by David Poyer
The fighters’ voices are loud. Their dialect’s different from that of his village, but he understands them. They pour water into radiators from goatskin bags, pry rocks out of knobby-treaded tires with knives, refuel from battered orange metal cans stacked in the shade. The odor of gasoline tinctures the wind.
Presently, when the trucks are cared for and covered, the tarps pulled tight and then carefully disarranged so no straight lines are left, their attention turns past the captives, to where woodsmoke blows from, and merry voices and music.
And presently, the scent of roasting meat.
THE boys wipe their lips with their hands, leaving smudges across their faces. They stand where the smoke blows. They’ve stood so long their legs shake, their heads spin with thirst and hunger and fear. Two younger fighters, one in a white robe like the drivers, the other in ball cap and T-shirt with interlocking colored rings on the breast, sit with terrible motionlessness against the ravine wall, weapons across their knees. Their jaws contract endlessly, chewing the wads of leaves called qat.
The other rebels are feasting. They toss bones over their shoulders, but none of the boys dares move. The fires crackle. Gradually the sky turns a darker blue. Shadows submerge the ravine.
A boy begs timidly for water. The young guards beat him with rifle butts until his head breaks like a clay bowl. He lies shuddering, eyes rolled up to blank whites, bare feet kicking as if he’s running. A darkness grows under him. He jerks, then goes still.
That was hours ago. Since then not one boy’s moved from where he was told to stand, not one has spoken.
Ghedi waits with them. His mind is reflectionless as the surface of the canal on a day without wind. He breathes in smoke and the smells of meat and smoke that come now and again like memories half remembered.
The dark comes, and stars sprawl above the firelight as light bleeds from the world. One burns brighter than the rest above the ravine walls. He fixes his gaze on it and listens to hyenas bark far off, the sound carrying across the desert for miles.
At last the man who pulled him off his feet hours before hoists himself from his crouch before the fire like a bundle of sticks wrapped in white cloth reassembling itself. He stretches, looking about, pushing dates into his mouth, sucking the sweetness from each finger. At the sky. The top of the ravine.
At last, as if remembering, he saunters toward the boys. Five are still erect, one lying in the sand, head shattered. The dark puddle has already vanished in the terrible dryness, sucked into the dust that looks white in the firelight, the light of the stars.
“You.” Seizing a small bandy-legged lad by the neck, he walks him to the fire, then past it, around a blind curve in the rocks and out of sight.
Ghedi has a sudden sharp memory. A lamb he’d grown to love, that he’d thought had been given to him. Then his father put the knife in his hand, and told him: this was Eid-ul-Zuha, and all belonged to God; and in His name the lamb was to die. He’d cried and begged. But at last, after it was explained, he understood.
God did not need the lamb. God had made all lambs, all human beings too. Ibrahim had been called by God to sacrifice his only son, Ismail. Ibrahim had shown his willingness, and God had not required that death. Now he, Ghedi, was called to do the same. What he loved most was the most acceptable sacrifice.
He remembered his father’s hand on the knife with his own. The feel as the blade punctured skin. The bleat, the twisting muzzle, quickly clamped shut by his father’s work-scarred hands. The smell of hot blood. The way the beast had looked up, trusting him.
He remembers the she-goat, in the bed of the truck.
And his own mother’s eyes.
A staccato of gunfire. The men at the fire glance that way but do not move from their relaxed crouches, their stone perches.
The tall one strides back alone. The folds of his maahwees whirl behind him. He swings one of the ugly rifles in one hand, muzzle down.
“Follow me. You boys! This way.”
Ghedi’s legs pop as he takes his first step in hours. He sways and almost goes down. Another boy catches his hand. They squeeze each other’s grip tight and stumble along together. The two guards fall in behind the little group. Curious gazes trail them as they pass the fire. A woman in the long colorful dress of the nomad crouches picking scraps and bones out of the dirt and placing them in a red plastic bowl. Only her eyes show beneath her shawl, and she does not look up as they pass.
“You’re nothing,” the tall man says conversationally. “You have no land, no clan, no weapons. You’ve pissed your pants. What sort of men are you? Are you men at all?”
None of the boys answers, and maybe he doesn’t expect them to. The smoke eddies around them, hanging in the ravine, drawing stinging tears.
When they turn the corner he lifts the rifle and they shuffle to a stop. Ghedi feels the hand gripping his tighten.
The boys stand shoulder to shoulder, barely breathing. Covered with the dust, they might be terra-cotta statues in the dark. Save for their wondering eyes. Then the guards shove them from behind, rifles out stiff-armed. They swim through the gathering shadows, through the last of the fire-smoke.
Gradually he makes out what fills the depression ahead. The mass of blackness seems to crawl, a living blanket.
It’s a crowd of women and children, squatting in what little light falls from the stars, from the single burning planet that hangs directly above.
“Yes, look on them. These are your enemy,” the tall man says. He doesn’t even sound angry. Only tired. “The enemy of all Ashaari and of your country. The government took it in their name. The government, that steals what is ours in the name of fairness. Does this seem right to you? Does this seem just?”
