Chapter Two
The Buffalo Trial
The dry season that year came in like a debt collector — early, certain, and without mercy.
The rivers thinned to ribbons and then to memory. The grass went from green to gold to the pale brittle color of old bone, and the herds that had spread across the Long Grass like spilled honey now drew together and began to move, all of them, all at once, in the great anxious migration the elders called the turning — when the whole living carpet of the savannah lifts itself up and walks toward the rumor of water somewhere past the horizon.
And with the turning came the buffalo.
They came last, as they always did, because nothing in the Long Grass was foolish enough to hurry a buffalo. They came in a black river a thousand strong, heads low, horns curved like the blades of some ancient slaughter, and the earth complained beneath them in a low continuous thunder you felt in your teeth before you ever heard it in your ears. Where the buffalo passed, they left the land scraped and churned and silent. Even the lions gave them the respect of distance.
All but one season in a lion’s life.
The Trial.
It was not written anywhere, the Trial, because nothing in the Long Grass was written. But it was older than any lion living — older than Hamadi, older than Hamadi’s father — and it went like this: when a prince came into his full growth, when he was no longer a cub and not yet a king, then in the season of the turning that prince would stand at his father’s side at the edge of the herd. And he would learn the one thing a king cannot be told and can only be shown.
That the land does not love you back.
That you may rule a thing your whole life, and it will trample you the instant you forget to be afraid of it.
Mufaro and Taku came to their Trial in the same season, because Hamadi saw no reason to wait, and because — though he would never have said it, would barely have let himself think it — some part of the old king wanted to see them measured side by side. Wanted to know, the way a father is not supposed to want to know, which of his sons the land would choose.
By then Mufaro was already magnificent. There is no kinder word for it. He had grown into his strength the way a river grows into its valley, filling it completely, as though the two had always been meant for each other. When he walked, the younger lions fell quiet. When he spoke, they leaned in. He carried his future kingship the way he carried everything — easily, without seeming to notice the weight, certain it would still be there when he reached for it.
And Taku had grown too, but he had grown the way a tree grows in the shade of a larger one: reaching, leaning, putting all its strength into the parts of itself that might, if it was lucky, find a gap in the canopy and a little light of its own. He was lean where Mufaro was broad, quick where Mufaro was certain, and his eyes had only sharpened with the years, until looking at the world had become for him a kind of permanent argument he was always quietly winning and never permitted to speak aloud.
He was clever. Everyone agreed he was clever. They said it the way you say a thing about someone you have already decided not to follow.
He could not have known — no one could have known — that on this one day, in this one red season, his cleverness was about to be proven completely, catastrophically, unforgivably right.
And that being right would cost him everything, and earn him nothing at all.
They went out three together in the red dawn — Hamadi between his sons, the old king flanked by the two halves of his future — and for the first part of the walk, before any of it, they were only two young lions and their father going out into a morning. Mufaro was loose and bright with the nearness of the thing, the way he always was before anything dangerous, and he kept up a stream of it as they walked — ribbing Taku about the time he’d frozen at his first hunt, Taku firing back about the time Mufaro had charged a warthog burrow and gotten his head stuck, the old shared currency of brothers, the small worn coins of remember when — and Hamadi walked between them and let the bickering wash over him and was, for that little while, a contented father with his two grown sons, going out to do a hard thing together as families had always gone out to do hard things. Taku laughed at something. The sound carried across the red morning between them. It was the last time the three of them would ever be what they were in that hour. The dust the herds had thrown up for days hung in the air and turned the rising sun the color of a wound, and not one of them thought it was an omen, because lions do not believe in omens.
Only Bariki believed in omens, and Bariki had not been invited.
He came anyway. He always came. He appeared on a finger of high rock above the plain with his staff planted and his old eyes fixed on the three lions below, and his lips moved, and what he said no one heard, because there was no one near enough to hear it — which was, he reflected bitterly, the condition of his entire existence.
What he said was: The wind is wrong today. The boy will know it before the men do. And they will not listen to the boy, because they never listen to the boy.
He settled down to watch, because watching was the only thing the spirits had ever permitted him to do.
The plan was Mufaro’s, and it was a good plan, and that was the worst of it.
