he would tell anyone who would hear. And since I was in a new game—total subservience to another—I was the one to tell. Slaves are not to be resold in the South Kingdom, especially not in Nigiki, but he did so, and that was how he made his fortune. Sometimes the slave was freeborn and stolen.
The master was a coward and a thief. He whipped his wife at night and punched her in the day so that the slaves could see that no man or woman was above him. I said to her once when he was away: If it pleases the mistress, I have five limbs, ten fingers, one tongue, and two holes, all at her pleasure. She said, You smell like a boar but you may be the only man in Nigiki who does not smell of salt. She said, I hear things of you men from the North, that you do things to women with your lips and tongue. I searched through her five robes, found her koo, spread its lips west and east, then flicked my tongue on the little soul deep in the woman that the Ku think is a hidden boy that must be cut out, but is beyond boy or girl. She made noises louder than when whipped, but since I was hidden under her robes, her slaves thought it was the recall of a whipping, or the god of harvest giving her rapture.
She never let me put anything inside her but my tongue, for such is still the way of mistresses.
“How can one lie with a boar?” she would say.
You are waiting to see how this ends. You’re waiting to see if I ever did pull apart the seas of her robes and take her without her ever asking such, because that is what you southern lords do. Or you are waiting for that moment when I kill her husband, for do not all my tales end in blood?
Soon I said to the nobleman, It is not yet a moon, yet I am already bored with being your slave. Not even your cruelty is interesting. I said good-bye, made an obscene sign with my lips and tongue to the mistress, and turned to leave.
Yes, in this way I left.
Fine, if you must know, I did strike the nobleman in the back of the head with the flat side of a long sword, bid a slave to shit in his mouth, and tied a rope around his head to keep his jaw shut. Then I left.
The children?
What does it matter?
I tried to see the children. More times than once or twice. One quartermoon after we left them with the Gangatom, I was sneaking along the two sisters river. By then the village would have smelled on wind the bodies of Kava, the witchman, and my beloved uncle. And coming up, on the Gangatom side of the river, a spear could meet my chest at any moment and my killer would not have lied when he said, Here I killed a Ku. I skipped from tree to tree, bush to bush knowing that I should not have gone. It was only a quartermoon. But maybe the albino ran into a boy who would stick him to see if his blood was white, and maybe the women of the village were scared of Smoke Girl’s troubled sleep and needed to know that one should not fear her, for how else would they know? And to let her sit on your head if she wants to sit on your head, and maybe my boy who thinks he is a ball rolls into a man because that is the only way he knows to say, Here I am, play with me, I am already a toy. And to never call Giraffe Boy giraffe. Not once. And the twins, such cunning minds and such joyful hearts, one will call you over the right shoulder saying, Where is east? while the other steals sips from your porridge.
And there was no Leopard to vouch for me; he found work and amusement in Fasisi. But the river runs through both lands, and trees stood far apart. I stopped at one tree, and was about to skip to the next, ten and seven paces ahead, when arrows shot past me. I jumped back and the tree caught the three arrows hitting it. Voices of Ku, men across the river, thinking they’d killed me. I dropped to my belly and scurried away like