“Is not secret, after all. The dead can’t hold on to any secrets, they dead. I was there, and even I didn’t believe it. The Aesi slash her throat.”
I shift as if dodging her words. The news so shocking and so inevitable at the same time that I both shake my head and gasp. Divine born, killed at the hand of a demigod make for a wicked kind of joke. But the last time we meet I try to kill her myself. I have no grief to fill the space that her death leave, but an empty space there is.
“What they call you?”
“Sogolon,” I said.
“I say I know a Sogolon and she is not you. She’s dead, not so? Or she another one who won’t stay gone? Are you here to save my boy? He is just a little boy, my little boy. Yet so many wicked people want to hurt him.”
Then she do something neither me nor her guard expect. Break from the throne like she trying to escape and run toward me, grabbing my hand. Either she weak or she begging, for her knees on the floor. She still don’t see that is me. First name on my list and I don’t kill her because I don’t have to.
“My son, my son, you going to find him for me? You going to bring back my precious boy?”
I look at her, not even seeing me, though to tell the truth if I was looking with her eyes, I wouldn’t see me either. Instead I find part of myself in her. When the desire is all you have left. No boy, just the longing for the boy. What she will never say is that she did still have longing for the boy even when he was right there. And that is what buckle her knees and bring her down to the floor.
“No,” I say, then leave.
* * *
—
I lose memory of who find me. But I remember that everything, even a gentle touch, burn. Just a breath on me would make me scream. I hear then through what did leave of my ears that this is either the gods’ wickedness or mercy. The two times I look at my hand I see charred meat so I stop looking. I just lie there on the dirt trail, hearing Jakwu’s laugh getting fainter and fainter, and knowing that if the laugh vanish, it mean the spell on him was broken too. But that thought come and vanish like smoke. The Tracker push me through the door, violating the door. It do nothing for Jakwu’s body, while mine explode in fire. All I see is fire. All I remember is flame. I have no recall of running, or dropping to the ground and rolling, or screaming over the crackling of my own flesh. The burning don’t stop even when the fire gone. The burning don’t stop during sleep, and even when I drag myself to a pond, the water taste red. Like I say, I don’t know who find me. My head was not keeping anything, not the horse, the wagon, feet, bed, sheets, cot, healing herbs, nothing. I do remember a plant rubbing all over me that burn first, then cool, colder than the white dirt in the mountains.
She find me. Who know how many days pass, or moons? You wouldn’t stop calling it, a man’s voice in a dark room say to me, after he squeeze water on my forehead and peel fruits to stick in my mouth. You wouldn’t stop calling it so we ask around for who go by that name. Nobody round here answer to that, but from Kongor come one who do. I couldn’t talk much so I don’t know how to ask anything. Another voice I feel nearby and ask if she call for the Nnimnim today. The next day a woman come, make herself known in the dark. Why the black? she ask, and the man say that she think even daylight burning her. The woman tell them she will take me now and leave by boat at night. I don’t know where we going, only that wind was blowing against that direction, and over the Ubangta, wind blow south.
“Nnimnim . . . Dolingo . . .” I whisper.
“There is no Dolingo,” she say.
One moon later it was the fall of Dolingo that shock me the most. Yes, the slaves kill nearly every noble, counsel, delegate, every master of verse and song, and every white scientist they could throw from their own tower, the Nnimnim woman say. Then they burned the halls of white science. Everybody wild, nobody thinking, everybody wanting blood. Most of the slaves couldn’t even speak since they didn’t know they had tongues. The Queen they give to a man not slave but not free either, who was to find one of the thousands of secret chambers in all of Dolingo, bind every limb up in rope, shove the feeder down her throat, and lock her away for as long as she live. Then they kill the man so that the location die with him. It don’t take long for Kwash Dara to send troops to restore the peace. That and a chief from Malakal to ease the people of Dolingo into a new era of further peace and cooperation. But Dolingo have the ropes and they have the gears. They don’t have the pull. We going to need the pull, he say, right as Kwash Dara send more troops.
Wild dakka to keep me in sleep, for when there is sleeping, there is healing. A bath in black plum leaves for open wounds. South people call this iputumame, but we call it kiluma, she say, as she bring a spiky plant in the room. It bring life, heal life, lengthen life, the only thing it don’t do is take it. She and the women slice the thick leaves, scoop out the gel, and rub it deep into my skin, then they wrap the leaves all around me, and give me tea from a sister plant to drink away infection. I wake up and see my skin green and scream until she say, Hush girl, these are the things that must happen to you. Another night the other women, seeing that I still can’t do anything with my hands and fingers, grind a paste out of the blister beetle and rub it in. Is days later when I can hold the bowl of tea myself.
“This tea, it different,” I say.
“You first words other than Nnimnim or Dolingo.”
“The tea.”
“Mkonde-konde in the North, umkakase in the East. It stop your mind running away from you. Skin no the only thing that need the healing,” she say.
The Nnimnim woman look at me, not pleased but satisfied.
“Your body take you far, Sogolon. Time now you give it rest.”
“You telling me to die?”
“No. You know what me telling you.”
I don’t catch what she saying, until I catch it.
“No,” I say.
“Many a woman out there with no use. You know there is a way because you seen it.”
“No.”
“This here body can only do so much for you.”
“I not taking no girl body, you hear me? I rather dead. Make death come first.”
“Death not coming for you, woman.”
“Then poison me.”
“If you was going die, you would have been dead long time now.”