These people don’t look as if they took anyone’s land. The boys peep at them from the corners of their eyes. The women rock, black-draped, bare heels flashing, holding their children close. One wails, beginning a general outcry. The high thin sounds mount to where the moon rises close and pale.
“The time for blood-compensation is past. When an injury is done to our clan, do we not have blood? Or are we its sons?
“I want all those of noble clan to my right. All those who are sab, to my left.”
The sab are those who are not of the pure clans, the proud tall nomads who come out of the geelhers, the camel camps, the high desert.
The boys edge apart. The hand gripping his loosens, then slides free in a whisper of dry skin. There’s no possibility of pretense. Each boy holds in his brain the chain of genealogy that defines his clan. More intimate than his bowels, as impossible to disown, this cannot be denied or lied about.
But his people have not been nomads for many generations. He’s proud of his line, but what will this man judge, when he asks its name? Time narrows down, narrows down, to a spider-thread glistening in starlight.
He stands where he is. The tall man asks his clan family, and when he says it, nods slightly. “Yes,” he says. “You are welcome with us.”
“I am proud to stand with you,” Ghedi says, the words from which old tale of camel raids and flashing swords he can’t recall.
The tall man blinks. “Remember when you were small, and your father and uncles showed you how to give honor to God.”
The weapon feels heavy, awkward, for a moment. Then it seems it’s lived within his skinny arms forever. Its weight makes something move inside his chest. Something that lifts, under his heart.
He’s pointing it when a short bandit in a dirty Western-style shirt suddenly slaps him on the ear. He staggers, head ringing. The man grabs the weapon back, shows him how the brassy shining rounds lock into the magazine, the magazine locks into the gun, the bolt snaps forward and the lever on the side goes up and down. “Now it’s ready to kill,” he snarls. “Are you?”
The smoke eddies in his eyes. The whimpers come louder. He aims the rifle again.
Then lowers it. “I have no quarrel with these,” he mutters. “Soldiers in trucks drove us from our
land. Not these.”
The men smile grimly. “Then don’t kill those,” the short one says. He looks past him, at the boys who stand to the left. The one whose hand he was holding stretches out his arms. Their gazes lock.
“Were you not taught that he who does not strike back when he is offended against is unworthy of the name of Ashaari?”
He remembers his father’s face. Wonders why he wasn’t there when the soldiers came. If he had been, would they still own their land?
The tall man slaps his face. “Well? Speak up!”
Ghedi’s voice sounds muffled in his own ears. “He did so teach me.”
“Then show us what he taught.”
Before the tall man’s finished speaking the gun’s jerking in his hands, deafening, like holding thunder itself. Its flashes show him the eyes of those he kills.
2
Fenteni, Ashaara
AROUND the compound of trailers and storage sheds the desert stretched shimmering. Despite the knock of a generator and the whine of an air conditioner inside the central lab-and-office prefab, sweat trickled down the ribs of the freckle-armed woman in jeans and short-sleeved bush shirt. The blistering African sun soaked into the polished aluminum roof like rain into a dry dune.
Dr. Gráinne O’Shea noted this only remotely. She was focused three hundred kilometers to the north, sixty meters below the desert surface. She frowned at the monitor, sucking a mint and pushing back a strand of wet auburn hair as the assistant the government had insisted she employ moaned-sang to himself, plotting dots across a graph.
O’Shea had spent all her professional life since graduate school in East Africa. First in the Ogaden, then Ashaara for the International Hydrological Programme, with funding from the UN Commission on Sustainable Development. She was married, but hadn’t seen her husband in years. He was in palaeographical assessment at the University College of Cork. She’d had his picture above her computer, but when it had fallen off the wall as the adhesive cooked out of the tape, she’d left it behind the desk. It was too much trouble to move the maps and printouts that stacked and slanted around the narrow space where she wedged her body, her elbows, and her keyboard.
“Crap,” she muttered. The screen had stayed blank for five full minutes. Ashaaran Internet service, never better than inchworm-slow, had grown even more sluggish in the last few weeks. Sometimes she didn’t get answers to her e-mails for days. Often they vanished, damned to cyberhell.
She leaned back, massaging her lower sacrum. “Abdiwali. Find any fuel?”
“They let me have five liters. But the price, I could not get it for—”
“That’s all right. Water?”
“The jerrican’s half full. Where are you going? Al-Musa again?”
A knock shivered the flimsy metal door. She waited for Abdiwali to get it. When he didn’t she sighed and stood.
A tall dark man she didn’t recognize, in the green of the Ashaaran military. A Russian jeep idled, a driver puttering across the hood with a cloth, soldiers sitting in back.
“Vous etes madame le professeur? J’ m’appelle Chef de Bataillon Assad.”
She shifted to French, the colonial language of northern Ashaara and the one most locals tried first when speaking to whites. “Bonjour, Chef. Pourrais-je vous aider?”
Assad looked around the trailer. He wore an automatic in a brown leather holster. “I’ve come from the capital to see how your work’s progressing.”
“Excellent. Will you come in? I can heat chai. Or would you prefer Nescafé?”
