The Smoke Jumper

by Nicholas Evans

  When the Warriors for God rebels came one night to his village, he and Lawrence were forced to watch while their mother was raped and tortured. Then they were forced to club her to death and afterward to do the same to their father and their younger brother and sister. The rebel leader told them that this would make men of them. They and the other abducted children were made to march for many days without food and barely any water to a great camp over the Sudanese border. There the prettier girls were given to the older soldiers as ‘wives.’ The boys and the rest of the girls were trained as soldiers.

  Daniel Makuma himself gave them long lectures about the spirit world and how Tipu Maleng would protect them in battle. He said that they must anoint themselves with shea butter oil that he had himself blessed so that enemy bullets would bounce off them. In battle they must always run directly into enemy fire, he said, shooting as they went. Anyone who lay down to shoot or to hide was a coward and would be executed.

  Their first mission after training was to go back to burn their own village and to kill their friends and neighbors. This, Makuma told them, would free them of all earthly ties and allow Tipu Maleng fully to embrace and protect them. Before the attack Thomas and the other child soldiers were given drugs to bolster their courage but in truth, he confessed, there was no need. He knew full well what he was doing. He wanted these people dead because they were witnesses to what he had already done to his family. By killing them and burning the village he and Lawrence hoped to erase all testimony and all memory of their first and far more hideous crime.

  At the camp, he said, if any child disobeyed an order, the others were made to club him or hack him to death. If they refused, the same fate befell them. It was after one such murder that Thomas lost the power of speech. He said it was as though God had taken away all his strength. During his last battle he became so useless that the commander abandoned him in the bush. His brother, he said, was braver.

  These weeks of Thomas’s slow revelation affected everyone at St. Mary’s, both staff and children alike, bonding them more closely than ever. Some of the older boys who had been reticent about their own crimes seemed to draw courage from Thomas and made confessions of their own. During one of Julia’s morning group sessions one of the would-be python killers, whose name was Alex, admitted taking part in several rapes. To Julia’s amazement, he said that one of his victims had been Amy’s friend Christine. The group consisted only of boys, so she was not present to hear this. Julia asked Alex if he would like to apologize personally and he said that he would. Christine said that she would be prepared to listen.

  On first coming to St. Mary’s, Julia had tried to protect Amy from the rawest horrors of what had happened to the children. But the girl had become so much a part of the place that this was now almost impossible. Christine had told her much of what she had suffered at the hands of the rebel soldiers (though not, it transpired, about the rape) and Amy had asked Julia many difficult questions. Faced with the choice of whether to gloss things over so as not to disturb the child or to address the issue squarely, rightly or wrongly, Julia had opted for the latter. The two of them had since had many long discussions about what it was that might drive ordinary decent people to commit such appalling deeds.

  Had she been asked to justify her decision, Julia would have argued that children of Amy’s age back home saw real-life horrors unfold every day on the TV news, but in a way that was somehow anesthetized and distancing, in which both villain and victim were nameless and quickly forgotten. Here at St. Mary’s, however, they were real. Amy knew their names and held their hands and played with them and watched them rediscovering the simple joys of love and friendship. What she was witnessing here was nothing less miraculous than the power of redemption. And this, Julia persuaded herself, was a rare privilege that neither of them, nor anyone else involved, would ever forget.

  Even so, Julia had wondered if it would be appropriate for Amy to attend Alex’s apology to Christine. She sought the advice of Sister Emily.

  ‘Amy is what some people call an “old soul,”’ the sister said. ‘She has an inner strength and a wisdom beyond her years. She is part of our family and Christine thinks of her as a sister. Since you ask my opinion, I believe it would be wrong to exclude her.’

  That evening, after supper, all of the children and all of the staff were asked to assemble in the hall. Sister Emily announced gently that Alex had something to say and the boy stepped forward. He stared at the floor, twisting a hand in the ragged tail of his shirt and in a small voice began to relate what he had done. Julia stood and listened with her arm around Amy’s shoulders. Every so often Amy looked at Alex, but mostly her eyes were fixed on her friend.

  Alex said that he was sorry and that he would never forgive himself for what he had done and as he said it he started to weep and soon many of those who watched were weeping too. Christine, however, kept her composure throughout, although she seemed to find it hard to look at him. When he had finished there was a short silence and she swallowed and gave a little nod and Sister Emily went to her and hugged her and then did the same to Alex. Some wounds ran too deep for instant forgiveness, Julia reflected, or perhaps for forgiveness at all. Christine would bear the scars forever. But the boy’s words might at least have helped with the cleansing.

  The following day, Peter Pringle had to drive down to Entebbe airport to collect some medical supplies that had been flown in from Geneva. He returned with sobering news.

  There had been a problem clearing the supplies through customs and so he had stayed overnight with friends in Kampala. A British diplomat and his wife came for dinner and talked of little else but the war in the north and how the lull of almost two years was rumored to be drawing to an end. The diplomat said that in the past twenty-four hours there had been reliable reports that Makuma and his army were on the move. And their target was not, as everyone had assumed it would be, to attack the SPLA in Sudan. They were moving south toward the border.

