Acts of Faith

PART TWO

Warlord

THE JINN VISITED him so often that he’d achieved a rapport with it, speaking to it as he would to a living man. “I will do today what it is said you wish me to do, so why are you here? Why do you trouble me this day?”

Abbas sat across from him, staring with wordless reproach. Ibrahim Idris detested that expression, but he knew it would do no good to look away, because no matter in what direction he looked Abbas would be there, the haft of the knife protruding from his ribs, his wide-set eyes glaring judgment.

“It is the opinion of the elders and my kinsmen that if I make peace with your mother’s lineage, you will trouble me no more. Very well, a murda takes place this very day, and trust that I will make peace, so go away.”

But Abbas remained.

Ibrahim took the copper pot from the fire and refilled his cup with sweetened tea. “Listen, this much I know. God would not permit you to trouble me because I beat you for committing rape. It was you who drew the knife on me. On me! The uncle who was as a father to you!” He flung the tea into his nephew’s face and watched the scalding liquid fly right through him and spatter in the dust.

“Ya, Ibrahim. Saddled and bridled and everyone is ready.”

It was Kammin, leading Barakat by the reins. At the Dinka servant’s approach, the jinn vanished, rising with the campfire smoke through the branches of the tree beneath which Ibrahim had passed a troubled night. A distance away, resembling a flock of egrets in their clean guftans and jelibiyas, the elders and the heads of the lineages that stood with Ibrahim’s, the Awlad Ali, were gathered around a haraz tree.

“You are like the haraz,” Hamdan, his old and loyal friend, had told him some time ago. “That is why you suffer.” Ibrahim had asked, “How so?” and Hamdan reminded him of the story. At the creation of the world, all the plants and animals were called upon to submit to Allah, but the haraz refused, saying, “I am the lord of the forest, why should I bow before any other lord?” For that, God condemned it to suffer through the hot season in full leaf and to shed its leaves in the rains. “It suffers for its pride,” Hamdan had counseled, “and so do you, but you are causing all the Salamat to suffer with you. Is that just? Unlike the tree, you have the means to end your suffering and ours as well.”

So he would eat his pride this day. Kammin bent down and locked his hands, making a mounting block. There had been a day when Ibrahim could vault into the saddle, but now he needed a boost. Drawing in the fragrance of camp smoke mingling with the odors of cattle dung, he rode slowly with his entourage through the camp to calls of “Allah yisalimak” from the men, to the ululations of the women, to the silent prayers from all that brotherhood be restored with his sister-in-law’s lineage, the Awlad Sa’idy, and the two clans aligned with them. The oldest of the old men could not recall a time when the Salamat had been as divided as they were now.

“Why do you look so glum?” asked Hamdan, riding alongside. “This is a murda we’re going to, not a funeral.”

“I am wary,” Ibrahim answered. “My worst enemies are with the Sa’idy. Only one thing will satisfy them, and that is a satisfaction I won’t give them, not even if it means breaking the bonds of brotherhood for good and all.”

“I’ve spoken to the mediators,” Hamdan assured him. “Believe me, they’re on your side. The demand will be made, but nothing will come of it.”

His sister-in-law’s grief had turned to madness, madness into a cold, abiding fury. At Abbas’s burial, she’d thrown herself on his body, wrapped in a white winding-sheet, torn her hair, and cursed Ibrahim. He who had sworn to protect her son had caused his death, as surely as if he’d stabbed Abbas himself. Later, after she’d recovered her senses, she prevailed upon the head of her lineage and the kinsmen of Nanayi, the girl Abbas had pledged to marry, to send a delegation to Ibrahim with a demand for blood money: sixty head of cattle, half to go to his sister-in-law, half to Nanayi’s kinsmen. He refused, sixty head being the established price for cases of murder. What blood was on his hands? he asked the delegation. Abbas had tried to murder him and in the blindness of his rage had stumbled and accidentally killed himself. They argued that Ibrahim had lost control of himself, provoking the young man; therefore he was responsible for what happened, all the more so because of his high position.

