Tongues of Fire (33 page)

“Stop.”

“I love you too.”

“Stop.”

“Don't worry. I'll catch it in my mouth.”

She did.

Afterward Neimy filled the calabashes with the bath water and took them outside. The Mahdi lay alone on the bedstead. His worries had gone away. For a little while his mind was empty. Then he began to hear the low voices, the moving feet, and from time to time the trickling of water; his worries returned. He did not love Neimy. And he could not be sure exactly what she meant when she said she loved him. She loved the way the Baggara loved. He, if he loved, would love partly like that, but partly in other ways as well. Even forgetting that, did she love him as a man or as the Mahdi? It did not really matter because there was no Mahdi and he was not the man she thought he was.

But of course there was a Mahdi. He got off the bedstead and went outside. The calabashes lay on the ground in front of the tent. A crowd had gathered, perhaps four or five hundred people, maybe more. There were more every day. He saw the light brown Arab faces of camel-raising nomads from the north and the black faces of cattle herders and millet farmers from the south. He saw Fur faces and Fulani faces and even a few Berber faces; and faces of other peoples he did not know, who came from the states that had been torn apart far away in the west. One by one they stepped forward, men, women, and children, and Neimy dipped a brass ladle into the bath water and held it to their lips for a ritual sip.

When they saw him they fell silent, like a concert audience when the conductor raises his baton. The Mahdi looked over their heads and saw the tents that covered the ground in all directions, as far as he could see. There were the round tents of his own people, and pointed tents and flat-topped tents. Some were big, some were small. They were all there because of him.

Slowly he turned and walked back into the tent. Outside, the low murmuring rose again. Water trickled. He covered the entrance to the tent with a large straw mat and paced back and forth in the hot darkness. He knew he could not wait much longer. Many of the people in those tents, especially the ones from the west, were armed. They had American guns, Russian guns, French guns; it depended on which war they had been fighting, and on whose side they had fought. Soon they would need food. So would their animals. Already the herds had eaten most of the grass for miles around. The few pools that still had water were now very small. Even the deep wells were drying up. Everyone was waiting for some signal from him.

Three and a half steps forward, three and a half steps back.

But what? How could he do anything before he knew more about the world beyond Kordofan, beyond the Sudan, beyond Africa? Only his father could have told him what he had to know; Bokur could not tell him. It was no use trying to find in Bokur what he needed from his father. All that did was make Hurgas hate him more.

Three and a half steps forward, three and a half steps back.

He heard horses outside the tent. A man spoke. Neimy answered. She pushed back the straw mat and entered the tent. He stopped pacing.

“A problem?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “At the watering hole. Dinka.”

Someone brought him the black mare. He rode across the camp, following the rows of tents like streets. Everyone stopped what they were doing to watch him. He did not look at them, but rode on. He was thinking about power. He began to realize how smart his father had been. Yet from the time he was a very little boy he had always thought himself much smarter than his father. Had he been wrong? His whole life had been a dream in his father's head. How could he be smarter than the dreamer? The dreamer had given him power. Now he would have to be smart enough to use it on his own.

Or he could go away. But how? Where? Why? He wanted to be what he was becoming. Was that part of the dream too? He forced himself to stop thinking about his father.

At the edge of the camp was a shallow depression about one mile wide. Bokur had told him that years before it was always entirely filled after the rains. Now there was nothing more than a little pool of brackish water in the middle. By the pool stood men from the camp; some of them held rifles across their chest. A few yards beyond them were twenty or thirty Dinka, and about a dozen cattle, short-horned animals smaller than the Baggara cattle.

The Mahdi rode down into the depression and halted in front of the Dinka. They were tall black people, naked except for the little scraps of hide that hung over their genitals. He looked at them and saw the bones under their dusty skin; the swollen bellies of the children; the sickly rust-colored hair of the babies. He felt the eyes of his own people on his back. It was time to begin.

