INQUEST: You forget which of us gives the orders.
TRACKER: I have never set foot in Mitu.
INQUEST: A different answer from I know of no place named Mitu.
TRACKER: Tell me how you wish this story to be told. From the dusk of it to the dawn of it? Or maybe as a lesson, or praise song. Or should my story move as crabs do, from one side to the next?
INQUEST: Tell the elders, who shall take this writing as your very own speech. What happened, your four years in Mitu?
I will describe his face without impression or judgment. His eyebrows raised higher than before, he opened his mouth but did not speak. It is my impression that he growled or cursed in one of the northern river tongues. Then he jumped from his chair, knocking it over and pushing it away. He leapt at me, yelling and screaming. I barely shouted out for the guard before his hands grabbed my throat. Truly it is my conviction that he would have strangled me until dead. And still he squeezed tighter, pushing me backward on my chair until we both fell to the ground. I daresay his breath was foul. Stab him I did, with writing stick into his hand and at the top of his shoulder, but I can say in testimony that I was indeed leaving this world and doing so with haste. Two guards came from behind and struck him in the back of the head with clubs until he fell on top of me, and even then his grip did not relax, until they struck him a third time.
I must say it was a fair account, though I remember my ribs suffering several kicks from your men, even after they bound me. My back suffering beatings from a yam sack. Also this: my feet meeting so much whipping I am surprised that I walked to this room. My memory cheats—they dragged me here. And that was not even the worst, for the worst was you having them put me in robes meant for slaves—what offense have done I to cause that?
Now look at us. Me in the dark even in daylight, you over there on a stool. Balancing paper and writing stick on your lap while you try not to knock over the ink at your foot. And these iron bars between us. The man beside me calls for the love goddess each night, and I have not heard such sounds since I searched for my father, my grandfather in a whorehouse. Between me and you, I wish she would answer, for his cries get ever louder each night.
So. My father and brother murdered and my uncle slain by my hand. Go back to my grandfather? To give him what tidings? Hail, Father, who I now know as my grandfather though you lie with my mother. I killed your other son. There was no honor in it but you are already a man with no honor. You truly are cunning. A cunning one, inquisitor, to get me so angry I speak to them and not you. What kind of testimony is this?
You have washed since I saw you last. Spring water with precious salts, spices, and fragrant flowers. So many spices I would suspect that your ten-year-old wife was trying to cook you. But Priest, I smell the blister on the right of your back, right where she poured boiling water and scalded you. By all the gods, she did try to cook you. You struck her, of course, hard in the mouth. You’ve brought her blood with you before.
Where is what happened next? After your guards clubbed me in the back of the head, but before they took me down here. The part where I strangled you till you were near dead. The part where the guards had to slap you like a fool on opium in a spirit monger’s den. Don’t ask about Mitu again.
One more thing. When did you move me to Nigiki? I ask because these are Nigiki slave robes. Besides, I smell the salt mines every direction I turn. Did you move me at night? What strange potions kept me asleep? People say a cell in Nigiki is more lavish than a palace in Kongor, but such people have never been in this cell. Did you move her as well or just your dear, difficult Tracker?
My last time in this city I was in chains as well.
I will tell you the story.
I let myself be sold to a nobleman in Nigiki, because a slave still had four meals, none by his own purse, and lived in a palace. So why not be a slave? Whenever I felt for freedom I could just kill my master. But this nobleman had the ear of your mad King. I knew because 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 a lizard.