CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Itried to play the scene in my mind a hundred times, and a hundred times I found it impossible to say goodbye to Jahnu. How could the last month of certifiable chaos erase years of rational thought?
Could this be a symptom of my multiple head contusions?
Though my head wound had healed, the Hundi tribe, and let’s be honest, Jahnu’s arms, had become a kind of silken cocoon of safety.
The desire to remain in my present circumstances, despite the absurdity of it, engulfed me.
I allowed my mind to imagine a life here, but knew that’s all it could ever be.
I tried to sleep, but the woven mattress felt like a sack of rocks and creaked on the rickety frame every time I shifted.
Just a few hours ago, Jahnu had walked me to my treehouse, kissed my forehead goodnight, and disappeared into the darkness.
His quiet control unnerved me. I felt the vibration of his desire.
I wanted to ask him to climb the ladder with me, knowing he could not so easily refuse me.
I wanted to fling my arms around his neck and ask him not to take me back in the morning.
But I’d done neither, and wondered briefly if the control I asserted on my emotions unsettled him as much as he did me.
Restless, I rose from the bed to stare at the night sky.
A gentle breeze tickled the wisps of hair that had fallen from my braid, and on the wind I breathed the hearty scent of peat moss and soil.
The moon, a crescent half orb, lingered near the western horizon telling me the long, sleepless night would soon be over.
I finally allowed my thoughts to rest on Greg.
Soon I’d be reunited with him and the life I’d left only a few weeks ago.
Would I tell him of all that had happened?
Could I keep from him what had happened between me and Jahnu without being consumed with guilt?
I always considered myself adept at keeping my thoughts and feelings guarded, especially with Greg, who’d never been very perceptive of my emotions.
But after being so laid bare by Jahnu, I found the seeds of doubt, that I’d ever been good at hiding, beginning to sprout.
I knew I may very well be returning to a life that looked much different than the one I’d left behind.
I would tell him and live with the consequences, come what may.
Several moments passed with nothing but the trill of cicadas and crickets and the hypnotic buzz of the jungle at night.
And then out of the quiet came a rising cry, the voice of a Hundi man carried on the wind, his words urgent but undefinable.
More voices joined in and the volume rose, as they grew closer, waking the sleeping village.
Panic crept over the skin on the back of my neck. After I scrambled into my shoes and climbed down the rickety ladder, three thwack thwack thwack noises sounded from the forest.
A high pitched scream made me lose my footing on one of the rungs and I plummeted the rest of the way to the ground, knocking the breath from me.
Wheezing, I rolled to my back, the stars overhead spinning in a kaleidoscope as I struggled to bring air into my lungs. The sounds of attack rose around me.
Finally the dizziness abated. I stayed low, crawling on my forearms and belly to an outcropping of trees that provided better covering.
My ankle throbbed and I cursed under my breath, wiping sweat from my forehead.
I had dropped at least eight feet. Was it broken, or sprained?
I turned and sat on my bottom, gently testing the mobility of my ankle by rolling it around.
I sucked in a breath of pain just as three shadowy figures ran across the path only ten feet in front of me.
I held my breath.
They held guns.
I cursed quietly. What could I do? I mentally flipped through several scenarios, none of which was forming a plan in my mind. I knew one thing for certain, I could do nothing from my hiding place.
Crawling on hands and knees through dense foliage toward the communal hut, I continued to hear shouts, now mixed with the sounds of fearful whimpers from Hundi families being pulled from their beds and forced to huddle together in the dirt.
Anger rose like bile in my mouth. If they hurt any of my new friends, so help me…but who were ‘they’? If it was the Makian’s, wouldn’t they be searching for me? Had I brought all this on Hundi?
I continued to crawl, the damp dirt clinging to my hands and knees, until I saw Sali sitting with M’Lea and the grandchildren across the path. I had to get to them without being seen, and finally managed to hobble from tree to tree on my bum ankle, the darkness my only cover.
Taking the long way around to the backside of the hut, I stood to catch my breath, pressing myself against the thatched walls as a group of men ran past me going the opposite direction.
Who were they? Where was Jahnu? His hut was on the other side of the village.
And where were the other Hundi warriors? They were conspicuous in their absence.
I leaned my body around the wall enough to see the shadowy shapes of the women and children in the yard. I could see the outline of one man holding a gun, standing guard a few feet from the group on the opposite side.
I crawled until I was close enough to catch Sali’s attention in the faint glow of the moon. I threw a few pebbles near her feet until she looked up and recognized my crouched shape against the building. She inched closer, slowly, so as not to draw attention from the guard.
“Pikinini,” she whispered, with veiled relief.
“What’s happening?” I asked. “Who are these men? Is it Makia?”
“I do not know. Some of the men may be Makia, but some are Hundi. Our own brothers from the eastern village. Some from the north…I recognize them, but some men I do not know.”
But why would Hundi attack their own tribespeople? Unless Mimbeck had succeeded in mustering his own men to stage a mutiny against Jahnu.
