Sudan: A Novel (17 page)

Aleuth watched in wonder.

“Are you going somewhere?”

He put the sack over his shoulder, picked up his long ebony spear and stepped out of the tukul. His eyes were steely, set and determined. But when he looked into his wife’s face and saw the fear there, he softened. He didn’t want to cause her additional pain, but he had to do what he had to do.

“I
must
go,” he said simply, then turned and began to untie their lone surviving zebu, slowly unwrapping the knotty, twirled rope from around the wooden peg.

“Go? Go where? And why are you unleashing the cow?”

When he had made his decision, Idris hadn’t even considered what he would say to Aleuth. Now, he couldn’t seem to find any words at all. There was too much pain in his heart to speak, so he gritted his teeth and continued to untie the family’s only cow.

“Idris?” There was so much misery in her voice it broke his heart. He stopped, turned to her and did his best to explain.

“I could not think of Akin before.” He stopped. Then started again. “I had to grieve for Abuong, and my heart is broken for him. But he is gone, and now I must not think of Abuong. Now, I must think of the living. I must do what I can for the living.”

“The living?” Aleuth stared at Idris, her mind spinning.

Idris replied with one word, dropped it like a pebble into a stream. “Akin.”

Aleuth was dumbstruck.

“What can you do for Akin?” she cried out in anguish. “She is gone. The trackers lost the trail in the woods. She is”--Aleuth sobbed out the word--“gone!”

“She is
alive!”
Idris shot back, his voice as hard as a stone.

“And we must pray for the mercy of God to be upon her!”

“I will pray for the mercy of God. But I will also put feet on my prayers.”

Other villagers had heard the raised voices and drifted closer to listen to what was going on. In the Dinkan culture, the wife accepted whatever her husband said as the will of the family. Something odd was happening between Idris and Aleuth Apot.

Unmoved by the sudden audience, Idris gathered the rope tied to the cow and looked at his wife. His look was kind, but he did not waver.

“I must do this,” he said. “I have to go.”

“Go where?” Aleuth asked, with shell-shocked incredulity. “I just lost a son and daughter. Am I now to lose my husband as well?”

Though his voice was stern, his eyes pleaded with Aleuth to understand.

“As long as I have breath in my body, my daughter has hope. I am going to find Akin and bring her home!”

There was complete, stunned silence. Aleuth was so shocked she could form no response. A few of the nearby villagers actually gasped audibly. One of the elders stepped forward. It was against custom to interfere in the affairs of another, but these were extraordinary times and the old rules didn’t seem to fit anymore.

“There is nothing you or any of us can do for Akin,” he said. “If a whole village full of men was helpless against them, what could you hope to do alone? We all loved her, but she is gone.”

Idris turned on the old man.

“She is gone until I bring her back! My daughter knows that I will not mourn for her as if she lay cold in a grave like Abuong. She knows her father will not abandon her. She knows I will not rest until I find her.”

Aleuth stared at her husband in disbelief. “But why are you taking our cow? It is the only one we have left.”

Idris addressed Aleuth, but he was talking to all the other villagers who had gathered there as well.

“I can only fight fire if I have fire of my own. I go to find fire. I will go to Bentiu...”

Bentiu!

The villagers were shocked. The city lay hundreds of miles to the north. Akec was the only one among them who had ever been there. Some of the other villagers had been east to Juba, but Bentiu was four times as big. And dangerous. It was said to be a very dangerous place.

“I will find someone in Bentiu to help me find Akin. And if not there, I will go somewhere else. But I will not stop, I will not rest, I will not give up until I find a man
like
the Murahaleen to
fight
the Murahaleen.”

He spit out the word “Murahaleen” as if it tasted foul in his mouth, and without another word, he turned and headed out of the village, his lone gray-and-white zebu plodding along contentedly behind him.

Aleuth stood and watched him go, too surprised and shocked even to cry.

The morning after Akin was captured, one of the soldiers untied her, moved her forward in the line of hostages and placed her among three other young girls.

While the men noisily loaded supplies and gear into the small truck to prepare for the day’s journey, the girls whispered urgently among themselves. Like victims of other catastrophic events, they each felt compelled to tell their stories, to process the horror in the telling.

The two older girls were from the same village; the third, like Akin was alone. Her name was Omina. At 12, she was a year older than Akin and had been the only child in her family. But she had no family left now. The attacking Arabs had killed her parents and then dragged her away.

Mbarka was the oldest and had just turned 15. Her mother and her two older sisters had been kidnapped, too, loaded into trucks and hauled off into the night. Bright-eyed and talkative, Mbarka was a sharp contrast to the other girl from her village. Shontal was quiet and reserved. She was barely 14 but looked older. Under the circumstances, that was not a good thing. The terror of the last few days had scarred her worse than the others. She had watched raiders hack her parents apart with machetes. The brown stain that covered most of her skirt was her father’s blood. What she had experienced had almost pushed her into insanity.

Akin wanted to comfort Shontal when she heard her story. After all, Akin was better off than the others. Her family was still alive! She knew they were. She couldn’t prove it, but it was true. It had to be true.

“I’m so sorry...” she began.