Ibrahim knew what was going on. For years his enemies in the Awlad Sa’idy had intrigued against him, seeking to unseat him from the omdaship. They knew the demand for sixty head was unreasonable; by making it, they hoped to create a scandal that would prove him unfit to be omda and in the process wreck his chances of winning the prize he sought above all others, the nazirship. To his everlasting disgust, they were using his sister-in-law’s sorrow as a pretext for their machinations, while Nanayi’s kinsmen were exploiting the situation to increase their own meager herd. Ibrahim owed nothing, but because he was famed for his generosity and for his compassion, he offered to pay thirty head, to be divided equally between the two aggrieved parties.

He had miscalculated both the degree of his sister-in-law’s wrath and her lineage’s dedication to working his political ruin. His offer was spurned. Later certain men of the Awlad Sa’idy persuaded Nanayi’s brothers, who had witnessed the fight between Ibrahim and his nephew, to swear that they had seen the two men grapple; when they next looked, their sister’s betrothed lay dead. This testimony, no doubt purchased, was sufficient to bring the case to the local court in Babanusa town. Ibrahim Idris ibn Nur-el-Din, omda of the Salamat, a man of honor, piety, and generosity, a proven leader in the jihad, the father of a martyr, experienced the singular shame and indignity of facing a panel of judges on a charge of homicide.

His trial did not last the morning. His witnesses were more numerous than his accusers’ and far more believable for the simple reason that they spoke the truth. The judges acquitted him but agreed that he had behaved provocatively. His offer of thirty head was therefore fitting. They ordered that it be accepted, which it was, though begrudgingly.

The affair should have ended there, but the payment failed to assuage his sister-in-law. He received his first visitation from Abbas one morning as he stepped out of his tent to urinate. He was so startled that he let out a howl, which brought his youngest wife (the same who had aided Miriam’s escape) to ask what was wrong. “Look there!” he said, pointing. “Abbas!” She did not see anything; nor did other people, emerging to see what the commotion was about. Some thought he had lost his mind, but the rest accepted that his nephew’s ghost had been summoned up by Abbas’s mother because she thought she’d been cheated of her due. His kinsmen advised him to give her what she wanted and thus lift her curse. He declined; to pay her would be to admit that he was guilty of the crime of which a court had exonerated him, and that he would never do, not if she called up a hundred jinns to haunt him.

She did not do that, but she did encourage some flesh-and-blood demons to cause him misery. At her instigation, his enemies mounted new intrigues against him. Most were petty and he fought them off easily, but one was very serious. A sheikh of the Awlad Sa’idy, a cousin of his sister-in-law, reported to the authorities that Ibrahim and a certain Messiriya trader had an illegal business arrangement. This trader went about buying back abid captives from their masters and then resold them to infidel foreigners for several times their worth and shared the profits with the omda.

Not only could Ibrahim be stripped of the omdaship for his dealings with Bashir, he could face charges of disloyalty to the jihad if the sheikh was able to prove his allegation. Praise be to God, he could not. He had no witnesses, no evidence; he was only reporting a rumor. It was his word against the word of the omda of the Salamat, and the word of Ibrahim Idris prevailed. The authorities never brought the case to court, but the mere accusation was enough to taint his name. When the old nazir died of his many ailments, the rural council and the provincial governor rejected Ibrahim and gave the post to the nazir’s eldest son.

He was a weak, ineffectual man, easily swayed by influential men; and the influential men among the Awlad Sa’idy bade him to remove Ibrahim Idris as omda after an ugly incident further strained relations between the Awlad Sa’idy and the Awlad Ali. A few young hotheads in Ibrahim’s lineage took it upon themselves to teach a lesson to the two brothers who had falsely accused him. During the dry-season migration to the south, they fell on Nanayi’s brothers, intending to beat them up. Things got out of hand and one was killed. The other swore vengeance. As omda, it was Ibrahim’s duty to admit that his people had been in the wrong and to arrange immediately for blood money to be paid to the dead brother’s kin and so prevent a blood feud. Still smarting from the injury their perjured testimony had done him, he failed to act.

