“Only one night passed in the forest.” Sogolon laughed like a wheeze. “So we come three days late,” I said. “You lost in that forest for twenty and nine days.” “What?” “A whole moon come and go since you gone into bush.” And perhaps this, like the last two times she said it, was where I threw myself back down on the rugs, stunned. Everything not dead had twenty-nine days—a whole moon—to grow, including truth and lies. People on voyages have long returned. Creatures born got old, others died, and those dead withered to dust in that time.
