Sudan: A Novel

by Ninie Hammon

  And that was exactly what the Arab mercenaries expected them to do. So far, everything had played out just as they had planned.

  The group of women and children left on the riverbank stared at the menacing cloud of thick, black smoke rising from the village. They were stunned, but their surprise quickly downshifted into fear. Mothers called their children’s names, searched for their own in the crowd of frightened youngsters—who looked around just as frantically for them.

  Akin had moved away from her mother and Shema as soon as Abuong splashed out into the river to stand before Pastor Maluong. The tall grownups blocked her view so she maneuvered her way through the crowd to the river’s edge, where she could see Abuong clearly and feel the warm water lapping against her bare feet. When panic broke out, she turned and screamed, “Mama! Mama!” and tried to run back to the spot where her mother and sister had been standing. But the scrambling mass of adults and children got in her way.

  Akin looked frantically from side to side, cried out for her mother, her voice gobbled up by the voices of all the other children crying out for theirs. Suddenly, she spotted Aleuth, shoving her way through the crowd to the riverbank with Shema at her side, calling, “Akin! Where are you? Akin!”

  “Here! Mama, I’m here, I’m here!”

  Aleuth broke free from the tangle of frightened humanity. Akin raced to her, threw her arms around her mother and held on fiercely, her heart pounding, her body trembling.

  “Mama, I couldn’t find you anywhere and I was so scared. Do you see the smoke, Mama? The village is on fire, it’s burning up. What are we...?”

  “Shhhhh.” Aleuth struggled to keep the sound of her own fear out of her voice as she tried to quiet the frightened child. “Everything is fine. Shhhhhhh. We’re in no danger. We’re safe here on the riverbank.”

  That’s when the Arabs struck.

  As soon as the village men racing toward the burning huts were out of sight around the stand of bamboo, the waiting mercenaries attacked. One band of mounted Arabs thundered out of the reeds downstream and crashed through the tall grass on the riverbank toward the horrified women and children. A second band on foot rushed the crowd from the woods upstream, pinning them against the river. The riders quickly surrounded their prey in an ever-tightening circle as a truck bumped down the road and halted in a cloud of dust.

  Chapter 6

  With far more bravery than good judgment, the tribal men on the riverbank had bolted up the hill toward the burning village. As soon as the men were in range, the Murahaleen guerrillas snapped their trap shut. The Arabs finally employed their automatic weapons, opened fire and mowed down the unsuspecting villagers like a scythe slicing through wheat.

  One after another they fell. Most were killed instantly by the sickening ka-thunk of bullets ripping into their bodies. Few had time even to cry out. The only men who survived were the ones quick enough to drop to the ground at the first gunshot. One of them was Akec Kwol.

  Akec lived in a tukul next to the Apot family, and he would have said that he and Idris were good friends. Idris probably would not have agreed.

  Akec was a big man in the village by a couple of standards. He was the tallest, by several inches, in a tribe whose most distinguishing characteristic was height. He stood six feet, nine inches, and was stronger than any other man in Mondala. He also was the richest man in the village. He owned many head of cattle—the standard of wealth among the tribes in Sudan—sheep and goats, and was able to farm a large sorghum field by employing other men to help him work the land. He’d received huge dowries when his daughters married farmers in adjoining villages, and now one of them was about to deliver Akec’s first grandchild. His wife, Nhiala, had left at first light that morning to be with their daughter during the birth.

  But it was not Akec’s wealth that made him so thoroughly disliked in the village. What rankled was his arrogance. He was a boasting show-off, and most of the villagers cut a wide swath around him whenever they could. Except Idris Apot. Idris didn’t like the man any more than the other villagers did. But as a Christian, Idris made an effort to treat his neighbor with dignity and respect and had no idea how much his kindness meant to the lonely, friendless man.

