tone still dull. “I lost very few men.”
“I am relieved to hear that.”
“Douglas shot down a helicopter. I heard him say, ‘Payback.’ What does that mean?”
“He evened the score. For what happened a month ago.”
Michael snorted. “As if war is a feud? There were a lot of them left alive. We couldn’t take them with us, and I don’t think we would have if we could have. We shot them. We shot them all.”
She pitied him, having to do and see terrible things, but felt none for the ones who had been shot. None whatsoever. “What would they have done if it had gone the other way?”
“What do you think they would have done? War is cruelty, you cannot refine it. A great commander in your civil war said that. Sometimes I think, the crueler I can make it, the sooner it will be over, but . . .”
He went inside and was soon asleep.
Quinette worked on her report for a while, then she too took a nap. She slept soundly, dreamlessly. It was nearly dusk when she awoke and, stepping out into the courtyard, saw Michael transformed. Instead of a beret, he was wearing a topee with a crest pinned to its front and, over his shirt, a leopard-skin smock. This outward change was matched by an inward one, evidenced by the smile he gave her—the smile that was like an embrace. He’d returned from his mental journey, returned to himself.
“My father’s, when he was in the British army,” he said, tapping the cork helmet’s brim. “There is going to be a dance tonight, to celebrate the victory. This is for you.”
He picked up a bundle wrapped in brown paper and handed it to her. She tore off the wrapper and unfurled a long dress, with a broad black stripe running down its middle and two more circling the billowy sleeves. The pattern recalled the geometric shapes of the wall paintings inside the tukul: concentric rings, diamonds, squares within squares, all in harmonious colors of orange, yellow, and terra-cotta. A sunrise of a dress.
“Thank you. It’s beautiful. Should I try it on?”
“And to please keep it on. I would like you to come to this dance in that dress.”
She went into her hut, stripped bare, and changed, loving the touch of soft, clean cotton against her skin. Pearl came in with a set of hoop earrings and a bead necklace. She put them on and freshened her lipstick, but she felt awkward, like a poseur, as she stepped out.
“White Nuba Woman!” she said, laughing.
WITH MICHAEL AND DOUGLAS at its head, and Quinette and Pearl just behind them, a torchlit procession marched to the dancing ground in New Tourom. It resembled a Mardi Gras parade, with the soldiers wearing a bizarre mix of costumes—sunglasses and fezzes, camouflage trousers beneath bare chests that were palettes for painted designs, arms plumed with feathered armbands—and old women, careless of their withered, fallen breasts, ripping off their blouses to wave them in the air and proclaim the Nubans’ ancient right to bare their flesh without shame. To take one’s clothes off and dance the dances of one’s ancestors, said Michael, was a gesture of defiance against the strictures of Sharia, Islamic law.
Quinette gave no thought to the politics of nudity when they arrived at the dancing ground. She was too captivated by the scene, washed by the supernatural light of a gibbous moon. Drummers and musicians with their douberre—the trumpets made from antelope horns—were assembled, girls with flesh oiled and painted in red and ochre formed half a circle, men the other half. The girls stood, the men sat on logs, heads bowed, sheaves of bundled grass in their laps. Pearl ushered Quinette to the female side of the circle. The douberre players blew deep, hollow notes, a choral of older women began to sing, and at a wild burst of drums, a group of girls moved forward, swinging their hips, swatting the air with the grass sheaves.
“This is called Nyertun,” Pearl said. “A girl’s love dance.”
Some of the men wore bells tied to their ankles and, tapping their heels, added a rhythmic jing-jing-jing to the drumbeats, the swishing of the grass bundles. More girls joined in. The drumming grew faster. The space came alive with orgiastic movement, limbs gleaming like polished metal in clouds of moonlit dust. As the girls danced closer to the men, the air seemed charged with a mounting excitement, heightened by the tinkling of the bells. One of the