“Time be not kind, dear boy.” Ullumon hacked and coughed, then leaned on his staff. “Right through dare.”

  Tall bush ahead glowed yellow at its lining. Behind them, the afternoon sizzled on a bustling lawn.

  The glade, adorned only with the sporadic up-shoot of dark shrubs, clanked and rippled with the colliding horns of some strange sort of deer.

  “What are they?” Conabitt asked Ullumon.

  “Impala,” said Leebu, licking his lips.

  Ullumon took note, banishing the cat up into a tree.

  Ullumon and Conabitt advanced, watching the herd. “Day are all male,” Ullumon said, digging into a satchel before turning jovial, “like you, me, and dat awful cat back dare.” The boy gazed in wonder at the deer’s black and white and tan brown, their weird, wood-like spiraling horns. The whole lot seemed preparing from some great battle, gaining speed to crash into one another or preening their weapons on a nearby shrub. Nearest the boy, two young males locked horns and wrestled one another through a kicked-up dust.

  After the clash, once a winner was vaguely established, Ullumon startled the boy with a guttural call. The boy instantly perceived the sound as the language of the beasts. Ullumon summoned over the loser, who wasted not a moment to trot up.

  “Tell us,” Ullumon said, “dear impala, why do you tussle so?”

  “Me mom used to giver stillborns to the baboons. When I’m king of me own herd there’ll be no stillborns.” The beast blew hot air from his snout and stood tall. “I’m prime and virile and strong.”

  “Is that true?” Conabitt said in Orisulan. He knew of baboons, and the thought of some demonic monkey gnawing on a dead deer baby sickened him.

  “Oh, yes,” Ullumon said. “Payment to da baboons for watching over dem. Remember dat, dear boy, da power of alliance.”

  Before rejoining the others, the impala enchanted the boy with talks of training to fight, honing what is given to us, and to the victor goes “the woman, the women, the woman, the women.” The boy uncontrollably wished that he could be one of these, just for a day. His mates had wrestled and played with oaken swords, but nothing so fun as this. He expressed such feelings to Ullumon, going on and on as the Lathairboni was pulling his fist out of his satchel.

  A fine golden powder rained down on Conabitt. The Lathairboni said something but this time the boy could not understand. Nothing existed for the boy but pain. An all-encompassing throb that contorted the boy’s hands and knees, sending him down onto them. It felt as if his head was growing away from his shoulders, a head that now burst. This would account for the sudden, freak change in vision, but nothing could explain the sense that he was no longer he.

  “Like what you see?” Ullumon was holding the looking glass that had belonged to the boy’s nanny. The boy walked, perhaps crawled, swiftly. Unable to see well directly in front now, the boy turned his head to the side. The glass was cracked, and behind the shards was the face of a young impala.

  “But—” the boy said in the guttural tongue.

  “Is the pain gone?”

  “But how?”

  The Lathairboni leaned onto his staff, eyeing the horizon beyond the ruckus. “It seems to me, dear boy, you should have other questions on your mind now.” Conabitt the impala turned and faced his bachelor herd, instantly struck with a prompting of his own instincts. “Now go and win.”

  Conabitt trotted on his hoofs, nervous beyond measure at what the others may say. But in him there sparked something else.

  “Have a go?” one said, not entirely pleasant.

  He needed no instruction. They paced out, turning as duelists and colliding headfirst into the other. They went one way, then another. Digs in the dirt were and were not avoided. In the distance, seemingly on the far side of the world, Ullumon cheered. There was nothing else now, only force. Little by little it seemed the other waned, boosting the boy’s heart until at last dazzling in joy itself as his opponent trotted off to find another.

  “I did it, I did it!” Conabitt bloomed, galloping back to Ullumon. The Lathairboni coated him in a pinkish powder.

  “Victory!”

  Whirling back to a sweating, dust-matted boy: “I actually did it.”

  They departed, rustling Leebu from a nap and beginning their return journey. The boy relived his encounter in his head, in his heart, with his hands and his mouth until every bird and snake within the vicinity of a well-fired arrow finally knew of his feat. Once back on the summit of the jungle hill, they stopped to stare at distant flumes of smoke.

