she said. “You see how their head full of nothing but thinking. It take many beggings, papers, and a treaty just to pass through the main street. Look at the magnificence of the citadel. You think they get that by allowing anybody to pass through and steal their secrets? No, fool. They use anyone who come down their streets for breeding, and kill whoever they can’t put to use.”
“You sent those pigeons to tell her you were coming. With gifts.”
“Why they so long in Wakadishu?”
“Me and the prefect and the Ogo.”
“Why they don’t come?” she asked.
“Maybe Wakadishu women have more meat and more blood. Are you not a southern woman?”
“The Aesi is already on caravan to Dolingo.”
“Somebody betrayed you? What say you to that, Sogolon?”
“You do nothing but joke.”
“And you do nothing but betray.”
“Two Dolingos there was. Just as there was a Malakal before Malakal. Old Dolingo, they never have queen, or king, they have a grand counsel, all of them men. Why put the whole realm in the hand of just one man, they say the people tell them, which was a lie, for they never ask people nothing. These men, they say, Why put our future in the palm of one man? Come soon, or come late, if you put power in a man’s hand, he going make a fist. Forget king and queen, build a counsel of our smartest men. Soon the smartest men listen to only the smartest men and soon they turn fool. Soon everything from where to collect shit, and who to fight war, take them men so long that shit run down the streets and they nearly lose in war with the four sisters of the South. Ten and two man and when they agree, nobody can see beyond their arrogance. When they don’t have accord they fight and fight and people starve and die, and always they so arrogant, thinking that mean they wise. And the people of Dolingo realize a true thing. A beast with ten and two head not ten and two times the wiser. He a monster shouting down himself. So Dolingo kill ten and one and make the last one King.”
“They’re still frightened over a great flood that never set loose,” I said.
“Now they the envy of the nine worlds. Every king want to ally with them, every king want to conquer them. But the first wise decree from the King? Dolingo will fight no war and have no enemy, no matter who. They sell to the good and the wicked.”
“This story was neither good nor short.”
“I tell Amadu he need none of you. Any five or six warriors and a hound. You is the only one I need, but even you is a fool. Every single one of you a fool. Spend so much time growl, and scowl like hungry hyena, none of you have time to find your own shit, much less a boy. You want to know what Kongor is to me? Kongor is where man teach me him true use. And even the last thing he good for a candlestick do it better.”
“Yet you help to find a boy who will be a man,” I said.
“But you know what I do? You know what I do? I take the greatest revenge. I bury every single one of you. Every single one. I was at every deathbed. Every mishap. Every plague of bad spirits. Every death turn. And I laugh. And if the knife was only halfway in, I push it deeper. Or I travel in the air and infect your mind. And I still living. I bury you and your son and your son’s son. And will I live. I … I …” She stopped and looked around the cell as if it were the first time she was seeing it.
“Wherever you just went to, maybe go back,” I said.
“What a day wh—”
“When a man tells you what to do. Don’t you have enough spirits in your head doing that already?”
“We talking about you.”
“You talking about everyone but me. Look at what all you do. Fellowship tear apart before it even come together in the valley. Three of you go off in the Darklands and one have to follow because you is man and man never listen. Delay we by one whole moon.”
“So you sold us off.”
“So I get you out of the way.”
“And yet look at me, and look at you. One of us has a nose and the other one still needs