They were all young as he, all veterans of other wars, and all saw visions of a new world, perfect and pure, to which they were devoted even beyond life.
In the most lawless stretch of the interior they laid hold to a city-state the size of Acadia, protected by the jungle, that in turn grew into a country the size of the Louisiana Purchase, in which they destroyed all roads, all telephone lines, all power cables, tax collection, any instrument of the modern world, to cut off contamination.
In the new land they fashioned fishhooks from bones, and medicine from tree barks and herbs native to the soil. They wove their own clothing, cooked their food in stone pots they carved from the mountain. There was no science beyond warfare, which they waged without cease on the corrupt world beyond their borders. Inside the republic they lived free and unstained.
From the center Job sent deacons south, west, and north to cleanse all corruption, while he himself held the eastern country absolute as the sun. “I am the sun,” he would declare one day, as the rebellion began to unravel from within. “I will bring light to evil, and wash away sin with perfection.”
He was thirty-two then, and had never known a woman’s embrace, and made virginity a requisite for all his soldiers. Only those who were not stained by sins of the flesh could be pure, and those who were not pure existed to be cleansed.
He put his stone knife through those who were not pure, one by one, so they could die pure in the jungle Eden. “You go to heaven now,” he proclaimed, in a madness so broken and scrambled it began to make a new sense. “Here I am ruler, and will commit this crime so that the next generation will abide no impurity.”
Only the children were granted reprieve, to become the base of his new army and his new world. The adults he captured were put to work in mines, toiling ceaselessly by day to harvest ore, iron, copper, gold, coltan, and by night to produce soldiers.
“All good is built upon wickedness. From the broken world we forge a whole one.” From the fertilizer of death sprang the new crop of purity.
To his army of orphans he gave the steel of arms to defend the new world, promising none should ever lord over them again. He was their Lord, permanent as the sun.
Five years more they raged through the jungle under his command. The more they succeeded, the greater the resistance from the outside became, until he needed stronger guns to defend against stronger enemies. These he acquired from what he could pay in gold from the mines, and all were eager to deal with him.
“Colonel,” asked one of his lieutenants, who would become the head of the first breakaway faction, “does this mean we have come to accept the tenets of capitalism? Is it not an unnatural way to be?”
“War costs. We are only trading rocks from the ground that have no meaning to us, for guns that do. This one thing to Caesar, until he too can be cleansed. As for the capitalists, they are only babes, suckling in their nannies’ arms, who would not survive a season here in the mountains.”
“Are we in that case with the Communists?” A new recruit asked, bewildered.
“We are free, and beyond isms. To show how free I will baptize the souls of a thousand slavers, and we will have a feast to celebrate their ascension.”
He could afford his magnanimity. By then he commanded a world larger than Charlemagne’s Reich, and there was not an army on the continent the equal of his. He was thirty-seven then, the age we will all be in heaven, and he was at the height of his power.
When he died in that jungle his commanders found his plague-stricken body, and eulogized him, realizing how little they had known him. They did not even know what name to write on his grave. Some argued for Achilles Asha, others for Job, and another faction argued that though he had changed his name and changed it again, these were merely the fictions he had lived by in the world, and he also possessed a secret name. This died with him. And in death, as in life, he was powerless to change it. His true name.
While he lived the army went undefeated, but two generations after independence, what remained of the three armies that succeeded him was a single regiment, scattered piecemeal through the jungle, oblivious to borders, but reunited on the mountain where Achilles had made his first miraculous stand, and where they would make their last if need be — supported by a single mine, of copper not gold, and whence they would set forth again to claim and purify the earth.
They were virgins, and so long as they knew not the sins of the flesh God would be on their side, and their struggle was permanent as the blood red sun.
These were our captors.
“How do you live with yourselves?” Effie asked, as we neared their mountain in the late afternoon light. “Why do you hate so much?”
Their officer looked out over the receding jungle with the disquieting calm and self-command of those inured to death. “I do not have to answer this insolence, sister. But I will share with you a secret. Death is natural. Yours, mine, everyone’s. I do not hate you, or anyone, even those I kill. All must die. Perhaps our enemies hate us, but to our view, the missionaries and colonizers — who came and stole the land from the old generation and then stole a new generation from the land — acted according to nothing but the perfection of their own purpose. To the extent they succeeded at that we salute them. They were excellent slavers, and excellent missionaries, doing whatever they thought was required of them to further their own way of life. We intend the same, according to a new purpose, to unwind history by our own thread. It is not personal. In another context I would be the implement of your desire — you would order me as you willed, Lord I Peter, stop blaspheming and fetch me a Tusker — so it is a question of subject and object. Who and Whom. ”
The truck bounded over the broken road as our guards fixed their ears on their leader and their hardened stares on us. We continued up the mountainside, powerless, toward their camp.
“Why are you with the missionaries, eh?” their leader asked, picking me out from the others.
“I am not with them,” I said calmly. He was nothing more than another sociopath, and I did not want to give him anything to seize on. “I am only with her.”
“She is a nun,” he laughed, looking at Sylvie with his red-rimmed eyes. He had spotted the bracelet on her wrist, which he now took in his battered hands, as a look of abject terror inched across her face.
“Why is she wearing the rosary?”
“It is from me,” I said.
“A present must be of gold,” he laughed. “It is a rosary.” His voice contained a preternatural calmness. He was in his element, and it was nothing for him to kill. He only needed a reason, and he would take a life as simply as blowing out a match. Or no reason at all.
“It is just a bracelet.” I feigned indifference, which I had for myself, but not for her.
“You are not a Christ bride, sister?” he asked.
“No. She is mine.”
“You are a race-mixer, my brother,” he grinned a demented grimace.
I did not want to give him fodder for his lunacy and stared straight ahead.
“The chief spoke to you. Answer him,” one of his minions threatened.
“What you call race is a lie,” I said.