  Leebu sniffed the air. “Looks like your human villages are burning.”

  “Come,” Ullumon said. “The night draws near.”

  “Where’s all that coming from?” the boy asked.

  Ignoring the question, Ullumon turned. His eyes bore a faint menace. “Da elephant has seven rows of molars. Remember dis. After da seventh iz gone da elephant starve. Remember dis lesson, Diamond. We only have so much time. Reap what iz yours while fit to.”

  *

  “This one?” Conabitt saw only a pile of dirty rags. Uprooting his face from of a swelling bag, the old man gave a nod. The boy grabbed the travel cloak and handed it over.

  “We must leave,” Ullumon said. “Tonight.” He confiscated the candles the boy was packing. “Leebu knows the hidden trails.”

  The evening had come and with it the stars, before the storms rolled in. Now the night beyond the hut echoed with the chorus of frogs in a calm vacuum, the world wet and gleaming. Whatever had burned and caused long spires of black smoke in the afternoon had to have been extinguished by the gusts that ended an hour ago. Initially caught in the first wave, the soaked and soggy trio had filed in with no intent to find cloaks or put back candles. The humans were exhausted and may have settled in for a quiet night around a brazier’s fire, if it hadn’t been for the hornbills.

  “They are coming, they are coming,” squawked the birds. The moment the rain ended, the two had returned to pitch a fit. With his satchels still wet and dripping and slung about him, the old man had limped outside. Behind him went the boy. “They are coming! The white—”

  Ullumon silenced the male with a gesture. Turning to Conabitt, “Fetch a sip of water for da old man.”

  When Conabitt returned, the hornbills stared down uneasily. Back out under the tree, Ullumon shook in his hand what any Orisulan would have called a potion. “Time for another, Diamond.”

  The boy uncorked the crude vial and drank down its contents without thought. Burning, emboldening, this liquid was thick, brown, and sick. And at its bottom the dear boy’s realization: the man loved him. More so maybe than his own scowling, governing father did. This sensation persisted in him as Ullumon looked up at the birds.

  “Continue, hornbill.”

  “They are coming, coming. The whites. Burning villages, they are.”

  The female interjected in a lighter lark: “Herders. Told on you.”

  Both flapped and spoke together: “Told them you may have the white boy.”

  “Day all wanting me gone!” Ullumon erupted. “And dis be how day mean to do it.”

  “No one spared,” the male seemed to have said after.

  “Does dis bother you, Diamond?” The old man was looking at him. The Lathairboni knew that while God’s Broth dissipated slow, the charmer, the potent Goonu powder dissolved in hyena blood, would wear off quickly. Wasting no time, he said, “You don’t wish to be found by da whites.”

  “I hate Suela,” the boy said. “Well, I thought I did. I want to go back to the Morgeltine.”

  “Why?”

  The boy seemed to provide his answer as if coughing up a lump. “My—my father.”

  “Ah.” The Lathairboni put a hand on his shoulder. “He was a calma, fairer man? Back dare? Back den?” The boy thought about it and nodded. “Maybe, dear boy, you were too young back den to see him for who he was. Who he iz.”

  “I want,” the Goonu at its zenith. “Can I stay with you, Ullumon?”

  Ullumon clapped his hands, bright as a bell. “Datz a good boy. I tell you what, you stay with old Ullumon. We do more adventure. Den we can take you back. But only if you say.” Ullumon sent away the birds, comforting the boy during his protests that he’d stay in the jungle forever.

  “Where we going now?” The boy shouldered the bag Ullumon had given him.

  “To da Nilosulans. Our peoples in da south.”

  *

  The jungles were still thick. Moving what Ullumon insisted in the dead of night was south bore them nearly impenetrable. All the stopping had worried the boy. He’d regained something of himself, though he discomforted still in seeing any old man cower and grimace under the burden of pain. Leebu, by a contrast grown expected, seemed to rejoice in the matter, strolling over and flicking his tail in the old man’s face when he wheezed the greatest.

  *

  “Sarge, look.” A mailed hand reached down into a vat. At its still-warm bottom was discovered the head of a monkey. Orisulans were fond of impaling, and the hangman’s noose. Beheading irked them.