  On his drive back north, Pringle told them, he had followed great convoys of government troops and artillery and as he drew near to Karingoa he had seen a first trickle of refugees heading on foot in the opposite direction with their children and their scant and bundled belongings.

  Two nights later, as she lay in bed, too hot and restless to sleep, Julia heard a distant thudding that at first she took to be thunder. The rains were late and the land was parched so that even the hint of a cooling storm bore some relief. But it lasted only a moment. For although she had never heard the sound of shell fire, she soon knew that this was what it was and that the promised storm was of a different kind.

  30

  They did as bidden and traveled only at night. The map was of little use but the sky was mostly cloudless and Connor steered by the stars and by the passage of the thinning moon that rose to eclipse them, casting ashen shadows across a landscape sometimes as lunar as itself. As they hiked higher into the mountains the air grew thinner and cooler and the going more treacherous. They would walk for miles, picking a route among the rock and thorn bush, only to find themselves lured by the lay of the land to the foot of an unscalable cliff or to the rim of some jungle ravine with a thousand feet of blackness echoing below. And they would have to retrace their steps and circle for many miles more before they could continue their journey east.

  When they were forced into the lower land they kept when they could in the cover of the trees and in the elephant grass that was often taller than themselves and always away from any road or trail they came across for many of these were mined and monitored. They skirted villages devoid of any life but the crows and vultures that sat atop bleached skulls and skeletons of cattle in the barren fields. Connor knew that the Dinka people who lived hereabout had suffered much at the hands of the rebels, both Makuma’s and those of Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army. On the second night they saw a convoy of military trucks rumbling slowly south with the dust swirling in the dimmed beams of their headlights. He and Lawren
ce lay side by side in the shadows watching for an hour while it passed. The boy said that he thought these were Kony’s men and that there were rumors that he and Makuma were joining forces for the invasion.

  When the sky began to pale they would start looking for a place to shelter for the day, some shaded enclave in the rocks or jungle glade where they could rest in safety. The food and water that Vincent had given them lasted two days and would have lasted longer if Lawrence hadn’t been so thin and weak. They shared the water but Connor made the boy eat most of the food and he used the iodine to treat the open sores on his bony arms and his bare and swollen feet.

  Most of the drainages they passed were dry but they found just enough water to get by. At the camp the children had tried to supplement their meager rations by scavenging in the bush and Lawrence had learned which trees and plants had leaves that were edible. When they came across one he would point it out and the two of them would stop and force themselves to eat. They ate the roots of certain other plants and sometimes even the bark. Connor had eaten many strange foods but none so desperate or foul. All tasted bitter and felt like prickled plastic in his mouth and he had to chew for a long time before he could swallow. Lawrence had grown used to it and grinned at the sight of Connor trying not to gag.

  They spoke little and when they did it was mostly to confer about which route to take or place to rest. Only once did Lawrence ask about his brother. He said he had been certain that Thomas was dead and questioned Connor closely about when he had last seen him and how he had looked. He said that he hoped Connor was not mistaken and had not merely seen the boy’s ghost, for it was a land now populated more by ghosts than men. Connor told him that Thomas no longer spoke and Lawrence nodded solemnly and said that he knew this and had thought the same might happen to him. He said that he and Thomas were ‘half of each other’ and Connor didn’t know if this was simply an Acholi way of saying they were twins or if the boy meant something more.

  As dawn approached on the sixth day they found themselves walking along the side of a winding wooded valley. Their night’s journey had been hard and they were weary and weak from hunger. The birds were starting to call and white butterflies the size of saucers fluttered before them in the half-light, startled from the dew-damp elephant grass. A herd of antelope of a kind Connor didn’t recognize moved slowly off through the trees, their ears and tufted tails atwitch and Connor found himself wishing, not for the first time, that he had accepted Vincent’s offer of the gun. They found a place to lay up and Connor left the boy to rest and took the plastic bottle and walked down through the trees in search of water.

  As he dropped deeper into the valley bed he heard the rush and tumble of a stream and soon caught sight of it down between the trees. There was a waterfall and a dark pool below, half rimmed with rock. He made his way down and squatted there to fill the bottle, staring at the surface of the pool and at a twig that slowly twirled there. The water felt cool and soothing to his hand. It was a place where they both might bathe and wash their dirt-caked clothes then dry them in the sun while they slept.

  Had he been less lost in the thought of this, he might have seen in the pool’s darkened mirror a pair of eyes staring back at him. For all the while a lone figure stood watching him from the trees that fringed its other bank and watched him now as he stood again and drank and walked back up the slope to fetch Lawrence.

  By the time they had drunk their fill and washed themselves and rinsed their clothes then climbed naked and dripping back to their hideout, the sun had almost risen. They spread their clothes on the bushes and settled in the grass to sleep.

  Connor woke with the feeling that an insect had settled on his neck. He was lying on his back and could feel the morning sun already hot on his bare chest. Without opening his eyes he lazily lifted a hand to brush the bug away and it was then that he felt the cold hard edge of the blade.

