Sudan: A Novel (47 page)

Omar patted the pocket where he kept the leather pouch with the remains of the money from Idris’s village.

That got Sulleyman’s attention. “So you’ve brought money. How much?”

Omar’s grin was disarming. “Enough.”

The level of Sulleyman’s suspicion still rose slightly higher than the level of his greed.

“You have yet to tell me what I want to know! Why this late at night? No one but a fool goes out to do business in Sudan after dark.”

Omar opened his hands, palms up. “Surely you don’t think I intended to come to you at this hour! I didn’t plan to arrive so late. I decided to travel through Dimari to get from Atbara to Kosti. And I misjudged the length of the journey.”

He shrugged a little sheepishly. 
“I will not travel that way again. It is a short route, but without roads, it takes much longer.”

“I am well aware of the traveling conditions around Kosti,” Sulleyman said condescendingly. “What does that have to do with your business with me?”

Sulleyman was irritable. He had been ready, eager for the little slave girl. The interruption had taken his desire away, distracted him.

“I went to Kosti to do business with Faoud,” Omar replied easily. “When I got there and told him what I was looking for, he told me he had sold his best batch of slave girls to you.”

Sulleyman stood silent; his look asked, “And?”

“Faoud said you are a shrewd businessman and always interested”--Omar bowed respectfully--“in a good return on your investments.”

Sulleyman grunted. “I am a businessman. Of course, I make a profit. If I did not make a profit I would be out of business.”

“Exactly,” Omar replied. “And I have a deal..."

“Sometimes I have more important things to do than business, however.” Sulleyman cut him off. “The slave girls—they are for you, or your master?”

Omar smiled a hungry smile.

“Both,” he said. His voice lowered an octave. “I get them...
ready
for my master. That is part of my payment.”

Sulleyman recognized the longing in the intruder’s voice and unconsciously connected to it. He identified with that kind of sexual need, that kind of raw, naked lust. Here was a man with a passion like his own, he thought, and his suspicions about the stranger began to melt away. The man obviously was who he said he was, so Sulleyman reluctantly shifted gears. He had lost his focus and had been interrupted at a very delicate time. But it was done, and there was no going back now. There would be ample time later to rekindle his desire. Perhaps he could make the man pay enough to make the intrusion palatable.

“You have interrupted my camp and my plans for the night, but I will still do business with you.” He was fully engaged in negotiating mode. “Tomorrow we break camp and return to the pasturelands and our homes in the north. I had decided to sell one, maybe two of my slaves along the way, but if I can make the profit tonight, it will save me the trouble of transporting and feeding them. You can go on your way, and we are both happy.”

He clapped his hands and summoned Pasha Drulois.

She disappeared into the darkness and returned a short time later with Mbarka.

“Two hundred and fifty pounds, and you can take the girl and go,” said Sulleyman with a wave of his hand. Pregnant, Mbarka would be more trouble than she was worth for a while.

“She is suitable for a Muslim,” he added as an extra selling point. “The procedure has already been performed. And as you can see, she has many fine...attributes.” The teenager was naked from the waist up. Her pregnancy was visible now only in her swollen, engorged breasts.

The girl was too old and well developed to be the 11-year-old child Idris and Leo had described.

“Two hundred and fifty pounds!” Omar laughed. “Is she made of gold? For that bag of gazelle bones I wouldn’t give you 100 pounds.”

Mbarka bowed her head in humiliation as the two men bartered for her like an animal in the marketplace. Her dark cheeks flushed with shame.

“I seek very young girls. Girls who have not yet been used as this one has.”

Sulleyman stopped. Apparently, he would not make money tonight after all.

“I am afraid I cannot help you. I have only one girl who fits your description.” Sulleyman’s voice grew suddenly ragged and hungry. “And tonight I will take this girl who has never known a man and initiate her into womanhood.”

The thought of it instantly put him into a good mood. “You are welcome to sleep in my camp tonight by the fire and not venture back out into the bush.” It was indeed a magnanimous offer to a stranger. “But it is not possible for us to transact any business.”

Omar refused to back down. He stepped closer to Sulleyman. “I have traveled a long way. I seek very young girls, and I will pay a premium price to get one. I am prepared to give you four hundred pounds if you have such a girl in camp.”

The soldiers who stood in the firelight murmured among themselves in surprise. Four hundred Sudanese pounds—for a slave? “The going rate is one hundred pounds per slave, yes?” He didn’t wait for Sulleyman’s reply. “You will get back four times the investment you have made. Pay one hundred, get back four hundred—you can only do that at the camel races.”

Sulleyman certainly wanted to sell a slave tonight to this man who obviously had more money than good judgment. Just not the slave the man wanted. Since Mbarka’s pregnancy did not yet show, perhaps Sulleyman could palm her off on the stranger. Then it would be his problem to put up with an undesirable slave and get rid of her useless offspring.

“I might be willing to make you a special deal on this one.” He pointed to Mbarka. “Only because you have traveled so far and it is late, I will let you have her for two twenty-five.”

Omar wouldn’t budge.

“This one has known many men, probably every man in this camp.” He gestured at the darkened tents just outside the glow of the campfire. “I seek young, less experienced girls. Faoud told me it would be weeks before he gets in another shipment, and I need slaves for my boss now.”

He lowered his voice and his tone was urgent. “And I need a virgin for myself...tonight!”

