Ndambi, my little lion girl, who reach near my waist before reach three. She was the one who make me worry, for lion years is not people years and one year for me might be ten for a cat. Maybe even more. I say to Keme, Since you are as much the man as the lion, is year but a year for you or it is more? But he couldn’t answer for anybody but himself. I have to take comfort in that he age as a man do and hope that in another ten and three years I will not be burying my children. Unlike Ehede, she never say anything with a human tongue.
Matisha, my loud little woman, miss the spirits of her brothers and sisters the most. She sometimes run out into the backwoods even though they never come to greet her. I tell her that they gone to the otherworld for good now, but perhaps one night she will see them up in the tree. She say to me, “Then I will never see them, for I sleep at night.” Unlike her brother walking on two legs, Matisha feel the most distress when any of the lion show up in her. She fear that as part cat she will have to marry a lion, and she already had enough of lions among the ones she grow up with. She hide it from me but I already know that instead of fingernails she have claws and sometimes she cannot control when they stick out.
Lurum can only claim to be the first out of my womb, but that boy act like he the first one born in the whole house. Hair short, unlike every other child, and tight to the skull, and a grin so wide it take up all of his face. If that boy just cry out it is because the back of his head just receive from me a slap. Sly, too sly. Wise, too wise. He is the one who I soon see build a new room on top of this house, or pull one little thing to bring whole house down. Wise, too wise, so wise that I ask him questions that I would the old, and with him there is nothing happening out in the street that I have to go out in the street to know. But he is not the oldest boy, and too often now fight break out in the house because little Keme try to remind him that he is the oldest. Oldest boy, Lurum always spit back at him, which just make them fight more.
I am a woman with children. Which mean that now I get as much joy running away from them, even if is for two or three flips of the time glass. And yet Keme is why I leave them for Taha district, on horseback because nobody look down on a woman when she is up this high. The boy did need learning, more than what his father could teach him, and even to that he would grumble how the boy didn’t need it. He was starting to sound like little Keme.
“All a warrior need is a sword and spear to conquer,” he would say.
“How you know what to conquer when you can’t read a map?” I reply.
Now I am in Taha district. The district in Fasisi with the most people but the least difference between them. Different in what they do, for the number of those trades higher than the sun. But not different in how they be, for they are not the nobles of Ugliko, or the sellers in Baganda, or the soldiers in Ibiku, or whatever one call the people of the floating district. Taha might have the most people living there who work somewhere else. For this is the district of service, of craftsman, builder, guard, teacher, midwife, apprentice, and poet. And they all have the same class, which is just one way of saying they all making the same coin, Keme say.
Taha district is where I go looking for a teacher for my boy. A master, like the ones I used to see at court running down the princes, trying to teach them things that they never need to learn. Somebody must be out there teaching the sons of warriors, and I was going to find him. Seven streets I cross before the thinking come to me that this is folly. Nobody who live here work here, remember? I stop at a post and tie up the horse, for road was as narrow as lane in this part of Taha. Halfway down a medicine men’s alley words come to me that the only people right now in Taha are new mothers and wet nurses, beggars with no one to beg, old people, and witches. That last one not a thought, but the mumble of a small crowd in the middle of the street that I walk into. Here be a witch, there go a witch, catch the witch. Is been so long since the great purge that I done forget that purging is still going on.
Somebody called a witchfinder. The same white clay man from the Sangomin. I look at him now, lower now than when Kwash Moki sons used to call for playmates. Maybe at some moment in the years the Aesi get tired of this not-boy not-man easing himself into the King’s favor, trying to stand on the left side of his right, when all he could call gift is the ability to smell out witches. The spider already have eight limbs, he don’t need four more, I picture him say as he banish him to low work, and it make me laugh out loud, so loud that people glare at me, for they gathered here for a serious matter. There he be near the archway at the mouth of this alley. At least the Aesi allow him to wear the white of his men-in-waiting. A thin tunic like that of a woman indoors, thin enough that you can see his scrawny backside and his elbows through the sleeves. The kind of man who don’t get much favor with other men in Fasisi. Except at night, and only in the floating district. I silence myself.