The herd was strung out along the dry course of the dead river, where the bank rose on the far side into a long crumbling ridge of sun-rotted rock and fell away on the near side into a shallow ravine choked with thorn. Between the ridge and the ravine ran a neck of open ground, a natural defile, perhaps forty lengths across — and Mufaro, surveying it from the rise with his father’s eye already in his head, saw at once what could be done.
“There,” he said. “We take them in the neck. If we press the rear of the herd from the high side and turn the leaders down into the defile, the body of them will bottle there — too many beasts, too little ground — and we can cut the weak ones out of the crush. Father. Look. It’s perfect. The land does half the work for us.”
Hamadi looked, and his chest warmed with the old recognition. There. That is what I made. That is mine. “It is well seen,” he said. “It is how I would have seen it at your age.” And it was the truest praise he owned, and he gave it freely, and he did not notice — he never noticed — the way his other son had gone very still beside him.
Because Taku was not looking at the defile.
Taku was looking at the thorn trees in the ravine, and the way their topmost branches had begun, in the last few minutes, to lean.
“The wind is turning,” Taku said.
He said it quietly. He had learned long ago that loud was no way to make Mufaro hear him; loud was Mufaro’s own language, and you cannot beat the river at being the river. So he said it quietly, and precisely, and with the cold clean certainty that was the one thing the world had ever consistently given him.
“It came off the escarpment all morning — from the high side, from our backs. That’s why your plan works. We press from upwind, the herd smells us behind them, they run from us forward, down into the neck.” He nodded at the leaning thorn. “But the wind is turning. Look at the trees. In an hour it will come off the flats instead — from below, from in front. And when it does, the herd will smell us not behind them but across them. They won’t run forward into the defile. They’ll wheel. They’ll turn on the press and run back up the high side, through the neck, over the exact ground we’ll be standing on.” He let that sit a moment. “Your perfect bottle becomes a flood, brother. And we’ll be standing at the bottom of it.”
There was a silence.
Hamadi looked at the thorn trees, and frowned, because he had not seen it, and a part of him — a part he was not proud of — disliked being shown a thing by the son he did not understand.
And Mufaro laughed.
Not cruelly. He was never cruel. That was the thing that made it unbearable, then and forever — that not once in the whole catastrophe of their lives was Mufaro ever once cruel. He laughed the warm easy laugh of a creature who has never in his life had cause to doubt that the world would hold, and he butted his great head fondly against his clever brother’s shoulder.
“You and your winds,” he said. “You and your what-ifs. Taku, if we wait for every wind to settle, we’ll wait until the rains, and the herds will be gone, and we’ll have learned nothing and eaten less.” He was not dismissing him to be rid of him. He believed, with his whole honest heart, that he was encouraging him — that the right response to fear was not to retreat from it but to charge it down, because that had always, every single time, been the right response for Mufaro. “Even if the wind turns — so what? If they wheel, we wheel with them. We’re not stones, brother, we’re lions. We adjust. Courage covers what a plan can’t. It always has.”
Courage covers what a plan can’t.
That was the sentence. Years later, an old and broken creature standing in the rain would be unable to remember most of this day, but he would remember that sentence with perfect clarity, because it was the sentence that had killed the part of him worth saving. Courage covers what a plan can’t. Spoken kindly. Spoken by a brother who loved him. Spoken by the one creature in the Long Grass who would never, not once in his charmed and golden life, learn the thing that Taku had known since he was old enough to count silences:
That courage is a luxury of the seen.
That the world catches the brave when they fall, because the world is always watching the brave.
And that it does not, will not, catch you when you fall in a place it has decided not to look.
“All right,” Taku said.
He did not argue further. He had argued with Mufaro his whole life and knew the shape of a thing that has already been decided. He turned his face to the leaning thorn one last time, and he said — to no one, to the wind itself — in a voice too low for his father or his brother to catch:
“All right. We’ll do it your way. We always do it your way.”
And up on the high rock, Bariki closed his eyes.
They took up their positions in the bright hard light of the climbing sun, and for a while it went exactly as Mufaro had drawn it.
