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.
“But this King didn’t know there was griots who sing songs of King before him. Who they be. What they do. Everything from the wicked work of Kwash Moki. The King didn’t even hear a song. The man at him side say, Most Excellent Majesty, there is a song that can rise against you. Then they round up nearly every man of song with verse from before Kwash Moki’s time and kill them. And who they couldn’t find to kill, they kill wife and son and daughter. Kill them and burn down they house and order all to forget that any song sing that way. Kill everyone in this man family, they do. He escape but even now he wondering why they didn’t kill him. They could have silence him without killing nine people to do it. But such is the way with these kings of North. I speak to him when he wake, that I know.”
Sobs woke me up before sun. First I thought it was wind, or something hanging on from a dream, but there he was across from the bed I slept in, the Ogo crouched in a corner by the south window, crying.
“Sadogo, what is—”
“It is like he thought if he walk on it he could ride it. That is how he looked. Could he ride it? Why didn’t he ride it?”
“Ride what, dear Ogo? And who?”
“The griot. Why didn’t he ride it?”
“Ride what?”
“The wind.”
I ran to my north window, looked out for a blink, then ran to the south window, which Sadogo crouched beside. I saw Sogolon and went down. She wore white this morning, not the brown leather dress she was always in. The griot was at her feet, limbs twisted like a burned spider’s, broken in too many places, dead. Her back was to me, and her robes flapped.
“Everybody still sleep?” she said.
“Except the Ogo.”
“He said he just walk past him and off the roof like he go down the road.”
“Maybe he walked on that road to the gods.”
“This look like a time for mockery to you?”
“No.”
“What he sing to you? In the day now gone, what he sing?”
“Truth? Love. That was all of his singing. Love looking. Love losing. Love like how poets from where Mossi come from talk about love. Love he did lose. That is all he was singing, love he did lose.”
Sogolon looked up, past the house up into the sky.
“He spirit still walking on wind.”
“Of course.”
“I don’t care if you agree or no, you hear m—”
“We agree, woman.”
“No good for the others to know. Not even the buffalo; let him eat grass otherwhere.”
“You want to drag the old man out into deep bush? You want him to be food for hyena and crow?”
“And then the worm and the beetle. It don’t matter now. He with the ancestors. Trust the gods.”
The Ogo came out to join us, his eyes still red. Poor Ogo, it was not that he was gentle. But something about someone else bringing his own self such violence shook him.
“We take him out to the bush, Sadogo.”
This was still savannah. Not many trees, but yellow grass reaching my nose. Sadogo had