Sudan: A Novel (16 page)

When the mercenary spotted Akin huddled in a corner behind a stack of boxes next to the cab in the back of the truck, his surprise turned instantly into laughter. With her short hair, black face and big, round eyes peering out of the shadows, he thought she looked just like a baby monkey.

“Come here!” he commanded.

Akin didn’t move. She couldn’t understand what the man in the white turban was shouting at her.

“You don’t want me to come in there after you,” he said, menacingly. “I said, come here!”

That time, he motioned with his hand when he spoke, and she figured out what he wanted her to do. Though she was almost paralyzed with terror, Akin understood the threatening tone of his voice if not the words, and she didn’t want to find out what the implied "or else!” might be.

She got up from behind the boxes in the far corner of the truck and timidly made her way to the open tailgate.

Akin had known that sooner or later somebody would find her. Of course, it had taken her a little while to realize she was lost. When she’d first come to, she’d felt an instant rush of relief that she’d finally awakened from a horrifying nightmare. She’d started to call her father to come and pick her up, hold her close and soothe the fear away.

Then she opened her eyes and pain shot down her neck from an inch-long gash on top of a huge bump behind her right ear. It hadn’t been a nightmare at all! The raiders really had thundered down on them with guns and machetes and swords. They really had shot her neighbors, stabbed and slashed her friends. The man on the big black horse really had hit her mother, and…

Her mind was confused about what happened after that, before she awoke to find the monsters who’d attacked her village all around her.

As soon as Akin got close to the back of the truck, the mercenary reached in and grabbed her, yanked her down to the ground and dragged her to the spot where 45 or 50 women and children taken captive by the other half of Faoud’s raiding party were tied together under an acacia tree.

“Here’s another one for you,” he said to one of the carbine-toting guards who stood watch over the captives. “Found her hiding in the truck.”

The guard put his gun down and picked up the end of the large rawhide rope to which each of the captives was tied with an individual, smaller rope. Half a dozen of the smaller ropes still dangled free at the end, awaiting other captives, and he attached Akin to one of them. He wrapped it mercilessly tight around her skinny wrists. She grimaced in pain, but didn’t cry out. Somehow, she knew it wouldn’t be a good idea to draw attention to herself.

Akin looked at the other prisoners. Her eyes searched the crowd for somebody, anybody she knew. But there was not a familiar face among them; they all were strangers, frightened strangers. The same look of terror, shock and disbelief was stamped on all their faces. Their clothes were dirty and torn, and several of them were injured. A woman leaned against an acacia tree, barely able to stand. Blood dripped off the fingers of her limp left arm from a gory slash just above her elbow.

Just then, three mounted raiders rode past them toward the front of the line. Hamir ordered his second-in-command to remain with the trucks so the man could get medical attention for the wound in his thigh, and then he shouted to the men who guarded the captives, “Get them up and move!”

The guard in front grabbed the first woman in the human chain, yanked her to her feet and shoved her forward. The other prisoners rose instantly and fell in line behind her. When the captives had been force-marched away from their villages, the soldiers had tossed two young children off the path to die—thirst or the jackals would get them. One of their mothers had been shot when she ran to the aid of her little girl. The other mother had been restrained by the group when her infant son was tossed away. Now, she marched along mechanically, unfeeling, the walking dead; her baby’s cries reverberated in her head long after the sound faded away in the distance. Those lessons had taught the group with brutal efficiency that anybody not able to keep up was considered a liability and would be discarded as offhandedly as a mango peel.

They walked on through the afternoon, followed the setting sun, moving quickly and quietly. The woman whose arm had been bleeding collapsed. A soldier sliced off the rope that bound her in the chain and left her body lying in the trail. All the other captives stepped over her as they trudged along. There was no crying, no conversation, no sound but the padding of their bare feet to mark their passage. During the first couple of miles after the attack on their villages, the group had been shoved and prodded along, to the accompaniment of a symphony of sobbing children, screaming women, shouts in tribal dialects and the sharp, foreign commands of the Arab horse soldiers. But the soldiers quickly silenced the captives. Those who spoke or made any noise at all were slashed with a whip one of the soldiers carried or suffered stinging blows from the other raiders’ riding crops. Fear kept the group quiet as they passed through the countryside.

Akin had no idea where she was. Although the other prisoners had been marched away from their villages, Akin had been transported unconscious in the back of the raiders’ truck. When she awoke, her surroundings were totally unfamiliar, and she had no sense of how far she had traveled from Mondala or in what direction. She couldn’t have run away, even if she’d dared, because she didn’t know which way to run. The realization that Mondala was completely lost to her, as unreachable as the stars in the night sky, frightened her almost as much as the soldiers.

The purple haze of Sudanese dusk began to settle in, and the long shadows of the trees—ebony, hashab, mango, acacia—dissolved into the approaching darkness.

Akin plodded along at the end of the line. She forced herself to take a step and then another and another, and resolutely refused to allow her mind to process the events of the last 12 hours. She fixed her gaze on the back of the young mother in line ahead of her. Now and then she caught a glimpse of the woman’s baby; his doleful, half-open eyes peeked at her over his mother’s shoulder.

