“Mossi, every house, every room, those caravans, they are all like this.”
“I know. I know.”
“Everywhere I go to find this boy, to save this boy, I run into something worse than what we are saving him from.”
“Tracker.”
“No. These monsters won’t kill him. No harm has come to the boy. None. I smell him; he is alive, no decay or death on him. Look at this boy you are holding up, he cannot even stand. How many moons was he behind that wall? From birth? Look at this nasty dream of a place. How are bloodsuckers any worse?”
“Tracker.”
“How? You and I are the same, Mossi. When people call on us, we know we are about to meet evil. Lying, cheating, beating, wounding, murdering. My stomach is strong. But we still think monsters are the ones with claws, and scales and skin.”
The boy looked at him as Mossi rubbed his shoulders. He stopped trembling, but looked past the balcony doors as if outside was something he had never seen. Mossi placed him on the stool and turned to me.
“You are thinking what can you do,” he said.
“If you say nothing.”
“I would never tell you what to think. Only … Tracker, listen. We come here for the boy. We are two against a nation and even those who came with us might be against us.”
“Every person I have met says to me, Tracker, you have nothing to live for or die for. You are a man who if he were to vanish this night, nobody’s life would be any worse. Maybe this is the kind of thing to die for …. Say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say that this is bigger than me and us, that this is not our fight, that is the way of the foolish and not the wise, this will make no difference …. Well, what are you going to say?”
“Which of these mangy sons of bitches do we kill first?”
My eyes popped wide open.
“Consider this, Tracker: The plan is to never let us leave. So then let us stay. These cowards have lived without an enemy so long they probably think swords are jewelry.”
“They have men in the hundreds upon hundreds. And hundreds more.”
“We need not care about hundreds. Just the few at court. Beginning with that hideous Queen. Follow for now, play the fool. They will summon us to court soon, tonight. Right now we should really feed this—”
“Mossi!”
The stool sat empty. The terrace door swung back and forth. The boy was not in the room. Mossi ran so fast to the balcony that I had to grab his cloak so he wouldn’t fall. No sound came out of Mossi’s mouth but he was screaming. I pulled him back into the room but still he pushed forward. I wrapped my arms around him tighter and tighter. He stopped fighting and let me.
We waited until dark to set out for the Ogo. That idiot who fed me came to the door to tell me of dinner at court, though not with the Queen. I should go to the docks and wait for the caravan when the drums begin to sound. No? Yes? Mossi held back behind the door with his knife. Someone must have seen the boy jump to his death, even if the poor child said nothing all the way down. Or maybe a slave falling to his death was not a new thing in Dolingo. This is what I was thinking while the man kept trying to stick his head in my door until I said, Sir, if you come in I shall fuck you too, and his blue skin went green. He said he would return for a glorious breakfast tomorrow, no? Yes.
I sensed Sadogo in MLuma, the third tree, the one more like a pole with massive wings to trap sunlight. Mossi worried that guards would be watching us, but such was the arrogance of Dolingo that nobody looked at two future seed pods as much of a threat. I said to him, How quaint our weapons must have seemed to them, not just our weapons, but all weapons. They were like those plants with no thorns that have never known an animal to eat them. When the men and women staring at us made Mossi reach for the knife hidden in his coat, I touched his shoulder and whispered, How many men with skin such as yours have they seen? He nodded and kept his peace.
At MLuma, the caravan stopped at the fifth floor. Sadogo