"The Strap"

They went into the forest because there was nowhere else, and because the something behind them left no other choice.

It was not a forest like the ones Kàkà knew. Her forests were flat and wet, mangrove and mud, water under all of it. This was old grey rock heaved up out of the trees, cliffs that came at you with no warning, the ground turning from leaf-rot to bare stone and back inside a single stride, and the roots here did not lie down. They went over the boulders and hung off the ledges like things that had decided to stop being roots. You did not run here. You climbed, and you fell, and you hauled each other up the stone by the wrist, and you called it running because there was no better word for going as fast as you could away from men who wanted you dead.

Márànata went first. She knew the ground---Kàkà could tell, because Márànata did not choose her turns, she only took them, the way you take the turns in a house you grew up in. She had run this rock before. The brothel had taught her to run, and the debt had taught her, and now the rock was teaching the soldiers nothing it had not already taught her, and she was still ahead of all of it. Still alive.

Then the first gun went off behind them.

And Kàkà's hands moved.

They went---both of them, before she had even heard the shot all the way through---to the place at her chest and her shoulder where the strap crossed, the canvas strap, the one that held the rifle against her body so the rifle was always there, always to hand, its weight the first thing she had ever been given that was only hers. Her hands closed on the strap.

There was no strap. There was no rifle. There had been no rifle for months, but her hands had never been told. Her hands went on being a soldier's hands inside a body somebody had taken the soldier out of, and they closed on the cloth of her own shirt and found her own thin shoulder under it and nothing else---no canvas, no weight, nothing to bring up and put between herself and the sound. She let go of her shirt. She kept climbing. Her hands did not understand, and there was no time to explain it to them.

Sparrow climbed in front of her.

Sparrow's feet were bare. There had been no time for shoes, and the rock was opening them up, dark prints on the grey behind her, and she did not make one sound about it. She had learned the same thing Kàkà had learned: that a sound was a something that got you noticed, and getting noticed was a something that got you taken. So she bled and she climbed and she said nothing, and Kàkà stayed at her back, because the path behind was where the men were, and Kàkà had decided, without deciding it, that the men would have to come through her to reach the small one.

The soldiers were not trying to kill them. Kàkà knew the difference in her body. When men want you dead they go quiet and spread out and come at you from the sides; when men want you somewhere, they make noise and they push, firing high, shouting, driving you the way you drive goats toward the one gate you left open. The shots were going over their heads. The engines---two bikes, then a third, and under them the deeper grind of something bigger---stayed back, herding, pushing them up and along, toward the high rock, toward wherever the gate was. Kàkà had been driven before. She knew she was being driven now. She hated that she could not yet see the shape of where it ended.

The rock face at the top of the first rise went near to straight up, a body and a half of it, one seam to put your hands and feet in. Márànata went up it like a lizard. She reached down and took the first girl's wrist and pulled, and the girls went up one by one.

Ésa could not.

She had one arm. The other was still bound to her chest. She stood at the bottom of it with her face gone flat and furious at her own body, and the bikes were closing, and Kàkà saw the whole of it in one breath: that Ésa would stand there and be taken before she would say she could not, because saying she could not was a door Ésa did not open.

So Kàkà did not make her open it.

"Foot here," Kàkà said, going in low under her, lacing her own two hands into a stirrup the way the boy at the camp had taught her to leg a smaller child up a wall. "I push, she pulls, you hold with the one. Go. Don't think about it. Go." And Ésa put her good hand up into Márànata's and her foot into Kàkà's hands, and Kàkà drove up with the whole of her small body and her legs shaking under her, and Ésa went up the rock on one arm and a child's shoulders, and at the top she lay a moment with her face against the stone. Kàkà came up last. Scrambling. No one to push her, the way it always was---the one at the back who legs everyone else up the wall and then claws up alone behind them.

The bikes reached the bottom of the rise and could not climb it. They turned, looking for the way around, and the way around was the goat path, and the goat path was the gate, and Kàkà understood that too, a half-second before it could have done her any good, and there was nothing to do with the understanding but keep moving.

⁂

The first one died on the ridge, and Kàkà did not see it happen.

