by Ninie Hammon
Sulleyman scoffed. “And he sent only one man?”
Omar smiled a confident smile that showed his shiny gold tooth. “I’ve bought for him for many years. He knows that I can do a better job than any six of his soldiers. I have his trust.” He paused for effect. “And his money.”
Omar patted the pocket where he kept the leather pouch with the remains of the money from Idris’s village.
That got Sulleyman’s attention. “So you’ve brought money. How much?”
Omar’s grin was disarming. “Enough.”
The level of Sulleyman’s suspicion still rose slightly higher than the level of his greed.
“You have yet to tell me what I want to know! Why this late at night? No one but a fool goes out to do business in Sudan after dark.”
Omar opened his hands, palms up. “Surely you don’t think I intended to come to you at this hour! I didn’t plan to arrive so late. I decided to travel through Dimari to get from Atbara to Kosti. And I misjudged the length of the journey.”
He shrugged a little sheepishly. “I will not travel that way again. It is a short route, but without roads, it takes much longer.”
“I am well aware of the traveling conditions around Kosti,” Sulleyman said condescendingly. “What does that have to do with your business with me?”
Sulleyman was irritable. He had been ready, eager for the little slave girl. The interruption had taken his desire away, distracted him.
“I went to Kosti to do business with Faoud,” Omar replied easily. “When I got there and told him what I was looking for, he told me he had sold his best batch of slave girls to you.”
Sulleyman stood silent; his look asked, “And?”
“Faoud said you are a shrewd businessman and always interested”--Omar bowed respectfully--“in a good return on your investments.”
Sulleyman grunted. “I am a businessman. Of course, I make a profit. If I did not make a profit I would be out of business.”
“Exactly,” Omar replied. “And I have a deal..."
“Sometimes I have more important things to do than business, however.” Sulleyman cut him off. “The slave girls—they are for you, or your master?”
Omar smiled a hungry smile.
“Both,” he said. His voice lowered an octave. “I get them...ready for my master. That is part of my payment.”
Sulleyman recognized the longing in the intruder’s voice and unconsciously connected to it. He identified with that kind of sexual need, that kind of raw, naked lust. Here was a man with a passion like his own, he thought, and his suspicions about the stranger began to melt away. The man obviously was who he said he was, so Sulleyman reluctantly shifted gears. He had lost his focus and had been interrupted at a very delicate time. But it was done, and there was no going back now. There would be ample time later to rekindle his desire. Perhaps he could make the man pay enough to make the intrusion palatable.
“You have interrupted my camp and my plans for the night, but I will still do business with you.” He was fully engaged in negotiating mode. “Tomorrow we break camp and return to the pasturelands and our homes in the north. I had decided to sell one, maybe two of my slaves along the way, but if I can make the profit tonight, it will save me the trouble of transporting and feeding them. You can go on your way, and we are both happy.”
He clapped his hands and summoned Pasha Drulois.
She disappeared into the darkness and returned a short time later with Mbarka.
“Two hundred and fifty pounds, and you can take the girl and go,” said Sulleyman with a wave of his hand. Pregnant, Mbarka would be more trouble than she was worth for a while.
“She is suitable for a Muslim,” he added as an extra selling point. “The procedure has already been performed. And as you can see, she has many fine...attributes.” The teenager was naked from the waist up. Her pregnancy was visible now only in her swollen, engorged breasts.
The girl was too old and well developed to be the 11-year-old child Idris and Leo had described.
“Two hundred and fifty pounds!” Omar laughed. “Is she made of gold? For that bag of gazelle bones I wouldn’t give you 100 pounds.”
Mbarka bowed her head in humiliation as the two men bartered for her like an animal in the marketplace. Her dark cheeks flushed with shame.
“I seek very young girls. Girls who have not yet been used as this one has.”
Sulleyman stopped. Apparently, he would not make money tonight after all.