And so the surviving brother took his revenge, ambushing his attackers one night, killing one and wounding another. Those upon whom vengeance was taken then took vengeance in their turn. Thus began a round of reprisal killings that took five more lives. That was when the rich and powerful men in the Awlad Sa’idy petitioned the new nazir to remove Ibrahim from office.

Hamdan begged him to call a big meeting of Salamat notables to end the feuding. Instead, Ibrahim brought a charge against the sheikh who had accused him of illicit dealings with Bashir, reporting that the sheikh was hiding cattle during the annual census, when livestock were counted to bring tax rolls up to date. “For why you are doing this?” Hamdan asked, pleading with him to avoid aggravating an already explosive situation. “To show these bastards that they cannot trifle with me and get away with it,” Ibrahim answered.

He summoned the police to check the kraals. They seized fifty head that the sheikh had not reported to the census-takers and sold them at auction, the proceeds going into the tribal treasury. The indignant sheikh and other Sa’idy leaders swore on the Koran that if the nazir did not now remove Ibrahim Idris, they would—by force. The khadim, the clan drum, was beaten throughout the Sa’idy camps, and men assembled for war. Upon hearing that his adversaries were coming to kill him, Ibrahim Idris ordered the Awlad Ali’s drum call to be sounded. Hundreds rallied to his side, the young men brandishing their rifles, women dancing the dances of war and vengeance.

The nazir called on the police to intervene, but they were too few, forcing him to ask the governor to send in the army. Soldiers entered the camps of the Awlad Sa’idy and the Awlad Ali and broke up the fight before it started. The governor’s deputy convened a meeting in Babanusa town to find out what had caused this dispute. Afterward the deputy privately informed Ibrahim that the government would not tolerate Muslims fighting Muslims when every man was needed for the jihad. He was to put his house in order, according to tribal customs; if he could not do it, his tenure as omda was over.

The threat provided him with the incentive to call for the murda that Hamdan had been urging.

They arrived at the appointed place, a grove of ebony trees not far from the millet gardens of the Awlad Sa’idy. The two alliances—the Awlad Ali together with the lineages loyal to it, the Sa’idy with its allies—sat in a crowded circle, facing each other. The chairman of the peace conference and the mediators sat off to one side, so as not to show favoritism. Examining the faces opposite him, Ibrahim knew this business was going to be as difficult as he’d anticipated.

“In the name of God the all-merciful, the all-loving-kind,” the chairman intoned, and opened the proceedings. Before the central dispute could be addressed, the matter of blood-debts incurred as a result of the seven revenge killings had to be resolved. The negotiations were clamorous, with men shouting opinions over one another, waving sticks or riding crops to stress a point. Despite the confusion of voices, all the cases were settled by midday. A meal was served—the meat of a bull slaughtered for the occasion, with millet and tea. Ibrahim hardly touched his food, his belly fluttering. The discussions had gone smoothly, but the blood-payments were the easy part.

The hard part began in the afternoon, after the allied lineages rode off, their business concluded, and the two major disputants reconvened, eyeing each other warily. The chairman called for the elders and notables of the Awlad Ali to speak, one at a time.

Hamdan was first. “A wound fell upon you, and the blood was on us,” he said, addressing the Awlad Sa’idy. “We should have come to you to make reconciliation, but we failed to. Then, in vengeance, a wound was on us, and you offered to come to us to settle things before there was more bloodshed, but we did not respond in the spirit of manliness, and this has led us almost to open warfare. The error was all ours. Now we come to make reparations. All we want is brotherhood from you.”

