Devil’s Harvest (2 page)

– Etienne van Heerden,
30 Nights in Amsterdam

The most recent information … indicates that the government of Sudan continues to pursue a deliberate strategy of waging war against the civilian population … The data shows a clear increase in … attacks in the weeks leading up to the planting and harvesting times.

– The Sudan Consortium: A briefing of the Summit of the African Union, May 2013

Here I am, pushing on with that thing people call life.

– Aisha Numba Justine-Waja, former refugee, in conversation with the author

South Sudan

Prologue

NORTHERN BAHR EL GHAZAL, SOUTH SUDAN

This is not the running solo of hand-slapped drums, the ox skins pulled tight, beaten with euphoric eyes. It is not the dust on friendly feet, ochre-red and rising thick like mist. There are no springing steps to mark this dance.

This is the beat that announces the demons as they leave their lairs, that heralds the dead from the baked earth. This is the pulse that lures them –
bud-a-bud-a-bud-a-bah
– gnashing into the world. The ground trembles with their arrival, the rhythm descending from the hills as a bow wave before them. Drunken hands on a wooden bar –
bud-a-bud-a-bud-a-bah
. Hail hammering flimsy tin roofs. The apocalypse reveals itself, with thudding hooves and snorting breath. Janjaweed. Devils on horseback.

A grandmother looks up from her washing under the haraz tree, hearing the cadence on the wind. The dense whorl of patterned scars on her forehead crinkles as she frowns. An elderly man grasps his gammy knee as he tries to get to his feet, but his stick is slippery in the heat and his grip fails him. His granddaughter giggles at the way he falls back with a sigh – aaahh – before muttering and trying again.

Alek starts to move even before they come into sight. She knows – by the way the air suddenly smells of metal, filling her breath with the taste of blood. Sweat beads her brow as she rises from the edge of the silted reservoir. She hears the distant snort of the horses. Looking up, she sees the flapping of the doves as they whistle up the ravine.
Bud-a-bud-a-bud-a-bah
. In her mind she sees the dust that trails behind them like smoke from a fiery engine, drifting across the wilderness in the hot breeze. She does not need to wait to witness the dead countenance of their eyes. They are ghosts to her, risen from their graves to claim back all who have dared to continue living. The Devil is upon them, drumming his bony fingers on tabletops.
Bud-a-bud-a-bud-a-bah
.

A bucket tips over at her side. The water spills and stains the dirt like oil. Or blood. To delay is to die. They have come for her father. But in his absence, she will serve their purpose well enough. She turns her back on the village. She heads past the luaak filled with longhorn cattle and out into the stark landscape, running. Her muscles strain at the thighs and her ankles quickly feel bruised as she struggles barefoot over the rocks. The red earth stains her skin like pollen. Behind her she hears the rumble of hooves getting louder, reverberating above the noise of the bleating two-tone goats and the lowing bull circling the cows in the luaak. The rocks are jarred and skewed, grinding against each other and the sensitive skin of her toes. She scrambles crab-like, hand over feet, down into the muddy wadi bed where the villagers grow their kudra and cassava.

Then she hears the cries of alarm, the shouts of impotent warning. But still she charges, further into the desolate ravine. Only when she hears the roar of death itself, the howling of the monster as it devours its first soul, does she throw herself to the ground. She crawls among the strewn boulders, eking out cover. She lies still and puts her hands over her ears, longing for silence. Her breast beats with a rhythm she cannot quell.
Bud-a-bud-a-bud-a-bah
. The sounds of horror cannot be quieted. How her own elective silence will come to tear at her heart.

A shadow is cast over the sun, dulling its light but intensifying the heat, like a lid closing on a cast-iron pot. A man is standing over her, his face silhouetted. All she can see is an eagle, carrying away the red sun in its clenched claws. A single eye, unblinking. The Eye of Horus. The eye that sees all, from which she cannot escape. To which she must surely return.

Al Babr is here.

Chapter 1

BRISTOL, SOUTH-WEST ENGLAND

It was difficult, looking back over his past, to pinpoint the moment when the weave of a life quietly lived had first started to unravel. It had not been a gradual fraying, that he knew, but rather an unstoppable loosening of the warp and weft that had bound his world together until his mid-forties. Perhaps it had been a bland life by the standards of others. But it had achieved its successes, its calculated ambitions largely attained. Perhaps this made the unravelling all the more astonishing: that its knit had been cautiously woven, seemingly tightly plaited.

He could not be sure what it was that first tugged at the loose end. ‘Things had not gone according to plan.’ It was a phrase his father used, said with resignation. ‘Not going to plan’ had covered the spectrum of human calamity, from the collapse of the build-it-yourself back-garden conservatory to the vicar’s shameful molestation of little Jeffrey Hope. But in his own case, the ‘thing’ was simply his entire life after forty, and the original ‘plan’ may have been as much to blame as anything else. Perhaps he had lacked ambition, or had meandered off into the academic brush. He could not be sure. But the binding had probably started to unwind in earnest on the day of his annual open lecture, shortly after he had secured his first coffee of the morning.

* * *

Associate Professor Gabriel Cockburn was aware that, with the ends of his trousers neatly folded and held in place with plastic clothes pegs, he probably did not present the most virile of figures. But there were certain practicalities that riding a bicycle to work necessitated, manly or not.

His usual detour from the direct route to the Bristol University precinct to get his morning coffee took him from Clifton Village onto Queens Road, passing by the students’ union. The union had been described as the ugliest building in Britain. There was something fascist in its design, square blocks that were reminiscent of the Soviet tenements of Sofia or Belgrade, but it was at least undergoing a facelift, with some promise of improvement. The downhill was gentle for most of the way, curving past the music department’s Victoria Rooms, marked by Edward VII looking out rather camply over his empty fountain, flanked by a gaudy collection of fish, clams and naked women.