“I am afraid I cannot help you. I have only one girl who fits your description.” Sulleyman’s voice grew suddenly ragged and hungry. “And tonight I will take this girl who has never known a man and initiate her into womanhood.”
The thought of it instantly put him into a good mood. “You are welcome to sleep in my camp tonight by the fire and not venture back out into the bush.” It was indeed a magnanimous offer to a stranger. “But it is not possible for us to transact any business.”
Omar refused to back down. He stepped closer to Sulleyman. “I have traveled a long way. I seek very young girls, and I will pay a premium price to get one. I am prepared to give you four hundred pounds if you have such a girl in camp.”
The soldiers who stood in the firelight murmured among themselves in surprise. Four hundred Sudanese pounds—for a slave? “The going rate is one hundred pounds per slave, yes?” He didn’t wait for Sulleyman’s reply. “You will get back four times the investment you have made. Pay one hundred, get back four hundred—you can only do that at the camel races.”
Sulleyman certainly wanted to sell a slave tonight to this man who obviously had more money than good judgment. Just not the slave the man wanted. Since Mbarka’s pregnancy did not yet show, perhaps Sulleyman could palm her off on the stranger. Then it would be his problem to put up with an undesirable slave and get rid of her useless offspring.
“I might be willing to make you a special deal on this one.” He pointed to Mbarka. “Only because you have traveled so far and it is late, I will let you have her for two twenty-five.”
Omar wouldn’t budge.
“This one has known many men, probably every man in this camp.” He gestured at the darkened tents just outside the glow of the campfire. “I seek young, less experienced girls. Faoud told me it would be weeks before he gets in another shipment, and I need slaves for my boss now.”
He lowered his voice and his tone was urgent. “And I need a virgin for myself...tonight!”
Sulleyman laughed.
“Faoud is sharper than an adder’s fangs. Don’t believe anything he tells you. He peddles more flesh than anyone in the country. He can find you what you want, and you won’t have to wait two weeks to get it. He’s just trying to jack up the price.”
Sulleyman stopped, did some mental arithmetic and made a decision. “I tell you what,” he said slowly. He hated to do it, but business was business. “This virgin girl I have, you can have her tomorrow for the four hundred pounds you offered. You get a young girl, and I make a good profit.”
Omar reached into his pocket and produced the leather money pouch. He emptied it, took from it every remaining pound Idris’s village had given him.
“Everything Faoud said about you is true,” he said respectfully. “He told me you were a shrewd businessman who drives a hard bargain. You are a better negotiator than I am. I will give you five hundred pounds for the girl, the virgin girl. It is, as you can see, all I have.”
The soldiers were stunned. Nobody paid that kind of money for a mere slave. Virgin or not, a girl’s a girl. After their employer took the man’s money, he would tell the tale forever afterward about the fool who came in the night and paid a king’s ransom for a skinny little slave.
Sulleyman surprised them. With a wave of his hand, the Arab chieftain dismissed the pile of money and Omar.
“Again, my friend, you are welcome to spend the night by the fire.” Omar could see twin flames of fiery lust burn in the man’s eyes. “But the little slave girl is
mine.”
Sulleyman turned and strode back toward his tent. The soldiers shook their heads in disbelief and began to disperse to their sleeping tents. Omar stood very still for a few seconds, the look on his face unreadable.
“Master Sulleyman,” he said, quietly, “I have one final offer.”
Sulleyman didn’t even turn around. “I don’t care if it’s another two hundred pounds. I told you, I’m not interested.”
Omar set his left foot up on a large stone beside the fire, leaned over and pulled up his pants leg. His personal money pouch was firmly attached to his calf. He reached into the pouch and pulled out a pile of bills, all the money he had in the world. “You might change your mind when you know what the offer is,” he said.
Time was measured in breaths. In, out. In, out. The world shifted on its axis, but the men who waited for Omar’s return in the moonlit desert night were suspended over infinity in a crystal Christmas ornament that swayed endlessly back and forth. There was no time, no past, no future. Life was a forever now.