His words were greeted with silence. The speeches of the next five men were received in the same way, and then it was Ibrahim’s turn.

“I have little to add to what my brothers have said. The stain is upon me. I should have come to you right away, but I did not because of the slanders and false accusations made against me. I was too proud, and now seven sons of ours shall never be seen again. This morning we made reparations for the spilled blood. Now it is time to reconcile our differences. I was very wrong.”

He made a dramatic gesture, taking the guftan from off his head and spreading it at the feet of the Awlad Sa’idy’s leader, a man with a raven beard. “I lay this before you that you may lay upon it all my mistakes. I want nothing but brotherhood with you. Do not deny it to us. Even if you do, we will not deny you ours.”

He sat down, Hamdan glancing at him with approval, but his opponents’ faces were as stones. The only sounds were the snorts from the horses tethered nearby, the whine of flies, the rasp of leaves in the wind. When the chairman asked the headman to speak, he took full advantage of Ibrahim Idris’s invitation to lay out his mistakes. With angry looks and in a harsh tone, he enumerated them, concluding, with a swat of his riding crop, that he had no desire for brotherhood.

Three more men uttered similar sentiments. The fourth and last—the sheikh whose cattle had been confiscated and sold at auction—accused Ibrahim of bribing the police to say the cows had been hidden from the census-takers, and he’d done this to put money not in the tribal coffers but in his own.

“Ibrahim’s omdaship is the omdaship of deceit,” he continued. “And who should want brotherhood with such a one?”

Ibrahim, heat rising to his face, started to get up to rebut this calumny, but Hamdan restrained him.

Now it was the turn of the mediators to have their say. Both agreed that the omda was the guilty party, and both implored the Awlad Sa’idy to accept the hand of brotherhood that was being offered.

Silence.

The chairman tried to persuade them. “Listen, you Awlad Sa’idy, in the matter of the omda’s errors, I am with you, but the talk you have been making here, in the presence of elders and mediators, isn’t proper. The omda has admitted his guilt for not coming to you at the beginning, but you beat him over the head with accusations that have nothing to do with the issue before us. And you have not admitted your guilt in rising into open revolt, threatening to seize the omdaship by force of arms. You would do well to confess it now.”

Flies buzzing, horses snorting, leaves whispering.

“What does your silence mean? That you do not see your wrong, or that you do and are ashamed to admit it?”

“We so admit it,” the headman replied. “We were wrong. As to the offer of brotherhood, we say this. Let Ibrahim surrender the omdaship and thirty head of cattle or its equal in money.”

There it was at last, the demand.

“You are offering to accept brotherhood at a price?” shouted an elder in Ibrahim’s clan. “That is outrageous.”

Excited voices rose to agree with the old man. There was a lot of yelling back and forth, until the mediators quieted everyone down.

The chairman looked sternly at the headman and said, “What is this talk of cattle and the omdaship? The omdaship is not Ibrahim’s to give away. It belongs to the nazir and to the government. Now stop this bargaining, as if you were in a souk. Look at this”—his arm swept—“all of us sitting together. What, I ask you, is sweeter? Come now, make peace without any more fuss.”

The headman pondered for a moment, and then agreed, but a few of his kinsmen, the tax-dodging sheikh included, weren’t ready to come to terms. Why should they listen to the chairman? they shouted. It was known that he and Ibrahim were friends. The omda was not a prisoner of his office, he could resign and ask the nazir to appoint someone to replace him.

The headman stood and faced them, his hands raised. “Quiet, everyone! Ya, you Awlad Sa’idy, be quiet! The chairman speaks wisely. The omdaship is in the hands of the nazir, and this is sweet, for all of us Salamat to be seated here together, talking instead of fighting. We will make peace. We will now swear alliance and brotherhood by the Koran. We will say the Fatha.”

At this Ibrahim Idris jumped up and proclaimed by the divorce of all his wives that if the Fatha were said, he would deliver, as a gift, the thirty head at the next market day, the day after tomorrow.

