penises, had put it all at risk. A good thing the captives still inside the zariba were so frightened—they might try to flee otherwise. A fine job that would make, gathering them up in the middle of the night.
He caught voices and stifled cries coming from somewhere off to his left.
He came to a clear space in the woods and stopped at its edge, the shadows of the trees concealing him. A few meters away the long, skinny legs of a girl, flung down on her back, glistened in a fire’s embers. Her arms were pulled back past her shaved head and were held at the wrists by one man, while another, his jelibiya rolled up around his waist, knelt between her splayed limbs and ravished her with the spastic thrusts of a dog mounting a bitch. Finished in seconds, he got to his feet and traded places with his companion. It was like a dance, so fluid and practiced were their movements. Several more of these criminal couplings were taking place, farther from the fire. Ibrahim couldn’t tell how many, nor identify the culprits—a mere cuticle of a moon was shining—but he was able to observe that the girl in front of him was quite young. The sentries had taken the most valuable. Ibrahim was appalled by their disobedience, their carelessness, their lack of self-control. Had he raped Miriam after capturing her? He’d had no relations with her till he’d returned to his camp and brought her into his house as his formal serraya. Self-denial, self-restraint were marks of Humr manliness. These Brothers were not manly but slaves to their impulses. And yet he did nothing, said nothing, held in mute arrest by the lurid, captivating choreography of white-clad men, wreathed in smoke tinged red by the embers, leaping onto black bodies, lying so still he would have mistaken them for dead if not for their muffled sobs. The two murahaleen closest to him were finished with their victim and called to a third, and in the instant before the man fell on her, Ibrahim saw her fully from the side, her young belly flat and her small breasts flattened also by the pull of her outstretched arms, her face turned aside so that she seemed to be looking straight at him with a look such as he’d seen on the faces in his dream. False! False! he thought. He fancied he saw an enticement in her eyes, a beckoning that spilled the pollutant of desire into the fine, pure waters of his rage. He was surprised that he should feel such lust—he expected better of himself; so when he lunged out of the shadows, in two big strides, the rifle in his left hand, the whip in his right, and laid a hard stroke across the man’s back, Ibrahim was lashing out at himself as well.
The recipient of the blow yelped and threw himself off the girl. Ibrahim hit him a second time, and he fell and rolled in the dirt, covering his head with his hands against the cut of the braided hide. A third stroke tore the sleeve of his jelibiya, a fourth made his knuckles bleed. The man lay doubled up. A floret of red blossomed on his back. Someone grabbed Ibrahim to stop him, but he broke free, pushed the fellow aside, and immediately gave the one lying at his feet another whack.
“Stop, please! I beg you, stop!”
In disbelief, Ibrahim stood for a moment, the whip poised; then he lowered it and, planting a boot in his nephew’s ribs, he shoved him onto his back.
“What are you doing? Practicing for your wedding night?”
Mistaking the cold sarcasm for calm, Abbas risked standing up, confusion and fear on his face.
“Answer me! Are you practicing for Nanayi with this—” He jiggled the whip over the girl, who was sitting up now, shaking as if from cold. Two brass disks were pinned to the sides of her nose, and their barbaric gleam disgusted him and made him bring the whip down across her thighs. She screamed. Why did I strike her? “This whore?” She bent over her slashed legs, and he gave her one across the back, raising a red welt from her shoulders to her hips, like a second spine, and she screamed again. Why do I hit her? He felt possessed by someone other than himself, prodding him to do things he didn’t intend to do, some jinn or demon that dwelled in these mountains, this