  Flat on his belly as bullets whizzed over his head, Akec knew his only hope lay in getting his hands on the weapons in his tukul on the edge of the village overlooking the river. With the smell of dirt in his nostrils, he lifted his head slightly and could just make out a group of men running toward the village, farm tools in hand— grubbing hoes, machetes, pitchforks and axes. They were the men who had opted to work in the fields instead of attending the service on the riverbank, and they’d seized whatever makeshift weapon they could find when they saw that the village was under attack.

  The Murahaleen saw the farmers, too, turned their weapons on them and mercilessly cut them down, one after the other. With the Arabs’ attention focused elsewhere, Akec and the others from the riverbank had a chance to escape.

  They crouched low and made a break for the stand of small acacia trees beside the bamboo at the base of the hill between Mondala and the river. From there, they slipped onto the trail that encircled the village and headed north toward the river and Akec’s tukul. On the other side of the village, the farmers who’d survived the first deadly hail of bullets made a break for the encircling trail as well and instantly vanished into the labyrinth of paths winding among the huts.

  The farmers and the men from the riverbank knew the layout of the village. That was their only advantage. They used the increasing smoke for cover, wove in and out among the burning huts, and quickly intermingled with the Arabs so the attackers couldn’t turn their automatic rifles on them without hitting each other. Then, with whatever weapons they could find, they fought back.

  One of the farmers launched a pitchfork at a guerilla mounted on a big Arabian stallion. The shot fell short, striking the horse in the side. The animal bellowed in pain, reared up on its hind legs and dislodged its rider before it keeled over on its side. Another farmer leapt out from behind a hut and finished off the dazed Arab with a grubbing hoe.

  Akec emerged from his tukul with his bow and arrows. He was not as good a shot as his neighbor, Idris, but at close range he could hold his own with any man. He crouched low behind the only cover he could find, a stack of cooking pots, and fired at an Arab torching the roof of a nearby tukul. The man cried out in pain as the shaft plunged deep into his chest. One of the men from the river launched a spear that just missed its mark, and its intended victim turned his horse and trampled the villager. Akec had to jump out of the way to keep from being trampled, too.

  Though the villagers’ Stone Age weapons were woefully inadequate, the young leader of the attack had never encountered any resistance at all, and he panicked. He signaled a retreat, and his men abandoned the handful of captives they’d corralled in the center of the village. The mounted soldiers galloped off to the rendezvous point a mile from Mondala while the foot soldiers headed down the hill to the riverbank where their companions were rounding up the women and children there for transport.

  Aleuth Apot had tripped when the terrified crowd exploded in hysteria, and she lay in the sand for a moment with the wind knocked out of her. But the fall didn’t loosen her grip on her daughters’ hands, and Akin and Shema stood above her, pulling with all their strength to help her to her feet.

  “Mama, get up!” Akin meant to scream the words but terror had taken her breath away and all she could manage was a raspy, choked whisper.

  “Mama! Please!” she pleaded. “Get up! You have to get up!”

  Aleuth staggered to her feet.

  Where was her son? What had happened to Abuong?

  She’d last seen him with Pastor Maluong in the river before the madness struck. Now she couldn’t locate him anywhere. She tried to see past the horses and riders encircling the panicked crowd but the moving wall blocked her view.

  Most of the women in the group were too dazed and frightened to
do anything except scream. They stood as immobilized as terrified rabbits, with their children gathered around them, as the raiders pulled the noose tighter and tighter.

  Aleuth was terrified, too, but she grabbed hold of her fear and hung on fiercely. She looked around, desperate for any avenue of escape, and her eyes locked on the stand of reeds that lined the downstream riverbank and formed a marsh spreading out into the water. It was a place to hide, not a particularly good one but the only one she had.

  Grabbing the girls’ hands, Aleuth darted behind the horses of two riders struggling with a mother whose two screaming boys were wrapped around her legs, zigzagged through the confused melee and sprinted for the bank of reeds. Somehow in the chaos and hysteria, she managed to make it to the marsh undetected. Once inside the grassy cover, she moved backward slowly and slipped deeper and deeper into the sanctuary of stalks.

