again. He straddled my lap and grabbed my arms, to which I hissed. Sore. He said something about us being poor old injured men who have no business doing … I did not hear the rest, for he then bent down and sucked my right nipple. I moaned so loud, I waited for some sailor upstairs to cuss or whisper that something is afoot with those two. His knees against my own bruised ribs made me breathe heavy. I rubbed his chest and he sucked in air and moaned it back out. I was frightened that I hurt him, but he took my hand away and placed it on the floor. He blew on my navel, then moved lower between my legs and did precious art. I begged him to stop in the most feeble whisper. He climbed back on me. The floorboards, looser than they should have been, creaked with each jerk. I let everything out through gnashed teeth and grabbed his ass. I went on top. He grabbed my left ass cheek right on a raw bruise and I shouted. He laughed, pulling me deeper into him, my lips down on his. Both of us failing to not make a sound, then both thinking fuck the gods for we will have sound.
In the morning, when I woke, a boy looked down on me. Not surprised at all, I was waiting for him, and for more like him. He raised his eyebrows, curious, and scratched at the shackle around his neck. Mossi grunted, frightening him, and the boy faded into the wood.
“You have saved children before,” Mossi said.
“I didn’t see you were awake.”
“You are different when you think no one watches you. I always thought that what made one a man was that he takes up so much space. I sit here, my sword is there, my water pouch there, tunic there, chair over there, and legs spread wide because, well, I love it so. But you, you make yourself smaller. I wondered if it was because of your eye.”
“Which one?”
“Fool,” he said.
He sat across from me, leaning against the wood planks. I rubbed his hairy legs.
“That would be the one I speak of,” he said. “My father had two different eyes. Both were gray, until his enemy from childhood punched one brown.”
“What did your father do to his enemy?”
“He calls him Sultan, Your Great Eminence, now.”
I laughed.
“There are children of great importance to you. I have thought of such things, of children, but … well. Why think of flight when one can never be the bird? We are of strange passions in the East. My father—well my father is my father and just like the one before him. It was not that I … for I was not the first … not even the first carrying his name … and besides, my wife was chosen from a noble house before I was born, and so it would have gone, for such is the way of things. The thing is not what I did, the thing is the prophet allowed men to discover us and he was poor so he … I … they sent me away and told me never to sail back to their shores or it would be death.”
“A wife? And a child?”
“Four. My father took them and gave them to my sister to raise. Better to keep my filth away from their memory.”
Fuck the gods, I thought. Fuck the gods.
“Then I sailed off course. Maybe it was the gods. There are children you think of.”
“Don’t you?”
“A night never passes.”
“This must be why loose wives dismiss us as soon as we burst. Sad talk of children.”
He smiled.
“Do you know of mingi?” I asked.
“No.”
“Some of the river tribes and even some places in great cities like Kongor kill newborns who are unworthy. Children born weak, or limbless, or with top teeth before bottom, or with gifts or forms strange. Five of those children strange in form we saved, but they return to me in dreams—”
“We?”
“Does not matter now. These five return to me in dreams and I have tried to see them, but they live with a tribe that is my tribe’s enemy.”
“How?”
“I gave them to my tribe’s enemy.”
“Nothing you ever say ends the way I think you would end it, Tracker.”
“After my tribe tried to kill me for saving mingi children.”
“Oh. You and these people, none of your rivers run straight. Take us finding this boy. There is no straight line between us and this boy,