Sudan: A Novel (22 page)

“Fight what?”

Ron considered trying to explain that one but thought better of it. “You and I, we’re going to get it all, the big Kahuna. I want interviews with slaves. And their masters. Shoot, I’d interview a slave trader, too, in fact, if I could get one to talk to me!”

The stunned look on Masapha’s face was almost comical.

“You know, it’s not a bad idea at all, not at all! Maybe I could use a wire... ”

Masapha didn’t reply. He wasn’t really listening anymore. He was looking at something in the distance, over a line of trees.

“Slow down,” he said.

Ron let up slightly on the jeep’s accelerator and followed Masapha’s gaze. Vultures circled high above a stand of trees just ahead. Not odd, by any means. But that many vultures, that was odd.

Masapha touched Ron’s hand on the stick shift. “Pull over. There is a thing that is not right about this. We should go on our feet to see.”

Ron stopped the jeep, grabbed his camera bag and followed Masapha. As they drew near, they could hear the scavengers, the raucous cry of the coffee-colored vultures, their wings flapping as they settled down out of the sky.

The men moved cautiously forward, edged around a small bend in the road and passed the brush that blocked their view of the trees. The sight and the stench slammed into their chests like twin wrecking balls.

Ron couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe.

Before him was a sight that would forever define evil incarnate. Hanging in the trees all around them were corpses, rotting corpses obviously dead for days. There were probably two dozen of them.

If the dead could have told their story, they’d have described how the raiders had descended on their Nuba village with guns, swords and machetes, how they killed, maimed, raped and finally burned the village to the ground.

Because the villagers were Christians, the leader of the Murahaleen had marched every man who had survived the raid to this stand of trees. And there, he had crucified them all.

Twenty-seven men had been nailed alive to the trees. The most hardy probably survived for as long as a day. Now all their heads hung down in death, hands and feet still impaled on tree trunks and limbs, with insects and buzzards picking to pieces their lifeless bodies.

Ron turned away, nauseated, shaking. Only a monster from hell walking the earth posing as human could have done such a thing. His head spun, and he was afraid he was about to be sick. The stench...he couldn’t breathe. No one in the world would ever believe that atrocities like this really happened.

Oh, yes they would.

His fingers were clumsy as he flipped the catch on his camera bag, lifted the Nikon out and hung it around his neck. He steadied himself, then turned and resolutely began to fire. He snapped one ghastly, grotesque picture after another. Click-click. Click-click. A guarantee that the world would not be able to turn its back and pretend it hadn’t happened. And a guarantee that each image would be seared into his soul, to haunt him for the rest of his life.

He had shot one entire roll and a few shots off a second before Masapha, who stood nearby visibly shaken, croaked, “Ron, look!”

Stretched out on the ground facing the crucifixion scene, a limp form lay in the dust, a boy, motionless.

Ron and Masapha ran and knelt in the dirt beside him. Masapha put his ear to the boy’s chest, below the swollen, festering wound in his shoulder, and could barely detect a heartbeat. “He is alive, but it is a near thing. We must find a doctor.”

It was late afternoon when the two camels and two horses rode into the camp. This camp had the feel of a village, not like the transitory one-night camps the girls had lived in since their capture.

When the slave auction in the desert had exploded in pandemonium, two soldiers had grabbed Akin and her three friends and hoisted them up onto horses. Then the men leapt onto camels and took off across the plain with the horses in tow.

They traveled for days after that, until the girls’ tender legs were raw from the saddles. Now, the Arabs quickly dismounted the camels, handed the reins to servants and left the captives tied to the horses. Akin and the others looked around in wonder.

The centerpiece of the camp, the hub around which all the rest revolved, was a large, white canvas tent. It dominated the camp the way the man inside it dominated the people in the camp. There were half a dozen smaller, colorfully striped tents encircling the big white one, each about 50 yards from the next. A handful of even smaller tents were scattered around the compound.

Beyond the tents to the north, a herd of camels grazed, each staked to the ground with a long tether rope. In the pastureland south of the encampment, a herd of horses was tethered to graze.

The camels, the horses, the camp—and now the four Sudanese girls—belonged to Sulleyman al Hadallah, who lived in nomadic luxury in the center tent in the compound.

The men who had brought the girls to the camp untied the ropes that bound them to the horses, lifted them to the ground and shoved them across the compound, past the tents and up a small incline toward a palm tree set off by itself. Under it was a faded green army tarpaulin stretched across a center pole and tied to four shorter poles driven into the dirt. The space beneath the tarp was only about three feet high, and it was open on all four sides, but it provided shade from the blistering desert sun. What the shelter also provided was the downwind stench of the camp’s latrines, located only a short distance away.

When the men got to the shelter, they shoved the girls under the tarp. One of the men bound the girls’ hands and then tied a length of rope to each girl’s ankle. He pulled the knots so tight they winced in pain. The ends of the tether ropes were tied to the shelter’s center pole. The lengths of rope were long enough for the girls to scoot as far as the edge of the tarp but no farther.

For the rest of the evening, the men celebrated loud, noisy dinners in the tents. The girls could hear shouts and raucous laughter. A small herd of black-robed women scurried back and forth carrying trays of food and urns of drink from what must have been the cook tent at the far end of the campground. Every time one of the women lifted the canvas flap of one of the tents, the clamor from the inside spilled out into the evening air.

The girls were ravenous and so thirsty their dry tongues stuck to the roofs of their mouths.

Finally, a small, bowed woman in a light-colored robe huffed and puffed up the path toward where they sat. She carried a bucket of water and a straw plate. When she reached the shelter, she sat the bucket down and flung the tin cup toward the nearest girl. Hesitating at first, but spurred on by the woman’s gestures and unintelligible urging, Mbarka picked up the cup and quickly jabbed it into the bucket. She took a long, gulping drink, then handed the cup to Shontal, who drank and then passed the cup on down the line.