The press began. Hamadi and Mufaro worked the high side, snarling along the rear of the herd, and the great black river shuddered and began, sullenly, to flow — down, forward, into the neck, exactly as planned, a thousand tons of muscle and horn funneling into the throat of the defile. Taku took the low position, the ravine side, the unglamorous post, because that was where he was put, and he watched the leaders crowd into the bottleneck and thought, against his own certainty, against everything he had read in the trees: Let me be wrong. For once in my life, let me be the one who’s wrong.
He was not wrong.
The wind turned.
It turned the way he had said it would, off the flats, off the front — a long warm shifting breath that came up out of the south and rolled across the trapped herd from the wrong direction entirely. And Taku, watching, saw the precise instant the buffalo found the scent of the lions on it — saw it pass through the herd like a current through water, head lifting after head lifting after head, a thousand black skulls swinging up all at once — and he opened his mouth to shout the warning that no one would have time to heed.
The herd wheeled.
There is no horror on the open plain like the wheel of a trapped herd, and there is no warning fast enough to matter. The thousand beasts that had been pouring down into the neck reversed in the space of three heartbeats and came back — back up the high side, back through the throat of the defile, back over the exact ground where the king and his sons had set themselves to press — and the low thunder became a roar that swallowed the sky and the sun and the small voices of lions.
Hamadi, old and quick with the speed that had kept him alive through forty such seasons, threw himself sideways into a fold of the ridge and the flood broke around him. Taku, low on the ravine side, was already moving the instant the heads came up, already running for the thorn, already saved by the simple fact of having been the only one who saw it coming.
But Mufaro.
Mufaro had been highest. Mufaro had been deepest in the press, farthest forward, exactly where a brave lion stations himself, exactly where the plan had wanted its strongest piece — and when the herd wheeled, it wheeled over him, and the world that had spent his whole life arranging itself for his convenience did not, this once, arrange itself in time.
Here is the loud half of what happened. This is the half the Long Grass would tell for a hundred seasons, and tell wrong every time.
The loud half is that the herd turned, and there was dust and chaos and the end of the world, and when the dust settled there was Mufaro — alive. Battered, bleeding from a dozen scrapes, his mane caked grey, but alive, standing swaying in the churned and emptied ground with the broken light coming down through the settling dust, having walked through a thousand buffalo and out the other side. The pride, watching from the safe high rise where the lionesses and the old had gathered, saw their golden prince emerge alive from the place where no creature emerges alive, and they did the thing a pride does. They ran to him. They cried his name. They wept and they laughed and they pressed against him to feel the warm fact of his survival, and the air filled with the rising smoke of it — Mufaro, Mufaro, he lived, he walked through it, did you see, did you SEE —
And Mufaro, dazed, half-deaf, his heart still hammering the panic out of itself, did not know what had happened to him. He knew only that the herd had come, and that he had not died, and the dazzling animal relief of being alive when you should be dead does not leave much room for arithmetic. Luck, he thought, in the part of his mind that thought anything at all. Luck, and the spirits, and perhaps — perhaps I am stronger than I knew. Perhaps I broke clear myself. Perhaps this is what Father meant. Courage covers what a plan can’t. He could not have told you, in that bright loud ringing moment, how he had gotten free. The dust had eaten it. There was a blank in him where the most important thing that ever happened to him should have been, and the pride’s adoring noise rushed in to fill the blank, and by nightfall he half-believed he had cut his own way out, and by the next season he believed it entirely, and he would believe it, untroubled, for the rest of his life.
That was the loud half.
It was a lie. Not a lie anyone told. A lie the dust told. The cruelest kind, because no one ever meant it.
Here is the quiet half.
When the herd wheeled, Taku was the only creature on the plain already in motion, because he was the only creature on the plain who had not been surprised. And in the first instant of the turn, even as his own body was carrying him low and fast toward the safety of the thorn, his eyes did the thing his eyes always did — they found, across the boiling chaos, the one thing that mattered.
His brother. Trapped.
The flood had driven Mufaro back against the ridge, and the ridge — the long crumbling ridge of sun-rotted rock that Taku had noted that morning and filed away in the cold ledger of his mind where he kept everything — the ridge had begun to go. The hammering passage of the herd had shaken loose a whole shoulder of it, and it was sliding, a slow grinding avalanche of rubble and red dust, sealing off the high retreat, closing Mufaro into a shrinking pocket of ground between the falling rock at his back and the ravine at his side and the wheeling herd in his face. And out of the front of that herd, head down, half a ton of black fury with a boss of horn across its brow like a slab of iron, came the lead bull — the old scarred king of the buffalo — driving straight at the trapped and swaying golden lion who had not yet even understood that he was about to die.
