“You ask me things I do not know.”
“How are we to save this child from whatever evil guards him? And if we do save him, what then?”
“Maybe we should make a plan now,” I said.
“Maybe you should leave proving you’re smart tongued to Sogolon.”
“Truth?”
“That would be the preferred thing, if you can manage it.”
“There was never a plan, other than fight whoever has the child and take him back. Kill if you have to. But no craft, so strategy, no subterfuge, no plan, as you said it. But that’s not full truth. I think there is a plan.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know. But Sogolon knows.”
“Then why does she need us? Especially since she acts as if she does not.”
I looked around. We were being watched, listened to, or our lips read.
“Move with me to the dark,” I said, and he stepped into shadow with me.
“I think Sogolon has a plan,” I said. “I don’t know it, nor does the Ogo, or anybody else who journeyed with us before. But that’s the plan too.”
“What do you mean?”
“There is no plan for us because there will be no us. Send us to fight the bloodsuckers, maybe even be killed by them, while she and the girl save the boy.”
“Is that not the pact you bound yourself to?”
“Yes, but something changed with Sogolon when she knew we were to head to Dolingo. I don’t know what, but I know I won’t like it.”
“You don’t trust her,” Mossi said.
“She sent two pigeons out when we left the old man’s house. Pigeons to the Queen.”
“Do you trust me?” he asked.
“I …”
“Your heart searches for an answer. Good.”
He smiled, and I tried to not smile but show a warm face.
“Why not just put a blade to her neck and demand to know?” he said.
“That how one gets a woman to obey in the East? She will not be threatened, that Sogolon. You have seen it, she can just blow you away.”
“What I see is that someone hunts her,” Mossi said.
“Someone hunts all of us.”
“But her hunter is only after her. And he or she is without cease.”
“I thought you only believe in one god and one devil,” I said.
“I think you repeat that to the point of annoyance. I have seen many a thing, Tracker. Her enemies have gathered mass. Maybe all of them with causes just. Other side.”
The caravan bumped something and shook. It threw the prefect right at me and I caught him as his head hit my chest. He grasped my shoulder and pulled himself up. I wanted to say something about myrrh. Or his breath in my face. He stood straight, but the caravan swung again and he grabbed my arm.
Five guards met us at the platform and said you land in Mungunga, the second tree. They took us over a steep stone bridge, with lookouts on both sides of the road, first to my room where they left me, and then, I presumed, to Mossi’s. Mine looked like it hung off the great tree itself, and was hanging by rope. I don’t know where they took the prefect. This was another room with a bed, something I was beginning to get used to, though why anyone would want a soft bed I didn’t know. The more your bed felt like clouds, the less you would be alert if trouble roused you from sleep. But what a grand thought, sleeping in a bed. There was water to wash, and a jug of milk to drink. I stepped to the door and it opened without my touch. That made me stop and look around, twice.
The balcony outside was a thin platform, maybe two footsteps wide, and loose, with rope as high as the chest to stop drunk men from falling to their ancestors. Behind this tree, two trees stood, and behind them several more. My head was scrambling for a bigger word than vast, something for a city as large as Juba or Fasisi, but with everything stacked on top and growing into the sky instead of beside each other and spreading wide. Did these trees still grow? Many windows flickered with firelight. Music came from some windows, and loose sounds running on wind: eating, a man and woman in quarrel, fucking, weeping, voices on top of voices creating noise, and nobody sleeping.
Also this, a closed tower with no windows, but where all the ropes carrying caravans came in and out. The Queen was right when she said Dolingo did not run on magic. But it ran on something. Night was going, leaving us, leaving people who would not sleep, leaving me wondering what Sogolon spoke of to the Queen, and where she was right now. Maybe that was why it took me longer than it should to smell it on me. Myrrh. I rubbed my chest, cupped my nose, and breathed in as one would drink in.
In the dream jungle monkeys swung on vines, but the trees grew so tall that I could not see sky. It was day and night like it always is in the Darklands. I heard sounds, laughter that sometimes sounded like tears. I was hoping to see the prefect, expecting to see him, but a monkey walking on two legs pulled at my right hand, let go, and jumped off, and I followed him, and I was on a road, and I walked, then ran, then walked, and it was so very cold. I feared hearing black wings but did not hear them. And then fire broke out in the west, and elephants, and lions, and many beasts, and beasts with forgotten names ran past me. And a warthog with his tail on fire squealed, Is the boy, is the boy, is the boy.
A smell woke me up.
“Welcome to Dolingo the magnificent, Dolingo the unconquerable, Dolingo that make the gods of sky come down on earth for nothing in the sky was anything like Dolingo.”
He stood over me, short, fat, and blue in day as the Dolingons were in night, and I almost told him that had I slept the way I usually do, with my ax under my pillow, he would be a headless man right now. Instead I rubbed my eyes and sat up. He leaned in so close that I almost bumped his head.
“First you wash, no? Yes? Then you eat the rise meal, no? Yes? But first you wash, no? Yes?”
He wore a metal helmet that lacked the nose guard of a warrior. But it was trimmed in gold, and he looked like a man who would soon tell me such.
“Magnificent helmet,” I said to him.
“Do you love it? No? Yes? Gold mined from the southern mines made its way to my head. This is no bronze that you see, only gold and iron.”
“Did you fight in any wars?”
“Wars? Nobody wars with the Dolingon, but yes, you should know that I am indeed a very brave man.”
“I can see it from what you wear.”
Indeed, he wore the thick quilted tunic of warriors, but his belly poked through like a pregnant woman. Two things. “Wash” meant him summoning two servants to the room. Two doors to the side opened without a hand, and the servant pulled out a wood-and-tar tub full of water and spices. That was the first I knew there were doors there. They scrubbed me with stones, my back, my face, even scrubbed my balls with the same roughness that they scrubbed the bottoms of my feet. “Eat” meant a flat plank of wood pushing itself out of the wall, where no slot was before, and the man pointing me to the stool already there, then feeding me with those things beloved of flighty men from Wakadishu, knives and spoons, and making me feel like a child. I asked if he was a slave, and he laughed. The plank pulled itself back into the wall.
“In our radiant Queen is all wisdom and all answers,” he said.