When the king returned from the quarry, he was very furious. He did not hide his disappointment from the minister of stones who was in his company. His kingdom he thought was making progress by why were there children working in the quarry? The other three ministers were summoned to the palace and the king expressed his disappointment to them too. The minister of silver, the minister of the port and the minister of the swamp all tried to explain that it was the same in the mines, the landing site and the pottery yard but this only made the king angrier. He asked the ministers why this was the case and why he did not know about it. For the first question, the minister of silver explained that many of the children went to work with their mothers because they could not be left alone at home. The king refused to accept the explanation and thus no minister attempted to answer the second question perhaps afraid of being yelled at. Three of them looked at the minister of stone accusingly for taking the king to the quarry.
After a long silence, the king spoke a little more calmly. He had come up with a solution. A place would be built by the ministers somewhere in the capital for the children to stay while their parents worked. He gave the ministers a year to finish construction of the place for the children. In the meantime, the children could spend the day in the palace while their parents worked. When the minister of silver complained about the costs, the king reminded him that three out of ten silvers were being taken from these working parents. After that, no other arguments were put forth. The king then tasked the minister of the port with informing the citizens of this decree thus giving him the humiliating title of minister of children.
All the ministers outwardly applauded the king's wisdom and they were dismissed. Inwardly, they were all in disagreement with his plan to fill the royal palace with paupers. They met in secret and devised a plan which would eventually lead to the king being despised by his people. An announcement of the royal decree was put out; No children will be allowed in the quarry, the pottery yard or the landing site. Children could stay at the palace during hours of work for a silver a child. The next step taken by the ministers was to cause the dismissal of every child who had showed up to work before with more than one child.
And just like that, Mulokozi found herself jobless. With the landing site, pottery yard and of course the quarry out of bounds, her options were getting a stall in the market or leaving Sika. Since she had already concluded that it would be a perfect place for the boys to grow up, she went to inquire about the process of getting a stall in the market. The cheapest stall, she discovered, was eighty silvers to be paid upfront and then ten silvers a week. She had some silvers saved up but not quite enough to make this investment. As she left the market in disappointment, contemplating leaving the kingdom, she came upon a man. He was a middle aged man with a little grey on his otherwise black head.
'My lady.' He greeted her bowing his head. He wore cotton robes but in the fashion of bark gowns worn in the central kingdom. Mulokozi was embarrassed by his actions. Even in the central kingdom where she should have been a queen, she was rarely if ever treated as one.
'Please stop,' She bade him, 'I am not who you think I am.'
'Dear princes!' the man bowed even lower as he proclaimed and a tear rolled down his cheek, 'I am glad you're safe.'
'You must but wondering who I am…' he spoke once he had stood upright and noticed the confusion on their faces, 'I am one of the five vassal rulers. Or I was.'
It had been four years since Gankambwe had declared himself king of the central kingdom. In those four years, the kingdom had undergone tremendous changes. All homesteads were required to grow millet, sorghum and bananas, on their land, for the king. Additionally, every adult had to work one full day each week in the mines and the royal forge. What the subjects did not know, and Gankambwe did not reveal, was that all these taxes were in place to fulfil the tribute quotas to the western kingdom where the god-king Lyampolo reigned. He had let his son Gankambwe rule the central kingdom on condition that he kept a steady supply of alcohol, silver and weapons. The millet, sorghum and bananas were for brewing the alcohol. Silver and iron were extracted from the mines. Arrow and spear heads were forged from the iron ore. All these were delivered to the western kingdom every fortnight.
In the fourth year, Gankambwe grew weary of being under his father's thumb. He thus put a plan into action which would lead to his independence. He called his advisors to the royal hall and issued an order to be carried out.
'Go out to the farthest ends of this kingdom and bring me all boys of three and four years.' He ordered. The announcement was abrupt and hence brought confusion to all the advisors' faces.
'Forgive me, your majesty.' One advisor found the courage to speak, 'Those are hundreds of thousands of children, what purpose are they to serve?'
Gankambwe laughed as if the advisor had said either the silliest or funniest thing he had ever heard. And then he stopped laughing very abruptly with gloom taking over his face. All the advisors were understandably scared because Gankambwe was a man who enjoyed violence as a response to questions he deemed stupid. Two years earlier, he had beheaded all four of his advisors after one of them had asked if 'everything was alright'. At that time, Gankambwe had just received an order from Lyampolo to double the alcohol tribute with a threat that one of his brothers would be given the throne if he could not. 'Everything is perfect now!' he had yelled at their headless corpses as they bled out.
'They will form an army.' Gankambwe responded to his advisor, 'The greatest army that this world had ever seen.'
All the advisors were too relieved after not losing their heads. None of them asked how toddlers would make an army. They all thought it but none dared to say it out loud. They bowed their heads and went out to separate children from their parents. There had been a consistent supply of sadness for all of four years but the kingdom wailed on that day more than on any other before that and the tall man laughed.
The place for the children to stay as their parents worked took almost two years and it required vast amounts of resources to build. At some point, the work had stalled due to shortage of funds, or so the king had been told, but the pace picked up once the king approved a tax increase. The king was unpopular in his own kingdom because of the high taxes and other exploitative policies. He could no longer go out into the people unguarded as he once could. He was an unhappy man. And yet he still had hope for a future absolution. Once the people saw the future 'the house of learning'-for that is what it would be called-brought to Sika, they would see the value in the tax increase. It broke his heart that so few children were sent to the house. The king was of course not aware that it cost a silver a child to gain admission. That was on top of the tax of four silvers out of every ten earned. It was a silver only the rich could spare. The king even sent his own children to the house but the effect on enrolment was minimal. The children were a few hundred, mostly the spawn of the wealthy hoping to get a connection with the royal family, possibly the future king. Zabu and Mulinzi were there too, thanks to the benefaction of their father's vassal. Often out of place, they spent their days rubbing shoulders with the children of the wealthiest citizens of Sika. They learned philosophical ideas like justice, responsibility and duty. All abstract things that initially did not make sense. What Zabu looked forward to the most, in the earliest days, was running down the royal hill back to his mother. Mulinzi always followed him around being the only person he knew.