men only to have our children grow up blaming us for it. Pray forgive that remark; I have also been living in a nunnery across from a whorehouse. Think of it, I, the King sister, in hiding with old women because he has sent assassins to the same fortress he imprisoned me. Seven Wings, they left to join the King’s armies in Fasisi. From there they will invade Luala Luala first, and the Gangatom and the Ku, and force every man, woman, and child into slavery. Not will, has. Luala Luala is already under control. War weapons do not build themselves.”
“Respect of the kings to you. But you stand there and try to make ordinary men and women care about the fates of princes and kings, as if what happens to you changes anything that happens to us,” I said.
“The Leopard tells me you have children among the Gangatom.”
“Don’t think I have been in any koo long enough to seed a child,” I said.
“Is this the mouth you warned me of?” she said, looking at both Bunshi and the Leopard. The Leopard nodded. She sat back down on a stool.
“How lovely a family you must have had, so that the loss of a son means nothing to you.”
“Not my—”
“Tracker,” Leopard said, shaking his head.
“The view is different when you are the child lost, Your Excellence. Then all you think of is the disappointment that is parents,” I said.
She laughed.
“Do I look calm to you, Tracker? Do you think here is one possessed with Itutu? How is the King sister so calm when monsters and men have taken her son? Maybe it is only the latest violation. Maybe I am tired. Maybe I take a bath every night so that I scream underwater and wash away tears. Or maybe a thousand fucks for you, thinking any of this is your business. Word has already reached several of the elders that not only do I have a child, but a child of a legal union with a prince. They know I will go to Fasisi and I will bring my claim of succession to the elders, the court, the ancestors, and the gods. My brother even thinks he has killed all the southern griots, but I have four. Four with account of the true history, four whose account will not be questioned by any man.”
“Why do all this to put another man on the throne? A boy.”
“A boy trained by his mother. Not by men who can only raise a boy to become another just like him. My brother’s army marched north to the river lands two days ago. Do you not have blood there?”
“No.”
“Gangatom is just across the river. And what he will do with the children too young to be slaves? You ever heard word of the white scientists?”
It took everything in me to answer quickly, and I still spoke too late.
“No.”
“Thank your gods that you never cross them,” she said, but she looked at me with one raised eyebrow, and slowed her words.
“White because even their skin rebel against their evil, for there is only so much vileness that your own skin can agree to. White like only the purest evil. The children, they take and bind to beasts, and devils. Two attacked me myself, one had wings of a bat as big as that flag. When my men killed it with arrows, it was just a boy, and the wings were part of his skin and bones now, even blood ran through it. And they do other things, turning three girls into one girl, sewing tongue to tongue to the boy so that he hunts like a crocodile and giving him bird eyes. You know why they take them young? Think, Tracker. Turn a man into a killer and he can turn back, or he can kill you. Raise a little one to be a killer and killing is all he does. He lives for blood, with no remorse. They take the children and turn them like they are plants, with every wicked art of the white science, worse if the children already come with gifts. Now they work for my brother and the bitch of Dolingo.”
“Sogolon said you were allies. Sisters together.”
“I was never sisters with that woman. Sogolon is who she knows. Knew.”
“Then I go to Gangatom.”
“You know some, don’t you? Children with gifts.”
“I go to Gangatom,” I said again.
“What? Nobody here told me you came with your own army. Your own mercenaries, maybe? Maybe two