No one saw it.
Understand that. It is the whole of the chapter, the whole of the book, the whole of the tragedy. No one saw it. The pride was on the rise, behind the curtain of dust, watching the place where the herd had been, not the place where it had gone. Hamadi was pinned in his fold of ridge, blind in the murk. Bariki was too far, and could only watch the small shapes move in the haze and grieve a thing he could not reach. There was no audience. There was no witness. There was only the dust, and the dark within the dust, and the dark does not testify.
And there was Taku.
Who turned, in the one safe instant of his life, and ran the wrong way.
He ran into it — away from the thorn and the safety and the long ordinary life he might have had, into the murk where his brother was about to die alone and unrecorded — and he reached the shrinking pocket of ground in the half-second before the bull did, and there was no time to think and nothing to decide and so he did not decide anything at all. He simply hit his brother. Threw the whole weight of his lean quick body against Mufaro’s golden flank and shoved — shoved him sideways and clear, out of the bull’s line, into the narrow gap where the rockfall had not yet finished closing — shoved him out of the path of his death and into the rest of his life, in a single motion that no eye in the world was turned to see.
And the bull, robbed of the one target and given another, turned its great scarred head, and its horn came across.
It caught Taku from brow to jaw.
He never felt it as pain. That is the truth that no telling ever captures. There was no time for pain. There was a white line drawn down the side of his face by something moving faster than feeling, and then the ground came up and the world tipped and the thunder closed over the top of him like water over a stone, and the last thing in his mind before the dark took it was not fear and was not even hurt.
It was a small bitter flicker of the old, the useless, the unforgivable triumph.
I was right about the wind.
Then the herd poured over the place where he lay, and around it, and away.
And it was quiet.
And Taku did not wake.
He woke to drums.
He did not know how long he had been gone. The light had changed — the hard red morning had softened into the long gold of late afternoon — and the dust had settled, and the plain was empty of buffalo, and he was lying alone in the churned and trampled ground at the foot of the rockfall, in the place no one had thought to look, with one side of his face fused to the earth by a mask of dried blood and dust and the other eye blinking up at an ordinary sky.
And from across the plain, from the high rise, from the warm distant heart of the Long Grass, came the drums.
He lay very still and listened.
There were drums, and under the drums there was laughter, the loose unguarded laughter of relief, and under the laughter there were voices, many voices, lifted together in the old songs — and threaded all through it, rising again and again like a bird breaking from cover, was a name.
Mufaro.
Mufaro.
Mufaro.
Taku lay in the dirt where he had bought that celebration with his face, and he listened to his brother’s name go up into the evening, and he waited.
He waited for someone to notice he was not there.
It is a small thing, to be missed. It is the smallest thing in the world. A pride has a hundred eyes; surely, surely, in all that joy, one of them would sweep the gathering and snag on an absence. Where is the other one? Where is Taku? He went out three with the king this morning and only two came back to the rise — where is the dark one? Surely his father, counting his treasures in the safety of evening, would reach the end of the count and find it short by one. Surely Subira, who had always seemed to see a little more than the others, would turn from the fires with that careful look and go searching for the missing piece. Surely Mufaro — Mufaro, whom he had just shoved out of the jaws of death, Mufaro who owed him now a debt so total it had no name — surely Mufaro, even drunk on his own survival, would feel the cold place at his side where a brother should be and come looking.
He waited.
The drums went on.
The sun sank a hand’s width toward the escarpment, and the gold went to amber, and the amber began to go to grey, and the drums went on, and the laughter went on, and the name went up and up and up into the darkening sky, and no one came.
Not Hamadi.
Not Subira.
Not Mufaro.
No one.
He understood it slowly, the way you understand a wound — first the fact of it, the simple stupid fact that he was still lying in the dirt and the light was failing and the party had not paused, not for a heartbeat, not for the length of a single missed breath, to wonder where he was. And then, behind the fact, the meaning of the fact, arriving cold and clean and total like the turning of the wind he had read in the trees that morning:
This is what I am.
