thought. “No! No!” Handy screamed, sprinting toward the frenzied crowd.
“Help us stop those people!” Fancher said to her. “We can’t let them do this!”
She pointed at the heaps of bloodied rags that twenty minutes ago had been listening to her read the ninety-first Psalm. “I can’t,” she said, choking. “Let them have at it.”
“You are safe, you’re not hurt!”
It was Michael, covered in dirt. He put his arms around her and held her close.
Fancher appealed to him to help restore the villagers to their sanity. What was going on over there, within sight of a church, was an abomination.
“This is war, Mr. Fancher,” Michael replied coldly. “And war is cruelty. It cannot be refined.”
They left at dusk, after the dead were buried—amazingly, only eight people had been killed, and the church had not been badly damaged, though there were rocket craters within fifty yards of it. “Jesus Christ is building his church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” The two ministers lectured her before they set off. Ministry was more than words, it was action, and she should have set the Christian example by helping them restrain the villagers. No matter what, that sort of conduct could not be justified. She agreed, she promised to improve, but while Fancher and Handy spoke in her ear, another spoke in her head: You can’t ask people to grant mercy to an enemy who shows them none. It seemed to her that Sudan was cut off from normal standards of behavior; it was under different, harsher rules.
The column walked till dawn, resting the next day in the village of another tribe, the Tira, to whom Quinette preached her second lesson. They left that night, passing through a region that had been spared from the war’s ravages because it was sparsely inhabited: a vestige of wild Africa where low ridges polka-dotted with acacia trees undulated toward a far-off range, rising like a volcanic island from an ocean of grass. Such ugliness and horror two days ago, such peace and beauty here. The range, Michael told her, was the southern face of the Limon hills. New Tourom lay beyond it. Home. Eager as they were to get there, they halted at midnight beside a riverbed and camped in the open, too worn out to march further. The men spread out into a defensive perimeter, and everyone but the sentries went to sleep to the lullabies of hyenas.
An urgency in her bladder and bowels woke Quinette at some predawn hour. After finishing that business in the riverbed, she crept back, but sleep eluded her and she lay on her bag, gazing at the constellations.
“That one is the Phoenix,” Michael whispered, raising his arm. “Do you see it? The one that looks like a house? The very bright star beneath it is Achernar. The Arabs named it. It means ‘star at the river’s end.’ ”
“How long have you been awake?”
“An hour. I cannot get back to sleep.”
“Me neither.”
“For the same reason?” he asked, turned onto his side, and laid his hand on her shoulder.
They sneaked away barefoot through the grass, past a none-too-vigilant sentry, came to a koppie, and sat under an outcrop, on a bed of sand.
“What river is that star at the end of?”
“The Nile,” he answered. “Do you see that long line of stars bending and twisting above it? That’s it. The Nile of the heavens.”
“I love the way that sounds,” she said. “Star at the river’s end, the Nile of the heavens.”
“Yes, the Arabs can be very poetic. As poetic as they can be brutal.”
He kissed her, so gently it was more a breath than a kiss. His fingers toyed with her braided hair, then fell to her shirt and opened the top two buttons. He cupped her breast and drew a ring around her nipple.
“I cannot keep my hands off of you. It’s a habit.”
“One you must never, ever break,” she said, laughing softly.
He stripped off his uniform while she wriggled out of her shorts and tossed them and her shirt carelessly aside. Their unwashed bodies gave off an ammonia-like odor. He stroked her back, as if he were strumming his harp. She’d had to rein in the raw carnality awakened by the dangers they’d faced together; now his touch and their isolation from the others unleashed it.
They lay without talking for a while, the sand cool against their skin. She turned sideways and held his face between her hands. “Wouldn’t it be beautiful if this was the