Sulleyman laughed.

“Faoud is sharper than an adder’s fangs. Don’t believe anything he tells you. He peddles more flesh than anyone in the country. He can find you what you want, and you won’t have to wait two weeks to get it. He’s just trying to jack up the price.”

Sulleyman stopped, did some mental arithmetic and made a decision. “I tell you what,” he said slowly. He hated to do it, but business was business. “This virgin girl I have, you can have her tomorrow for the four hundred pounds you offered. You get a young girl, and I make a good profit.”

Omar reached into his pocket and produced the leather money pouch. He emptied it, took from it every remaining pound Idris’s village had given him.

“Everything Faoud said about you is true,” he said respectfully. “He told me you were a shrewd businessman who drives a hard bargain. You are a better negotiator than I am. I will give you five hundred pounds for the girl, the
virgin
girl. It is, as you can see, all I have.”

The soldiers were stunned. Nobody paid that kind of money for a mere slave. Virgin or not, a girl’s a girl. After their employer took the man’s money, he would tell the tale forever afterward about the fool who came in the night and paid a king’s ransom for a skinny little slave.

Sulleyman surprised them. With a wave of his hand, the Arab chieftain dismissed the pile of money and Omar.

“Again, my friend, you are welcome to spend the night by the fire.” Omar could see twin flames of fiery lust burn in the man’s eyes. “But the little slave girl is mine.”

Sulleyman turned and strode back toward his tent. The soldiers shook their heads in disbelief and began to disperse to their sleeping tents. Omar stood very still for a few seconds, the look on his face unreadable.

“Master Sulleyman,” he said, quietly, “I have one final offer.” 

Sulleyman didn’t even turn around. “I don’t care if it’s another two hundred pounds. I told you, I’m not interested.”

Omar set his left foot up on a large stone beside the fire, leaned over and pulled up his pants leg. His personal money pouch was firmly attached to his calf. He reached into the pouch and pulled out a pile of bills, all the money he had in the world. “You might change your mind when you know what the offer is,” he said.

Time was measured in breaths. In, out. In, out. The world shifted on its axis, but the men who waited for Omar’s return in the moonlit desert night were suspended over infinity in a crystal Christmas ornament that swayed endlessly back and forth. There was no time, no past, no future. Life was a forever now.

In the profound desert silence, they would hear anything that approached long before they could see it. They froze at the tiniest sound, their hearing so focused they could have detected the slither of a snake across the sand.

The silence was a prison that held each man locked tight inside, a captive of his own thoughts, hopes and fears. Ron and Masapha still reeled from the pendulum swing of their circumstances. They’d been rescued from the razor’s edge between life and eternity, returned from the world of the dying to the world of the living. Gratefully, their emotional response to the reversal hadn’t hit yet; they didn’t have time for that right now.

Masapha scooted away from Leo and whispered to Ron, who crouched in the darkness and strained with the others to detect any hint of Omar’s return.

“Do you think maybe they have made of Omar a prisoner?” Ron turned to respond and noticed that Leo had tucked his chin down close to his chest.

“Keep an eye on that snake,” he told Masapha. “Looks like he’s trying to loosen his gag.”

Masapha pulled Leo’s gag so tight it cut into the corners of his mouth. Then he sat back down and all was still and quiet again. The only sound that broke the stillness was almost no sound at all, less than the whisper of a breeze. It was the sound of prayer.

The tribal was no longer on his knees. He lay face down. His whispered words gently moved the grains of sand in front of his mouth.

Ron, Masapha and Koto watched him as he petitioned the God of the universe to intervene in the fortunes of his child. Each of them had come to care for the Dinkan farmer. Koto remembered the kindness the tribal had shown to a frightened boy he didn’t know, whose language he didn’t speak. Ron and Masapha thought about the brutal beating the man had suffered in silence, how the whip slashed again and again into his back. All of them had been indelibly touched by the sacrificial love of the tall, thin African father.

His father’s grave was next to his mother’s, but each had an individual stone. Hers had been there for almost 20 years longer than his. The stones were under an oak tree with a fresh spring umbrella of bright-green leaves. Dan had always liked that oak tree. He’d wanted so badly to climb it when he, his father and Ron had come to the cemetery to visit his mother’s grave. If ever there was a good climbing tree, that oak was it.

A simple stone. Date of birth. Date of death. None of that “beloved father/brother/son/husband” stuff.

“Paul Daniel Wolfson,” Dan read out loud. Then he leaned back against the big concrete crypt near his parents’ graves, the final resting place of the dentist who’d filled his teeth when he was a kid. A breeze nudged the bushes, and purple, pink and white blossoms rained down onto the grass. Dan breathed in a lungful of air that smelled so clean it must have been freshly washed and hung out on the line to dry.

It seemed foolish to speak out loud to a headstone, but Dan did it anyway. “I wonder what it would have been like to know you—not as my father, but as a man. I think I would have liked you, that you and I would have been friends. I think we would have had some good times together. I know we would have laughed—you liked to laugh, I remember that. I remember the sound of it. It was booming, like your voice when you preached.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Yeah, we’d have gone on some crusade together, too, I bet. We’d have climbed on our horses and gone out to attack some windmill somewhere. We’re a lot alike, you and I.”

He paused, surprised at the wave of emotion, at how very desperately he missed his father and wanted to talk to him, just once, right now.