She was running third, ahead of Sparrow-and then the rock where she had been had no girl on it. There was a sound. It was not a cry. It was a soft heavy sound, cloth and meat going down onto stone, the sound a thing makes when it has stopped being able to catch itself. Kàkà's head came round. The girl lay face-down on the grey with her arms thrown out in front of her, her hands still half-closed, still holding the shape of running, and she did not move and was not going to.

The girl behind her stopped. Bent. Reached.

"Leave her." Márànata did not turn her head to say it. "She's gone. Leave her."

The girl who had stopped straightened up. Her mouth was open. She was crying now, no sound to it, only the water coming down and her chest going, and she stepped over the gap where the other girl was and she kept running. And that was the something Kàkà put away in the place she put things: that the one crying was the one still running, that you could do both, that the body would go on up the rock with the face coming apart on top of it, because the body had learned that stopping was the single something it was not allowed.

Sparrow had seen. She made a sound---small, swallowed, the front of a sound bitten off---and Kàkà put a hand flat between her shoulder blades, hard, and she did not say it's alright, because it was not alright and Sparrow would know the lie. She said, "Up. With me. Don't look at the stone, look at my hand, go where my hand goes." And she set the hand on the rock ahead of them, and Sparrow went where it went, and they climbed past the gap, and behind them the gap stayed a gap.

The oldest one died trying to save them, and Kàkà did not see that either.

She was out on the goat path with Sparrow ahead of her and Ésa ahead of Sparrow, all of them strung along the rock with the drop on the one hand, when it happened, back up on the ridge they had just come off. Kàkà had not seen her stay. There was a boulder up there on the lip of the ridge, big as a cooking pot, big as two, balanced there since before any of them were born, and the oldest girl had put her shoulder to it because the men were coming up the path below it and she had worked out, in whatever time she had to work anything out, that she could not run anymore but she could still do this.

Kàkà heard the rock go. A grind, then a gathering, then the long crash of it down the slope, and under the crash other sounds---a bike, a man, the short cut-off ends of voices. And then, in the middle of all of it, one more sound that did not belong to the rock. Lighter. That went down with it.

She looked back.

There was the ridge. There was the lip where the boulder had sat, and the raw pale scar in the earth where it had torn away. There was no girl on the lip. The place the oldest one had been standing was a place with no one in it now, open to the sky, and the rock and whatever it had taken were still going down into the ravine and out of all hearing, and Kàkà's eyes went to the empty lip and held there one beat, two---

Ésa's hand closed on her shoulder. "Now." That was all of it. "Now."

They moved.

The lip stayed empty behind them. The crashing stopped somewhere far down where she did not have to look, and then there was nothing at all.

⁂

The bikes came up the goat path one behind the other, because the path would let them go no other way, and Márànata was waiting at the bend where the old tree leaned out over the drop.

She had a branch. She had broken it off while they climbed---a dead limb the length of her arm and thicker---and she held it low along her leg the way you hold a something you do not want seen until it is too late to matter, and when the first bike came round the bend she brought it up and across, into the chest and the throat of the rider, and he went off the back of the machine with his arms going and his mouth open, and the machine carried on over the edge of the path into the air and a long second later came apart on the rocks below. The second rider grabbed his brake, too late and too close, and the front wheel met the trunk and stopped, and the rider did not stop. He went on headfirst into the wood and folded down against the roots and stayed folded.

Kàkà found the rock without looking for it.

It was just there by her foot---loose, the size of her fist, heavier than it looked, one edge broken to a point---and her hand had it before she had decided anything, because her hands were forever deciding things ahead of her. A man came up the path on foot below Márànata, rifle up, close, no time, and her hands did the only thing they could with what they had---

And the wanting came up in her then, huge, worse than at the first gunshot, the want so big it was nearly a taste in the mouth: the want of the rifle. The weight of it. The one thing she had ever been good at, the thing that had kept her alive in the years she did not look at, the long black certainty of it rising to her eye and the whole world going simple behind the little notch at the end. Her body screamed for it. Her hands went half to the strap that was not there even as the other half drew back with the stone---the body trying to do two things at once, the soldier thing it still knew and the child thing it had been made into---and there was no rifle. There was a rock and a girl's arm. She threw the rock.

