Black Leopard, Red Wolf

So Ebekua the elder took me aside and said Fumanguru, I have news from the lands of sky and the chambers of the underworld that made me shiver. The gods have made peace, and so have spirits of nurture and plenty with devils and there is unity in all heavens. I said I do not believe this for it demands of the gods what they are not capable of. Look, the gods cannot end themselves, even the mighty Sagon, when he tried to take his own life only transformed it. For the gods there is nothing to discover, nothing new. Gods are without the gift of surprising themselves, which even we who crawl in the dirt have in abundance. What are our children but people who continue to surprise and disappoint us? Ebekua said to me, Basu I do not know by how this entered your head, but bid it farewell and let us never speak on such things again.

A smaller book, bound in alligator skin, opens with this:

Day of Basa Dura

Oh I should know the will of Kwash Dara? Is that what he thinks? Did he not know that even when we were boys I was my own man?

Five pages more:

Bufa Moon

And nothing until so far down the edge of the page the words nearly fell off:

Tax the elders? A grain tax? Something as essential as air?

Obora Gudda Moon

Day of Maganatti Jarra to Maganatti Britti

He set us free today. The rains would not stop. Work of the gods.

I threw down that book and picked up another, this one in hairy black-and-white cowskin, not shiny leather. The pages were bound in brilliant red thread, which meant this was the most new, even though it was in the middle of the stack. He put it in the middle, surely. He scrambled the order so that no one could build the story of his life too easy, of this I was certain. A cat dashed past me. A flutter over my head and I looked up. Two pigeons flew out a window high up over me.

What are we in, but a year of mad lords?

Sadassaa Moon

Day of Bita Kara

There are men that I have lost all love for, and there are the words I will write in a message I will never send, or in a tongue that they will never read.

Day of Lumasa

What is love for child, if not mania? I look at the magic of my smallest boy and cry, and I look at the muscle and might of the oldest, and grin with a pride that we are warned should be only of the gods. And for them and the four in between, I have a love that scares me. I look at them and I know it, I know it, I know it. I would kill the one who comes to harm my sons. I would kill that one with no mercy and no thought. I would search for that one’s heart and rip the thing out and shove it in their mouth, even if that one is their own mother.

Six sons.

Six sons.

Guraandhala Moon

Day of Garda Duma