two head cut off and rolling on the table in front of her. The women still screaming and two lords get up.
“Sit down, beautiful men and women. Sit down!”
The whole hall go quiet. Kwash Dara stand up and walk right over to his sister. He grab one of the heads by the hair and lift up to his face. The eyes still open, the brown skin almost blue, the hair thick and bushy and the beard patchy as if he scratch it out.
“Now this one, this boy lover. Is he a boy lover? He must be a boy lover to think that my sister, a princess, can become a king. What kind of witchcraft they must work on him, to scheme and plot, and remember, eh, sister? Take some wise words from your wise King. As you drag a man into a plot, so you should also drag the wife, or she will think it a plot against her. Next time you get this plotting sickness, try not to infect anybody else with it, sister. Play a game of Bawo.”
He drop the head on the table and Lissisolo jump.
“Remove her from me,” he say.
Now here is a true thing. The King still afraid to kill his sister for if divine blood run in his rivers then it must also run in hers too, and who would be the one to kill she born of a god?
He lock her away in a dungeon with rats big like cats. Lissisolo don’t scream or weep. She in there for day upon day and they feed her scraps from the royal table so that though she only get bone and dregs, she would know where the dregs come from. The guards take to sporting with her but not touching her. One day they bring her a bowl of water, and say it come with a special seasoning most excellent, and as they place it down she could see a rat floating in it. She turn and say, My bowl has special seasoning too, and dash her piss at them. Two guards rush to the bars, and she say, “Get to it then, be the one to dare touch divine flesh.”
Lissisolo don’t know it but ten and four day pass her in the dungeon. Her brother come to see her, wearing red robes and a white turban that he place a crown on. No chair in the cell, and the guard hesitate when Kwash Dara point at him to go down be on four, like the donkey, so the King can sit on his back.
“I miss you, sister,” he say.
“I miss me too,” she say. Always too clever but not clever enough to know when to blow out that wick so she don’t shine too bright around a man, even if the man be her brother.
He say to her, “Differences we have and will have, sister. That is just the ways of blood, but when trouble comes, when ill fortune comes, when just bad tidings come, surely I must stand by my blood. Even if she betrayed me, my sorrow is her sorrow.”
“You have no proof that I betrayed you.”
“All truth rests with the gods, and the King is the godhead.”
“When he dies, if the gods wish his company.”
“Now, and the gods are bound by their own law.”
“Who is your latest coward hiding behind shadows?”
He come out of the dark into the light of the torch. Skin black like ink, eye so white they glow, and hair red like a fireball flower. She know him name before he say it.
“You are the Aesi,” she say. Like every woman, every man, every child in the lands, when she see him, it was as if the Aesi was always behind the King, but nobody can remember when he take that place. Like air and the gods, there was no beginning and no end, only Aesi.
“We come bearing news, sister. It is not good.”
The King rock himself on the soldier back. The Aesi approach the bars.
“Your husband and your children all fell from air sickness for it is the season, and they went where malevolent airs were prominent. They will be buried tomorrow, in ceremonies fit for princes, of course. But not near the royal enclosure, for they may still carry disease. You will—”
“You think you sit like a king when you are the speck of shit on donkey’s backside that the tail can’t wick off. What did you come down here for? A scream? A plea for