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sunrise, I tried again to pray, but another captor struck me with the rod. The next night, after another thrashing, I gave up the prayers. I had lost my mother. My father. And mycommunity. I had lost my chance to learn all the Qur’anic prayers. I had lost my secret opportunities to learn to read. When I tried to mumble the prayers in my head—
Allaahu Akbar. Subhaana ala huuma wa bihamdika. A’uudhu billaahi minash shaitaan ar-Rajeem
—it wasn’t the same. Praying inside the head was no good. I was worse than a captive. I was becoming an unbeliever. I could not praise Allah properly, without prayer.
    WE WALKED FOR MANY SUNS, growing slowly in numbers, lumbering forward until we were an entire town of kidnapped peoples. We passed village after village, and town after town. Each time, people swarmed out to stare at us. Initially, I believed that the villagers were coming to save us. Surely they would oppose this outrage. But they only watched and sometimes brought our captors roasted meat in exchange for cowrie shells and chunks of salt.
    Some nights, when they had us lie down in fields, our captors paid village women to cook for us—yams, millet cakes, corn cakes, sometimes with a bubbling, peppered sauce. We ate in small groups, crouching around a big calabash, spooning out the hot food with the curved fingers of our right hands. While we ate, our captors negotiated with local chiefs. Every chief demanded payment for passage through his land. Every night, our captors bartered and bickered well into the evening. I tried to understand, in the hope of learning something about where we were going, and why.
    The boy who worked for our captors came back many times to offer me water and food. I watched and listened as he tried to convince the head captors that children should be freed from the coffle and allowed to walk alongside the bound adults. After a few days the leather strap was taken off my neck. I nodded to the boy in thanks.
    There was a little girl who walked beside her yoked father, holding his hand for most of the day. She was very young, perhaps only four or fiverains. Sometimes, when she pleaded with him, he carried her. One time, the girl tried to catch my attention, and to play peekaboo with her hands and eyes. I turned away from her. I couldn’t bear to watch them together, and did my best not to listen to them talking. Everything about them reminded me of home.
    The boy who travelled with the coffle often fell into step beside me. His name was Chekura. He was as thin as a blade of grass, and as ungainly as a goat on three legs. He had a star etched high on each cheek.
    “Your moons are beautiful,” he said.
    “You are from the village of Kinta,” I said.
    “How did you know?”
    I pointed at his cheek. “I’ve seen those marks before.”
    “You’ve been to Kinta?” he asked.
    “Yes. How old are you?”
    “Fourteen rains.”
    “I bet my mother caught you,” I said.
    “Caught me doing what?”
    “Being born, silly. She is a midwife. I always help her.”
    “You lie.” He persisted in his disbelief until I named some of the women from Kinta who had recently had babies.
    “Yes,” I said, “my mother surely caught you. What’s your mother’s name?”
    “My mother is dead,” he said, flatly.
    We walked silently for a while, but he remained next to me.
    “How could you do this to us?” I finally whispered. He said nothing, so I continued. “My mother and I came to your village. I know it by the two round huts, the high mud walls, and the funny looking donkey with one ear torn and the other streaked with yellow.”
    “That was my uncle’s donkey,” he said.
    “So have you no honour?”
    After his parents died, he told me, Chekura had been sold by his uncle. For three rains now, the abductors had used him to help march captives to the big water. So that meant that we were heading toward big water too. I could think of only three reasons: to drink, to fish or to cross. It had to be the