  Akin clung to her mother’s hand. Her heart pounded so hard she feared the raiders could follow the sound of it to their hiding place. In all her 11 years, the little girl had only been truly terrified one time. She had been gathering firewood one day when she was six and had stumbled upon a black mamba. No one survived an encounter with a black mamba; a bite from one of the vicious, aggressive snakes was always fatal. Like cobras, mambas rise up off the ground to strike and can sink their venomous fangs into a victim 10 feet away. Akin had been much closer than that. Terror had taken her breath away then, too, and stolen all the strength from her limbs, left her no air to cry for help, no power to run away. She’d simply stood frozen for a five-second eternity and watched in fascinated horror as black death slithered past her bare toes and away into the grass.

  Now, she stared with the same fascinated horror at the thin wall of reeds that stood between her and the madness on the riverbank. She knew that at any moment death could rise out of the reeds like a black mamba and strike the three of them down.

  High on his Bedouin saddle, one of the mercenaries scanned the river as others lined up the women and children and began to rope them together in a human chain attached to the back bumper of the small truck.

  Suddenly, his eye caught something unusual. The tops of the reeds to his left were moving against the downstream flow of the river current. With a quick whistle, he caught the attention of one of the soldiers near him and pointed to the serpentine pathway of reeds moving in the wrong direction. The young soldier smiled knowingly and wheeled his horse into the shallow water.

  Aleuth heard the horse’s hooves strike the dry reeds less than 30 yards behind her and knew instantly they’d been spotted. She dragged the girls as fast as she could through the boggy water. The spiny heads of the reeds stung her face like tiny sweat bees as she ran.

  When the black Arabian horse burst through the reeds, it almost trampled them. Aleuth turned and screamed, and the huge animal reared up on his hind legs—which saved her life. The motion knocked the Arab’s aim off center, and the lance thrust meant to impale her struck her a glancing blow on the forehead instead and left a crimson furrow as it raked across the top of her scalp. The force of the blow propelled her backward, and she fell unconscious into the reeds in the shallow water. Shema was so terrified she kept running; Akin stopped to help her mother.

  With the speed of a striking snake, the Arab reached down and grabbed Akin. Almost pulling her arm out of its socket, he yanked her out of the water and threw her over his saddle horn. Nudging his horse’s flanks, he turned the big horse back toward the riverbank as Akin kicked and shrieked, pounded her little fists against the horse’s flank and wrenched her body from side to side in a desperate effort to get free.

  The soldier intended to dump Akin into the group of women and children his comrades were tying together with lengths of rope. But when he lifted the squirming child off his saddle, her small foot caught him squarely in the groin. With a roar of pain and rage, he threw her small body like a rag doll over the heads of the half dozen prisoners already tied to the truck bumper. She landed with a bone-jarring crunch in the bed of the small truck, slid forward and slammed her head into a wooden crate. Then she lay very still, blood slowly forming a pool beneath her right ear.

  Idris and the other hunters spotted the smoke from a long way off. Two of the men were carrying on a pole between them the large reedbuck Idris had bagged. Two others were toting gazelles, and the remaining men carried a half dozen bush rats and rabbits.

  At first, the men thought the column of black and gray smoke that rose into the late morning sky must be a brush fire. They quickened their pace for another mile, fearful the fire might spread to the village. But as soon as they crested the final hill between them and the river, they could see the roofs of the huts burning.

  The hunters dropped their kill in the dirt and started to sprint for the trail that led to the riverbank downstream of Mondala. Idris stopped them.

  “Wait! Why do you think the village is burning? It’s the Murahaleen!”

  The men froze.

  “The Murahaleen are attacking the village!” Idris’s voice came out in a strangled sob. “They have rifles and machetes. We can’t just go running…”

  He stopped. His mind was spinning; then his whirling thoughts congealed into a single image.

  “This way!” he cried.

  He gripped his bow, his spear and his few remaining arrows, turned and raced up the winding, rocky trail that led to the top of the cliff overlooking the river. After a moment, the others followed. They could hear the women and children screaming and the gunfire before they reached the top of the hill, so they dropped low, panting, and crawled the final 50 yards to a collection of boulders that littered the crest of the cliff face.

