followers and the soldiers’ families lay ahead, partly veiled by smoke from burning sorghum stubble. Pausing, she looked up at the ledge and the mouth of the cavern on whose walls the ancestors had painted their inscrutable tale in pictures. At that moment she thought of Malachy’s words, “You have got to meet these people halfway, you have got to become one of them.” She knew what she must do and resolved all at once to do it.
“I’d like to stay here for a little while,” she said.
Negev shrugged uncertainly. “As you wish, missy.”
“Without you. I’m perfectly safe. Please go and speak to Pearl,” she added in a peremptory tone. “Tell her to come here. I want to talk to her.”
When Pearl arrived, Quinette made her request. The girl said nothing, puzzlement and a little alarm showing on her face, along with a question. She’d anticipated this reaction—what she was asking was without precedent, and Pearl wanted an explanation.
“I know that a Nuban’s wife must be strong and brave and have no evil in her,” Quinette said with slow formality. “Your father told me.” She pointed toward the ceremonial ledge above. “There. He took me there and showed me the ancestors’ paintings, the day he asked me to marry him.”
The girl’s expression did not change. She said, “Please wait here, Kinnet,” and went off, almost at a run. Quinette had anticipated this as well: Pearl would have to seek the counsel of her elders.
Sitting against a sun-warmed rock, the overheated air tingling in her nostrils like steam, she admired the landscape, the mown sorghum and wind-rippled grass taking on the color of burned butter in the slanting light. Minutes passed, she didn’t know how many. The light now fell at a near horizontal, slicing over the heights on the valley’s western side. Then she saw Pearl below, coming up the path followed by two women, one in a faded shift, the other in a blue kanga. The same pair who’d presided at the ritual Quinette had witnessed, the judges of female courage and virtue. The woman in blue was carrying a coiled whip.
“They will do it,” Pearl said.
Quinette took off her shirt and let it fall to the ground. From a clay jar Pearl poured sesame oil into her hands and rubbed it into Quinette’s back and shoulders, then sat down at the mouth of the cave, next to the woman in the faded shift. The woman in blue spoke. Quinette turned to Pearl for a translation.
“She asks that you do what she does,” the girl said.
Her chin jutting proudly, torso pushed forward, hips out, the woman began to dance to a silent drumbeat. With the knotted lash bent over her head, the tip in one hand, handle in the other, she stepped out wide to one side, lowering the whip to hold it across her back, then crossed her right foot over the left and repeated the movement until she’d described a full circle. She could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy—it seemed all women in Sudan passed from young to old with only a brief transit through middle age—but she danced with the grace of a girl. Quinette followed her lead, her movements, stiff and uncertain at first, becoming more supple and confident. The woman clucked approval, then demonstrated a refinement, turning as she sidestepped so that each large circle became a series of smaller circles, a ring of connected rings. Quinette did likewise, going around once, and again, and the whip’s sting went through her like an electric shock, bringing reflexive tears to her eyes. She willed them dry, clenched her jaw, and flinched as the oxhide cracked again.
She spun once more, forcing herself to look into the face of her tormentor and examiner. And around again, the whip’s slap as definite as a gunshot, its burn like a bullet’s. A third crack. Her eyes did not grow wet, she did not flinch, a gasp never left her throat.
The woman in blue danced before her, clutching the bowed lash in both hands. Quinette spun, offering her back in sweet surrender, and felt the knots tear flesh, the blood trickling down the culvert of her spine. She looked at the ruby droplets glimmering in the dust, each one a bead in the seam welding her to Pearl, to the woman seated next to Pearl, to the woman in blue, and to every soul in this alien world that was to be her own. A bond no one