“Not a new thing for a prefect.”
He pushed the blade harder against my neck.
“The paper. Down.”
I put the paper down and looked up at him. “Look at me,” I said. “I shall hold this paper over this flame, for I feel it will reveal something to me. I do not know you, nor do I know how stupid you are, but I cannot make what I say any simpler.”
He withdrew the sword.
“How do I know this?” he said.
“You will have to trust me.”
“Trust you? I don’t even like you.”
We stared at each other for a long time. I grabbed a sheet, the one most sour.
“You and your curtain for a dress,” he said.
“Will you not stop until I am off with my clothes?”
I waited for a sharp reply, but it never came. I would have gone there, trying to figure out why the sharp reply never came, or try to catch him before he hid it from his face, but I did not.
“What are you—”
“Please, be quiet. Or at least watch for the keeper.”
He stopped talking and shook his head. Fumanguru had written these writs in red ink, bright in colour but light in tone. I pulled the candle closer to me, then held the sheet right over the flame.
“’Tis Mossi.”
“What?”
“My name. The name you have forgotten. It is Mossi.”
I lowered the flame so that I could see the flicker through the paper and feel the warmth on my finger. Figures took shape. Glyphs, letters moving left to right or right to left, I did not know. Glyphs written in milk so they would be hidden until now. My nose led me to four more pages smelling of milk. I ran them over the fire until glyphs appeared, line after line, row after row. I smiled and looked up at the prefect.
“What are those?” he asked.
“You said you are from the East?”
“No, my skin went pale when all the colour washed off.”
I stared at him blankly until he said something else.
“North, then east,” he said.
I handed the first paper to him.
“These are coastal glyphs. Cruel letters, the people call them. Can you read them?”
“No,” I said.
“I can read some of it.”
“What … do … they …”
“I’m no master of ancient marks. You think Fumanguru made these?”
“Yes, and—”
“For what purpose?” he asked.
“So that even if the wrong man came this close to the water, he would never be able to drink.”
“That I understood you makes me very sad.”
“Glyphs are supposed to be the language of the gods.”
“If the gods are too old and stupid to know the words and numbers of modern men.”
“You sound like you stopped believing in the gods.”
“I am just amused by all of yours.”
It bothered me to look at him and see him looking at me.
“My belief is nothing. He believed that the gods were speaking to him. What draws you to Fumanguru?” Mossi said.
And I thought, for a blink, What should I construct now, and how much will I have to build on it? The thought alone made me tired. I told myself that I was just tired of believing there was a secret to protect from some unknown enemy, when the truth was I was tired of not having someone to tell it to. Here is truth: At this point I would have told anyone. Truth is truth, and I do not own it. It should make no difference to me who hears it, since him hearing the truth does not change it. I wished the Leopard was here.
“I could ask you the same thing. His family died from sickness,” I said.
“No sickness cuts a woman in two. The prefect of prefects declared this matter closed, and recommended that to the chiefs, who recommended that to the King.”
“Yet here you are, in front of me, because you didn’t swallow that story.”
He leaned his sword against a stack of books and sat on the floor. His tunic slipped off his knees and he wore no underclothes. I am Ku and it is nothing new to see the man in men, I said to myself three times. Without looking at me, he pulled the tail of his garment up between his legs. He hunched over the papers and read.
“Look,” he said, and I leaned over.
“Either his mind went slightly mad, or it is his intent to confuse you. Look at this, the vulture, the chick, and the foot all pointed west. This is northern writing. Some make one sound, like the vulture’s sound, which is mmmm. Some make a whole word or carry an idea. But look at this down here, the fourth line. Do you see how it differs? This is the coast. Go to the coast of the South Kingdom, or even that place, I forget its name. That island to the east, what is the name …?”
“Lish.”
“You can still find this writing in Lish. Each one is a sound, all sounds make—”
“I know what a word is, prefect. What is he saying?”
“Patience, Tracker. ‘God … gods of sky. They no longer speak to spirits of the ground. The voice of kings is becoming the new voice of the gods. Break the silence of the gods. Mark the god butcher, for he marks the killer of kings.’ Is this sounding wise to you? For it is foolishness to me. ‘The god butcher in black wings.’”
“Black wings?”
“This is what he says. None of this moves like a wave. I think he meant it so. A king is king by a queen, not a king. But the boy—”
“Wait. Stay, do not move,” I said.
He looked up and nodded. His thighs, lighter in skin than the rest of him, sprouted hairs too straight. I went right to the library master’s table, but he was still gone. I guessed he kept behind him the logbooks and records of kings and royal subjects. I climbed two steps up a ladder and looked around until I saw the mark of the rhinoceros head in gold. I flipped from the back page and dust rushed into my nose, making me cough. A few pages in was the house of Kwash Liongo, almost the same as what Fumanguru had scratched out on paper. On the page before was a Liongo, his brothers and sisters, and the King before him, Kwash Moki, who became King at twenty and ruled until he was forty and five.
“What news on black wings?”
I knew I jumped. I knew he saw me.
“Nothing,” I said.
I grabbed the batch of papers and placed them on the table. The candles threw colour on them like weak sunlight.
“This is the house of Akum,” I said. “Rulers for over five hundred years, right up to Kwash Dara. His father is Netu, here. Above him, here, is Aduware the Cheetah King, who was third in line, when the crown prince died, and his brother banished. Then above him is Liongo the great, who ruled nearly seventy years. Who doesn’t know the great King Liongo? Then over here on this leaf, Liongo again and above him, Moki, his father, the boy King.”
“Turn the page.”
“I did. There’s nothing before.”
“You didn’t—”
“Look,” I said, pointing at the blank page. “Nothing is there.”
“But Moki is not the first Akum King, that would make the line about two hundred and fifty years old.”
“Two hundred and seventy.”
“Keep flipping,” Mossi said.
“Family map. Fasisi Kwash Dara. Akum. His seat of rule, his praise name, his king name, and his family.”
Three pages up, another family map someone drew in a darker blue. At the top of the page was Akum. At the bottom was Kwash Kagar, Moki’s father. But above him something curious, and above that even more curious.
“Is this a new line? An old one, I mean,” the prefect said.
“House of Akum up to Moki’s father. What do you notice?”
“Above Kagar is a line pointing to Tiefulu? That’s a woman’s name. His mother.”
“Beside hers.”
“Kwash Kong.”
“Now look above Kong.”
“Another woman, another sister. Tracker, no king is the son of a king.”
“Until Moki.”
“There are many kingdoms that follow the wife’s line, or the sister.”
“Not the North Kingdom. From Moki down, every king is the king’s oldest son, not his sister’s son. Grab these.”
I went back to the glyphs. He followed me over, looking at the maps, not at me.
“What did you say about kings and gods?” I said.
“I said nothing about kings and—”
“You tiresome in all your ways?”
He dropped the papers at my feet and grabbed the writs.
“A king is king by a queen, not a king,” he said.
“Give me that. Look at this writ.”
He bent over me. This was not the time to think of myrrh. He read, “‘That the house of kings return to the ways that had been decreed by the gods, and not this course which has corrupted the ways of kings for six generations. This is what we demand: that the king follow the natural order set by gods of sky and gods below the earth. Return to the purity of the line as set in the words of long-dead griots and forgotten tongues.’ This is what he wrote.”
“So the northern line of kings changed from king’s sister’s son to king’s son, six generations ago. These are facts for any that would look. No reason to murder an elder. And these writs, sure they call for a return to the old order, which some might say is mad, some might say is treason, but most will never go so far back in the line of kings to check,” I said.
“And what do you think will happen if they do?”
“Outrage maybe.”
He laughed. Such irritation.