“What do you want?” he asked. A gaunt old man answered in his own language. “I do not understand Dinka,” the Mahdi said. “Do none of you know Arabic?”

A boy stepped forward. He had a bloated belly and a cataract that covered one eye like a white glaze. “Water,” the boy said in Arabic. “We are thirsty. Our cattle are thirsty.” The old man called the boy to him and said something in a sharp voice. The boy nodded and looked up at the Mahdi. “Water, master. Let us drink.”

“I am not your master,” the Mahdi said. “There is only one master.”

“Please, master.”

A rusty-haired baby began to cry. Its mother held it to her thin and wrinkled breast. It kept crying. “Are your people Muslim?” the Mahdi asked the boy.

“No.”

“Are they Jews? Or Christians? Because,” he raised his voice so his own people could hear him better, “the Koran says that there is a special place for Christians and Jews.”

“No,” the boy answered.

“Then you cannot drink here.”

The boy turned to the old man and spoke to him. The old man listened and said nothing. The boy looked up at the Mahdi. “We are thirsty,” he said in a low voice.

“Your people may drink on one condition,” the Mahdi said. “You must accept Islam. To accept Islam you must give up all your old gods forever.”

The boy said something to the old man. The old man shook his head and began to walk away. A woman spoke to him. He answered her. She began to scream at him. Others began to scream. The old man argued with them. They shouted over him. After a while the old man stopped arguing. They all became silent. Another man spoke to the boy. The boy turned to the Mahdi and said: “We will accept Islam.”

“Then drink,” the Mahdi told him. “And after, come to my tent. I will give you food and show you how to be a Muslim.”

The naked people ran toward the pool of water. Their cattle followed. Only the old man stayed where he was. After a while he walked slowly away, across the depression.

The Mahdi looked at his people and saw the approval in their eyes. He knew that he had done something his father could never have done. He would be better on his own. His father had dreamed. He would act.

For a few moments he watched them drink. Then he remembered the coughing child and rode quickly back to the camp, straight to the tent he had noted during the night. He jumped off his horse and looked inside. A red-eyed woman told him the child was dead.

CHAPTER THIRTY

Slowly the Mahdi walked back toward his tent. He led the black mare by the bridle. Above him the afternoon sun made the pearly sky shimmer and writhe in the heat. He had grown used to the African sun: It was part of normal life like rusty hair and swollen bellies. Now, suddenly, he felt it very strongly—its heat, its weight, its bite. The mare nudged his back with her nose. He walked faster.

Neimy sat in the entrance to the tent, sharpening a knife on a flat stone. Her head was in the shade but her hands were not. The blade flashed little suns in his eyes as it scraped back and forth.

“A woman came looking for you,” Neimy said. He heard a wariness in her tone that made him want to look closely at her face. All he saw were flashing golden suns.

“What kind of woman?”

“A Turk.” The noise of the scraping grew louder.

He knew a Turk could be any foreigner, or even someone from the government. “Is she from Khartoum?”

“I don't know.”

“What did she want?”

“To talk to you.” A spark flew off the stone and vanished in the air.

“What about?”

“I don't know. She went with Hurgas to find you. She will come back.”

He tethered the horse to a stake driven into the ground beside the tent. “When?”

“I don't know.” She leaned aside to let him pass. He went into the tent and lay down. The golden suns faded from his eyes. It was dark and very still. He listened to steel scraping on stone. For a while there was nothing else to hear; then from somewhere in the distance came the noise of a motor. It grew louder. The scraping stopped. He rose and went outside.

An open jeep was approaching between the rows of tents. A woman was driving. Hurgas sat beside her. Although she drove slowly, Hurgas was very nervous. The Mahdi could see that he was leaning forward with his hands on the dashboard, peering anxiously through the windshield. The jeep rolled up in front of the tent. Hurgas fumbled for a moment with the door handle, and then climbed over the side. “That's him,” he said to the woman.

