Acts of faith (41 page)

In a ragged double column, the raiders crossed a plain plastered with the dried mud of a recent rain. Low hills made a brown barrier to the north; to the east, the direction in which the column was headed, rose an escarpment crowned by big oblong boulders that resembled resting elephants. His objectives, the Nuban village and the airfield used by the foreign contrabanders, lay on the plateau atop the escarpment. Good Nubans at peace with the government had reported that bad Nubans in the village harbored infidel soldiers who guarded the airfield. Ibrahim’s mission was to wipe out the rebel force, kill or capture everyone in the village, burn it to the ground, and then wait while a squad of militia engineers from the Kadugli garrison, trained in their arts by Iranian and Afghani brethren, destroyed it. He wasn’t reluctant to engage the infidels in battle—it was honorable to fight men capable of fighting back—but the rest of the business, the killing and capturing of the villagers, the burning of their houses, had become hateful to him. Five days ago, before departing from Babanusa town, he’d had a talk with a mullah. Was it not haram to kill people, even infidels, who offered no resistance? The wise man shook his head, saying it wasn’t necessary for them to resist actively to be considered enemies. They were deserving of death if they sympathized with the rebels, if they disobeyed government orders to move to a peace camp, if they failed to report rebel activities in their neighborhoods. “From the Fourth Sura,” the mullah said, and then recited the verse from memory. “ ‘You shall find others who desire security with you and at the same time to preserve security with their own people: so often as they return to sedition, they shall be subverted therein, and if they depart not from you, nor offer you peace, nor restrain their hands from warring against you, take them and kill them wheresoever you find them. Against these we have granted you manifest power.’ ”

Ibrahim Idris memorized the passage, and had recited it to himself before going to sleep, as a charm against the evil dreams. The dreams came regardless, and old men fell with gushing wounds before his sleeping eyes, flaming roofs crackled like heavy rifle fire, women being raped cried out to him to save them.

Back in the column, a handful of murahaleen were singing to relieve the monotony of the ride, perhaps to stir their fighting spirits, for the attack would come today.

The tailed one that lows
When she strays she is not soon found
A fine lad plants his sand-ridge to the edge of the plain
A fine lad is ready to die by the spear.

An old droving song. It made him nostalgic for the days of his youth, when a fine lad stood ready to die by the spear not in a jihad but in defense of herds against cattle thieves, lions, leopards, hyenas. There didn’t seem to be as many lions, leopards, and hyenas as before. The war must have gotten rid of many of them, which didn’t cause him any grief; and yet the absence of their roars and shrieks was a sign of how much the war had changed things, maybe forever, certainly for what remained of his lifetime. Sometimes his own land seemed a foreign place, and during those times he yearned for old, familiar things, even things he feared and despised, like cattle-killing lions.

Barakat’s leg was much improved. The stallion was stepping over the hard, uneven ground with his former lightness and sureness of gait. The removal of the thorn and the Chinese balm had done the trick. The balm was more effective on horses than on men; Ibrahim was still sore and stiff.

Southward a long way cloud mountains rose, and one appeared to rest on the leaning black pillar of a heavy downpour. If the storm moved this way, it would fill the wadis and turn the ground to glue and make the going very difficult, but he saw that it was sweeping toward the west. He was grateful for the rain that had fallen here a few days ago. The mud had dried to a mortar, and that kept the dust down and thus lessened the chances of the column being spotted from any great distance. Ibrahim preferred to move at night and attack at dawn, but unfamiliar with this part of the Nuba, and uncertain as to how reliable his Nuban guides were, he’d decided to approach in daylight.

Once his force was up on the plateau, he was going to divide it: half his men and the militia would assault the airfield under cover of a mortar bombardment, while the other half swooped down on the village, a couple of kilometers away. They would then rejoin the first group at the landing strip. After its destruction was complete, they would return to Kadugli town, there to sell the slaves and cattle the men didn’t want to keep for themselves. Simple battle plans were the best battle plans. War might have become hateful to Ibrahim, but he was good at it.

Suddenly one of his foul moods fell over him. Where did these spells come from? It felt as if a gusher of dark blood were spilling through his arteries. He was powerless to contain it.

“Ya, Kammin.”

“Ya, Ibrahim,” his servant answered.

“Find Abbas. Tell him to come up here.”

Abbas rode up alongside. “Yes, uncle.”

His nephew’s posture, round-shouldered, too far forward in the saddle, did nothing to brighten his spirits. Dusty jelibiya bunched at the waist by a belt of frayed, sun-faded magazine pouches, Kalash slung aslant across his back, Abbas was wearing a grave expression.
He probably thinks I’m going to give him a special mission that will better his chances of martyring himself,
Ibrahim thought.

“Didn’t I tell you to stay close to me?”

“When the action begins—”

“You’ll stay here now. I don’t think you’ll be needing this today.”

He leaned over and hooked a finger in the leather cord holding Abbas’s key to Paradise: room 420 in the Grand Hotel Sudan.

“And straighten your shoulders. Sit your horse like a Humr man.” The dark blood thickened. He was cold inside. For no reason, he felt like slapping this kid. Perhaps what Bashir had said of a wife—beat her every morning, if you don’t know why, she will—applied to a nephew as well. But he would not beat him with his hand; with his tongue instead.

“What is this stuff?” He motioned at the ground.

The thick eyebrows crawled together, and Abbas looked at his uncle as if he were crazy.

“Why, it’s dirt.”

