but the Brothers seemed to think it was their right, and so he’d stopped trying. A jinn was loose in the land, making men crazy.
Miriam. Once more she rose to the forefront of his consciousness. He saw her, in the blue cloth he’d bought her, walking toward him with sinuous grace to bring him the sweet tea she made, felt her strong fingers rubbing the liquid butter into his calves, heard her say “I am here” when he came to her at night; and the memory of the way she pleasured him now caused him to long for her with an unbearable longing. To remember the first time he saw her . . .
“I’ve heard that the abid here go without clothes, and now I see that it’s true,” the militia captain had said scornfully. His company of infantry had been attached to the murahaleen for the operation, the first the murahaleen had run in the Nuba hills.
He passed his binoculars to Ibrahim Idris. The village on the opposite hill appeared so close that Ibrahim could see the little gardens planted alongside the tall, round houses, the lines made by the layers of grass thatch on the roofs. The men threshing grain in the field between the hills looked to be only a few meters away. Some wore shorts, but the rest nothing more than wide leather belts.
“Shameful, isn’t it?” whispered the captain, a young man wearing a green headband with the profession inscribed on it in white. “People like that deserve what we’re going to give them.”
“Would you not give it to them if they were clothed?” Ibrahim asked.
“What do you think?”
“Then you see, we’re giving it to them because these Nubans support the rebels, not because they’re naked.”
Ibrahim scanned the countryside, looking for armed men, and stopped when the lenses brought into plain view a girl grinding grain or nuts on a stone at the edge of the village. She was kneeling, ankles crossed to anchor her, and had not a stitch on except for a white bead belt and a red bead necklace that swung between her breasts as she rocked back and forth, pressing the stone in her hands against the grinding stone at her knees. Her black skin sparkled with sweat, and when she pressed down, the muscles in her arms and along her ribs stood out, like those in a slightly underfed leopard. Her braided hair trailed to her shoulders and was slathered with ochre and oil so that it glistened like her flesh. He doubted he could have taken his eyes off her if he wanted to. She brushed the ground-up grain or nuts into a basket and stood, looking, it seemed, straight at him, and when she stretched her tired arms overhead, it was as though she were displaying herself for him alone. Her long legs, the mounds of her breasts, the flat belly that told him she had not yet borne a child—all of this stunned and captivated him. He caught the gleam of the gold ring in her nose, but the binoculars weren’t strong enough to reveal her features; still, he sensed that her face was as beautiful as the rest of her, and he nearly groaned with desire as she turned and walked toward a house, her back straight, her high, lean buttocks switching under the white girdle of beads. He returned the binoculars to the captain and pointed the girl out to him and declared, his voice thick: “I’m claiming her now.”
“That’s no girl for an old man,” the captain remarked. At least he had a sense of humor.
“Listen,” said Ibrahim in case his companion wasn’t joking, “you tell your men, I’ll tell mine, that anyone who seizes a girl with a long red necklace brings her to me unharmed.”
Yamila—that was her name in her tongue. His claim on her had spared her from the Brothers that day of the raid. In his camp he’d spared her from the abuse of his wives, jealous of her beauty and the attentions he paid her; and when the time came to have her genitals cut, he’d spared her from that as well. Though she was a concubine, he treated her like a wife and perhaps better. Bought her the blue cloth to cover her nakedness, gave her a tent of her own so she did not have to sleep in the kraals and goat pens like his other slaves, and when she became pregnant, told her that by the laws