  Idris peeked over the top of the rocks and took in the whole scene in one glance. Women he’d grown up with, children who’d played with his children, were being herded like cattle toward the back of a truck. Dead bodies lay everywhere. Where was his family?

  There had been a moment as he ran along the trail that Idris wondered if he could do it, if he could actually shoot a man. But there was not a moment’s hesitation now. With smooth, practiced skill, he drew back his spear and hurled it with all his strength at the nearest raider. It struck the man in the chest, and he dropped off his horse in a heap.

  Idris grabbed his bow, fit the slot of an arrow onto the string and pulled it taut, as the other hunters began firing, too, singling out the mounted soldiers rather than the guerillas mixed in with the crowd for fear of hitting one of the villagers. Aiming carefully, Idris let his missile fly, but as it sailed across the river, someone shouted a warning. His target ducked and the arrow missed its mark.

  The leader of the guerrillas, a bearded man named Hamir, seemed to absorb the light around him into his own darkness. He sat atop his white Arabian stallion like a death angel. His flowing black robe and the black shora scarf on his head blew in the wind as he surveyed the morning’s haul. There were perhaps as many as 75 children and maybe 50 women—it was hard to get an accurate count with them running around screaming. He knew his employer, Faoud al Bashara would be able to get top dollar for the little girls—the ones Faoud didn’t keep for himself. The slave trader they worked for did what was haram, forbidden, with children, both girls and boys. There were a lot of young ones here who...

  Suddenly, the soldier on the horse next to him let out an odd, gurgling grunt. He turned in time to see the man slide out of his saddle, a spear stuck like an exclamation point in his chest.

  A cry of pain squalled out of a rider behind him, and he whirled around to see his second in command shrieking in agony, a feathered shaft buried deep in his thigh.

  “Hamir!” a soldier shouted, and the leader instinctively ducked as an arrow flew so close to the side of his head he could feel the air rearrange itself as it passed.

  “There, on top of the cliff!” A soldier had spotted the tribals. He and the others raked the rock face with a hail of gunfire from their semiautomatic rifles.

  But as soon as the soldiers s
topped shooting, arrows and spears rained down on them again. One after another, raiders cried out and dropped to the ground. When an arrow sailed past Hamir’s right shoulder and stuck with a resounding thunk in the wooden post that supported the canvas cover on the back of the truck, he called it quits.

  “Out, now!” he yelled at his men, motioning toward the road.

  He knew the tribals couldn’t hope to compete in a battle of weaponry, but there was no way for his solders to leverage the superiority of their firepower. They couldn’t storm the villagers’ position on the cliff, and as long as the men shooting at them could hide behind rocks high above their heads, he and his men were effectively outgunned.

  “But, the prisoners...” One young soldier started to protest. “How can we...?”

  “Leave them!” the leader bellowed. “I said get out! Now! Get in that truck and drive!”

  Hamir turned his horse away from the deadly hail of arrows dropping out of the sky, kicked the animal’s flanks and galloped up the road. His men followed suit. They dropped the ropes that bound their prisoners, leapt on their horses and raced up the road behind Hamir. Two riflemen stayed behind to keep the tribals pinned down while the foot soldiers escaped. The small, covered truck brought up the rear. The driver shoved down the accelerator and roared up the hill. The three women and four children who’d been tied to the truck’s bumper were yanked off their feet and dragged along behind.

  Idris and the other hunters firing from the top of the cliff had crouched so low when the second round of automatic gunfire pinged off the rocks around them that they didn’t see the raiders’ retreat. When the firing stopped, they peered over the rocks in time to see the rear guard of soldiers disappear over the hilltop.

  Idris dropped his weapons, stepped to the edge of the cliff and jumped into the river. He’d done the same thing hundreds of times as a boy, but those memories lasted only until his head cleared the water and he saw the carnage on the riverbank. He splashed out of the water, looked around frantically and called for his family.