penlight between her teeth. When that didn’t work, she got her diary, propped it against her upraised legs, and attempted to describe her out-of-body experience, but it was impossible to find the words. Finally, a wave of exhaustion washed her into unconsciousness, but soft thuds above her head woke her up. She flicked on the light and saw spiders and beetles dropping out of the thatch ceiling onto her mosquito net, crawling down the sides with a scratching of busy legs. A bat darted through the flashlight’s beam, quick as an apparition. She lay wide-eyed and cringing until dawn. Two cups of freeze-dried coffee barely cleared her head, but now the scented air and the soldiers standing at attention and the early light glinting off rifle barrels and spear points quickened her senses.
The walk was a short one down a footpath through the dun grass, past a dried-up water hole ringed by palm trees, a background against which the spear-carrying soldiers made a picturesque sight—click. They came to a small homestead, with a beehive hut where two Arabs waited, sitting on bamboo chairs—the same two she’d seen in the marketplace yesterday, the one bearded, the other clean-shaven. The retrievers. We are the redeemers, they are the retrievers. She heard Ken call the one with the beard by name, Bashir, but the other remained anonymous. They’d put on their Sunday best for the occasion—fresh robes and turbans, leather shoes instead of sandals, rings on their fingers, dressy watches on their wrists. The soldiers fanned out to encircle the homestead and an enormous mahogany tree nearby. It cast its branches out for fifty feet in all directions, the lower branches hanging almost to the ground to form a tent of leaves. The Arabs stood and greeted Ken and Jim and Manute. There was a bit of conversation, then the retrievers led everyone to the tree; the one called Bashir parted the branches and held them aside. Ducking her head, Quinette followed Jim into the shaded circle, and there the slaves huddled in the cool red dust, faces blending with the shadows so that all she saw at first were four hundred eyes, shining white and lifeless, like fragments of clamshells set in lumps of mud. They were all women and kids and teenagers, barefoot, dressed in rags, in shorts, in what looked like feed sacks with armholes. Her vision adjusting to the dimness, she saw a naked chest ridged with scars, and the absence of pattern told her that they were not the decorative marks with which some Dinka ornamented their bodies. No one spoke, even the babies were silent, lying limp in their mothers’ laps, hair reddened and tiny bellies bloated from malnutrition. The only sound was the hum of flies, the only movement the flutter of bony hands brushing the flies away, and one adolescent boy did not have a hand, swatting with the puckered stump of his wrist. Another, sitting with his legs spread-eagled and a crude crutch at his side, was missing a foot.
Jean and Mike began a head count. Quinette volunteered to help, because she wanted to do more than gawk at these wretched souls as if they were a sideshow attraction.
“Okay, take the bunch on the right, we’ll take the ones on the left,” Mike said. “Count ’em twice to make sure.”
Quinette moved in closer, her finger wagging left to right, right to left. These are people, these are human beings, she said to herself, for the slaves sat so passively, so devoid of emotion that she felt as if she were making an inventory of inanimate objects. Swaddled in unlaundered clothes, bodies that hadn’t known soap and water for weeks or months threw off a dense, sour, salty stench. People, human beings who’d been whipped, who’d had a hand or a foot lopped off because they tried to escape. Making her second count, she noticed a small, deep scar gouged into many faces, beneath the left eye. Wondering what the marks signified, she lowered her gaze, squinting at an emaciated woman with a stained blue scarf on her head. She tried not to make her curiosity obvious, but the woman noticed and hissed. Quinette looked away, a little ashamed. The woman hissed again, pointed at the scar, and stabbed the air with a fist. Hssss.
“She’s trying to tell you that she was branded,” Jean said matter-of-factly. Jean was a nurse back in Canada, a pert woman with curly chestnut hair and a bowed mouth. “That’s