Assad said neither, but he’d take water. She poured a cup from the container Abdiwali’s family kept filled for two euros a week, and invited the major to sit. But he ignored the folding chair and strolled the length of the trailer, turning sideways to skirt boxes of records and sampling equipment, sipping as his gaze roved. Gráinne tried not to frown.
For the first year in-country she’d worked with a Dr. Isdheeb, with the oddly named Ministry of Interior Resources. But Isdheeb had vanished suddenly—“poofed” as one of her UN contacts put it—and she’d been passed from desk to desk until the last time she’d reported to the dusty brickpile that smelled like it was still 1880 no one had been willing to speak with her. They’d watched her stride down the corridors with averted eyes, and most of the desks had been empty. Which was strange for Ashaara, with its top-heavy bureaucracy that was a maddening hybridization of the European love of forms with the African habit of personalizing interactions.
She turned, and caught sight of Abdiwali. He was shaking, backed between two UN-issue filing cabinets, eyes fixed on the officer as if on a lion that had suddenly entered the trailer. Gráinne had encountered a lion once, in the western mountains. The tawny animal had watched her with sleepy eyes for what felt like a century before padding away, back into the broken terrain as if created from it and now dissolved again.
“Who is this man?” Assad asked her, lip curled as if he sniffed a foul odor. “This . . . southerner.”
“Mr. Abdiwali’s my assistant and interpreter.” She made her voice firm. “He’s been a great help. I hope it will be possible for him to continue working with me.”
Assad shrugged. He kept looking at the computer. “He can wait outside. Who does this equipment belong to? The vehicles?”
Gráinne nodded, and her assistant ducked outside, bending his knees as he passed their visitor. A blast of heat entered as he opened the door, then cut off as it slammed, vibrating the walls. The air conditioner whined harder. “Those are the property of the International Hydrological Programme.”
“American?”
“Actually Russian funded, mostly. And UN recognized.”
“You are a scientist?”
Was he from the ministry? Actually, he’d never said he was. But then, who was he? “Uh, correct. I’ve published in arsenic geochemistry and geochemical modeling at the field scale, and reactive transport modeling of groundwater and surface water. But most of my experience has been in arid-region hydrogeology. And you, Major? Where did you study?”
“Tell me, what is ‘hydrogeology’?”
She fought to keep a straight face. “Studying the occurrence, distribution, and effects of subsurface water.”
“I’m told you have explosives here.”
Was that what this was about? They were afraid their bloody “rebels” might seize it? “We once did, Major. That is, Dr. Kyriazis did.” She explained the equipment in the second trailer: the twenty-four-channel digital instantaneous floating point seismographs, the geophones, and the seismic source, a Bison hydraulically accelerated weight system towed behind her Land Rover. “So you see, we haven’t needed explosives for years now. Few geologists do.”
“What happened to those you had?”
She told him that whatever Kyriazis had brought had been either expended or taken home with him; she had no explosives and for that matter no arms. That was what had confined her to the compound for the last weeks: unrest in the hinterland, lack of security and field support from the ministry. Could he supply escorts and assistance? Fuel? Bond paper, which she was almost out of? (She didn’t mention the toilet paper situation, knowing how Ashaarans reacted to any hint of female uncleanness.) The president had assured her the ministry would support her efforts to clarify the country’s water resources, especially in the teeth of drought and famine.
Assad listened expressionlessly. He moved to a piece of graph paper taped to the wall. It was frail and darkened, as if held over a fire. A series of broken lines, crossed by a diagonal rising from left to right. “What does this convey?”
“Demographic water scarcity versus a technical use-to-availability ratio.”
“These lines have the names of countries.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“Why is Ashaara at the bottom?”
She said wearily, “That chart’s fifteen years old, Major. From Dr. Kyriazis’s report. Do you remember him? Ever heard his name before?”
“F
oreigners come and go in Ashaara.”
“He was here for twenty years. The horizontal lines denote water supply needed to support a population, including household use, industrial uses, and agricultural production. Yes, Ashaara’s at the bottom. He predicted what was coming. Massive drought, drop in groundwater levels, then famine. He laid out how you had to change the way you farmed and how you used water, and advised the president to seek aid to do that.
“Instead, the U.S. and the Russians fed in more weapons, playing you off against the Eritreans. You built a useless concrete industry. Now drought’s hit again, and you don’t know what to do, any of you. What will you do? Do you have any idea?”
But the major’s eyes were riveted where her bush shirt gaped, fixed on the claddagh her husband had given her, long ago. “A strange symbol. Is it Christian?”
She told him about the Galwayman captured by pirates and sold to an Arab goldsmith, and how when he had been released he’d set up his shop in the oldest fishing village in Ireland. Knowing all the while Assad must have something else in mind. Abdiwali had brought stories from the marketplace about growing clan friction. The president had to go. That was perfectly clear, even if no one said so in her presence, and she knew enough never to comment on how badly he’d indebted and looted this nation.
Assad nodded, looking around again. “What exactly are you doing in our country, Dr. O’Shea?”
“Do I need to repeat everything I’ve just told you? I investigate ground-water resources.”
“What do you do with these resources?”