In the profound desert silence, they would hear anything that approached long before they could see it. They froze at the tiniest sound, their hearing so focused they could have detected the slither of a snake across the sand.
The silence was a prison that held each man locked tight inside, a captive of his own thoughts, hopes and fears. Ron and Masapha still reeled from the pendulum swing of their circumstances. They’d been rescued from the razor’s edge between life and eternity, returned from the world of the dying to the world of the living. Gratefully, their emotional response to the reversal hadn’t hit yet; they didn’t have time for that right now.
Masapha scooted away from Leo and whispered to Ron, who crouched in the darkness and strained with the others to detect any hint of Omar’s return.
“Do you think maybe they have made of Omar a prisoner?” Ron turned to respond and noticed that Leo had tucked his chin down close to his chest.
“Keep an eye on that snake,” he told Masapha. “Looks like he’s trying to loosen his gag.”
Masapha pulled Leo’s gag so tight it cut into the corners of his mouth. Then he sat back down and all was still and quiet again. The only sound that broke the stillness was almost no sound at all, less than the whisper of a breeze. It was the sound of prayer.
The tribal was no longer on his knees. He lay face down. His whispered words gently moved the grains of sand in front of his mouth.
Ron, Masapha and Koto watched him as he petitioned the God of the universe to intervene in the fortunes of his child. Each of them had come to care for the Dinkan farmer. Koto remembered the kindness the tribal had shown to a frightened boy he didn’t know, whose language he didn’t speak. Ron and Masapha thought about the brutal beating the man had suffered in silence, how the whip slashed again and again into his back. All of them had been indelibly touched by the sacrificial love of the tall, thin African father.
His father’s grave was next to his mother’s, but each had an individual stone. Hers had been there for almost 20 years longer than his. The stones were under an oak tree with a fresh spring umbrella of bright-green leaves. Dan had always liked that oak tree. He’d wanted so badly to climb it when he, his father and Ron had come to the cemetery to visit his mother’s grave. If ever there was a good climbing tree, that oak was it.
A simple stone. Date of birth. Date of death. None of that “beloved father/brother/son/husband” stuff.
“Paul Daniel Wolfson,” Dan read out loud. Then he leaned back against the big concrete crypt near his parents’ graves, the final resting place of the dentist who’d filled his teeth when he was a kid. A breeze nudged the bushes, and purple, pink and white blossoms rained down onto the grass. Dan breathed in a lungful of air that smelled so clean it must have been freshly washed and hung out on the line to dry.
It seemed foolish to speak out loud to a headstone, but Dan did it anyway. “I wonder what it would have been like to know you—not as my father, but as a man. I think I would have liked you, that you and I would have been friends. I think we would have had some good times together. I know we would have laughed—you liked to laugh, I remember that. I remember the sound of it. It was booming, like your voice when you preached.”
He smiled and shook his head. “Yeah, we’d have gone on some crusade together, too, I bet. We’d have climbed on our horses and gone out to attack some windmill somewhere. We’re a lot alike, you and I.”
He paused, surprised at the wave of emotion, at how very desperately he missed his father and wanted to talk to him, just once, right now.
“Dad, I don’t know how to do this!” he cried out.
He looked away then, leaned his head back and blinked, so tears wouldn’t run down his face.
A flock of birds fluttered overhead in the bright-blue sky. They reminded him of the geese he used to watch from the porch swing when he was a kid, big, gray birds that honked their achingly lonely melody as they flew south for the winter.
“I know how to succeed,” he whispered thickly, “but I’m about to fail. I don’t have the votes, Dad. Plain and simple. I’ve counted and recounted; they’re just not there.”
He turned his face into the breeze and felt the chill of tears on his cheeks.
“The Freedom from Religious Persecution Bill isn’t going to pass. And when it’s voted down, the big corporations will heave a gigantic sigh of relief, they’ll cut their political contribution checks right on schedule, and the American people will keep pretending it’s not happening.” His voice began to break. “And men in Sudan with guns and swords and machetes will continue to ride down into villages and kidnap little kids. Make them slaves. Slaves!”
