Yesterday the gendarmes led supervised trips to a public well, but by the time their turn came the soldiers had grown tired of the task. Lucine wonders if the others are as thirsty as she. If only she were bigger and less afraid, she would swallow her beating heart, which seems to be lodged in her swollen tongue. She would put it back in her breast where it belongs and find a way to protect the people she loves. That is what Hairig would have wanted. But swallowing anything, much less the lead ball lodged in the middle of her mouth, is impossible. Sometimes, if she locates her fear somewhere specific, like in the face of the thick-lipped gendarme or the uniformed arm of the man who took Anush, her fear grows smaller but more potent. It transforms into something else entirely: a hate so pure that it sustains, even nourishes, her.
When the sun starts to set, the gendarmes order the deportees to stop marching. The relief at the prospect of a few hours of rest is short-lived, for a cold desert wind begins to whip at their backs. Lucine huddles close to Bedros and Mairig in their makeshift tent. Mairig doesn’t say a word. She turns her back to them and falls asleep. Perhaps she’s right to do it. A rescue plan is better executed after a good night’s sleep.
Lucine vows to stay awake in case Anush returns in the night. She peeks at Bedros, who is also still awake.
“How can it be so cold at night when we are boiling in the day?” he asks, picking at the tear-shaped scab on his left cheek.
“The weather is fickle,” Lucine says. “Stop picking. You don’t want another scar on your face, do you?”
Bedros shrugs. “Girls worry about the strangest things.”
“Get some rest,” Lucine tells him.
Despite her fatigue, Lucine finds it easy to stay awake. Thirst attacks the remainder of her body, traveling down from her throat to cramp her abdomen and legs. Her mind drifts back to the night Uncle Nazareth was taken. She sees herself standing before Governor Muammer, like David before Goliath, aiming Bedros’s slingshot straight for the man’s forehead. Next, she strangles the potbellied fool with those yellow-and-brown marble prayer beads he’s always carrying around. Numerous versions of this heroic vignette play over and over in Lucine’s mind until her lids grow heavy with satisfaction and sleep.
She awakens in the middle of the night to screaming women and the furious pounding of hooves. There is so much dust and so little moonlight that she wonders if this too could be a dream. In the faint orange glow of the moon, four expert horsemen ride toward the caravan. They are dressed in large fringed turbans and tribal ?alvar, pants so baggy and wide they look like inflated balloons. The horsemen open their mouths and let out a piercing tribal scream in a language that’s neither Turkish nor Armenian. They swarm like hornets toward the caravan.
“Bastards!” she hears someone shout in the darkness.
The few remaining oxcarts are plundered. One of the horsemen is dragging a young girl by the hair. Lucine runs in the opposite direction. She cannot see the totality of what is happening but recognizes the backside of a lumbering ox and runs toward it. The animal moves quicker than it ever did when Bedros was driving it. Damn ox. In her haste, she trips over something or someone. It is Bedros, kneeling next to a broken wooden crate, desperately trying to put something back in it.
“Are you all right?” she asks him, forgetting about the ox.
He shakes his head in response. “Our oxcart is gone.”
“I know.”
“They’ve taken our pot and the ladle but left all our grain,” he says.
“Kurds,” says Lucine, her eyes searching the ground. “It is against their custom to take our food.”
Lucine stares into the wooden crate where Bedros has managed to collect two sackcloths of bulgur grain and one plum. What kind of custom allows you to take a girl but not her bulgur?
That is when she remembers Mairig. Only after she has surveyed the remaining food supply.
“Mairig!” she yells, ignoring her burning throat. “Mairig!” Lucine runs toward bodies rising from their crouched positions. She scans their grimy, stunned faces. Tearless, because their bodies are just as parched as their souls.
She finds Stepan the sheepherder flat on his back, his hands still folded together in sleep. Lucine touches his peaceful face with the lids sealed shut and decides to wake him before seeing the wound at the side of his skull where an animal has trampled him. Lucine remembers the heavy-footed ox clamoring for safety and feels strangely responsible for Stepan’s fate. This thought and the blood, so dark and sweet smelling, make her fall to her hands and knees, heaving.
This is how Bedros finds her. “Come, she’s here,” he says, leading her by the elbow to a wooded area. “She’s over here.”
Mairig sits with her back against a tree, her legs spread wider than Lucine has ever seen them. Aram lies squirming beside her, his swaddling clothes loosened. Mairig is holding something tight in her two hands, but Lucine cannot see what. Lucine stands before Mairig in the darkness, taking in her matted hair and sunken eyes. She shudders at the sight of this stranger who has replaced her mother.
“Did they take our water?” asks Mairig, pushing the words past her parched lips.
Lucine does not know how to respond. They have had no water since the incident with Firat and the broken jug. Bedros runs before her and wraps his arms around Mairig’s shoulders.
“Listen,” says Mairig, pushing Bedros away from her. “You should leave now. Let me rest. Take good care of the baby. I will catch up later.”
“Catch up? When?” asks Lucine.