Kammin and the others laughed out loud.

“What kind of dirt, you foolish boy? I taught you a long time ago. You’ve forgotten? Look at the short grasses, how few bushes and trees there are. Look at how the soil isn’t cracked. Look how there are in places rain pools with water still in them.”

Abbas’s brows parted and came together again and parted again.

“Oh, I’ve forgotten the name. I know it’s good for nothing.”

“
Naga’a.
We call it naga’a. It’s the clay that doesn’t crack, and so the rains don’t soak into it, and so little grass grows in it. Yet it is good for something. You saw there was more grass and more trees where we camped last night. I’ll help you with the riddle. Those were red acacia trees.”

Abbas was silent.

“Ya, Ganis could have solved that riddle when he was a child. You can sing verses from the Koran. Sing to me now from the book of grasses, the book of soils. Or can’t you read them?”

The boy’s shoulders slumped again as he seemed to shrink under his uncle’s scorn, and his diminishment excited Ibrahim to humiliate him further.

“You wish to marry Nanayi. You wish today to capture cattle for a bride-price, but you don’t know the first thing about cattle. I dare say none of you do,” he snarled, turning to face the young men riding directly behind him; then, turning back to Abbas: “Not the first thing about where to find water and good grass for them. How do you intend to keep your bride-to-be in good cloth, in tea and sugar?”

“Allah karim,”
Abbas answered in a small voice.

“God is generous indeed, to those deserving of his generosity. Do you expect Allah to provide even if you do nothing? Esmah! Move into town with your bride, become a mullah, earn your bread preaching in the mosques.”

He knew he was going too far; knew also that he was making everyone in earshot feel embarrassed by speaking thus so publicly, but he couldn’t stop himself. The dark blood had to run its course.

“Do any of
you
know what the soil is called where we camped last night?” Turning once more to the young men at his rear. “Do any of you know why grass and trees are abundant there and not here? One day this war will end, inshallah, and what are you going to do then? You youngsters don’t listen to tradition in anything, but especially in the matter of cattle. So will you become farmers? But you don’t know enough even for that. Maybe you’ll all leave Dar Humr to work for pay in town.”

They and Abbas had seen him like this before and knew better than to speak when one of his black spells was upon him; but he believed their voices were muted more by ignorance than by fear. And their silence, like the nights empty of lion roar and hyena cry, was yet another sign of how greatly life had changed, how unlikely its chances of returning to the way it used to be. He took so many pains and precautions to spare the lives of his men so the Humr would continue to exist and, God willing, be strong. Yet what was the good of that if none knew the things a Humr should know to call himself a Humr? All our traditions rest on cattle, he thought. Without them, the Humr won’t be Humr, and there will be no more cattle if no one knows how to breed and raise them. When I was young, I knew not to graze cows too long in the north because the grasses there are saltless; I knew when to move them to graze on the salty grasses of the sand ridges farther south. Does Abbas know that? Do any of them? Do they know, as I did when their age and even younger, that the succulent grasses in Bahr el Ghazal, when eaten down to stubble, will spring up again and can be grazed a second time?

“You had better capture a lot of abid today, boys,” he said to no one particular. “Ha! You’re going to need them to do the work you can’t do!”

With a snap of the reins, Abbas turned his horse to bump Barakat and get his uncle’s attention. The stallion, intolerant of such cheeky behavior, tossed his head and tried to bite Abbas’s horse, which shied sideways, almost dumping its rider.

“Ya! Uncle! We don’t capture these blacks because we need them but because it’s warranted. Because it’s commanded!” His temerity surprised Ibrahim and gratified him at the same time. The boy’s got some spirit, at least. “The soil where we camped is the cracking black clay called
talha
! Grass and the red acacia grow there because the water from the naga’a runs off like rain from an iron roof and flows down to the talha, which captures it in the cracks!”

“And short grass grows in the red clay that doesn’t crack in the south!” a voice behind him shouted.

“We plant millet on the sand ridges, as the song says!” another voice cried out. “A fine lad plants the sand ridges to edge of the plain!”

“The grass named
liseyg
is fine grazing, but too much of it bloats cattle!” a third voice called.

The tension had been relieved. Hamdan
,
riding on Abbas’s left, burst out laughing. “Listen to them, Ibrahim, my friend. They’ll make fine cattlemen yet!”

“God willing,” Ibrahim said, and the clotted dark blood broke up in the wadis of his body, and he joined in Hamdan’s laughter.

Well, it’s floodin’ down in Texas
And all the telephone lines are down . . .

Whipper Layton, banging out a slow blues beat on the drums. Long, mean riffs, mean but sad at the same time, poured from Stevie Ray’s guitar, notes running like muddy water over rocks, and Dare pictured a windowless cinder-block roadhouse with its complement of pickup trucks in the dirt parking lot and enough secondhand smoke inside to give you instant lung cancer, urban cowgirls grinding up against their urban cowboys never rode a horse cuz they don’t know how.

And I been tryin’ to call my baby
And Lord I can’t get a single sound . . .
Dark clouds are rollin’
Man, I’m standin’ out in the rain . . .
Yes, flood waters keep on rollin’
Mine’s about to drive poor me insane.

He tuned down the cassette player and pulled out the chart wedged between his seat and the pedestal, checked the course directions grease-penciled on the acetate cover, and then his dead-reckoning against the coordinates flashing on the GPS.

“Should be comin’ up on it in just a few minutes,” he said.