  The sergeant grumbled, walking from the doorway. “These jungle vermin, they should be round up and drowned.”

  The soldier plopped the head back in, afterward kicking the whole thing over. The handful of men tearing apart the hut paled in number to the company who tore down the snares and deadfalls outside. Every local finger had pointed toward the evil wizard, and the captain-turned-lunatic whom the sergeant served spared no expense at getting them promptly to the fabled hut.

  Cots were flipped, cupboards cleared, sacks and bags run through then tossed onto a roaring bonfire. Religion and the soldierly came hand in hand, at least in Mulgara where civilizations beat metal into armor and not coconuts into annoying drums. Those inside were sickened by the obvious devilry; the nailed ears, unsettling smells, the ophidiarium under the man’s dinner table.

  “Sarge!” A tracker burst in. “We found tracks. A man and a boy’s. They’re leading away, seems to be following some path some leopard’s on.”

  “Sarge!” came another voice.

  The sergeant winced, then swung his eyes over. A soldier stood in the darkest, furthest corner of the godforsaken place, stammering until he squeaked, “You need to see this.”

  She was stuffed crudely into a wooden chest then covered by a zebra hide. Her wounds consistent with Suelan rebels. But nothing else fell under what the sergeant could call the norm. The boy’s nanny’s eyes had been cut out, carefully relocated into the clay jars tucked away under her exposed rump. Worse yet, causing one of the brawny men to run out and vomit, the angle of her sex exposed how easily its greater parts had been removed, their locations unknown, and would be forever. The Orisulans took pleasure watching the place swirl up then crash in cinders.

  *

  Somewhere before sunrise, the cat found a cave of ferns, tolerably moist, a place where the old man crawled in like a spider who’d been scorched by flames. The boy excited at the prospect of joining the cat. There was a hunt to be had, but his feet ached and his head swam.

  What felt like an instant later, the boy was roused from a deep sleep. Wiping free from his face the leaf that had woke him, he grunted and squinted up into the canopy. Morning had come, and with it the grey and pink of a sky still determined to hide the sun. What pallor seeped through did so on the dreary camp. Leebu was sleeping directly above, on a sturdy branch, belly fattened by a kill whose uneaten remains hung nearby. The hooves reminded Conabitt of what he’d been yesterday. He managed to smile. Then he looked over at Ullumon.

  It was as if the night had sucked him like a giant leech. His limbs, limp yet gnarled and root-like. His mouth, stuck in an awful expression. His skin, dried as a mummy’s despite the humidity already beading on the boy’s lip. He crouched down, relieved when he saw the slow up and down of Ullumon’s ribs. He was old. Older than the boy had thought. At long last the man’s wrinkled, brown lids cracked open.

  “Are you okay?” Ullumon said nothing, but shifted a little in the sodden leaves. “Why not turn us into elephants? Then we could get where we’re going.”

  “Now he is thinking, Leebu.” The old man laughed. “The change. Too much pain for old bones. Help me up, dear boy.”

  And that was it. Conabitt thought he heard a hip pop, then they were off again. Leebu roused, savorless biscuits eaten, more vines and fern parted, and soon the three had reformed their file and trekked down what Leebu had said was a meat trail. With little deviation, the cleared-out sliver carried them southward, delivering upon them a second night of misery.

  “Stop here.” The old man had found a log, a less black shape mottled by fungus that bore a blueish glow. He looked like some demon, seated in contemplation.

  “No good here,” Leebu growled.

  “Does not have to be a mansion, Leebu.”

  In the luminescence, the boy could see the cat was looking around. The cat said, “Your ears are failing you. We are—”

  Then the boy heard. He got down and crawled over. “What are they?”

  Similar to what he’d heard come out of Leebu during the quarrel over the sacks, growls were coming from somewhere beyond the trees. These growls, however, boomed and persisted. More than one cat was out there.

  “Lions,” Leebu said, to which the boy’s eyes grew wide. “Heard of them, have you?” Conabitt listened, depicting as best he could them calling to one another.

  “Are those their names?”

  “We must reroute,” Leebu said. “Come.”

