triumph to the SPLA commander. He looked amused by this demonstration, but when the wrestler raised his palms and lowered them, pressing them flat on the ground at his feet, Goraende’s expression turned serious. He strode into the center of the ring, conferred with the referee, then snatched, from a man nearby, a long pole with a wooden triangle at its top and banged it on the ground several times. A cheer went up, rippled through the crowd, and swelled into a roar.
“Well now, you are about to see something interesting, an unscheduled event,” Barrett explained to the bewildered visitors. “That fellow has challenged Michael to a match, and when one man challenges another like that, getting down on his knees, it can’t be refused. Michael, you should know, was a champion in his day, never defeated, but of course it isn’t his day anymore.”
Michael. Quinette decided she preferred his given name. Sitting at the far edge of her row, she had a clear view of him, stripping his clothes off some distance away. Apparently he was so at ease in his own skin that he didn’t mind baring it with a crowd of foreigners nearby. His one concession to modesty—if it was a concession and not merely an accident—was to stand facing away from them. Quinette averted her glance, but her own sense of decency wasn’t equal to her curiosity, and she looked again, watching him squat over a mound of ash to scoop handfuls over his shaved head and chest while an assistant covered his back. The ritual took a few minutes. When he stood, an arm crooked to rub ash into the back of his neck, his strong legs, taut buttocks, and flaring back, every inch powdered gray, arrested her gaze. She thought he looked like Adam the moment after God molded him from the dust of the earth and breathed life into him.
He did a literal girding up of loins, wrapping a red sash around his midsection, tucking the end between his legs and tying it off. Walking into the arena, he seemed shut up in his own world. His opponent was shorter but younger, with a tree trunk of a chest. The two men crouched face to face, elbows on their knees, hands out, and circled each other, looking for an opening. The younger man’s arm lashed out for Michael’s ankle, but he saw it coming, shot both legs backward, and as the challenger stumbled forward from his own momentum, whirled and gripped him around the waist from behind. The SPLA soldiers in the crowd let out a yell. The challenger twisted free, and both combatants were head to head, hands clasping the backs of each other’s necks. In that position they pushed, shoved, waltzed back and forth. Suddenly the challenger sidestepped, turning his immense torso at the same time. As his supporters bellowed, he hooked his left arm through Michael’s right and drove him to his hands and knees. Dropping to his own knees, he attempted to flip Michael onto his back, but with one palm on the ground, Michael spun away and got up to face his adversary once again. The challenger lunged with both arms for Michael’s head—a feint, for as Michael drew out of the crouch, raising his arms to block the move, the younger man ducked under his guard and clutched him in a bear hug. In that moment, their foreheads clashed with an audible crack. Michael wasn’t cut, but blood was streaming into his adversary’s eyes. Red blood on black skin, the coats of protective ash streaked with sweat—Quinette gasped at this exhibition, at the pure, raw maleness of it. Michael hooked one leg over the back of his opponent’s and tried to trip him. He might as well have tried to trip a stone block. Straining, grunting, his face a mask of pain and effort, the half-blinded challenger lifted Michael off his feet and pressed forward. Michael began to topple backward but pulled the challenger down with him, breaking the bear hug; then, in a quick, fluid motion, he locked his adversary’s arms in his, twisted sideways, and rolled him onto his back.
The defeated man lay there for a moment, panting. A couple of men rushed in to bind his wounded forehead with palm leaves. There was a delirium of shouts and yells as soldiers hoisted their champion onto their shoulders. Two women in Quinette’s group, sitting just in back of her, complained that this had been a