the first time? Had he forgotten his vision of a Nuba where people spoke the same language and tribal differences were forgotten? If any of that were to come to pass, things had to change. There would be no place in a new Sudan for a sixty-year-old man with the power and authority to beat his teenage bride for deciding how she wanted to worship. Change—that’s what Suleiman and those others feared. Michael mustn’t allow their fears to stand in the way . . .
He listened to her ardent oration with his head tilted against the back of his chair, a pose that suggested patient indulgence. “Are you proposing something?” he asked. “What is it?”
“Nothing. I’m proposing that you do nothing.”
“Nothing? That is not what I expect to hear from an American.”
“Sometimes doing nothing is doing something, and this is one of those times,” she advised. “Let Fancher and Handy, let us, continue to do our work. If that bothers your adjutant or Suleiman or anyone else, you can tell them that life is going to be different. That you haven’t been fighting this war just so everything can stay the same.”
“But you know, that is what so many Nubans are fighting for, and not only Muslims. To be left alone and to live exactly as their ancestors lived.”
“That isn’t what you want, Michael. The war’s already changed things. You don’t need me to tell you that they can never be the same again. “
“I will think about this doing nothing,” he said.
“Please, darling. I did something for you, and you know what it is. Do this for me.”
“I am going to think about it.”
She could interpret the modulations of his voice, the meanings encrypted in its rises and falls. He wasn’t going to think about it. He’d made up his mind. She had won.
It wasn’t a victory that charged its price in advance; it delayed payment.
MICHAEL’S STRATEGY TO stage the offensive at the end of the dry season, trusting that the wet would blunt or avert a retaliation, had not presumed a drought. In the fourth week without rain, Khartoum took advantage of the favorable weather and struck back. For three consecutive days, everyone in town and in the garrison heard the distant, ominous rumble of bombs; for three consecutive nights, they saw the spastic flashes of artillery over far-off ridgelines; and for a week afterward reports and rumors came in by radio and bush-telegraph of raids by militia battalions on foot and on horseback, in trucks and tanks. They came from towns Quinette knew and from places she’d never heard of, Toda, Nawli, and Andreba; Tabanya, El Hemid, and Lado. When it was over, seventeen towns had been leveled and thirty-six thousand people had been killed, displaced, or taken into captivity. Tamsit, scorched earth. More woe to the land of the whirring wings beyond the rivers of Ethiopia. New Tourom escaped the onslaught. Government planes attempted to bomb it but were driven off by flurries of anti-aircraft fire; a militia column advancing from a Sudanese army garrison was ambushed before it got within ten miles of the town. It was the safest place in the rebel-held Nuba. For several days, survivors from elsewhere shambled into New Tourom, walking ghosts starved and dehydrated, wounded and sick. They built crude shelters of sticks and straw on the outskirts, and in a short time the town had its own slum of more than a thousand people. It grew to two thousand, to three. The missionaries stopped all other work to help care for the multitudes. Quinette pitched in, making splints and bandages for the injured, dishing out doura gruel, but the numbers kept growing, and with the drought, New Tourom’s citizens resisted parting with their remaining stores of grain. Dysentery swept through the refugee camps. Manfred and Ulrika were overwhelmed. So were Michael’s military police, struggling to maintain order. Clashes broke out between townspeople and refugees, who also fought among themselves over a bowl of food or a jerry can of water. One morning a gun battle erupted between local troops and soldiers who’d fled a distant garrison. Two were killed. Hunger and disease had brought things to the verge of chaos, a breakdown of all ties of family, clan, and tribe that would pit every man against every other man.
With a stunning lack of diplomacy, Kasli chose this time to remind his commander that he had predicted disaster, and now here it was. The dry-season campaign had achieved worse than