It hit the man in the face. She heard it land. There is a sound a rock makes on a face, and it is like no other sound, and her hands had never made that sound before, because the gun had always put a space between her and the sound---a distance, the clean far-off drop of a man going down a long way off. There was no distance now. He was ten feet from her and she heard the stone go into the front of his head and she saw what it did. He went sideways. His rifle fired up into nothing. He took one step, and another he did not mean to take, off his line, and the side of his head met the rock wall, and there was a second sound, worse, wetter, and he went down the wall the way a living thing does not go down---loose, all at once---and lay at the bottom of it with his face turned wrong and did not move.

Kàkà stood with her hand still open from the throw.

The hand was shaking. She looked at it shake. She told it to stop, the way she had always been able to tell it to stop---back when stopping it was a thing she did by laying it flat along the cold of the rifle and letting the metal hold it still---and there was no rifle, and the hand had nothing to lie against, and it went on shaking, and she could not make it stop, and she gave up trying, because Sparrow was looking at her.

Sparrow was looking at her hand, and at the man at the bottom of the wall, and back at her hand. Not afraid of Kàkà. Kàkà knew afraid, and this was not it. It was the look of one person finding a something in another person that they recognized-and Kàkà did not want it, not this one, not Sparrow seeing this thing in her. But it was too late. The rock was thrown and the man was down, and Sparrow had seen whose hands had done it, and what kind of hands they were.

"Come on," Kàkà said. Her voice did not shake, even though the hand did. "We're not done. Come on."

They came off the goat path onto the high ground, and the high ground was the end of it. The cliff went up on one side and the drop fell away on the other and the rock closed in ahead, and there was a flat place of red earth, and beyond it a firebreak cut straight down through the trees---a wide raw road of red ground---and that was where the jeep was, and the jeep was coming up.

⁂

She knew what it was before the jeep stopped, and the knowing came down cold through the middle of her and took the last of the hope out with it.

It was the wrong way for it to come. That was how she knew. Men chasing you come from behind. They come up the path you came up; they follow your prints; they push from the place you have just been. This came from above. It came down the firebreak, out of the high ground ahead, from the one direction that was not behind them, and there is only one reason men come at you from the front while other men push you from the back, and it is not chasing. It is the other thing. It is the something the herding had been for the whole time. She had been driven up onto this flat the way you drive a goat into a pen with the gate already shut on the far side, and here was the far side, here was the gate, coming down the red road with men hanging off it, and it had been waiting for her since before she started to run. The running had never once been away from anything. The running had been the long way into here.

The jeep stopped on the flat. Soldiers came off it and out of the trees on both sides---more than she had rocks for, more than Márànata had branches for---and they spread out, quiet and certain, rifles up and level and laid on the women, the way men stand who have done this before and have been told exactly how it goes. The circle drew shut. Kàkà stood inside it with Sparrow behind her and the small one's hands twisted into the back of her shirt, and she counted the rifles, because her head and her hands both counted when there was nothing else to be done with the fear---eleven, twelve, thirteen---and the count told her only what she already knew. Too many. Always too many. A something finished before it started, and they had only just now caught up to the finish.

The jeep door opened, and the patch soldier got out.

He did not look at any of them. That was the first something, and it was worse than if he had. A man who hates you looks at you; a man who has come to perform looks at his audience. This one looked at the rock. He looked up the cliff and down the drop and along the line his soldiers had made, and Kàkà watched the one eye go around the edges of the flat, checking the angles of it. He was making sure the trap was shut. Then he counted them. She saw his lips move, the small movement, one two three four five six, counting the catch. And only when he had counted the cliff and the drop and the women and his own guns did he speak, and even then not to any of them but the air, flatly.

"He took the boat," the patch soldier said. "Out into the open. That was... a great deal of noise." A small pause. "We thought he would. The river-one knew him from before, from the old work, and he said the ferryman would do exactly that. Throw himself wide. Make us choose." The eye came round the flat again. "So we did not choose. He took some men out after the boat. I brought the rest in along the high ground, ahead of where you would run, because you would run here. There is nowhere else this ground lets a person run."

There was no pleasure in it that Kàkà could find anywhere, that he had laid all of this and spent however many men it took and there was nothing in his face but the small, flat ease of a man whose figures had come out even. He was nothing like the still empty one who had stood on the mud at the bend. The empty one seemed like he had wanted nothing at all. This one wanted the column to add up, and it had added up, and that was the whole of what he wanted, and now he had it.

