“What kind of man eats other men? Am I not a man? Am I not a brother? Am I not man?”
His voice rose louder and louder, like a shriek.
“You are a brother. You are my brother.”
“Then what is my name?”
“Kami … Kami … Kami … Kola.”
This is where he was most a man. I could not read his face. Monsters can never hide a face behind a face, but men can.
“Take a story and give me.”
“You wish for a story? I shall give you a story. There was a queen, and she had men and women who bowed to her like a queen. But she was no queen, only the sister of Kwash Dara, the North King. He exiled her to Mantha, the hidden fortress on the mountain west of Fasisi, breaking his father’s wish that she stay at court. But that father had broken with his father before that, for each generation has sent the eldest sister to Mantha before she could claim the rightful line to the throne. But that is not the story.”
This King sister who thinks she is a queen, Lissisolo was her name. She plotted against the King with several men, and Kwash Dara, he punished her. He killed her consort and her children. He could not kill her, for great a curse it is for family blood to kill family blood, even bad blood. So he banished her to the hidden fortress, where she was to be a nun the rest of her life, but this King sister, she schemed. This King sister, she plotted. This King sister, she schemed more. She found one of the hundreds of princes with no kingdoms in Kalindar and took him as a husband in secret so that when she gave birth to a child he would be no bastard. She hid the child to save him from the anger of the King, for he was angry indeed when his spy told him of the marriage and the birth. And he set out to kill the child. But that is not the story.
This King sister, she lost the child, or men stole him, and she hired me and others to find the child. And we found him, captive to bloodsuckers, and a man with hands like his feet and wings like a bat, and breath like the stench of long-dead men, which gave his brother joy to eat, for he prefers the blood. And even as we returned the child, for there were several of us, there was something about this child, a smell that was there and not there. But men of the King were after the child and the King sister so we rode with them to the Mweru, where the prophecy said they would be safe, though another prophecy says no man can ever leave the Mweru. But that is not the story.
I tell you true. Something about that boy would trouble the gods, or anyone who desires his heart always to be at peace. I was the only one who saw, but I said nothing. So he stayed in the Mweru with his mother, and with the personal guards of women and the rebel infantry of men who stood guard outside the lands, for no man who enters the Mweru leaves. And it so happened that the one demon we did not kill, the one with bat wings, the one they call Sasabonsam, he came for the boy and he snatched him, or so they said and will still say. And he flew away with the boy, who never screamed, though he could scream, never shouted, though he shouted at many things, never, ever raised alarm, though his mother was always expecting an intruder. You cannot push the person who jumped. And the bat man and the boy, they did much terrible sport. Much that is vile and disgusting, much that would outrage the lowest god and the wickedest witch. And one day they came upon a tree where … they came upon a place where love lived. The boy was with him, someone wrote in blood on sand. A beautiful hand wrote on the sand in blood. But that is not the story.
For the man who lived in the house of love, he came upon the message written in blood, by one who was dead. And he was beyond words, but filled himself with grief and rage, for they were dead. They were all dead. Some of them only