Acts of faith (85 page)

Making for the
jebels,
the column proceeded through an incinerated landscape, the bones of livestock whitening fields that looked in the moonlight as if they’d been covered by a blizzard of ash. A team of minesweepers went out ahead, swinging their detectors back and forth. The silence was eerie, interrupted only by the crunch of burned sorghum stalks underfoot. Besides landmines, there was the danger of stumbling into an enemy ambush—a government garrison wasn’t far off—and everyone’s eyes and ears were tuned to a high pitch, trying to pick out human forms in the darkness, listening for voices.

Walking behind her husband, Quinette experienced a heightened alertness, a druglike quickening of her senses produced by an amalgam of fear and excitement. The possibility that she might be killed at any moment made her feel intensely alive, and more than ever Michael’s sister-in-arms.

The thumping of a heavy machine gun sent everyone to the ground. Red and green tracer bullets, stitching the skies above the hills, declared that the column wasn’t the target—some trick of acoustics had made the machine-gun sound much closer than it was. Flat on her stomach, Quinette watched the tracers streak, then slow down, appearing to float like dying sparks before they winked out. There was a series of muffled thuds from an indeterminate distance behind her. Artillery shells whooshed overhead. Half a minute later a flickering appeared among the hills, followed by a ragged rumbling, then more machine-gun fire, then a bright flash as something exploded and caught fire.

Michael, lying beside her, counted by thousands to time the interval between the flash and the sound. “Seven kilometers,” he said. “Six point eight exactly.” He clapped his hands twice, and the men stood and continued toward the mountains that made a jagged jet-black silhouette, as if a hole had been opened in the sky to reveal a starless void lying beyond the heavens. Michael composed a coherent narrative out of what had been, to Quinette, a lot of confusing noise and flashes. SPLA guerrillas had ambushed a convoy trying to sneak through to the garrison under cover of the predawn darkness. The government troops had called artillery fire on the ambush, but the garrison’s guns, shooting at such long range, had been off the mark and the shells had landed harmlessly. The explosion had been a truck or armored personnel carrier struck by rocket-propelled grenades, or perhaps by an artillary round, falling short of its intended target.

His version of events was dead on. Reaching the base of a jebel at first light, they came upon the bullet-sieved hulks of three Sudan army trucks. In one the driver had been welded to the charred remains of the cab, his body shrunk to half its normal size: a faceless blackened form. Corpses lay all around, and the stench was awful. A year ago Quinette would have been sickened, she might have even been moved to pity; but now her only thought was “They had it coming.”

The column climbed into the jebels. Even there the Masakin had not found much refuge. The people who emerged from the villages were emaciated, barely surviving on the spare crops scratched out of rocky hillsides, some of which had been transformed into moonscapes by Antonovs and helicopter gunships.

There was a reason the government was paying the Masakin so much attention. Michael showed it to her from a ridge overlooking a cauterized plain of sun-cracked clay and a road: the main supply route between two government-held towns, Talodi in the east, Kadugli in the west, where, he said, it turned northward to join the pipeline and another road that ran to the oil fields. He pointed to the south.

“That way, less than one hundred kilometers, is the oil company’s airfield. These hills will be our base when we attack it. From here, with the lorries, we can transport the heavy mortars. We will leave at dark and be in position by midnight. We will hit them and the pipeline hard and fast.” He balled his right hand into a fist and smacked the palm of his left. “Hard and fast.”

They went on, arriving at a town where the local SPLA battalion was headquartered. Its commander invited Quinette to stay with his wives, all three of them, while he and Michael worked out their battle plans. Negev lugged her rucksack into the tukul and rolled out her sleeping bag. She fell on it and didn’t wake up till early afternoon, when the youngest wife brought her a meal of
mandazi
cakes and stringy goat meat, the same fare she’d eaten throughout this trek. She could shove her arm into the waistband of her hiking shorts and figured she’d lost a pound for each of the ten days since she’d left New Tourom.

