to the edge of the cliff and without stopping leapt off.
EIGHT
The boy became air three years ago. On the way to the collapsed tower, I wondered how much one could change in three years. A boy at ten and six is so changed from a boy at ten and three that they may be different people. Many times I have seen it. A mother who never stopped crying or looking, giving me coin to find a stolen child. That is never a problem; it is the easiest of things, finding a stolen child. The problem is that the child is never as he was when taken. For his taker, often a great love. For his mother, not even curiosity. The mother gets the child back, but his bed will remain empty. The kidnapper loses the child but lives on in that child’s longing. This is true word from a child lost and then found: None can douse it, the love I have for the mother who chose me, and nothing can bring love for the woman whose kehkeh I dropped out. The world is strange and people keep making it stranger.
Neither I nor the Leopard spoke about the woman. All I said that night was, “Show the boy some gratitude.”
“What?”
“Thanks. Give the boy thanks for saving your life.”
I walked back to the gates. Knowing he wouldn’t, I said my thanks to the boy as I passed him.
“I didn’t do it for you,” he said.
So.
Now we were walking to the collapsed tower. Together, but we did not speak. The Leopard ahead, me behind, and the boy between us, carrying his bow and quiver. Since we had not spoken we had not agreed, and I was still half of the mind to say no. Because the Leopard did speak true in this, that it’s one thing if you are unlucky in war, of lower birth, or slave born, but chaining a woman as prisoner is something else, even if she was clearly possessed by some kind of lightning devil. But we did not speak of the woman; we did not speak of anything. And I wanted to slap the boy for walking ahead of me.
The collapsed tower stood to the south of the first wall. Nobody on these streets, or paths, or alleys looked like they knew the King was coming. In all my years in Malakal I had never been down this street. I never saw reason to go to the old towers, past the peak, and down below the reach of most of the sun. Or up, as the climb was first so steep that the clay street turned into a narrow lane, then steps. Going down was steep again, where we passed the windows of houses long gone from use. Another two on both sides of the lane that looked like it housed wicked acts, for it was covered in markings and paintings of all kinds of fucking with all kinds of beasts. Even going down, we stood high enough to see all of the city and the flat land beyond it. I heard once that the first builders of this city, back when this was not yet a city, and them not yet fully men, were just trying to build towers tall enough to get back to the kingdom of sky and start a war in the land of gods.
“We are here,” the Leopard said.
The collapsed tower.
That itself is a misspeak. The tower is not collapsed, but it has been collapsing for four hundred years. This is what the old people say, that back then men built two towers apart from the rest of Malakal. The building masters went wrong from the day they built on a road going down instead of coming up the mountains. Two towers, one fat and one thin, built to house slaves before ships came from the East to take them away. And the thin tower would be the tallest in all the lands, tall enough, some say, to see the horizon of the South. Eight floors for both but the taller one would reach even farther upward, like a lighthouse for giants. Some say the master builder had a vision, others say he was a madman who fucked chickens and then chopped their heads off.
But what everybody saw was this. The day they set the last stone—after four years of slaves killed by mishap, iron, and fire—was one of celebration. The warlord of the fort, for Malakal was only a fort, came