  He opened his eyes and saw the figure standing over him, silhouetted by the flaring sun behind. And for an instant as he squinted up he thought it was Lawrence. Then he saw it was a man and that the blade now poking hard into his throat belonged to a spear. The man was tall and broad and his eyes were fierce. His head was shaven and except for a loincloth he was naked. And now Connor saw there were half a dozen others with him, all armed with spears and machetes. He tried to sit up, but they started to shout so he lowered himself again and, craning his neck, saw that Lawrence too had spears at his throat. The boy looked petrified.

  The men were yelling so excitedly that it took Connor a while to figure out that they were speaking a kind of Swahili. And though he couldn’t make out much, he understood enough to know that he and Lawrence were suspected of belonging to the rebels. He heard Makuma’s name several times and Kony’s too. One of them was shaking out the contents of the bag. The discovery of the machete and Connor’s Bible seemed to bolster their suspicions.

  The men made them both get to their feet and it was plain from the way they looked Connor up and down that they hadn’t seen too many naked white men before. He kept his eyes fixed on the one who appeared to be their leader and who still had his spear poking at Connor’s chest. Connor tried not to look as frightened as he felt and greeted him in Swahili.

  ‘Shikamoo.’

  It was the respectful greeting normally used for addressing elders but it didn’t seem to impress anyone, for they all began shouting and accusing them of being Makuma’s spies. Connor felt the spearhead pierce his skin and he looked down to see a trickle of blood run down his ribs. He waited for them to stop talking and then told them as calmly as he could that they were not Makuma’s spies but his captives and that they had escaped.

  There was a gabbled conference and from the little Connor understood, it seemed that he had sown enough doubt to avoid being murdered on the spot. One of the men seized Lawrence’s tattered fatigues off the bush and shoved them into the boy’s face, shouting why, if he wasn’t a rebel, did he wear a rebel’s clothes. Connor said that the boy didn’t understand Swahili and when the man ignored him the leader told him to stop. He turned to Connor and said that they must put on their clothes and come with them.

  They were marched for maybe an hour down the valley with spears at their backs until they saw a cluster of mud and grass huts in a clearing above the river, sheltered by acacia and borassus palms. News of their capture had clearly gone before them for as they drew near a gaggle of naked children came running toward them, calling out muzungu! muzungu! and daring each other to touch Connor’s arms. One even jumped to touch his hair.

  They were made to sit on the ground in the shade of the palms with two of their captors standing guard and a throng of women and children who stood staring and talking and giggling. Then the crowd hushed and parted and the leader reappeared with an older man who seemed to be treated by all with great respect.

  ‘Shikamoo,’ Connor said.

  The old man nodded. ‘Marahaba.’

  The old man asked where they had come from and Connor told him their story as best he could in his faltering Swahili and the man watched him all the while without interruption. When he had finished, the old man asked if they had seen other soldiers on their journey here and Connor told him about the convoy. Finally the man asked when they had last eaten and Connor told him that for three days all they had eaten was leaves. The man told the crowd to disperse and left without any indication of what was to be their fate, but a short while later a woman brought them a pot of water and two bowls filled with a thick porridge which they both ate hungrily.

  In the late afternoon some soldiers arrived and from the drift of their questions Connor gathered that they belonged to the SPLA. Their commander wanted to know all about Makuma’s camp, how many men were there and how well armed. Connor and Lawrence told him what they knew. The commander asked why, if their destination was Karingoa, had they come this far east and Connor said they had been warned that there were troops massing in the west and only here would it be safe to cross the border.
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  At dusk they were taken to a bare hut and fed again. Through the guarded doorway Connor could see the soldiers across the compound talking with the old man and some of the other men but he couldn’t hear what they were saying. Lawrence sat slumped and forlorn against the wall, staring at the ground. Connor settled himself beside him and put his arm around his shoulders and tried to cheer him up by talking about Thomas and St. Mary’s and the kind of things they did there. His Acholi was so primitive and poor that soon the boy started to smile at his mistakes and correct him.

  Lawrence asked him what kind of food they ate there and Connor told him it was always tree leaves, but plenty of them. The boy laughed. Connor asked him what was his very favorite food and Lawrence thought for a while and said with great seriousness that it was roasted goat meat and matoke, a mash of plantains. Once, however, his father had brought home a jar of peanut butter which they ate with warm corn bread and this, on reflection, was probably his favorite taste.

  He fell asleep with his head resting on Connor’s chest.

  The soldiers woke them at dawn and marched them from the camp without saying where they were going, though it soon became clear that they were heading south, following the course of the river. The valley was thickly forested and the going hard and by the time they stopped to rest, the sun had climbed high and their clothes were soaked with sweat. They cooled themselves in the river and drank. The soldiers gave them some sorghum bread and they sat eating it in the shade, watching scarlet and yellow birds swoop for flies above the water.

  The commander told Connor that they were close to the Ugandan border now and that he had sent men ahead to make contact with the Ugandan government forces who patrolled it. Half an hour later the men returned with a UPDF sergeant and two younger soldiers. The sergeant greeted Connor solemnly and asked the same questions that they had answered many times already. The SPLA commander led his soldiers off without another word.