“And straighten your shoulders. Sit your horse like a Humr man.” The dark blood thickened. He was cold inside. For no reason, he felt like slapping this kid. Perhaps what Bashir had said of a wife—beat her every morning, if you don’t know why, she will—applied to a nephew as well. But he would not beat him with his hand; with his tongue instead.
“What is this stuff?” He motioned at the ground.
The thick eyebrows crawled together, and Abbas looked at his uncle as if he were crazy.
“Why, it’s dirt.”
Kammin and the others laughed out loud.
“What kind of dirt, you foolish boy? I taught you a long time ago. You’ve forgotten? Look at the short grasses, how few bushes and trees there are. Look at how the soil isn’t cracked. Look how there are in places rain pools with water still in them.”
Abbas’s brows parted and came together again and parted again.
“Oh, I’ve forgotten the name. I know it’s good for nothing.”
“Naga’a. We call it naga’a. It’s the clay that doesn’t crack, and so the rains don’t soak into it, and so little grass grows in it. Yet it is good for something. You saw there was more grass and more trees where we camped last night. I’ll help you with the riddle. Those were red acacia trees.”
Abbas was silent.
“Ya, Ganis could have solved that riddle when he was a child. You can sing verses from the Koran. Sing to me now from the book of grasses, the book of soils. Or can’t you read them?”
The boy’s shoulders slumped again as he seemed to shrink under his uncle’s scorn, and his diminishment excited Ibrahim to humiliate him further.
“You wish to marry Nanayi. You wish today to capture cattle for a bride-price, but you don’t know the first thing about cattle. I dare say none of you do,” he snarled, turning to face the young men riding directly behind him; then, turning back to Abbas: “Not the first thing about where to find water and good grass for them. How do you intend to keep your bride-to-be in good cloth, in tea and sugar?”
“Allah karim,” Abbas answered in a small voice.
“God is generous indeed, to those deserving of his generosity. Do you expect Allah to provide even if you do nothing? Esmah! Move into town with your bride, become a mullah, earn your bread preaching in the mosques.”
He knew he was going too far; knew also that he was making everyone in earshot feel embarrassed by speaking thus so publicly, but he couldn’t stop himself. The dark blood had to run its course.
“Do any of you know what the soil is called where we camped last night?” Turning once more to the young men at his rear. “Do any of you know why grass and trees are abundant there and not here? One day this war will end, inshallah, and what are you going to do then? You youngsters don’t listen to tradition in anything, but especially in the matter of cattle. So will you become farmers? But you don’t know enough even for that. Maybe you’ll all leave Dar Humr to work for pay in town.”
They and Abbas had seen him like this before and knew better than to speak when one of his black spells was upon him; but he believed their voices were muted more by ignorance than by fear. And their silence, like the nights empty of lion roar and hyena cry, was yet another sign of how greatly life had changed, how unlikely its chances of returning to the way it used to be. He took so many pains and precautions to spare the lives of his men so the Humr would continue to exist and, God willing, be strong. Yet what was the good of that if none knew the things a Humr should know to call himself a Humr? All our traditions rest on cattle, he thought. Without them, the Humr won’t be Humr, and there will be no more cattle if no one knows how to breed and raise them. When I was young, I knew not to graze cows too long in the north because the grasses there are saltless; I knew when to move them to graze on the salty grasses of the sand ridges farther south. Does Abbas know that? Do any of them? Do they know, as I did when their age and even younger, that the succulent grasses in Bahr el Ghazal, when eaten down to