She didn’t care how much damage she did, how many lives her story would cost. We’re fighting for survival here.”
“Do you think you are telling me things I haven’t told myself? But I gave the orders, not you. It’s on my conscience.”
“Mine, too. I didn’t object to your orders, and I could have. Do you think I haven’t agonized about that? But Dare and that woman were collaborators as far as I’m concerned. It was done for survival and so much more. For every soul in these mountains. For him”—she placed Michael’s hand on her stomach—“so he can grow up in peace. Do you think Christ doesn’t understand that? Of course he does, and he forgives. He forgives and forgives. Seven times seventy-seven.”
“How very nice it must be to believe that. Do as you wish and then ask for forgiveness and everything is fine.”
“Between what’s necessary and what isn’t—that’s the choice. You said that. Christ knows you did what was necessary. He knows that nobody warned you it was Tara flying Phyllis in here. Tara was an unfortunate accident.”
“She was a good woman, I was fond of her,” he said. “How can I call myself a soldier now? A murderer, that’s what I am.”
Tears came to his eyes. She had never seen him cry before. He was weeping for Tara and for his own soul, damned not by God but by himself. His sorrow only made her more determined to break the Enemy’s grip on him.
“All right, a murderer, but even murder is forgivable,” she said in a stern voice. “The only thing that’s unforgivable is to think you can’t be forgiven. You really must do what I told you, or this will get the better of you, and you won’t be able to carry on. The people need you, Pearl needs you, I need you. We need you to be strong, Michael.”
He rose and stood by the door, looking out into the courtyard. At the moment she couldn’t bear the sight of his back turned to her. She got up and went to him, folding her arms around him, laying a cheek between his shoulder blades. “Would you come with me? To our secret place?”
He stiffened. “What are you suggesting? At a time like this?”
“Not for that, darling. To show you what I’ve been telling you.”
They climbed the steep, stony path to the refuge. It was behind the pinnacle rocks rising above St. Andrew’s church—a grotto facing a granite slab into which untold ages of weather had carved a cistern, its sides as smooth as a potter’s mold, its ten-foot depth filled with water in the rainy season. A strict prohibition had forced them to choose this secluded spot for a rendezvous. Among the Nubans, sexual intimacy was forbidden while new life grew within a woman’s body; they believed it made the baby impure, and that a couple who violated the ban would be punished by the illness or early death of their child. Quinette had seen expectant girls leave their husbands to live with their parents; she’d heard stories about men who had been caught secretly visiting their pregnant wives and suffered such scorn that they had to move to other villages.
Michael did not believe in the taboo, but he had to keep up appearances and insisted that she move into the empty tukul between the one they shared and Pearl’s and Kiki’s. She hated the arrangement—sleeping in separate rooms, like some Victorian couple—and had hoped he would come to her at some late, discreet hour. Fear of disgrace restrained him: the bodyguards standing watch outside the compound walls might hear them and spread malicious gossip. It was no wonder Nuban men took several wives. Quinette trusted the mind-heart half of her husband; it was the physical part she did not trust. Its hungers could eventually drive him to seek satisfaction with another woman, and she feared who that woman might be. She’d taken the initiative, telling him that she couldn’t bear the abstention, and was there some place they could be alone together? “I know of one,” he’d said, his look telling her that he was grateful she had broken the ice.
“Now what is it you are going to show me?” Michael asked.
Without a word, she removed her kanga and sandals and hopped across the granite—exposed to the sun, it was hot underfoot—and launched herself into the cistern. The water was tepid at the surface but grew colder as she dove to the bottom. Touching it, she