I gave everything. I saw what no one saw and I ran where no one would run and I paid what no one will ever pay, and the world did not so much as turn its head. I could have died here. I nearly did. And it would be the exact same evening. The same drums. The same songs. The same name. There is no version of this day in which I am noticed, because there is no version of me that the world has ever agreed to see. He walked through the herd and they sang for a season. I carried him out of it on my own back and opened my face to the bone doing it, and not one creature in the whole of the Long Grass will ever know it happened.
A boy will forgive being hurt. He had been hurt before; he could bear being hurt. What he could not bear, what no creature alive can truly bear, was the thing the empty evening was teaching him with its drums and its distant joy:
You are not even worth the looking.
And lying there in the gathering dark with his ruined face turned up to the first cold stars, Taku stopped waiting.
It is a quiet thing, when a heart decides to stop waiting. There is no sound to mark it. But it is the loudest thing that ever happened in the Long Grass, and Bariki, far off on his rock, felt it go through the night like the snapping of a great dry branch, and bowed his head, because he had felt this exact thing approaching for years and had not, in the end, been able to do anything at all.
It was the mandrill who came.
Not the father. Not the lioness. Not the brother. The old half-mad seer that the pride tolerated and did not heed — the one creature in the Long Grass as accustomed as Taku himself to speaking truths into rooms where no one was listening — he came down off his rock in the last grey light and crossed the empty trampled plain on his crooked legs and his staff, and he found the young lion lying alone in the place the celebration had forgotten, and he sat down in the dirt beside him without a word.
For a long while neither spoke.
Then Bariki took, from the pouch he carried, a small gourd.
“For the face,” he said. “It must go on now, while the wound is fresh, and be bound, and kept clean. If it does, the face will heal nearly whole — a pale line, no more; in a year you would have to look close to find it.” He held it out in his old leathered palm. “It is bitter. It will burn worse than the horn did. But you will keep your face.”
Taku did not look at the gourd.
He was looking across the plain at the far-off glow of the fires, the warm bright distant heart of everything he was not part of, and when at last he spoke it was in the voice of a young lion arriving, all alone, at the central discovery of his life.
“If I let it heal,” he said slowly, “and it fades to a pale line no one can see — then in a year, it will be exactly as if it never happened.” He turned his head, then, and fixed the old mandrill with his one clear eye, and there was something almost like peace on his ruined face — the terrible peace of a creature who has stopped hoping for the thing it wanted and decided instead to take a lesser thing the world cannot refuse to give. “It already is as if it never happened, old one. Listen.” He tipped his head toward the drums. “That is the sound of a thing that never happened. I saved his life this afternoon, and the proof of it is that the whole world is singing and not one note is mine.”
“Taku—”
“They cannot see what I do. They have never been able to see what I do. They cannot see what I feel; I have hidden every wound I ever took, all my life, the way I was taught, the way the proud and the unseen always hide them — and look where the hiding got me.” He breathed out, long and slow, and the breath shook. “Hidden pain can be ignored. I learned that today. I learned it lying in this dirt listening to them sing. Hidden pain can be ignored, and I have been hidden pain my whole life, and so I have been ignored my whole life, and the two things were always, always the same thing.”
“That is not the lesson—” Bariki’s voice had changed; he had understood, a heartbeat too late, where the thing was going. “Taku. No. I know what you are thinking. It is the head of a long road and there is no turning place upon it and at the end of it there is no one — do you hear me — at the end of that road there is no one at all—”
“But pain you can see,” Taku went on, as though the old one had not spoken, and his voice did not rise; it only grew quieter, and more certain, and more lost. “Pain written on a face, where it cannot be looked away from, where the eye snags on it before it snags on anything else — that, the world has to answer. They can refuse to see what I do. They can refuse to see what I feel. They cannot refuse to see this.” He turned his ruined face up to the rising stars, deliberately, the way a flower turns to a sun it has decided to stop trusting. “Every creature that ever looks at me again will see it first. They’ll see it before they see my brother standing next to me. They’ll see it in the dark. They’ll see it from the high rise. I will never again, as long as I live, walk into a room and not be seen.”
