same.” Slouching again, he stretched his legs over the ground, cleft and crazed from lack of rain. “Garang and the high command do not know what I’ve told you. It would make no difference to them if they did—Garang and his Dinkas have spilled a thousand liters of innocent blood—but I thought the denial that it was a purposeful act would sound more convincing if they did not know. My soldiers did not know either. They had no field glasses to show them it was a civilian aircraft. They did only what I have trained them to do—obey orders. You and I are the only ones who own the truth. I have made my wife a party to what I did, and perhaps that is wrong, too, but you see, it is a secret I cannot live with alone. I am not strong enough. I had to confess it to someone, and who else but you? And now I ask you to forgive me.”
“For what you did or for involving me?” she asked.
“For both.”
“Only God can forgive what you did, and He will if you ask Him.”
“I have, more than once. But now I’m asking you.”
She rose and stepped over the fissured ground between them to lay her palm on his arm. He sealed her hand with his.
THIN CIRRUS CLOUDS began to sheet the skies in the afternoons, while the air grew dense with prophecies of rain. The dry season was drawing to a close, and the kujurs conducted ceremonies to bury its trials and to petition the ancestors for a bountiful rainfall. The season’s military triumphs were marked by a celebration more orderly and choreographed than the spontaneous demonstration that had met the army’s return a week ago. Instead of being presented with medals, the bravest warriors were honored in the same way as victorious contestants in the wrestling festivals, with the girls’ love dance, the Nyertun.
Quinette was expected to take part. In the afternoon she lay naked outside her hut while Pearl, Kiki, and Nolli covered her with a homemade wax, then peeled it off, removing her body hair—it was considered unsightly among all of Sudan’s blacks. She was relieved that Fancher and Handy had declined an invitation to attend. If they hadn’t, she would have been forced to be an observer rather than a participant; it took no imagination to picture what their reaction, Handy’s in particular, would be to seeing her dance with virtually nothing on and her midriff marked by cicatrix. But she considered herself Nuban in all but the color of her skin and saw no conflict between her duties as a minister of Christ and her obligation to follow the customs of the people who had adopted her as she had adopted them. Malachy would have understood. It was the way of Africa.
And so she came to the Nyertun in the traditional costume—a skimpy barega below her waist and a bead bodice to cover her top—and danced under the moon. She had become quite proficient and gloried in her art. At the climactic moment, when the woman claimed her man by kicking a leg over his shoulder, she heard some onlookers gasp. She had been so transported, so lost in the sound and movement, that she hadn’t noticed Yamila, who now stood beside her, glaring defiantly, a leg resting on Michael’s opposite shoulder.
As Quinette discovered in a moment, custom ruled that when two women chose the same man, the decision rested with him. When Michael nodded to Quinette, Yamila hissed and would have scratched her if several girls hadn’t restrained her. Yamila broke free and ran off. Quinette couldn’t say who was more mortified, she or her rival.
So Yamila had at last declared her feelings. The dance went on without her into the early morning. When it was over and Quinette and Michael retired to their hut, she did not make love to him, she fucked him. Fucked him on the bed and then on the floor mat with a wanton ferocity, as she imagined that wild girl would have done had his nod gone to her. She used her body like a weapon to pummel whatever polygamous, adulterous thoughts Yamila might have put into his head. Fucked him until even that vigorous man had nothing left to give, and as they lay on the mat in mutual exhaustion, she asked, “If she had gotten to you first, would you have gone with her?”
He laughed. “No. I want only you, and I am