The Kings and Queens of Roam: A Novel by Daniel Wallace Read Free Book Online

a soft green dream. Civilization, such as it was, was left far behind. They trod on earth that had never known the step of a human foot. Occasionally they’d encounter Indians, who would give them meat and water and then disappear into the forest like ghosts. (Even then Elijah knew that one day he would have to kill his share of Indians. It wasn’t something he wanted to do, but it was something he would have to do to become the man he planned on becoming.)
    The journey was hard. In the beginning Elijah and Ming Kai were full of hope and a wild bravado, they felt like two reckless gods making their own path in a new world. They became like brothers. But after many weeks of making paths they began to feel desperate. Tired, hungry, sick, dirty, and scared—for there were lots of bears in this part of the world—at the end of each day they felt they could go no farther . . . and yet they arose the next day and did. Elijah saved Ming Kai’s life twice: once from a snake and once from rock slide. Ming Kai saved Elijah’s life three times: once from a giant cat, once from a poisonous berry, and the third time from an Indian woman (though Elijah didn’t feel this time should count because he really wasn’t in danger, so they were even, as far as he was concerned).
    And then one day, Elijah gave up. He simply stopped and sat down on the forest floor.
    “I can’t go on,” he said. “I am done. This is where it has been written that I will die.”
    “I see no such writing,” Ming Kai said, looking about.
    “I will die here and be remembered by nobody. All my friends will forget me. At least you have a family, Ming Kai. They will miss you. Your sons will tell the story of how a white man came and took you away and you were never seen again. At least you have that.”
    “Yes,” Ming Kai said. “At least I have that.”
    “Let’s pick where our graves shall be,” Elijah said.
    Elijah stood. He found a flatness not far from where it was written that he would die. “This seems like a nice enough spot,” he said. “What do you think?”
    Ming Kai sniffed the air. “I don’t know.”
    Elijah looked more closely at the ground and sniffed himself. “I think you’re right,” he said. “This is where the bears come to shit.”
    But Ming Kai shook his head. “I think—I think it is too soon to die.”
    For Ming Kai’s nose—which, like so many Chinese organs, was advanced beyond the reckoning of his Caucasian brother—smelled what was surely the mulberry tree. Mulberry trees smelled like red wine and wet grass, and his grandmother. He walked to the edge of the rise, the flattened expanse on which just moments before they had planned to bury themselves, and his Chinese eyes saw it, growing wild in the valley below them. Not one, not two, but a hundred of them. Elijah followed his stare.
    “Is that . . . ?”
    Ming Kai nodded. “Yes,” he said in a whisper. “Yes.”
    But there was a problem: between the two men and the bushes they had been seeking for who knows how long was a ravine, a ravine as deep and dark as the mouth of hell itself. A bridge would have to be built. Ming Kai knew how: they cut down two dozen saplings, each half again as long as the ravine itself, and tied them together with rope until they formed a solid frame, and let the thin and fragile platform fall from one side to the other, where it rested. Elijah looped a tree stump with a lariat and swung across the ravine on it—agile as a monkey—where he secured the posts and waited.
    “Come,” he told Ming Kai.
    “But—”
    “It will hold,” Elijah said.
    “The horses—”
    “Even the horses.”
    It didn’t really even matter to Ming Kai anymore. It would have been just the same to him if he had fallen to his death into the ravine. But the bridge held, and the rest of their lives began.
    Ming Kai ran down the hill; Elijah followed. From the first tree he found he clipped a leaf and ate it, just to make sure, and by his smile