He took a radio out of the jeep. A big black field set, the antenna up, the handset on its coiled cord. He held the handset out toward Ésa.

He said nothing about it. He did not say who was on it. He held it out the way you hand a person a thing they have been waiting for, both of you knowing it.

Ésa did not take it.

The patch soldier waited. He did not threaten her, did not jerk it at her, did not speak. He held the handset out at the end of his arm and waited, and the waiting went on---five seconds, six---the set hissing its small static into the quiet. He could wait. The trap was shut. There was nowhere for the waiting to go wrong.

Then he turned his head, slowly, and looked at Sparrow.

He said nothing. He looked at the smallest one, the barefoot one with her hands twisted into the back of Kàkà's shirt, and he let the look sit there, and its meaning needed not one word hung on it: that there were other ways to make a woman take up a telephone, and that they were all of them standing inside the circle, and that the smallest was the nearest to hand. Kàkà felt Sparrow go still behind her. Kàkà moved---half a step, sideways, putting more of her own body between the look and the girl, knowing it was nothing, that her body was not a wall, that there was no wall thick enough---

Ésa took the handset.

The voice that came out of the radio was a man's, and Kàkà did not know it, and she knew everything about it in the first word.

It was deep, and it came slow, and there was drink in it---years of drink, a type of slow that has been practiced a long time. It said one word, and the word was Ésa's name the way you say a thing that is yours, that has always been yours, that has wandered off and been a great deal of trouble and is now, at last, back within reach of the hand. There was no question in it. There was ownership in it, gone soft and tired all the way through, and there was... a whole marriage in it---a whole bed and a whole table and a whole roof---all of it folded down into two syllables by a man who had said the name ten thousand times across a room. Kàkà heard the whole of that in the one word.

The general's wife.

She had heard it at checkpoints since she was small enough to fit under a market table. The general's wife, the general's wife---a thing they said, a card you played to get through a gate. She had never once thought about the general. There had to be a general, for there to be a general's wife, but he had only ever been a word standing in front of another word. Now he was a voice, tired and deep and certain, saying Ésa like he owned the air she stood in, and Kàkà understood, all at once and far too late, that the woman she had crossed an entire southern belt of a country beside, was this man's wife. Was married to the war. Had stood up inside it, near the top of it, in the house where it was decided. Had poured the wine.

Ésa closed her eyes. Only a moment.

"Afanigönga," she said.

And she said his name the way he had said hers---Kàkà heard that too---not with hate. Hate would have been easier to listen to. She said it with the terrible, flat closeness of a person saying the name of someone they had slept beside for years, someone whose every cruelty they could name before it came because they had watched it grow. And it cost her to say it. Kàkà could see the cost, the gold band going round and round on the finger, fast, and Ésa's voice held level over the top of the fast hand the way the skin of the river holds smooth over a thing drowning underneath.

The voice said more then, a long slow run of it, and here Kàkà lost the thread, because the patch soldier had let the handset down a little and the wind took some of it and the static ate the rest, and the man's voice was low and built for the one ear it was aimed at.

She strained for it.

She caught seven villages. She caught the Quiet Sisters, and something almost like a laugh after it, an old, dry warmth---I never knew about the Sisters, that was clever, you were always---and the rest gone. She caught the word children said the way you would say flies, said small, said cheap. And she caught Ésa's answer, because Ésa pitched it to carry, because Ésa wanted the soldiers to hear it even if the man would never weigh it.

"Long enough to matter."

The voice did not rise. Kàkà kept waiting for it to rise.

It went on, slow, and she lost more of it---something about holding a thing back, about all these weeks, the word the Mouth, the word protecting coming up once out of the hiss and going under again---and she watched Ésa's face instead, because Ésa's face was the part she could read. And Ésa's face was saying that whatever the man was holding out as a kindness was the worst thing he could have said, that I protected you, in this man's mouth, was a knife held out to her handle-first.

"You protected nothing," Ésa said. "You have never once in your life protected a thing you did not first put in the way of harm."

The hiss. The wind. The ring of soldiers, not moving. The jeep idling somewhere behind.

Then, the voice said two names, and these Kàkà heard clearly, because the man said them clearly, slowly.

"Isheni," it said. "And Tago."