In a rare burst of generosity, the unknown woman had culled some scraps from the table where the men had been eating and brought the girls their only meal of the day—some pita bread, dates, couscous and feta cheese made from camel’s milk. She watched the girls devour the food until a large woman came out of one of the tents and called to her, and she turned quickly and hurried back down the path.

The celebrations ended in the gathering dusk. Most of the men headed toward sleeping quarters in three of the striped tents. The girls could hear their voices as they talked to each other in their strange tongue. In fact, the girls could hear the sounds of the encampment surprisingly well. Even small sounds like cooking pans banging carried a long way in the cool, dry air.

The girls talked quietly and studied this new environment. If it was a village, it was an odd one. While there were easily 50 to 60 men, they had yet to see a single child and only a handful of women.

They had never met a Bedouin.

The Arab nomads had come south only temporarily to graze their herds in the lush green meadows and to trade livestock in Kosti. Once he’d sold off his stock, Sulleyman and his herders would return to Qadiq, the town in the north where the Hadallah clan lived. He made enough money to support a very comfortable lifestyle there by selling and trading camels and horses, and he supplemented his income by the sale of slaves he picked up on his trips south.

With his connections in Mauritania, Sulleyman could sell the slaves for twice what he had paid for them. And he had the use of them during his stay in Sudan. Occasionally, he kept slaves for his household, but his general policy was to use the women and girls for his personal pleasure and then sell them off when he returned home. It would take a rare slave to catch his fancy; he had bedded hundreds of them over the years. He was particularly fond of virgins, virgins who still looked like little girls. He liked their childlike bodies and how they fought and screamed when he took them. But a virgin was only a virgin once; as soon as she was deflowered, she was interchangeable with any other slave.

The four slaves he had sent his men to buy at the slave auction would bring a good price, and if he decided to purchase any others, he would negotiate with his broker in Kosti, Faoud al Bashara. 

Akin’s eyes were drawn to the big center tent in the gathering darkness. She saw a lamp flicker and then begin to brighten until the whole tent was bathed in a golden glow. When night fell and the stars appeared in the black sky, the white tent became a ball of light.

As she watched, the flap of the tent flew open and two men came out. In the puddle of light in front of the tent, she could see that both wore white headdresses, with fabric covering the lower portion of their faces. A man inside the tent barked at the two men, obviously giving an order, and they strode purposefully away.

Akin turned her attention from the men back to the tent, where she could see the man inside, the one who had issued the order, silhouetted by the golden glow of the lamplight in a perfect shadow on the tent wall. As she watched, the man began to take his clothes off, tossing his long flowing robe aside, and Akin’s face flushed with embarrassment. She quickly averted her eyes and caught sight of the two men who had left the tent. They were striding up the path toward the shelter where she and the other girls lay in the darkness.

Instantly, her heart began to hammer, her mouth went dry and she began to pant, making little whimpering, hitching sounds as if she were crying. But she was way too scared to cry. She desperately wanted to run away, like she had run in terror from the men who attacked her village. But she couldn’t run fast enough to escape them then. And tied to a stake, she couldn’t run at all now.

When the men reached the open shelter, they ducked under the tarp. They reeked of wine, camels and body odor, and the girls shrank from them as far as they could. One of the men grabbed Mbarka’s arm and yanked her out. She gasped, just a little squeak, before terror stole her voice and she could make no sound at all. She stood quaking as one man untied her hands and the other untied the rope attached to her ankle. Tossing the ropes aside, one of them seized her right arm, the other her left, and they turned with the terrified teenage girl between them and hustled her back along the path to the white canvas tent in the center of the encampment. When they got there, the men shoved her through the open tent flap, then turned and stood guard just outside.

The startled girl caught herself on a tent pole as she fell into the tent. Slowly, she lifted her head and her eyes widened when she saw Sulleyman al Hadallah. He was totally naked, lying back against a stack of pillows. Beneath his bearded face, his hairy, dark-skinned body glistened in the flickering lamplight; his fat belly trembled with his rapid breathing. Gold earrings sparkled behind his drooping jowls. His eyes were dark and menacing, his lips twisted in a predatory smile.

From her vantage point, Akin could see the scene played out in shadows on the glowing tent walls. She could see Mbarka’s shape near the tent flap, but the man’s shadow wasn’t there. He must have left the tent, or he was lying down where she couldn’t see him.

Mbarka had never seen a man like this. The sight of his naked, quaking body made her stomach heave. She instantly averted her eyes to the floor of the tent, just keeping him in the upper periphery of her vision. He had been lying back with his arms spread out expansively, and he sat up slightly, waved his hand slowly in a come-here motion, and said something in Arabic. She clung to the tent pole, unable to move even if she’d wanted to.

He spoke again, his voice gravelly, his tone beckoning, and he motioned again for her to come closer. She did not move, and his face darkened. Ponderously, he got up off the pillows and plodded menacingly toward her. Suddenly, her terror exploded; she let go of the tent pole and bolted. She barely made it through the tent flap before one of the guards grabbed her and shoved her roughly back inside. She stumbled and fell, landing on her back, and when she looked up, the overweight man was standing above her, leering down at her.

Akin watched the scene play out in shadows. She saw the man get up and begin walking, his black silhouette approaching the thin one huddled at the front of the tent. She saw Mbarka lurch toward the tent flap, and watched the guard shove her back inside. And she saw the man reach down, grab her arm and drag her to the back of the tent. When the man’s shadow vanished, she heard Mbarka’s shriek, a cry of terror that split the darkness. She screamed and screamed, and suddenly her shrieking changed tone and became an anguished cry of pain that sounded like an animal captured in a snare.