Suddenly my heart dropped, and I knew I had to get to Jahnu before anything happened to him.
“Stay with the children. I’ll try to figure out what’s going on.
” I maneuvered myself back the way I came, without being seen by the young man with the gun, and now I stood on the backside of the huts that lined the yard leading up to the communal canopy.
The field where the children practiced their archery stretched out in front of me.
My heart beat wildly with rising adrenaline. What was I going to do? I listened for a while, the resonance of the jungle making it hard to decipher the sounds I heard coming from up the hill. I definitely heard men’s voices, but couldn’t tell what they were saying.
I left my hiding place and inched my way toward the noise. The huts were my only cover as I went, but thankfully my ankle was momentarily anesthetized under the dose of adrenaline coursing through my body.
As I neared, I saw the flicker of candlelight and torches. The shadows danced on the walls and ceiling of the canopy as the commotion intensified in the place, where just hours before, I had prepared Stahgan’s body for burial.
Then I heard it, a voice I recognized but hadn’t heard in many, many days. The words sounded strange to my ears—English words, but spoken without accent, or at least without the accent I had been accustomed to over the last month. They sounded so very American.
“Where is she?” he yelled. Greg.
Greg was here. Greg was at Hundi village. Greg was just up the hill on the other side of the thatched walls that made the communal canopy a cozy refuge of family mealtimes and tribal sing-sings.
Without thinking, I started to run. I closed the gap between us, bounded into the hut with equal parts apprehension and excitement, when I was met with a picture I couldn’t quite grasp in my mind.
It was like the negative of a 35mm film, shrouded in amber light—only the outlines of the most prominent features visible when held up for illumination.
The colors and values seemed inverted in the darkness. It was all wrong.
Greg didn’t look like Greg. He was unshaved and his beard was a smattering of patchy piles in different shades of disarray.
His hair was long and hung in his face. His clothes, dirty and hung off his long, lanky body like he was a castaway on a deserted island and had lost his desire to care about his appearance.
But none of that bothered me quite like the image that stood before me in a dizzying array of contradictions.
Greg was holding a gun.
“What the hell is going on?” I blurted.
“Sidney? Oh Sidney!” Greg bounded to me, holding the gun—some kind of AK47 semi-automatic—to his side and crushed me against him with his other arm.
He reeked of body odor and liquor and I was momentarily frozen with surprise and disgust. I just stood there, awkwardly, letting him hug me, but standing rigid without returning the gesture.
“I knew it!” he said, pulling away. “I knew you were still alive. I could feel it,” he said, pounding his chest, his eyes crazed as they took me in. “Are you alright? They didn’t hurt you, did they?”
“Greg? How…how did you…?” And then the rest of the scene filled my vision.
Mimbeck’s large form loomed in the dark canopy.
Torch light lit his glowering face. A few Hundi men surrounded him, one I recognized as the man, Hani, who’d hit me the day we visited the eastern village.
I did not recognize the others, but their nervous energy reverberated off them in a visible display of discomfort and anxiety.
More shouting turned our attention to a pack of men coming up the pathway from the other side. They drug someone by the arms into the dimly lit space and my breath caught in my throat.
“Jahnu!” I whispered. His chin rested on his chest, his head lolled as if he was unconscious. They held his body up between them, and grabbing his fro, lifted his head toward Mimbeck.
“Jahnu!” I flew to him. His eye was already swollen shut.
Blood dripped from his nose, his eyebrow, down his neck from his ear.
A big hand swept me away and I would’ve fallen back if it hadn’t been for Greg catching me.
Mimbeck growled something incoherent to my ears and Hani stepped forward, addressing Greg.
“Mimbeck says he has fulfilled his part of the agreement…now you must fulfill yours.”
I turned on Greg. “What is he talking about?” Greg wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Greg, look at me. What did you agree to?”
“I was never going to do it, Sid I swear! But Mimbeck showed up at Makia saying he knew where you were! I had almost given up. I had booked a plane ride home,” he was visibly crying, the turmoil of the last month catching up to him and wreaking havoc on his face.
“I was willing to do anything to find you! I knew…I knew you were still alive.”
“What did you do?” I yelled, my own angry tears pricking the back of my eyes, threatening to spill over.
Jahnu let out a soft moan, as if he regained consciousness.
I went to him, and this time Mimbeck did not stop me.
I placed my hands carefully on either side of his head, examining the damage Mimbeck’s men had done.
His nose was broken and his left eye, bruised and swollen.
His lip bled, and I checked his ear, fearing an intracranial hemorrhage or orbital fracture.
“Are you ok?” I whispered. “I’m scared, Jahnu. What can I do?”
“Sidney?” It was Greg’s voice behind me, but I ignored him, searching Jahnu’s face for recognition. His one working eye caught mine in a look of tortured tenderness when he said, “Sid-de-nee…let me speak to my uncle.”