His journey this particular morning was disrupted by a group of ragged-haired students setting up for a protest outside the university administration block. He slowed and was eventually forced to stop when one of the motley crew waved a yellow pamphlet in front of him.

‘Stop the drone wars!’ the youngster shouted, though Gabriel was right in front of him and there was no one else around.

The front page of the pamphlet had a half-discernible picture of unhappy people sitting on a pile of rubble. Hand-written posters advised that the protestors were objecting to a conference planned with BAE Systems, Rolls Royce and Thales, and assisted by the university’s aviation and engineering department. Gabriel was tempted to tell the youth to get a job, but he restrained himself, recalling that his father had used that very line a few years before in response to a documentary on the mentally ill living under the bridges in Manchester. Instead he ignored the outstretched pamphlet and pushed his bike through the group.

He rested his bicycle unlocked against the back of a bus shelter on Clifton Triangle. Someone had spraypainted a cartoon figure on the perspex, a little girl holding a bomb-shaped balloon that tugged on its string. The words ‘Bristol Against Arms Trade’ were scrawled above it in dripping black paint. The city was increasingly vandalised by spray-painters, some seeking to emulate the famous Banksy; others simply covering the walls with lewd designs. To Gabriel it all seemed antisocial, but the council was too fearful of alienating the student body to clamp down on offenders. They had even set an entire area in the city centre aside for the miscreants to ‘express themselves’, as if it were a form of art or therapy. Local politicians treated vandalism like a quaint tourist attraction.

The bright red umbrellas heralding the espresso bar calmed his flustered nerves. There was already a group of students and businesspeople waiting to be served. He took his place in the queue, steeling himself against the unnecessary proximity of the others in the line, against the unsolicited whiffs of body scents and deodorants. He tried to establish an impenetrable aura about him, in that determined way one does when standing on the metro, for example, rocking on a fixed pivot. He peered down at the spiderweb strands of blonde-grey hair that had collected on his lapels from the stranger in front of him. Must the woman throw her hair about quite so? He had already spent more time than seemed sensible that morning tapping at his jacket with a loop of sticky tape wrapped over his fingers, plucking at cat hair and what regrettably appeared to be some of his own head-cover, also shedding now.

The mayor had given a speech the day before, urging that this was a time for all Britons to ‘stand together’. The recurrent disturbances (the right-wing newspapers used the word ‘riots’ while the
Guardian
insisted on referring to ‘incidents of social unrest’) had apparently established a new solidarity among the better-heeled in Bristol. The middle class was under attack; Thatcherism needed a recall (though Dame Margaret was long demised); immigration laws should be revisited. Stand together with whom, Gabriel wondered. Mr and Mrs Worthington who snuck their garbage into his bin at night? The Greens opposite, whose brattish child trundled up and down the pavement, pants pulled halfway down his knees, his skateboard clacking against the kerb like castanets? The Kahn father-and-son partnership who spent more time revving the engine of the Ford Escort and inspecting its manifold cover than actually driving the thing, their incessant hooting sounding late into the night? Patriotism was all very well until you met your neighbours.

And yet here they all stood, together in a manner of speaking, as united as they could hope to be in the course of a passing day. But the needs of each individual established only a competitive frisson. The slight jostling was accompanied by strained smiles and polite but assertive interventions. There was little camaraderie despite the shared expedition into the early-morning English fog. The advent of day would be marked for each one of them by the first rush of caffeine. Until then, each remained suspicious of the intentions of the other. Hell is other people, queuing Britishly for their first espresso of the morning.

‘Yep! Yep! Give me a flat “why bother” with wings,’ yelled the barista. ‘And a tall foamy with a double hit. Yeah, let’s get to it! Aweh!’

It always took some time for the trends of London to reach Gabriel’s coastal corner. The whole culture was contrary to his nature – the gaucheness, the overexuberance, the un-English embrace of the espresso bar with its clean lines, Latin American music and sexy quasi-Italian names. But it had become habitual, despite the discomfort and the vulnerability in stepping forward to be berated by the black baristas, jocular and loud in the quiet cold of the early sunshine. Each morning, Gabriel made the short walk from the coffee bar to the biological sciences building. He liked the way his breath puffed out in misted waves, hot with coffee and body warmth. As he pushed his bicycle with one hand, his branded takeaway cup with its moulded drinking lid in the other, he felt cosmopolitan and somehow risqué. Now that it was here, he was as impatient as those around him for the bite of caffeine, the bitter aroma of Arabica sucked over a small square of dark chocolate. Chocolate in the morning; his mother would never have approved.

‘Aweh, brothers, beautiful lady for our special attention.’

The barista was flirting with the immaculately turned-out woman ahead of Gabriel. The man’s skin had a silkiness to it and his lips were a natural dark red. He opened his mouth wide as he shouted out orders, his pink gums and tongue making his teeth seem all the more brilliant. It was inappropriately amorous for the hour. Gabriel wanted his coffee, but the female executive was deliberating over a complicated order involving fat-free milk and ratios of coffee to froth. Her calves were toned, clad in light-brown stockings and half-hidden by high-heeled boots. Gabriel watched how the muscle flexed and relaxed as she spoke, an involuntary peristaltic motion like a feeding mollusc. There was much that was glutinous about her. His mind wandered to darker places, her quaffed hair now tousled. He looked away, mildly revolted by the unbidden image. Such is the distraction of masculinity.

‘What’ll it be, man?’

The sleek blonde had moved off to the side to fiddle further with her americano or whatever it was she had ordered. The familiarity of tone jarred, and for a moment Gabriel was unable to recollect the mock-Italian phrase he needed. He scanned the blackboard above the barista’s head with increasing panic.