Dare said, “From the bronze age to the twentieth century quick as a wink. Nothin’ like progress.”
SHE’D SPOKEN TO all the meks but two. They would have to wait until tomorrow. She was worn out, and so was Moses, practically hoarse from his translating work, and he still had teaching to do.
“An English class for some older students,” he said. “Possibly you could assist me.”
“Me?” Quinette said, her hand going to her chest. “I’ve never taught.”
“This is only the English alphabet. Very easy.”
“All right. You helped me, I’ll help you.”
The class was held outdoors, with a chalkboard propped against the trunk of a tree. There were ten students in their late teens or twenties, and among them was the woman of fierce beauty who’d spoken about her captivity on Nuba Day. Quinette couldn’t recall her name, but her tale of escaping her master she hadn’t forgotten. Moses spoke in Nuban, motioning at Quinette to introduce her. The young woman said something.
“Yamila says you have met before,” Moses translated.
“Yes. Hello, Yamila.”
“Ah-lo,” Yamila replied without a smile.
Moses passed out the copybooks and pencils. No computers or visual aids here, no desks—the students sat on rocks or on empty cooking-oil tins—no nothing, not even a roof over their heads.
Moses wrote an A on the chalkboard. “What is the letter?”
The class, in unison: “Capital letter A!”
“Write, please.”
Heads bowed over copybooks.
He wrote an a.
“Small letter a!”
It took half an hour to get to z. Moses checked the class’s work. This was where Quinette was to give him a hand. It was difficult to read the students’ scratchings. Yamila’s were the most illegible of all; the letters looked like aimless scribbling. Quinette squatted, took a stick, and wrote an A in the ground.
“Ay,” she said. “Capital letter ay.” Motioning to Yamila to make the sound, stretching it out like she was pulling a rubber band. “Ayyy.”
Silent, the young woman looked fixedly at her.
“Ayyy,” Quinette repeated, and meeting with the same stare, she called Moses over. “I don’t think she understands what’s going on here.”
“Oh, but she does,” Moses said. “She wishes to learn to read and write, but she can be stubborn. Please try with her again.”
Gesturing at the ground, Quinette encouraged her pupil to write the letter: “Ayyy.” There was something intimidating about Yamila’s expression, so untamed that the wonder was that anyone had been able to subdue and enslave her in the first place.
Yamila bent down and formed the letter and said “Ay,” and turned to Quinette as if defying her to find fault with her writing or her pronunciation.
“Good. Now, bee.”
She made an awkward but recognizable B.
“Now, cee.”
“Cee.”
They went on—dee, ee, ef, gee, aitch—with never a moment’s softening in Yamila’s countenance. Well, after what she’d been through, what else could she be but hard and full of rage? You couldn’t expect her to grow mellow and tender just because a stranger was helping her learn the English alphabet.
Numbers were next, and then a spelling lesson, and by late afternoon the adult education class was over. The pupils stood, Moses leading them in prayer. “Father in heaven, watch over us. Do not kill us, do not allow us or our children to go hungry, do not make us sick. Father in heaven, bring peace to the Nuba, deliver us from war, deliver us from evil, Amen.” This God wasn’t the God Quinette prayed to. This was the God of Sudan, who had to be asked not to kill people, or starve them, or make them sick.
She walked back to the garrison with Negev. After they’d gone through the passage in the hills, she saw several figures dancing on a wide ledge atop a promontory.
“What are they doing?”
Negev replied vaguely that it was “for the sibr,” and when she suggested they have a look, he shook his head. “Men are not allowed. Women only.”
Now her curiosity was piqued. “Well, I’m a woman. Could I go by myself?”
“You are white lady, missy, and I don’t know if it is permitted. If someone tells you to go away, please to do it.”
She turned up a path, her approach masked by the ring of boulders that made a natural wall around the ledge. With the excitement of doing the forbidden, she hid behind one of the boulders and cautiously raised her head. High oblong rock formations leaned into one another at the back side of the ledge, like the poles to a teepee, and in the cave-like space between them, a