Douglas and Fitzhugh when they were hiding from the bomber, waiting for dark.
He’d begun his military career as an enlisted man in the Sudanese army, won a commission as a lieutenant, been sent to America for further training, and shortly after his return, deserted to join the rebels when his commanding officer told him he would have to convert to Islam and adopt a Muslim name if he expected to rise in rank. He’d been fighting ever since. If all that combat had brutalized him, as it had brutalized just about everyone else in Sudan (“Even your mother, give her a bullet! Even your father, give him a bullet!” Fitzhugh had once heard SPLA recruits chanting. “Your rifle is your mother! Your rifle is your father! Your rifle is your wife!”), he hid it well. He gave the clear impression that the mellow, muted ballad he was singing now was much more in keeping with who he was.
“I believe you can ease your mind, colonel,” Manfred said abruptly, and squinting under a visor made with his hand, he pointed toward the savannah that lay between a mountain range to the west and the hill occupied by the hospital compound.
Michael and Fitzhugh stood and looked, the low sun almost directly in their eyes, and made out five figures, moving single file across the plain. In the liquid light of Africa’s magic hour, they seemed to be walking on the bottom of a translucent copper sea.
“I think someone’s been hurt,” Fitzhugh said; as the figures drew closer, he’d seen that two, lagging well behind the others, were carrying what appeared to be a litter.
“But who? I sent three men to guard the American and Suleiman, and I count five men out there.”
“Yes, five,” Manfred confirmed. “But we’d better see if something’s wrong.”
Instructing Ulrika to prepare a bed in case one was needed, he set off with Fitzhugh and Michael, following a footpath around the garden and down the hill. The sun dipped below the western range and a wind sprang up and the grass on the hillside danced in the wind, as if rejoicing in its release from the heat that had baked it dry as paper. When they were about halfway down, they met Suleiman and two of the guards, both shirtless. Michael fell into an incomprehensible conversation with them, Suleiman gesturing at the third guard and Douglas, laboring up the hill with the litter.
Fitzhugh called out and started toward them with Manfred. Douglas and the soldier set the litter down. It had been made with a pair of crooked poles, between which the guards’ shirts had been stretched, tied down by the sleeves. On it lay what at first looked like a heap of rags but on closer inspection revealed itself to be the emaciated body of an old man.
“Hey, Fitz”—he gave a tired wave—“glad to see you. We could use a hand the rest of the way.”
“And damned glad to see you. But what is this?”
He looked at the body, lying motionless on its back, more bone than flesh, and the black flesh shriveled and the hair on its head sparse, grizzled, and white.
“Found him about three miles back, in a riverbed,” said Douglas, his face raw from sunburn, his shirt drenched clear through.
“But why carry him all that way? He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“That’s what we thought when we found him.”
Manfred kneeled beside the litter on one knee and looked for a pulse. As he did this, the man’s eyes half opened, his lips parted, and he made a dry sound, half gasp, half whisper. Fitzhugh felt a small chill; it really was like seeing a corpse come to life.
“Three miles that way, in a riverbed, you say?” the doctor asked. “You saw a village near there?”
Douglas shook his head.
“Well, there is one. Not very big. Perhaps you didn’t notice it. He must have come from there.” The grass all around had grown pale in the twilight and the distant mountains turned gray, and in the gloom and steady breeze, the man’s hair moved as a cobweb moves when a door swings open in a room. “I suspect he’d been in that riverbed for a day or two.”
“Wouldn’t know. I spotted him under a tree. First glance, I didn’t think it was a human being, and then, maybe a few seconds later, it hit me, and I said to Suleiman, ‘That was a body back there,’ and he said that, yeah, he knew and that he was dead. I