Bruno’s nose was bleeding. A bump in the road had thrown him against the side of the pick-up and almost knocked him senseless. I’d yelled to Joma to drive more carefully, and Joma had deliberately driven even more recklessly to show me how little he cared about what was happening to us in the back. Beside him, Blackmoon was silent. He hadn’t said a word since we had left the fort. He was looking but without interest, listening without hearing. Something was bothering him. He was mired in his own thoughts. Whenever Blackmoon kept a low profile, you knew he was collecting himself before bouncing back. His silence was subversive; it was the calm before the storm. There was a striking contrast between the unstable boy of those first weeks and the one now sitting in the cab, and I wasn’t convinced it was a change for the better.
About midday, we halted amid a tangle of disembowelled hillsides and scrawny shrubs. I was relieved to sit on the soft sand after the metal bed of the pick-up. Bruno, who couldn’t clean himself because his wrists were tied behind his back, had blood on his beard and half of his shirt. He slumped by my side while Joma stood at the top of a ridge and searched the surroundings with his binoculars. Crouching not far from the pick-up, Blackmoon, his sabre stuck in the sand, laboriously wiped his lensless glasses with his cheche.
Joma came down the hill and walked around the vehicle, his chin between his thumb and index finger, thinking. When he noticed that we were watching him, he gave us a V-sign and climbed back up onto the ridge.
‘I think our Goliath is lost,’ Bruno said to me.
‘I think so, too. We’ve been this way already. See that rock over there that looks like a jar with handles? I’m sure I saw it less than two hours ago.’
‘That’s right. We came past here in the opposite direction.’
Joma came down from the ridge again, spread an old map on the bonnet of the pick-up and started looking for points of reference. After this fruitless exercise, he hit the bonnet in annoyance.
We drove back the way we had come for dozens of kilometres until we reached a massive cliff looking down on a plain bordered by scrub. In the distance, a herd of antelopes was fleeing from a predator. Joma went and stood at the edge of the precipice, took out his map and again started looking for landmarks. An anthracite foothill to the south was bothering him. Joma checked the coordinates on the map, compared them with the landscape in front of him, and orientated himself with the help of a compass. His features relaxed, and we realised that he knew where he was now.
We stopped in the shade of a solitary acacia. The sun was starting to set. Blackmoon untied us so that we could eat the slices of dried meat he gave us in brown paper and went and sat down halfway between the pick-up, where Joma was, and us.
‘Playing hard to get or what?’ Joma shouted to him. ‘Come over here.’
Blackmoon stood up reluctantly and joined his chief, who handed him a can of food and a metal canteen.
‘What’s the matter?’
Blackmoon shrugged.
‘You usually ramble on even when you have nothing to say.’
Blackmoon lifted the canteen to his mouth in order not to reply. Joma took out a large knife, cut a piece from his slice of dried meat and bit into it without taking his eyes off his subordinate. He started talking to him in a patois that Bruno translated for me simultaneously.
‘Why don’t you say anything?’
‘Do I have to?’
‘I don’t like your silence, Chaolo. Should I take it that you’re angry with me about something but you don’t dare lance the boil?’
‘What boil?’
‘Precisely. What’s the problem?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘No kidding!’
Blackmoon turned away in order not to have to suffer Joma’s inquisitive gaze. But he knew that Joma was waiting for an explanation and that he wouldn’t give up until he got it.
‘Well?’ Joma insisted.
‘You won’t listen to me anyway.’
‘I’m not deaf.’
‘No, I don’t want to get into an argument with you.’
‘So it’s as bad as that, is it?’
‘Please, Joma, just drop it. I’m not in the mood.’
‘Just try. I’m not going to eat you.’
Blackmoon shook his head. ‘You’re going to get upset, and then you’ll make my head spin with your theories.’
‘Are you going to come out with it, or what?’ Joma roared, spattering saliva from his mouth.
‘You see? I haven’t said anything yet, and you’re already making a fuss.’
Joma put his meal down on the ground and looked his subordinate up and down, his cheekbones throbbing with anger. ‘I’m listening …’
Blackmoon hunched his shoulders and breathed in and out like a boxer on his stool after a tough round. He raised his eyes to his chief, lowered them again, then lifted them as if lifting a burden. Having summoned both his breath and his courage, he said, ‘You’re the teacher I always dreamt of having, Joma. I wasn’t your boy, I was your pupil. But I don’t like the teaching you’ve forced on me.’
‘Can’t you be a bit more precise?’
‘I’ve never refused you anything, Joma. I love you more than my father and my mother. I left my family for you, my village, everything …’
‘Get to the point, please.’
‘Let them go!’
The blade of a guillotine couldn’t have cut short the debate with such startling abruptness. Joma almost choked. Stunned by Blackmoon’s words, he blinked several times to make sure he had heard correctly. Throwing a rapid glance in our direction, he realised that we had also heard the boy’s suggestion; he grabbed Blackmoon by the neck and pulled him close.
‘What are you talking about?’
Blackmoon started by loosening the fingers around his neck. Calmly. Then he mopped his forehead with his cheche and returned Joma’s fiery gaze.
‘I don’t want to raise my hand to anybody any more, Joma. I’ve had enough. I want to go home. All this talk of revolution and justice and God knows what else doesn’t grab me any more. I don’t believe in any of it. For years now, we’ve been running all over the place, and I still don’t see the end of the tunnel. What’s changed since we started playing at being rebels? Not a damned thing. And you know why? Because there’s nothing to change. The world is what it is, and none of us can change it because we aren’t God.’
Joma was dumbfounded. After a long silence, he said, ‘You’re right, boy. You should have kept your mouth shut …’
We set off again as soon as the meal was over. It was Joma himself who tied our hands behind our backs, as if he didn’t trust Blackmoon. Of course, he had not lingered too long over his subordinate’s remarks. As far as he was concerned, they were just idle words spoken by a young boy overwhelmed by the turn that events were taking. All the same, it had made him slightly ill at ease. During the ride, he didn’t say another word to Blackmoon, but kept looking at him out of the corner of his eye.