But there was no time for comfort. The guards barked orders in a language none of the captives understood. They stood and marched out in single file across the plains of southern Sudan.

The days blended one into another, and she no longer kept count. Every day was the same as the preceding one, little food, little water, walking to the point of exhaustion. Akin’s brief acquaintance with the other girls quickly forged into friendship in the crucible of horror. The four had a strength together that none of them could have summoned alone; the presence of Mbarka, Omina and Shontal kept Akin going.

The caravan finally set up camp in a grove of trees beside a railroad siding a few miles south of Wau, a city of about 200,000 on the Jur River almost 200 miles south of Bentiu.

The raiders marched the captives to cattle cars strung along the track and crammed them inside. Akin and the girls tied to her had been loaded first, and about 60 other women and children had been jammed into the transport after that. Akin was mashed against the back wall; the crushing weight of the other captives and the lack of air made her head swim. It got worse when the sun came up; the cattle car heated up like an oven as the train traveled north toward Southern Kordofan. The slits in the side of the rail car provided minimal ventilation, and Akin gasped for air until she passed out. But she remained upright because there was nowhere for her to fall.

Finally, the train stopped, and the guards began to unload the captives packed up against her. Suddenly, there was air to breathe. Akin came to and saw the moon through the open door as she stumbled with the others out onto the ground.

The captives were quickly loaded into canvas-covered trucks. Akin caught sight of the other girls’ frightened faces, their eyes glowing in the bright headlights of the truck behind them. Then the guard slammed the tailgate shut, and the caravan of trucks roared off into the night.

I
dris sold his zebu to a farmer in Vulya, the first village he came to after he left Mondala. The man was a Christian, and when he heard Idris’s story, he was so touched that he paid twice what the animal was actually worth.

Unencumbered by the cow, Idris set a grueling pace. From first light in the morning until it was too dark to see, he walked; his long strides ate up the miles day after day. He only took time for essential rest and refused to stop long enough to hunt for food. He ate berries, mushrooms and wild gourds and scared up enough game to get by—guinea fowl, partridges, pheasants and rabbits. About 10 miles north of Bayom, he almost stepped in a bustard’s nest and feasted that night on the land bird’s eggs. But there were days when he found no game at all; days he walked 30 to 40 miles on an empty stomach and then fell into an exhausted sleep, hungry.

Alone every night in a strange place as the profound African dark gobbled up the world outside the campfire light, Idris was afraid. He was more frightened than he had been as a boy when he and a friend had hidden all night high in an acacia tree as a lioness prowled around beneath them.

But he was certain that wherever Akin was, she was far more frightened than he was. She was just a little girl!

There was a prayer on his every breath. Sometimes his tears and his pain and his prayer mixed together to form something far grander than a simple man could understand. At night on his knees, he petitioned the God of the universe to protect his little girl, to give her the courage to hold out until he found her. And he would find her, or die trying.

He asked nothing for himself, but he was strong after he prayed, his fear left him and he felt a peace that could only have come from God.

Set back from the road in a field on the outskirts of Bentiu, Idris found a particularly tall palm tree on the edge of a small stream. Careful to make sure nobody saw him, he used a stone to dig a hole close to the trunk of the tree, placed his money sack in the hole and covered it with rich, black soil. There were thieves in Bentiu; he needed to be cautious. Idris had never in his life committed an illegal act; today he would search for someone who broke the law for a living.

Ron lay on the baked sand under the scorching Sudanese sun, shaded his eyes with his hand and squinted at the canvas-topped transport trucks parked below him and at the Sudanese villagers tied up next to them. A small brown lizard scurried across the top of the rocks he had piled up for additional cover, and Ron edged carefully backward on his hands and chest until he was below the crest of the sand-covered hilltop where he and Masapha had set up shop to capture a slave auction on film.

Masapha had called it, X marks the spot.

Weeks of searching, asking questions and searching some more had come up snake-eyes until the Arab happened upon a woman whose brother worked in a remote oil field. She’d told Masapha about the day her brother had been high up on a rig and saw in the distance an odd assortment of vehicles, transport trucks, jeeps, a car or two, horses and camels. That was odd enough, she’d said. What was stranger still was where the caravan was headed. They were going nowhere! There was absolutely nothing in the direction they were traveling but emptiness.

In that emptiness, Ron and Masapha found the final piece of Masapha’s puzzle.

About five miles from the lone oil well in Block 8A on the Licensed Oil and Gas map’s grid, a half-mile outcrop of rock jutted up out of the desert floor like a shark fin. Among the barren hills on the undulating plain, it was the only secluded piece of real estate for 50 miles in any direction.

Acacia thickets, brush and groves of stunted trees clung tenaciously to the sand on its boulder-strewn sides; on the desert floor at its base, syringe-needle thorn bushes and brambles grew in tangles so dense even Br'er Rabbit couldn’t have made his way through. Its highest point was on the northern end, and below that 150-foot crest, the outcrop curved inward to form a hollow about 300 yards wide that was enclosed on three sides. That was the stage where the drama of the slave sale would be played out; on top of that hill, Ron and Masapha had the best seats in the house.

“You scored, pal,” Ron whispered.