“Very well, it is agreed,” the chairman said, and with hands outspread, he led the assembly in the Fatha: “Praise be to God, Lord of all creatures, the most merciful, king of the day of judgment. Thee do we worship, and of thee do we beg assistance. Direct us in the right way; in the way of those to whom thou hast been gracious; not of those against whom thou are incensed, nor of those who go astray.”

Ibrahim Idris exhaled with relief. It was over and he hadn’t lost a thing except thirty cows.

Two days later, at the cattle market in town, the black-bearded headman refused to accept them, saying that the Awlad Sa’idy had demanded a price for brotherhood, but now, to show that their desire for it came from the heart, they would forsake all of it. Ibrahim insisted they take the cattle regardless and present them to his sister-in-law as a peace offering. The jinn had not visited him in the past two days, and he wanted to keep things that way.

With business concluded and with a light heart, he called on the nazir to tell him that peace had been restored among the Salamat. All its lineages were again brothers. The nazir lived in a fine house with a walled courtyard scented and shaded by frangipani, where they sat drinking tea and talking. Their conversation was interrupted by a knock at the metal gate. One of the plump nazir’s Dinka servants answered.

“Ya, omda, there is a man to see you,” the servant said. “He says he has news for you, which must be given in private.”

Excusing himself, Ibrahim went out into the dusty street.

“Salaam aleikum,” said Bashir, his beard freshly barbered and his clothes spotless.

“Aleikum as-salaam. It’s not a good thing for us to be seen together. How did you know I was here?”

“I make it my business to know things,” the Messiriya trader said. “And among the things I know is where she is.”

Ibrahim, his heart stammering, regarded Bashir, trying to gauge if he was telling the truth. “Where?”

“A town in the eastern Nuba. New Tourom.”

He seized Bashir by the arm and pulled him away from the gate. “How do you know?”

“Because I was there one week ago. I made inquiries and I saw her. Yamila, the one you call Miriam. I don’t blame you for wanting her back.”

“You saw her?” First the jinn had vanished; now this, a still clearer sign that his troubles were at an end.

“A tall young woman with bird’s wings tattooed on her belly.”

“Al-hamduillah!”

“Our agreement. Two hundred thousand pounds.”

“Two hundred once I have her again, you criminal.”

“I will take half that now, the rest once you are in possession of her.”

“I don’t go about with that kind of money on me. What do you think I am? A moneychanger?”

“Your pledge to deliver it by this evening will be sufficient,” Bashir said with some insolence.

“Very well, then. You’ll get it. Now, tell me what else you know.”

“This New Tourom is west of Kauda, well into the hills. The Christians have a church there.”

“She’s become a Christian?”

“I have no idea. All I do know is that she has been there since she fled from you, and that your son by her, Abdullah, is dead. He did not survive the journey.”

“Dead? The boy is dead?”

“I regret to tell you he is. And I have further bad news. This New Tourom is very near to where the rebel army in the Nuba has its chief base. I saw a lot of black soldiers about, maybe a thousand, and all very well armed.” Bashir paused. “I would say it isn’t a place you could shoot your way into, and if you tried, she could be killed in the crossfire. That’s what I would say, but then, war isn’t my business.”

Looking directly at the trader, Ibrahim asked, “Are you saying there might be some other way? Could you and your friends get her out of there and bring her to me?”

“Kidnapping is also not my business. I leave it to you to figure out how to retrieve her, but if I can be of service, please to tell me.”

“For a price.”

“Of course for a price. We can negotiate that later. As to the price at hand, I am staying with a colleague, a man named Aderrahman. His house is behind the souk. This evening, after prayers. Inshallah, I will see you there with a hundred thousand pounds.”

“Inshallah,” Ibrahim Idris said, and returned to the courtyard, unable to think for the voice calling her name in his head, over and over. Miriam.