“He is ready to meet you,” the colonel told her, seeming to apologize.
He and Sunny trudged into the water, each taking hold of the rope the soldier had cast out to them.
“I will hold it—I will hold it—” the colonel told Sunny, drawing the raft toward her with all of his might.
Sunny backed away and extended his hand to her in unspoken reassurance.
She moved, yet didn’t take it. She had the sense that she might never stand again in this place. And she was keenly aware of the people whom she seemed to be leaving behind.
She couldn’t know that her mother, ailing and bruised from the attack at her home, was at that moment walking toward her along the Gulf of Martaban, retracing the steps she had taken when she’d heard the rumor that ten-year-old Louisa had been slain. She didn’t know that the boys, earlier that day, had scattered in the burning forest after Kyowaing’s invasion. She would never know that Lynton’s corpse, weighted with chains, had three days earlier been flown out over the gulf and dumped, so that, like a downed plane, it fell through the sky, plunged into the waters, and finally came to rest on the sea bottom. She couldn’t fathom the atrocity she would witness four days hence, when, after she succeeded in convincing Bo Moo to reunify and called her men to her, Bo Moo would decide to punish ten of those men for having trusted Lynton. Nor could she imagine the harrowing way that nearly every one of those men would lose his poise, crying and swearing and beseeching someone—beseeching God—for mercy, while in the chaos, before the crack of the gunfire, Sunny, also seized, would find her with his eyes and motion for her to run, to spare herself the sight.
She couldn’t know. She couldn’t. Yet, as if for the last time, she held in mind those who had held her in turn.
“Take my hand,” Sunny said.
“He’s a Christian,” the colonel added. She wasn’t sure if he meant to remind or reassure her.
“I have faith,” she told them.
She had the chilling notion that they were but souls in the abyss, without a god or a country or a man to defend them. And to banish the notion, she put her rifle in Sunny’s outstretched hand.
“You can step onto the raft,” he said gently. “It is safe.”
But she waited, uncertain and trying to be brave, for one more moment on Burma’s shore.
PROLOGUE
Miss Burma Page 37