It was a dark night. A very, very dark and long night. A night that lasted for months, though it was hard to say how many, as the girls used their monthly bleeding to count the days, and when the bleeding stopped, counting became difficult.
The warlords brought the women they had stolen into the mountains, to their kingdom, where trees covered the sky. In that place the women realized some of the men were in fact little boys with red eyes and slack faces. When the men and boys went out to fight, they wore leaves and flowers in their hair because it made them invisible to bullets. There were other women in the warlords’ kingdom, but they spoke a different language, when they spoke at all, and moved like ghosts.
The men had chosen this place because their god lived there, deep in a hole in the mountain. Every day, the five women were sent with the other captives into the hole to pick away at the flanks of the god of gold and bring out his shiny scabs.
And at night? Every night was hell embodied as a man or a boy, five or six times over. The loud one didn’t know them; she just closed her eyes and let her soul drift far away while she waited for it to be over.
But the war saw the quiet one’s beauty, and she was held back and given like a gift to a man they called Number Two, who came and went from the kingdom on a powerful white man’s bidding. He would fly in on a helicopter, bringing guns and money. When he came, he always asked for her. No one was allowed to touch the quiet one but him.
They said he came from a city named for blood, Sangui.
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Of the five women:
One ran, and the boys laughed and put a bullet in her back.
One woman began to drink the poisoned water in the god’s hole, even when the others begged her to stop, and she died raving in a fever.
One woman had been the two girls’ teacher, a nun, and when she could, she diverted the hell from her students. But most of the time she couldn’t.
And the two girls survived, but only because neither wanted to die and leave the other one alone in the terrible kingdom.
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One day the men were ambushed by other men that looked exactly like the first men, and there was fighting and gunfire and explosions that shook the earth and chaos, and the teacher said run, and the girls and the teacher ran and ran and ran, until they came back to their town, and stumbled into the hospital and were finally, finally safe.
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The two friends expected things to get better after their escape, and for a while they did.
But soon after they healed and could get up and walk around again, they noticed something strange: a smell. People around them would cringe and move away. The three women sniffed the wind and tried to figure out where it came from. It was rotten like outhouses and the medical garbage pile, and it grew stronger whenever the three were together. Eventually, they realized that it wasn’t being borne in on the wind; it was coming from them, out of their pores, caught in their hair, redolent on their breath.
The women scrubbed and scrubbed, and drank sweet teas, but no matter what they did, the hell they had passed through lingered over them, clearing rooms with its stink. It was pungent, embarrassing, pervasive, and impossible to get rid of.
A smell that was not a smell.
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Then one day the loud woman’s sweetheart took his cows back. They later heard he had waited a week, and then given them to another girl’s father.
The quiet woman’s stomach grew round and large and the reverend mother called her to her office and explained that, while the quiet one could still be a nurse, the cloistered life was no longer appropriate. Not for a mother.
The teacher who had escaped with them left for the city called Sangui, saying she couldn’t remember what God’s face looked like anymore. She asked the two girls if they wanted to go with her. The quiet girl might have gone, except by then she was too big to travel. The loud girl would not leave her friend.
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There was ripping and screaming and a baby was born. They named her Christina.
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The two women moved back to their parents’ neighboring farms. The loud one’s mother and father died within a year of her return, one after the other. The quiet one’s father had died while she was away in the terrible kingdom. Her mother grew small.
The quiet one still worked as a nurse at the hospital, but the loud one’s hands would shake with every new broken woman brought in. She tried to sell vegetables instead, but grew tired of the other sellers’ stares and wrinkled noses.
So she found a new occupation. She no longer liked boys, but for the work she did, she didn’t have to like them. She just had to close her eyes and let her soul drift far away.
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Though the women still loved each other, they knew something had fractured between them that could not be entirely mended. They both focused on the baby, who grew quickly. The quiet one sometimes caught herself staring at her daughter’s face. And sometimes she could not look at her child at all, and when that happened the loud one would pick up the little girl and walk away, kissing the salt off her baby cheeks until she laughed.