The woman opened the door and got out. She was white. She had thick chestnut hair streaked yellow by the sun. She wore khaki trousers and a khaki shirt with big pockets; a camera hung around her neck.

“Are you the man they call the Mahdi?” she asked in Arabic, looking at him. Her eyes were pale blue. It had been a long time since he had seen blue eyes; he could not stop staring at them. She lowered her eyelids.

“I am,” he said.

“I'd like to talk to you.” She spoke Arabic very well, but with a faint trace of an accent he thought was American. “I'm a reporter.” She handed him a plastic card.

He glanced at it. He saw her photograph, her name—Gillian Wells, and a list of newspapers and magazines in the United States and Europe. All the print was in English. “I don't read this language,” he said, giving it back to her.

“It's my press card. It just says that I'm an accredited journalist and where my articles appear.” She named the newspapers and magazines.

“I don't think I have anything to say that would interest people so far from here.”

Her eyes sought his and he felt her pale blue gaze. He was accustomed to brown eyes that he could look into and read. When he looked into her eyes he could not see past their blueness. “If you are really the Mahdi they will be interested,” she said.

“He is the Mahdi,” Neimy said in a clear, deliberate voice behind him. He turned and looked at her sitting in the shade by the entrance to the tent. She was watching the white woman.

“Then you'll answer a few questions?” the white woman said to him.

He thought of his father, if he was alive, opening a newspaper in some far-off place and finding her article. He did not believe his father was alive, and he had seldom seen him reading a newspaper, but he said, “Yes.”

“Good. Is there somewhere we can go to talk?”

“Here,” the Mahdi said, sitting down. “This is my wife and her brother. I have no secrets from them.”

The woman sat on the ground opposite him. Hurgas stood by the jeep. Taking a notebook and a pencil from the pocket of her shirt, the woman said, “I understand that you have not always lived here, among these people.”

He glanced quickly at Hurgas. Hurgas was gazing down at his feet. The Mahdi turned to the woman and saw that she had followed his glance. Already he regretted he had decided to talk to her. “That's true,” he said. “I am an orphan. For a while I lived with other nomads in the north. But I am a Baggara. Look at me.”

She looked at him. So did Hurgas and Neimy. Their stares did not bother him. He was used to people staring: He was big and well formed. And he was the Mahdi.

After a pause she said: “Apparently your coming here was foretold many years ago.” The blue eyes watched him closely.

He kept himself from glancing again at Hurgas. “So they say.”

“Do you believe in prophecy of that sort?”

“How can you ask a Muslim if he believes in prophecy?”

“But we're living in a scientific world. Doesn't all religion, Islam included, have to change with the times?”

“Islam does not change,” he said. “It makes change.”

“What about science? Surely expanding scientific knowledge changes everything?”

The Mahdi looked beyond her at the rows of tents away into the distance. The sun had dipped a little lower in the dusty sky and was starting to turn it red. “Where is this science that you talk about?”

The blue eyes flickered; and he knew that soon they might be like any other eyes he had known: windows to the thoughts inside. He found himself trying to imagine the life he would be living if he had never left North America. The woman wrote in her notebook and said nothing. He watched her face. The sun had tanned it and stretched the skin tightly across her bones. The tip of her nose had burned and peeled many times, leaving a small pink spot on which he saw one or two tiny scab-covered fissures. They made him think there was something fragile about her. Fragility was much more exotic than cameras or journalists or white skin. Here fragility died young.

Suddenly he was conscious of a half-forgotten smell in the air. He inhaled deeply through his nostrils and smelled it: her smell. It was soap and apples. He remembered a bushel basket of red apples on the kitchen floor at Lac du Loup.

Behind him the knife scraped on the stone. He forced himself to stop thinking about apples or Lac du Loup. It was harder to stop thinking about the woman—there wasn't an ocean between them. “Do you have any more questions to ask me?” he said to her.

She looked up from her notebook. “Yes. But I'd like to see something of the camp first.”

“Very well. Hurgas will take you where you want to go.”