Fancher appeared at the door to tell her that it was time for her debut as a minister. She followed him to the church, a long bungalow just outside of town, with the usual makuti roof and a tall wooden crucifix planted in front. The men were already gathered inside, where she could hear Handy reading from the Psalms—” ‘He shall cover you with his feathers, and under his wings shall you trust. His truth shall be your shield and buckler . . .’ ”

“That’s our reading for today, the ninety-first,” Fancher said to her, offering a smile of reassurance. He handed her a Bible, marked at the Psalm. “I’d like you to start with it.” He motioned at a tree a short distance off. Under it stood one of the translators in Fancher’s retinue, with the flip chart on an easel and the tape recorder on a table, plugged into speakers and a solar panel. The news that the women and children were to be ministered to by a woman had drawn quite an assembly—more than a hundred, Quinette judged. “I’ll watch how you do and give you a critique afterward,” Fancher said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

She had thought her experience with speaking to liberated slaves would give her confidence, but her knees shook slightly as she stood before all the expectant faces. This wasn’t making a speech, this was
ministry.
The sweat trickling into her eyes didn’t help, and she flubbed the first verse and had to start over. She read on and, verse by verse, felt more sure of herself. The indwelling spirit poured through her, and instead of standing rigidly, she began to pace to and fro, gesturing, her voice growing stronger. “ ‘You shall not be afraid of the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flies by day. . . . Nor for the pestilence that walks in darkness, nor for the destruction that wastes at noonday . . .’ ” It wasn’t too long a Psalm, just sixteen verses, but with each line needing to be translated, its reading took a full fifteen minutes. She concluded—” ‘With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my salvation’ “—and glanced over her congregation at Fancher, standing with his arms crossed over his chest. He pursed his lips and gave her a single nod.

That gesture encouraged her to ad-lib.

“ ‘I will show him my salvation,’ ” she repeated. “And God showed us our salvation in Jesus Christ, his son. Now we’ll learn about Mary, who gave birth to Jesus—”

“Gunships! Gunships coming!”

The cry came in three different languages, English, Arabic, Nuban. “Gunships coming!” Men were running from the church. In seconds Quinette’s audience fled in all directions. Fancher seized her arm and yelled, “Over there!” They ran to a bomb shelter—nothing more than a wide, deep hole in the ground. It was already packed to the rim. They ran to another and wedged themselves in, crouching atop a pile of people, with no more than six inches between them and the top of the hole. Between the shelter and the church, a few women lay flat on the ground. Quinette looked up. Two gunships materialized, looking like huge predatory insects.
“Woe to the land of the whirring wings . . .”
Both swooped directly over the bomb shelter, their rapid-fire cannons making a loud, hideous, ripping noise.
“A thousand shall fall at your side . . . but it shall not come near you . . .”
Quinette pressed her face into the back of a person under her and heard a series of sharp cracks. Rockets, Fancher said. The gunships flew off. Fancher crawled out of the hole, got to his feet, and dived back in. “They’re coming in for another run!” he cried, the last couple of words drowned out as both helicopters skimmed the treetops, close enough that Quinette glimpsed the pilot’s helmeted head in the cockpit window; then she curled into a fetal position and covered her head as brain-numbing explosions brought down a rain of dirt and debris. The ground shook, shrapnel scythed a tree branch overhead, and it crashed somewhere nearby. No one in the shelter was hit.
“I will say to the Lord, He is my refuge and fortress . . .”

In the silence that followed, she heard shouts. Peering over the shelter’s lip, she saw Michael leading teams of antiaircraft machine-gunners and riflemen. Waving his arms, pointing, he showed them where to set up firing positions. She felt a rush of love, of pride—to be the wife of such a man! The gunships roared in again and this time flew into a sheet of bullets. The noise was stupendous. Quinette did not duck, thinking that she should match her husband’s bravery. The lead gunship wobbled, then dropped, settling on its wheels as if it had made a normal landing. Michael’s troops riddled it with bullets.

