She had no illusions that she would gain his forgiveness; he would hate her now — if not more so, given her escape — as he had hated her the other day.
No, what she wanted was to look him in the eye and tell him that his chance had come and gone, that, with the coming of the Serene, the opportunity to get what he and his fellow believers wanted was a thing of the past. She wanted to tell him that he had lost the war, and that everything would be very different, now.
She wanted to tell Ali al-Hawati that no longer did she fear him and his kind.
Then she would smile, and turn her back on him, without flinching at the thought of attack, and walk away.
AS SHE DROVE through the punishing afternoon heat, she turned the car radio to Uganda FM and listened to the latest reports from around the world.
She would have liked to have had Geoff’s softscreen with her now, despite her frugality and anti-materialism that had never allowed her to indulge herself. For the past few years she had made do with a cheap wind-up radio to provide her with news of the outside world.
Republicans in America were encamped outside the White House in protest at their government’s inability to confront the extraterrestrials. Shares in arms manufacturers around the world had tumbled, and in the States the gun lobby and pro-hunting groups were vociferous in their complaints about having their rights violated by the aliens. The President had gone on live TV last night to demand a meeting with the leader of the ‘alien invasion.’
Sally smiled to herself and tuned into a music station.
Three hours later she came to the river and the village of Benali, its inhabitants stirring in the cooler hours of late afternoon. Women washed clothes in the river and children played with tyres in the dusty streets. It was a scene, typical of Africa, which had changed little in a hundred years.
She made out a large number of Yemeni men and women among the Ugandans. After the Israeli strikes on Sana in 2019, displaced Yemenis had fled south, settling in Ethiopia, Somalia, and even as far as Uganda. They were largely fisher-folk, drawn to the coastal regions or, in this case, the wide river on the border with Kenya.
She braked on the crest of the road overlooking the village and the river. The shanty town looked impoverished, a series of corrugated metal huts, patched with multi-coloured polythene sheets — where Islamists must have found eager recruits among the poor, displaced Yemenis.
She wondered if al-Hawati had been lured into terrorism by the promise of riches, or the reward of a martyr’s place in paradise. Would she despise him any the less had his motivations been the former?
Her arrival caused a commotion amongst the village children. They flocked around her car, keeping a safe distance, watching her with big eyes, mistrustful yet curious.
She climbed out and smiled at the children, African and Yemeni, and singled out the tallest — a boy clutching a deflated vinyl football — and said, “I am looking for Ali al-Hawati, a fisherman. Do you know where he lives?”
This provoked an intense and noisy debate among the crowd. The boy with the football shouted loudest, then looked at Sally. “He lives beside the river. Come with me.”
She followed the boy, followed, in turn, by the ragged posse of village children, chattering among themselves.
A few days ago, she thought as she hurried down the sandy track after the boy, she would never have dared enter a Yemeni village known to harbour terrorists. Even now she experienced a residual fear at what she was doing, tempered by the knowledge that no one, now, could harm her physically.
Nevertheless, as they turned a corner and came to a line of huts fronting the river, her heart set up a laboured pounding.
A Yemeni woman in a stained shalwar kameez and a half niqab veil sat before the second hut, mending a fishing net. She looked up and stared at Sally, her brown eyes massive above the fabric that covered her mouth and nose.
The young boy said something to the woman, and without a word she stood and hurried into the hut. Behind Sally, the children stopped as one and watched in silence.
Seconds later a man, wearing only shorts and a ripped vest, stepped out.
He stopped dead when he saw Sally, and she was gratified at the expression of shock on his thin face. The jagged scar that ran across his cheek was red raw; he had declined her advice to seek medical help.
In English he said, “What do you want?”
“I came to see you, Ali.”
His eyes narrowed, flicked beyond her to see if she were alone.
“Why?” he snapped. “What do you want with me?”
Behind him, the woman — presumably his wife — ducked from the hut and stood watching them.
Ali turned and, with surprising vitriol, shouted at the woman. Her gaze fell from Sally, as if in shame, and submissively she scurried back inside.
“I came, Ali, simply to talk.”
Her words discomfited him; his sneer faltered. He looked beyond her at the gallery of watching children, and he gestured with anger and yelled at them in Arabic.
When Sally turned, she saw that every last one of them had fled.
She wondered at the power this man had wielded in the village, and if the reason for the anger that manifestly simmered beneath the surface of his superior demeanour was that he realised, with the coming of the Serene, that his ability to command fear, and therefore respect, would in time diminish.
They stood in the late afternoon sunlight, facing each other, and Sally felt as if they were the only people in the world.
“I came to tell you,” she began, “that what you did the other day, when you attacked the medical centre and kidnapped me and my colleague, made me more fearful than I had ever been in my life. I feared what you were going to do to me. And at the same time I was angered by my powerlessness to do anything to prevent what you were doing. To you, I was nothing — I, who had for years helped Ugandans and Yemenis, was less than nothing in your eyes. You would kill me and film my death, and show it to the world… and that filled me with anger and hatred and fear.”
He spat, “You are all the same, Westerners, men and women, you bring your ideas here and we do not want them!”
Sally smiled. “And that’s where you’re very wrong, Ali. You see, we are not the same at all. It’s convenient and easy for you to think that we are all the same, but unlike you and people who think like you, we, my colleagues at the centre, are all very different in our opinions and politics, our beliefs or non-beliefs. I work with Muslims and Christians and atheists, with many nationalities… We are all very different, but we work together for the common good.” She shook her head. “But I could talk to you for a million years, and I would never make you understand the values by which I live.”
“I despise your values!”
She smiled at him, and said softly, “But you do not know my values, Ali. You do not know who I am, or what I believe.” She waved, as if to dismiss all this, and went on, “But the reason I came here is to tell you, Ali, that I no longer fear you. Everything is different now, with the coming of the aliens. They have brought a truth to our planet which you, in your ignorance, will have to come to terms with. Perhaps, in time, you will learn peace, and look back and see the wrong you did. I hope so. But…” she smiled at him, radiantly, suddenly overwhelmed with a feeling of liberation, “I want to tell you that I no longer fear you, and nor do I hate you.”
She reached into the breast pocket of her shirt. “I have brought you something, Ali.”
She held it out.
He stared at the small tube of antiseptic in her hand.