do you want them?” Rashid asked Sheikh Muhammad. “In your field over there?” he said, pointing his head to the north.
“That’s very kind of you, but my grandson, Cloudy, will put them in a field away from the village, just to be safe.” Cloudy got his nickname because he was so tall that people in the village teased him that his head reached the clouds.
Rashid duly accompanied Cloudy to the fields well beyond the village. Zara, still lurking by the door of the kitchen hut, watched Rashid’s labored steps. His eyes frightened Zara, as if they were dead and yet angry. She wondered what was making him so unhappy, and why his grandfather hadn’t noticed it or had chosen not to notice. Perhaps Rashid would have liked to be given the option of going to school. Uthman was rich, so it should not have been a problem for them, but her grandfather had told her they were also very old-fashioned and mean with their money. Uthman seemed to have decided the boy’s future for him, without considering his feelings.
For Zara, the opposite was true. She and her grandfather had a standing joke about reading each other’s thoughts, so quick were they to pick up each other’s mood.
“That’s because we’re so similar,” Sheikh Muhammad had told her often. “Even when you were a tiny baby, I could tell from your eyes that you could see right through me, so I made a decision to always tell you the truth,” he had laughed. She couldn’t imagine Sheikh Uthman having such a conversation with his smoldering grandson, and she felt sorry for Rashid. He’s like a neglected plant, she thought.
Later, when she served the family men their dinner, she heard her grandfather ask Cloudy if the goats were healthy. When he was told that they were, her grandfather seemed relieved.
“But I think it’s best I stay with them, Grandfather,” Cloudy continued. “Several of the other families are moving their goats farther away, just in case we’re attacked.”
“Make sure you take enough blankets to keep warm,” his grandfather warned. Then he gazed out over the village, “He’s a strange one, Uthman, and I don’t understand why he isn’t more worried about the Janjaweed.”
“Perhaps because he’s such good friends with the authorities,” suggested Zara’s father sarcastically. “You heard him.”
“That’s what worries me. God help the poor man, if he thinks they’re going to protect him.”
CHAPTER SIX
Sheik Muhammad’s village, Darfur
At five forty the following morning Zara awoke with a jolt, gripping her blanket tightly with both hands. She sat up, awake and alert, even though the grey dawn light was only just seeping into her hut. Her two half-sisters, with whom she shared the hut, were also emerging from sleep, startled and asking what was going on. Then, at the same moment, each girl realized what had woken them—the deep drumming of horses’ hooves. They scrambled from their beds, heading for the door, pulling their blankets around their shoulders like robes.
The air in their compound was already filled with dust, stirred up by the horses, as if a sandstorm had swept across the valley, engulfing their village. Through the dirty, swirling cloud came guttural, rasping, Arabic shouts: “Get up, you lazy slaves! Get out of here!”
There was a whooshing noise frighteningly close to her right ear, and something landed on the roof with a thump. Zara’s knees went weak, and she thought she was about to faint from fear. But instead she ran faster than she knew possible, followed by her half-sisters, all of them too terrified to look back.
Zara’s father appeared at the door of his hut, scanning the compound, confused. Seeing the flaming torch on the roof of his daughters’ hut, he rushed to the girls, hugging them. An instant later her mother and her grandfather were there too, comforting them, stroking their hair.
“They’re brave girls,” her father commented, blinking tears from his hazel eyes. “And quick too, thank God.”
They stood watching trails of smoke rising from the thatch roof of Zara’s hut. Hundreds of insects that made their home in the densely-packed dried grass stirred, emerging like a hazy layer that hovered uncertainly above. Then suddenly the flames crept across it in a smooth blue and yellow wave. No one rushed to fetch buckets of water because they knew it was too late. Within three minutes the thatch had been consumed by a roaring, snapping fire. Ten minutes after the torch was thrown, the hut was a sizzling, blackened shell.
“What about Cloudy?” asked Zara, recalling that her half-brother had spent the night minding the recently purchased livestock in their field beyond the village. She felt her heart lurch as she wondered how well concealed he had been.
Zara’s older brother, Abdelatif, turned to their grandfather. “I’m going to check on Cloudy. We should warn him what’s going on.”
Zara’s pulse began to race at the prospect of her tall, skinny brother confronting the Janjaweed. Although she had never told him, she thought of Abdelatif as an egret, a long-limbed, graceful bird with a small head, thin neck and angular features, not as a fighter or a tough guy. Was her father really going to allow eighteen-year-old Abdelatif to put himself in danger? She wished everything would slow down for a moment. Most of all, she wanted to rewind time and stop the creeping fear flooding her veins. She squeezed her eyes closed and hung on to her father.
“Is it safe to leave the village yet?” Zara asked.
“It’s over,” remarked Sheikh Muhammad. “They’ve delivered their message, loud and clear.”
Zara noticed her grandfather’s voice sounded strained, as she had never heard it before. She was even more alarmed when her beloved Abdelatif walked out of the compound, his head held high. She prayed her grandfather would have second thoughts and stop him, but the sheikh was already talking to the villagers who had gathered at the gate.
“God is merciful, and thankfully no one was hurt,” Muhammad told the local men, his voice suddenly calm and reassuring once more. “The Janjaweed won’t come back today. Go home and be with your families.”
A moment ago, Zara thought, her grandfather had been shaking with fury, but he now had himself under control. Even if he was doubtful and afraid, she knew he would be strong in the presence of the others. Slowly the crowd shook itself out of its collective shock and people wandered off to get on with their day.
Her hands were still quivering as she ate her breakfast of porridge from the communal bowl. She felt a further tremor of dread as she realized that everyone in their village had been living in a happy bubble in which Janjaweed attacks happened to other Darfuris, but not to them.
We’re all blind fools, she thought. We’ll have to leave our village, just like millions of others across Darfur; just like the caravans of people we’ve seen passing by our village, on their way to the refugee camps. This is it, she realized, terrified and yet too stunned to cry or express her fears. The time had come to be strong like her grandfather. She carried the porridge bowl to the kitchen hut, resolving to wash it, and do all her other tasks and errands, before her mother asked her to.
* * *
Cloudy was already awake and eating breakfast when the Janjaweed appeared. He had slept badly, unaccustomed to bedding down with just a blanket, outdoors. Nevertheless he was in a cheerful mood, humming an Egyptian pop song he had heard on the radio the previous day.
He