Dan let go then and put his head in his hands. For the first time since his father died, he cried. And some part of him he hadn’t heard from in a long time spoke.
God, don’t let this happen, Dan said in his head. Please.
God, don’t let this happen, Ron said in his head. Please.
He looked down in pity at the Dinka tribal. Don’t let this guy lose his daughter after all he’s been through.
On his face in the sand, pleading with God to give him back his little girl, Idris suddenly heard the snap of a branch. They all did and froze, held their breath. Another crackle. Footsteps. Someone was coming. Idris rose to his knees and listened.
The others instinctively dropped to the sand and hunkered down behind the log. If it was a guard on sentry duty, maybe he would walk past them in the darkness. Or maybe he would change direction.
It’s only one person, Ron thought, and if we had to, we could handle one person. We’ve got Omar’s knife.
With everyone’s attention diverted, Leo began to squirm in the darkness. Masapha had tightened the gag in his mouth but not the ropes that tied his hands.
As the steps neared, Ron whispered to Masapha, “It sounds like the same footsteps that left. I think it’s Omar!”
The hearing of the two tribals, Idris and Koto, was much more refined and acute than the American’s or the Arab’s. Both figured out quickly that the footsteps that now approached had the same stride, rhythm and cadence as the footsteps that had left an hour earlier. But what struck Idris was not what he could hear; it was what he couldn’t hear. The steps were solitary; they were not accompanied by the lighter, leaf-rustling steps of a child. Ron saw Idris’s expression and suddenly understood what Idris already knew. Omar was on his way back, all right. Alone.
Ron couldn’t bear to look at Idris’s face. He had watched the man’s heart break in the jail cell when Leo taunted him with what was in store for his little girl tonight.
The lone set of footsteps crunched closer and closer.
On his knees in the sand, Idris began to cry silently. He felt the same bottomless hole open in his gut that he had felt the day he knelt in the sand and cradled the butchered body of his little boy in his arms.
But Akin was not dead! Barbed thoughts ripped open his heart with jagged, nightmare
images. A man held his little girl down. Akin struggled to get away, screamed, cried, pleaded with him to stop. The man came down on top of her, forced her, raped his baby girl!
He wanted to cry out, to shriek, to wail, to jump up and run into that devil’s encampment and snatch his little girl into his arms and carry her away. But he could do none of those things. He had not the air to wail nor the strength to run. It was over. It was finished. He had given everything he had to save his child. And he had failed. At the moment his child needed him the most, he had let her down.
He knelt, staring with unseeing eyes into the darkness where Omar had disappeared, and sobbed, cried as he had suffered the lashes on his back—in silence. The footsteps crunched around the stand of bushes.
Suddenly, Idris froze. He sucked in a ragged gasp.
The footsteps stopped.
Ron lifted his eyes to Idris’s face. He couldn’t read the expression. He shifted his gaze to Omar.
Lying in Omar’s arms, cradled against his massive chest, was a frightened, terribly thin, scarred and beaten 11-year-old girl.
Akin saw her father at the same moment he saw her. Her face exploded in joy.
“Papa!” she gasped.
Idris continued to sob. A smile filled his face with such profound joy it was sacred. He couldn’t speak; he merely held out his arms. Omar set the child’s feet on the ground. She flung herself into her father’s embrace with such force she almost knocked him backward off his knees.
Idris held her tight to his chest. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He rocked her back and forth crooning, “Akin...Akin...Akin,” with broken, sobbing breaths.
The child cried, too, the relief and release so overwhelming—the terror gone, her Papa here. Here! It was over, over! She cried harder and harder, let it all out in heaving sobs, her arms wrapped so tight around her father’s neck he could hardly breathe.
The others rejoiced with Idris, their faces lit by the glow of his achingly tender reunion. Some of them had never felt the kind of happiness that warmed their hearts. It was so pure and sweet it was almost holy.