And he closed his good eye, and he turned his open face into the cold night air, and he let the wound do what wounds do when they are not tended.
He chose the scar.
Bariki set the gourd down in the dirt between them. He did not argue further; he had argued with fate before and knew the shape of a thing already finished. He sat with the small useless gourd between his paws and watched a young lion he loved make the one decision that could not be unmade, and he thought, with the old grief that was the only thing the spirits had ever given him in trade for his sight:
A boy will forgive being hurt long before he forgives being unseen.
And now he has found a way to make certain he is never unseen again. He has taken the one wound the world gave him for free, and he is building it into a monument, and he will call the monument justice, and there is nothing in this whole turning world that I can do but sit here in the dark and watch it weather.
The drums, far off, did not stop.
It was deep night before Mufaro came, and he came by accident.
The celebration had finally guttered down into the heavy contented sleep of a pride that has been frightened and then spared, and Mufaro, restless even in his triumph, even in his exhaustion — restless with a vague itch he could not name, a sense of something out of true, some accounting in the back of his mind that would not balance — had wandered out from the warm pile of sleeping bodies to walk the edge of the resting-ground under the stars. And there, at the very rim of the firelight, on a low rock at the boundary of everything, he found his brother sitting alone in the dark with his face turned away.
“There you are,” Mufaro said. And then he came round, and the dim light caught the side of Taku’s face, and the easy warmth went out of his voice all at once. “Taku. Your face. What — by the kings, what happened to you? Were you caught in it? When the herd wheeled — were you near it? Why didn’t you come to the healers, why are you sitting out here in the dark, the whole pride would have—”
“It’s done,” Taku said. “It’s already done. Leave it.”
Mufaro lowered himself to the rock beside his brother, slowly, his whole simple honest heart filling up with a horror and a tenderness he had no idea how to spend. He looked at the great livid seam down the side of his brother’s face — the wound he himself had been spared, the wound that had his own name written invisibly all through it, the price of his own life paid out in the dark by the one creature he had laughed at that morning — and he did not know any of that, and he never would, and what came out of him, because it was all he had, was the wrong thing. It was, in fact, exactly and precisely the wrong thing, the way it always was, the way it would be until the very last day of both their lives.
“You should have stayed clear,” Mufaro said gently. “When it turned. I know it was fast, but — you’re quick, Taku, quicker than any of us, you of all of us should have been the first one safe. Why were you even down in it? There was no need to be a hero. Everyone got out. I got out.” A small wondering shake of his head, the dazzled survivor still marvelling at himself. “I still don’t even know how I did it. I think — I think I just broke clear. The spirits were with me. But you didn’t have to be near it at all.”
Everyone got out. I got out.
Taku closed his eyes.
He almost laughed. There was a moment when the whole black comedy of it rose in his throat and he nearly laughed in his brother’s face — I got out, I think I just broke clear — because of course Mufaro believed that; because in Mufaro’s world it was true; because the dust had eaten the truth and the pride had sung the lie into stone and there was no longer any room in the world for what had actually happened in that shrinking pocket of ground.
He did not laugh.
And he did not tell him, either.
He understood, sitting there in the dark with his open face, that he could. That he could say the four words — I saved your life — and Mufaro would believe him, would be shattered, would be overcome, would spend the rest of his days trying to repay a debt he had not known he carried. And Taku understood, with the cold clean logic that was the only steady gift the world had ever given him, that he would rather die than say them. Because a recognition you have to demand is not recognition. It is alms. It is a thing you extract, a debt you call in, and the moment you have to ask to be seen, the seeing is already worthless. He had wanted, his whole life, to be known — freely, without asking, the way Mufaro was known just by walking into the light. And he understood now that he would never have that, and that the only thing worse than not having it would be begging for a counterfeit of it from the very brother whose existence had eaten his own.
So he kept the silence. He folded the truth up small and swallowed it, and it went down into him and lodged somewhere near the bottom and began, slowly, over years, to turn to stone — and Mufaro would look at that scarred face ten thousand times across the rest of their lives, at the coronation and across the carcass and at the very end in the rain, and not once, not for a single heartbeat, would he know that he was looking at the price of his own life.
Instead, Taku asked a question.