Kàkà did not know who they were. She heard the names go into Ésa like something with a point. Ésa's face, which had held through the wine and the children and the protecting, came apart along one seam---not all of it, only the mouth, a tightening and then a stillness around the mouth that was worse than any cry---and the fast hand on the gold band stopped. Stopped dead. And a stopped thing, on Ésa, Kàkà had learned, was a worse something to see than a shaking one.

The voice ran on around the two names. Kàkà caught your guards. She caught the ones who carried him, and she did not know who him was, but she saw that Ésa knew---that him was a person Ésa had lost and was carrying still---and that the two with the names had carried that person somewhere, to the water, the word jetty surfacing once out of the static and going down.

Then the voice came clear again, and what it said was unbearably gentle. "They were loyal to you. To the very end of it. Even at the end, when it would have cost them nothing to stop."

"What did you do." Ésa's voice was not level anymore.

"What you left me to do." The voice was so tired. "I did not want them. I wanted you. But you were not there to be asked, Ésa. You were out on the water, saving the world one child at a time, and they were the ones standing in front of me, so they were the ones I asked, and they would not answer, because you had taught them not to, and so it went the way these things go." A pause. The small clink of a glass set down. "You were always so good at teaching people to be loyal to you. You never once sat and counted what your loyalty cost the people who gave it."

Ésa was shaking. The whole of her, now, and the handset trembled against the side of her face.

"You buried our son," the voice said, "and you decided it was my war that did it, and perhaps you are right---I have not been able to tell, for a long time now, which of the dead are mine. But you knew the house you married into."

"You took me as a fifteen year old girl, you monstrous fuck," Kàkà could feel Ésa's teeth gnashing.

Silence.

And then... "Yes. I did. Regardless, you knew what the wine was poured for. You drank it too, Ésa. For years you drank it too, and you called it peace, because the peace was yours and the war was only ever everyone else's." The voice came down to almost nothing, almost soft, almost kind, the last small turn of the screw. "You did not run because it was wrong. You ran because it stopped being theirs and became yours. That is the only thing that has ever made any of us run."

And Kàkà, ten feet off, holding behind her own thin body a girl she had given a name to, understood the thing that mattered even with half the words lost into the wind: that the woman beside her had once stood where this voice stood, up inside the thing that was eating the country; that she carried a dead child in her the way Kàkà carried a brother the unit had taken and never given back; and that none of it---not the grief, not the leaving, not the children hauled out of cellars one by one across seven villages---none of it had bought Ésa a single inch of clean ground in the eyes of the man who owned her name.

The patch soldier reached out and took the handset from Ésa's hand. She let it go. There was nothing left in the hand to hold it with.

"General," the patch soldier said.

The voice on the radio said, "Kólá."

And that was the first time Kàkà heard the patch soldier have a name, and it was such a small, ordinary name, two soft beats of it, Kólá, the kind of name a mother gives. And somehow that was the most frightening thing in the whole flat grey morning: that the something with the patch and the scar and the counting lips had once been a baby that a woman had named Kólá, and held.

"Bring her to me alive," the voice said---and Kólá had let the handset turn outward in his hand now, so that it carried, so that all of them heard it, the women and the girls and the ring of guns, clear over the wind. "Kill the rest."

The radio hissed. Then it did not even do that. The line was dead.

Kólá lowered the handset. He looked at Ésa, and there was nothing in the look; the column had come out even. He looked at the girls. He looked at Kàkà, and at the small one behind her.

He raised his hand to the soldiers.

And Kàkà's hands went to the strap.

They went to her chest and her shoulder, to the place the canvas crossed, to the weight that had been the first thing in her whole life that was only hers, the long black certainty that made the world simple, the one thing that could answer thirteen rifles in the only language thirteen rifles understand. Her hands closed.

There was no strap. There was no rifle. There was a girl with a name behind her, and a man's hand up in the air in front of her, and a ring of rifles coming level, and her hands closed on nothing---on the cloth of her own shirt and her own thin shoulder under it, on the air where the thing should have been---the thing her body had been reaching for since she was nine years old, and had never, not once until this exact morning, with everything she loved standing behind her, needed so badly and found so wholly gone.

She was still counting. Thirteen rifles. The count was no use to her. A name was no use to her. Sparrow was behind her, and the strap was not there, and the hand went up.