dead father, a longbow. As his grandfather yelled at him, young Adnan scooped up three arrows before running out of the house and towards the sound of gunfire.
His shack was on a hill, and from the front door he could see smoke and flashes of light towards the square. There was more shooting behind him to the west, but it was farther away. Adnan ran to a flight of rickety stairs that led down his hill. He leapt down the stairs, took them three and four at a time, his young, sinewy, coal-black legs comfortable with the exertion. With the gunfire around, he instinctively tucked his head tight into his neck as he ran.
He passed an old man on wooden crutches standing in front of his shack. The cripple shouted to the child, demanded he go back to his home, but Adnan wasn’t listening.
Adnan was going to save his family and his town from whoever threatened it.
The Nubians were fearless and ferocious warriors since the times of the pharaohs, and their weapon of choice had always been the bow. Nubia itself means “land of the bow.” Nubian archers served as highly coveted mercenaries in ancient wars as far away as distant Persia.
Adnan’s family had descended from a dozen generations of bow makers, but bows made them no money, as AK-47s and the Chinese AK knock-off, the Type 81, hung from the shoulders of everyone around here with cause to wield a weapon. An AK is more powerful than a bow, an AK is easier to master than a bow, and, it could be argued, an AK is only slightly more technologically complicated. For this reason Adnan’s grandfather switched to making sandals, but Adnan had learned as a child how to use the large bamboo bow with leather at the handgrip, with bone and horn inlaid at the tips and just above the leather wrapping.
Adnan barreled through a small driftwood and baling wire gate, into another dusty alley. The gunfire from the square reverberated on the walls and carried down to him. He tucked his neck in tighter as he turned to race towards it, his father’s weapon in his right hand and the arrows in his left.
Other townspeople were out now, running away mostly. Adnan passed them at a sprint as he moved towards the action.
He rounded a narrow passageway and stumbled to a halt. Thirty meters ahead, at the entrance to this alley, a black man in a black suit skittered around the corner, as if shoved from behind. His hands were bound in front of him, and he slipped and stumbled forward on the shiniest shoes Adnan had ever seen in his life. The young Sudanese boy ducked quickly into an unused doorway to the back of a derelict butcher shop, hid himself in a morning shadow, his back to the wall, and then lowered to a squat. He ducked his head around the corner and saw the black man being pushed towards him by a bearded white man.
An infidel.
The white man held a long pistol in his right hand, and he shouted as the two men ran up the alley towards Adnan’s hide. “Move! Move! Move!” The foreign word meant nothing to young Adnan, but the tone told him he was forcing the black man forward.
Adnan had never seen the president of his country and had no idea of the identity of the big man with the bound hands.
Here was Adnan’s moment. In seconds they would pass, and he had no doubt he could put a steel-tipped arrow through the back of the infidel. He only had to wait a few seconds and take him down from behind.
As the footsteps and the angry foreign shouting closed on his position, Adnan changed his focus to the other side of the doorway, one meter from the tips of his bare feet. A dead rooster lay in the shadow, his feather-covered carcass maggot-infested and putrefying. The Sudanese boy’s eyes narrowed with purpose. He chose an arrow and laid the remaining two on the dusty stoop next to him. He pointed the razor-sharp barb of the arrow in his hand at the most rotten morsel of the dead bird and stabbed it deeply, turning the point around to the left and the right like a key in a lock.
Covering the tip of the missile in bacteria, a determined smile covered the young boy’s face.
The suited black man passed the doorway, again nearly falling forward. Behind him no more than a few