He turned his ruined face to his brother in the dark, and he asked it in the old way, the way they had asked each other things since they were cubs on a sunlit rock arguing about elephants, and his voice was very quiet and very even, and there was no anger in it anywhere — which is how Mufaro would know, years later, looking back across all the wreckage, that this had been the moment he lost his brother and failed to notice.
“Tell me something,” Taku said. “Does it matter — if you give up something. Something that costs you everything you have. Does it matter, if nobody ever knows it happened?”
Mufaro thought about it.
He was good, and he was honest, and he gave the question the real and serious answer that a good and honest creature gives, never dreaming what it would cost, never knowing he was answering the truest possible question about himself and getting it, in the only way that mattered, devastatingly wrong.
“Yes,” he said. “Of course it matters. The thing you save is still saved. The good is still done. It doesn’t stop being true just because no one was watching.” He believed it completely; it was, very possibly, the wisest thing he ever said, and he said it to the one creature in the world for whom it was pure poison. “A sacrifice is a sacrifice whether the world claps for it or not, Taku. It counts. It always counts. The kings see it, even when no one else does.” He smiled, tired and warm and certain, and nudged his brother’s shoulder, gently, with his own. “Why? Did you do something brave out there that you’re too proud to tell me about?”
It was a joke. He meant it as a joke. He had no idea — he could not possibly have had any idea — that he had just laid his paw directly on the exact center of the wound and pressed.
There was a long silence.
Far off, an owl called once, and went quiet.
And Taku turned his face away, back to the dark, and asked the second question — the one that was not really a question at all, the one that held inside it the whole shape of everything that was coming, the coronation and the lie and the long descent and the rain and the grave, folded down small into eight words spoken by a wounded young lion to the brother who loved him and could not, would never, hear him:
“Then why,” he said, “does it hurt so much?”
Mufaro had no answer.
He did not even fully understand the question — heard it, perhaps, as something philosophical, some clever dark turn of his brother’s clever dark mind, the kind of thing Taku had always said to make the older lions blink. He sat with it a while because he did not know what else to do, and after a time he did the only thing his honest clumsy heart could think of. He leaned over, slowly, and pressed his great brow against the unhurt side of his brother’s face — gently, the way they had slept piled together as cubs, before the world had got in between them — and he held it there, saying nothing, because for once in his life he had understood, dimly, that there were no words that would not be the wrong ones.
And Taku let him.
That was the thing Mufaro would remember, at the very end, in the rain, when it was far too late for remembering to be anything but punishment. Not the betrayal. Not the words on the cliff. That his brother had let him. That on the night it all began — the night Taku had saved his life and lost his own, the night he chose the scar and stopped waiting and started down the road with no turning place — his brother had still, for one last moment, let him close.
They sat like that until the moon was high.
And when at last Mufaro rose and went back to the warm sleeping heart of the pride, certain as ever that the world would still be there when he reached for it, Taku stayed where he was — alone on the low rock at the boundary of everything, in the dark, where no one could see him, where no one had ever been able to see him, where he had learned that very day exactly how completely a living creature can go unseen.
And he reached out one paw, quietly, to the cold ground where his brother had been sitting a moment before.
And he closed it around a small thing that was lying there.
And he drew it in against his chest, against the place where the swallowed truth had already begun to harden, and he held it.
What it was, he never told anyone.
He kept it the rest of his life.
You will not understand it yet. You are not meant to. But hold onto it — carry it with you through all the cold dark country that is coming, when he has become Broken-Face and you have begun, like everyone else, to look at the wound before you look at the lion — hold onto the knowledge that on the night it all began, the night the world taught him he was not worth the looking, he reached out in the dark and kept something of his brother’s.
Because a creature does not keep what it does not love.
Two brothers. One scar, paid for one of them by the other, and never once acknowledged. One golden lion who would carry the proof of his brother’s love on his brother’s own face for the rest of his life and never learn to read it. And one dark prince, lying alone in the dirt while the drums played for someone else, holding a small kept thing against a hardening heart, having just discovered the one law the Long Grass truly lived by — the law that would make him, and unmake him, and outlive them both:
What cannot be seen does not exist.
The drums, far across the plain, played on until dawn.
No one ever asked where he had been.