Their ears ringing, Quinette and Fancher got out of the hole and brushed dirt from their hair. SPLA troops ran toward the downed helicopter a hundred yards away. Villagers, scrambling from their hiding places, followed them. Quinette walked in a shell-shocked daze. The women who hadn’t made it to a shelter had been shredded by cannon fire. She couldn’t tell how many there had been. Nearby, the tree beneath which she’d begun her meeting was splintered and blackened, the tape recorder and speakers and other paraphernalia scattered amid rocket fragments. The troops were dragging the bodies of the crew from the gunship. One was still alive. Villagers pounced on him, tearing at him with bare hands, hacking him with pangas in an orgy of revenge.
Only with your eyes shall you look and see the reward of the wicked,
Quinette thought. “No! No!” Handy screamed, sprinting toward the frenzied crowd.

“Help us stop those people!” Fancher said to her. “We can’t let them do this!”

She pointed at the heaps of bloodied rags that twenty minutes ago had been listening to her read the ninety-first Psalm. “I can’t,” she said, choking. “Let them have at it.”

“You are safe, you’re not hurt!”

It was Michael, covered in dirt. He put his arms around her and held her close.

Fancher appealed to him to help restore the villagers to their sanity. What was going on over there, within sight of a church, was an abomination.

“This is war, Mr. Fancher,” Michael replied coldly. “And war is cruelty. It cannot be refined.”

They left at dusk, after the dead were buried—amazingly, only eight people had been killed, and the church had not been badly damaged, though there were rocket craters within fifty yards of it.
“Jesus Christ is building his church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
The two ministers lectured her before they set off. Ministry was more than words, it was action, and she should have set the Christian example by helping them restrain the villagers. No matter what, that sort of conduct could not be justified. She agreed, she promised to improve, but while Fancher and Handy spoke in her ear, another spoke in her head:
You can’t ask people to grant mercy to an enemy who shows them none.
It seemed to her that Sudan was cut off from normal standards of behavior; it was under different, harsher rules.

The column walked till dawn, resting the next day in the village of another tribe, the Tira, to whom Quinette preached her second lesson. They left that night, passing through a region that had been spared from the war’s ravages because it was sparsely inhabited: a vestige of wild Africa where low ridges polka-dotted with acacia trees undulated toward a far-off range, rising like a volcanic island from an ocean of grass. Such ugliness and horror two days ago, such peace and beauty here. The range, Michael told her, was the southern face of the Limon hills. New Tourom lay beyond it. Home. Eager as they were to get there, they halted at midnight beside a riverbed and camped in the open, too worn out to march further. The men spread out into a defensive perimeter, and everyone but the sentries went to sleep to the lullabies of hyenas.

An urgency in her bladder and bowels woke Quinette at some predawn hour. After finishing that business in the riverbed, she crept back, but sleep eluded her and she lay on her bag, gazing at the constellations.

“That one is the Phoenix,” Michael whispered, raising his arm. “Do you see it? The one that looks like a house? The very bright star beneath it is Achernar. The Arabs named it. It means ‘star at the river’s end.’ ”

“How long have you been awake?”

“An hour. I cannot get back to sleep.”

“Me neither.”

“For the same reason?” he asked, turned onto his side, and laid his hand on her shoulder.

They sneaked away barefoot through the grass, past a none-too-vigilant sentry, came to a
koppie,
and sat under an outcrop, on a bed of sand.

“What river is that star at the end of?”

“The Nile,” he answered. “Do you see that long line of stars bending and twisting above it? That’s it. The Nile of the heavens.”

“I love the way that sounds,” she said. “Star at the river’s end, the Nile of the heavens.”

“Yes, the Arabs can be very poetic. As poetic as they can be brutal.”

He kissed her, so gently it was more a breath than a kiss. His fingers toyed with her braided hair, then fell to her shirt and opened the top two buttons. He cupped her breast and drew a ring around her nipple.

“I cannot keep my hands off of you. It’s a habit.”

“One you must never, ever break,” she said, laughing softly.