Black Leopard, Red Wolf (The Dark Star Trilogy #1)

by Marlon James

Bi oju ri enu a pamo. Not everything the eye sees should be spoken by the mouth.

Old men say night is a fool. It will not judge, but whatever comes it will not warn.

The fat one behind me, he swung, I ducked, he tripped, he fell, I jumped, I grabbed the rock that was my pillow and bashed his head until his face smelled fleshy.

I let the half-blind man live because we need stories in order to live, don’t we, priest? Inquisitor. I don’t know what to call you.

The board was on the floor, many balls missing. Too many for a good game. But my father was looking to win, not to play.

But my father never speaks when he can punch, and he has punched me for less.

The lion needs no robe and neither does the cobra. I would go to Ku, where my father came from, even if I did not know the way. My name is Tracker. Once I had a name, but have long forgotten it.

Sometimes the only way forward is through. So I walked through. I was not afraid.

In the evening, which came quick, breezes shifted up and down, and winds went rough past me, like fat men in a hurry.

was a fool. I thought you learned the old ways by forgetting the new.

the Zareba is out in the bush a journey from sunrise to noon.

The ground was right now not the ground, and the sky was not the sky, and lie was truth and truth was a shifting, slithering thing. Truth was making me sick.

“Stay with family and blood will betray you. No Gangatom looking for me. But I envy you.”

Like, I like. Dislike, I love. Disgust, I can feel. Loathing, I can grab in the palm of my hand and squeeze. And hatred, I can live in hatred for days. But the smug smile of indifference on someone’s face makes me want to hack it off.

“Where is the palace? In the city you ran from, boy. Pupils ponder the real nature of the world, not the foolishness of old men. The palace where they build ladders to reach the stars, and create arts that have nothing to do with virtue or sin.”

Quiet is the opposite of sound, not the absence of it. This was absence.

“They live in trees and attack from above, but I have never heard of one this far from the coast. He is Asanbosam, the flesh eater. His brother, Sasabonsam, is the bloodsucker. He is also the smart one. We should leave now.”

But a lie is a house carefully built on rotten stilts. A liar often forgets the beginning of his tale before he gets to the end, and in this way one will catch him. A lie is a tale carefully told if allowed to be told, and I would seek to break his untruth by asking him to tell a different part of the tale. So I asked him not of the first search or the second, but of the four years in between.

It came from the merchants in the East. Now there were secret dens in every city. Nobody I knew who had taken it had a tomorrow. Or a yesterday. Just a now, in a den with smoke, which made me wonder if this man was opium’s seller or slave or a thief of men under opium.

I say better a mad king than a weak one, and better a weak king than a bad one. What is evil anyway, a sad soul infected with devils who take his will, or a man thinking that of all his mother’s children he loves himself the best? You

But because these northern kings have a way that never changes, where each decision tells the keen observer what decision will come next.

Uwomowomowomowo,

My blink blocked blood before it splashed my eye.

Woodpeckers tapped out a beat, telling birds far away that we approach.

Sogolon laughed. “How long you going take to find the missing if you take this long to notice the gone?”

“Find your strength and go. Or stay. Your malcontent is no mystery to me anymore. You are always the Leopard. But maybe you stay out of bushes you don’t know. I won’t be there to save you next time.”

“To the masquerade,” he said, shaking his head at speaking to such an imbecile. The curse of all so young.