All of the captives were hungry. They’d had nothing to eat since breakfast—hours ago in another life, in a world that no longer existed. They’d only been allowed a brief water break at a stream in the forest. The soldiers carried food with them. They reached into their knapsacks for hard bread and fruit that came from their supply truck and ate as they rode along. The captives stared at the food; hunger gnawed at their bellies. They were learning the first of many hard lessons about slavery—they were property, and their owners would never invest anything more in them than the bare minimum to keep them alive.

As the sun dipped below the horizon and the color of the sunset drained out of the sky, the raiders steered their exhausted band of hostages toward a particularly thick stand of trees to spend the night.

When they reached the grove of palms and acacias, a few of the riders dismounted and herded the women and children under the boughs of a large palm tree set off by itself. The captives willingly complied and sank down on the cushion of palm fronds atop the soft grass and weeds that grew around the tree’s massive trunk.

Since none of the hostages had ever owned a pair of shoes, their feet were tough. But the paths around their village or the pastures where they herded cattle hadn’t prepared them for hours of forced march through thickets and over miles of stony trails. Their feet were bruised, sore and bleeding, and they wanted nothing more than to sit down.

Akin collapsed in a heap a rope’s length away from the young mother. The little girl had watched the black, velvet sky gobble up the golden sunset, and as the world around her descended into darkness, so did she. She was an 11-year-old child who’d been kidnapped, ripped away from her life by monsters worse than the demons that stalked her most terrifying nightmares. She was alone, famished, tired and scared, so scared the ball of fear rested heavier in her stomach than her hunger. She wanted to cry—no,
scream
. She wanted to jump up and run away as fast as she could back to her village, her family and her world. But she wasn’t even certain that her family and her village existed anymore. She hadn’t seen her brother die, but she’d watched the soldiers kill dozens of her friends and neighbors. Had her mother survived the attack by the Arab on the black horse? Akin wondered. What had happened to her brother and sister? And her father--where was
Papa!
The image of his face produced a yearning in her heart so intense it was a physical pain in her chest. Oh, Papa, come and get me! she thought. Please, come and get me and take me home!

For her whole life, her father had stood between her and every bad thing in the world. She had cuddled up warm and secure in her father’s care every day that she could remember. When she lay down on her woven straw mat on the dirt floor of the tukul at night, she fell innocently asleep. She was safe. Papa was there; Papa wouldn’t let anything hurt her. But now, in the blackness of this night, Papa was gone. She faced the first night of her life on her own, and she was so scared, so terribly, terribly scared.

Akin started to cry. Not out loud. It hurt too bad to cry out loud. She didn’t want to hear the sound of her own grief. She cried silently, her tears streaming down her face and dripping off her chin.

Then she lay down and curled up in a fetal position among the palm fronds. She tried to be small, so small no one would see her or take notice of her at all. Mercifully, her exhaustion overwhelmed her, and she fell asleep.

Sunrise over Mondala found Idris Apot where he had been at sunset, seated outside the door of his tukul beside the dead body of his only son. Aleuth had been up all night, too. As she sat by her husband’s side while the first rays of the sun shot light into the valley, she pulled herself out of the fuzzy cotton of shock and forced herself to focus on the child she had carried, nursed, clothed, bathed, played with, prayed for and loved for almost a decade.

She reached out and took his cold hand, his left hand, the other one was... Silent tears ran down her cheeks.

Though her head wound was not life-threatening, Aleuth had a mild concussion. She suffered waves of dizziness, and her vision was sometimes blurry. The neighbors who had carried her unconscious to the village after the attack had refused to allow her to return to the riverbank when she came to. She only learned that her son had been killed when Idris walked up the path to their home with the boy’s limp body in his arms. As soon as she learned that Akin had been kidnapped, Aleuth went mercifully into shock. She had sat in the dirt beside her husband and their son’s body overnight, staring blankly into the darkness.

But with the morning came reality. She and Idris had to bury their son.

Shema sat beside her mother and held on with both hands to the hem of her mother’s bloodied sack dress. Neither of her parents took much notice of her. She hadn’t spoken a word since the attack, except the strangled “Mama!” that told Idris where to find his wife.

Akec had been one of the men assigned to dig graves. When he finished, he went to Idris’s tukul and looked down in pity on his grieving neighbors.

“I have made a resting place for Abuong,” he said simply.

Idris nodded. He got up on one knee, leaned over and carefully lifted Abuong’s cold, stiff body. Akec helped Aleuth to her feet. Then the four of them, three adults and a little girl, set out for the burying ground to lay a nine-year-old boy to rest.

When they reached the freshly dug grave, Aleuth fell to her knees and began to wail. She rocked back and forth and beat her fists into the soft earth as her soul cried out in agony. Shema patted her mother’s shoulder, her eyes dry. Something inside the five-year-old child had clicked off and shut down; she was as emotionless as a stone.

As soon as Idris shoveled the last scoop of dry dirt into Abuong’s grave, Aleuth stopped wailing. It was done. Idris helped her to her feet and steadied her as he walked with Akec and Shema back to the village.

Idris said nothing when they reached their tukul, just picked up his traveling sack, the one he carried with him when he went to hunt or trade in other villages, and began to pack it. It didn’t take long; he didn’t own much and needed little of it where he was going.