts who go to sleep for cold seasons, and men who fall ill and never rise, but this felt like someone stole my days and whoever I should have been in them. My life, my breath, my walk, it came to me why I hate witchcraft and all magic.
“I have been in the Darklands before. Time never stopped then.”
“Who was keeping time for you?”
I knew what she meant behind the witch double-speak. What she said, not out loud, the word inside the word, was who in the world would care for me that they would count my days gone? She looked at me as if she wanted an answer. Or at least a half-wit answer she could reply to with a full-wit mockery. But I stared at her until she looked away.
“A whole moon come and go since you gone into the bush,” she said again, but soft as if not to me. She looked out the window.
“Trust for the gods be the only reason why I here for a moon in Kongor. If it was my will over the gods, this whole place and every man in it would burn. Can’t trust no man in Kongor.”
“Can’t trust any man, anywhere,” I said. She flinched when she saw I heard.
“My gratitude for waiting in a city that does you ill,” I said.
“Not for you I do it. Not even for the goddess.”
“Should I ask who?”
“Too many children in Kongor don’t have an end to they story. That older than two hundred years, that older than when I was a child. So let this be the one child who story have an ending, no matter how grim, and not be another one that wash up with no head when the floodwater roll back.”
“You lost a child? Or were you the child?”
“I should have make distance between me and this city. Make distance four nights after you didn’t show. Last time I walk these roads a man of good breeding pay five man to steal me so he can show me what an ugly woman was for. Right there in Torobe. Couldn’t beat him wife because she from royal blood, so he bond me for that.”
“Kongori masters have always been cruel.”
“Low-wit donkey, the man was not my master, he was my kidnapper. A man would know the difference.”
“You could have run to a prefect.”
“A man.”
“A magistrate.”
“A man.”
“An elder with a kind ear, an inquisitor, a seer.”
“Man. Man. Man.”
“Justice could have come for your kidnapper.”
“Justice did come. When I learn a spell and the wife pregnancy devour her from the inside. Something else go up inside the man.”
“A spell.”
“My knife.”
“When you last pass through Kongor?”
“Amadu debt to me doubling just by me coming back.”
“When last, Sogolon?”
“I already tell you.”
Noise bounced up to the window, but it had order, and rhythm, beat and shuffle, the clap of sandals and boots, the trot of hooves on hard dirt, and people who oohed to other people’s aahs. I joined her by the window and looked out.
“Coming from all corners of the North and some from the South border. The border men wear a red scarf on the left arm. Do you see them?”
The street stretched behind the house, several floors below. Like most of Kongor, it was built of mud and stone, mortar to stop the rains from beating the walls away, though the side wall looked