  The boy followed, but not without hoisting Ullumon up and being the old man’s second staff. Somewhere deep in the night the rains came again, as did another miserable shelter were the boy shivered until dawn.

  Right as bug bites and the legacy of Ullumon’s biscuits had convinced Conabitt they’d died and wandered into the hell Orisulan priests loved to warn him about, on this day, the second day since leaving Ullumon’s dry hut and only three since being rescued, right as afternoon heat was giving way to the brief joy of evening, Leebu led them out from under the trees and onto the fringe of a Suelan village.

  The cat accepted Ullumon’s rope, pulled from his satchel and wrapped around its neck like a dog’s leash. This pageant was the only way to prevent widespread panic, for as they made their way to whatever Ullumon had in store, they did so through the rickety fences of goat corrals. Never had the boy heard such barnyard mayhem. Suelans emerged from their huts. They were the same ebony as Ullumon, as the men who’d tried to abduct him, who had killed his nanny, the soldiers, the coachman. Yet with their dress, veiled only in ornate bone rings and the burgundy droop of tough loincloths, these Nilosulans presented an even wilder man.

  Apprehension towards Ullumon and his plodding, cold-staring cat lifted when the clear, big white eyes Conabitt saw took their turn to stare upon him. Conabitt hadn’t noticed the lack of trees, the slight slope on which they walked down something like the main avenue. Only when they stopped at the pointy heads of carved-out wooden canoes did he gaze upon the wide plain of water that ribboned around a lush bend.

  “Da swamps be our friend,” Ullumon said to him. “Village-burning whites be not coming here.” Nilosulans had dropped their fish nets and now crowded around. Odd, but for all the monkeys and deer and cat talk, Conabitt scratched his head as a village elder begin speaking to Ullumon. The boy understood nothing.

  Ullumon seemed to fair better, slowing the tongue they spoke to respond and point down to the water’s edge.

  As another night approached, a negotiation of sorts ended and the trio stepped inside a canoe. Accompanied by a local, this apt boatmen stood at the very rear of the canoe, pushing them along with a wooden pole.

  In the last moments of evening, turns soft and sharp glided the boy past fields of grass. How far below their stalks went before rooting in murky bottoms he could not guess. It took only one look beyond the worn wooden lip, into the black mirror disrupted by their wake. The boy felt uneasy, passing a speckling of outstretched trees, the last of the islands, then they were swallowed by the delta.

  The moon had been out early. Together they turned the watery grasslands that enclosed the travelers into sallow, rustling walls. At their breaks, which were many, the boy soon recognized these to be the inclusion of other channels. A maze was what they were in. Certainly safe from being found, at least by men. But the far black of island forests and the too-near lurkings under an ancient wetland hid every fear a boy could imagine. Sallow walls, when they squeezed in on them, the boy rightly perceived as the mark of a shallow bottom. In these moments the boatman, Boadu—as he’d replied to Ullumon’s inquiry— softly guided the canoe so close to the grass that it rubbed against their arms. When the channels widened, Boadu repositioned them in the water’s center.

  “Why does he do this?” Conabitt whispered up to Ullumon, who in turn spoke to the boatman in the local, southern tongue.

  “Says hippos,” Ullumon translated. “Day be at da sides in deeper water.”

  Conabitt turned and scrutinized the strikes of Boadu’s pole. They seemed gentle enough, enough not to enrage a submerged monster, at least. The paintings and rumors back at the colony were bad enough. Being out at night amongst those horrid water cows who chomped people and horses in two was—“Ullumon, I don’t want to be here,” the boy accidentally said in cat.

  “Boy’s right,” Leebu said, stiffening the guide. The boatman heard only growls, the kind that came at moments where fishing ended and brutal fights against leopards often began. “No place to be, stuck out on a drifting log.”

  “Shut your jaws,” Ullumon said from up front, causing the cat to growl deeper and the boatman to utter a string of chants. Leebu stood. The boy no longer saw the silhouette of the old man, only the leopard’s side as the entire canoe rocked. “And sit,” Ullumon whispered, “down.” Ullumon repeated his command, but still the cat hung over the side, continuing to lap up water. “You wish to tip us?”