behind your flying skills. For the hundredth time, please knock that darlin’ shit off.”
“Take it from here, First Officer English, ma’am. How’m I doin’ in the social skills department now?”
“You can knock that off too. It’s M-A-R-Y.”
WHAT IS THE mother of desire?
What causes a man rich in cattle, honored in war, blessed with sons, endowed with wives, and granted fame to awaken each morning with his thoughts possessed by an infidel girl?
In what womb of heart or mind is this obsessive longing conceived, what milk does it drink that it should grow so strong as to clutch heart and mind with an unbreakable grip?
What is the price of desire?
For now, Bashir and I have set it at two hundred thousand pounds, but it will cost more in the end, and not in currency alone.
Astride Barakat, leaning lightly against the saddle’s backrest, reins in one hand, the other hanging loose at his side, Ibrahim Idris silently vowed that if Allah, the all-merciful, the all-loving-kind, returned Miriam to him, he would atone for his sins by making the pilgrimage. He would see to it that she was made a proper Muslim. He would divorce Howah, the jealous one who had arranged her escape, and take her to wife in Howah’s place.
And if her return was not God’s will?
Then I must, Ibrahim said to himself, submit to God’s will. I must learn resignation. I must not allow this desire to master me. Jihad is also struggle with oneself, it is above all struggle with oneself. Yet “war is enjoined you against the infidels, but this is hateful unto you.” So spoke the Prophet in Sura of the Cow. “Yet perchance you hate a thing which is better for you, and perchance you love a thing which is worse for you—but God knows and you know not.”
Behind him flowed more than five hundred men and nearly that many horses, murahaleen in white, militiamen in tan, some riding double with the horsemen, some afoot. Alongside him, walking, were his two Nuban guides and Kammin, and, riding, his lieutenant, Hamdan, and the militia commander, the same one who had been with him when he first saw Miriam kneeling at her grindstone. He was still a captain, but not quite so zealous as he was then. The captain had been wounded, which, Ibrahim had observed, often sobered a man. Saddle creak, soft jiggle of bits, bridles and rifle slings, tramp of feet, hoof-clop. Sounds of war as much as gunfire and mortar bursts. Sounds that had become hateful to him, and was it possible that this that he had grown to hate was better for his soul while that which he loved and desired was the worse for him? “War is enjoined you against the infidels.” To wage jihad was, then, an act of faith; therefore to hate jihad was to hate the faith. Perhaps that—an apostasy of sorts—was also a sin to be added to the others.
In a ragged double column, the raiders crossed a plain plastered with the dried mud of a recent rain. Low hills made a brown barrier to the north; to the east, the direction in which the column was headed, rose an escarpment crowned by big oblong boulders that resembled resting elephants. His objectives, the Nuban village and the airfield used by the foreign contrabanders, lay on the plateau atop the escarpment. Good Nubans at peace with the government had reported that bad Nubans in the village harbored infidel soldiers who guarded the airfield. Ibrahim’s mission was to wipe out the rebel force, kill or capture everyone in the village, burn it to the ground, and then wait while a squad of militia engineers from the Kadugli garrison, trained in their arts by Iranian and Afghani brethren, destroyed it. He wasn’t reluctant to engage the infidels in battle—it was honorable to fight men capable of fighting back—but the rest of the business, the killing and capturing of the villagers, the burning of their houses, had become hateful to him. Five days ago, before departing from Babanusa town, he’d had a talk with a mullah. Was it not haram to kill people, even infidels, who offered no resistance? The wise man shook his head, saying it wasn’t necessary for them to resist actively to be considered enemies. They were deserving of death if they sympathized with the rebels, if they disobeyed government orders to move to a peace camp, if they failed to report rebel activities in their neighborhoods. “From the Fourth