of vibrant red appeared. As the low-signature shots echoed through the hall, with the rat-tat-tat of celebratory firecrackers, a few of the delegates loosed shrieks of terror before they expired and pitched forward, stacked on themselves like so much kindling wood.
The Caliph was disappointed; they sounded like frightened girls. These were good men: why could they not die with dignity? The Caliph tapped one of his retainers on the shoulder. "Mustafa," he said, "please see that the mess is cleaned up promptly." They had found out what happened to the grout when blood stayed on it too long, had they not? The Caliph and his deputies were masters of the palace now; they had to see to its upkeep.
"Just as you say," the young man replied, bowing deeply and fingering his leather pendant. "Without fail."
The Caliph then turned to the eldest member of his retinue, a man ho could always be counted on to keep him informed about matters lose at hand. "How fares our ram in the thickets?"
"Sahib?"
"How is the prisoner adjusting to his new accommodations?"
"Not well."
"Keep him alive!" the Caliph said severely. "Secure and alive." He set down his teacup. "If he dies prematurely, we won't be able to behead him come Friday. I should be very displeased."
"We will take care of him. The ceremony will proceed as you have planned it. In every detail."
Small things mattered, including the death of small men like the delegates. Did those men understand the service they had just performed in dying? Did they appreciate the love that had propelled the hail of bullets? The Caliph was truly grateful to them and to their sacrifice. And that sacrifice could be postponed no longer, for a KLF communique had already been sent denouncing the negotiations as an anti-Kagama plot and those who participated in them as traitors. The delegates had to be shot simply to make the communique credible. This was not something he could explain to them beforehand, but he hoped some of them surmised it in the instant before they perished.
It was all of a piece. The execution of Peter Novak, the repudiation of the negotiators, would be guaranteed to strengthen Kagama resolve for complete and unconditional victory. And to give pause to any other outside interlopers - agents of neocolonialism, in whatever humanitarian garb - who might try to appeal to "moderates," to "pragmatists," and so undermine the zeal of the righteous. Such half measures, such temporizing compromises, were an insult to the Prophet himself! And an insult to the many thousands of Kagama who had already died in the conflict. No differences would be split - only the heads of traitors.
And the world would learn that the Kagama Liberation Front would have to be taken seriously, its demands honored, its words feared.
Bloodshed. The immolation of a living legend. How else would a deaf world learn to listen?
He knew the message would be relayed to those it needed to reach among the Kagama. The international media was always another matter. For the bored spectators of the West, entertainment was the ultimate value. Well, the struggle for national liberation was not conducted for their entertainment. The Caliph knew how Westerners thought, for he had spent time among them. Most of his followers were poorly educated men who had traded plowshares for swords; they had never been on a plane and knew little of the world except what they heard on the heavily censored Kagama-language radio stations.
The Caliph respected their purity, but his range of experience was far greater, and necessarily so: the master's tools would be needed to dismantle the master's house. After attending college at the University of Hyderabad, he had spent two years obtaining a graduate degree in engineering from the University of Maryland, in College Park; he had been, he liked to say, to the heart of darkness. His time in the States taught the Caliph - Ahmad Tabari, as he was then called - how Westerners viewed the rest of the world. It introduced him to men and women who grew up in households of power and privilege, where the main struggle was over the remote control, and the greatest danger they faced was boredom. For them, places such as Anura or Sri Lanka or Lebanon or Kashmir or Myanmar had been flattened into metaphor, mere emblems of the pointless barbarity of non-Western peoples. In each case, the West enjoyed the great gift of obliviousness: obliviousness to its complicity, obliviousness to the fact that its barbarity dwarfed