They burned the body the next day, well outside the compound, using a patch of scrubland.
Daudi had watched Gentle use the tip of a machete to delicately split open the plastic bag over the body’s head. His view had been obscured as others gathered around, close. Blood oozed rather than ran, thick and dark. They had to wash the dead man’s face before they could be sure who it was.
“Lebna,” one of the others said and there was a murmur of agreement that rippled through the gathering.
“Send word to his father,” Boss said, but no one seemed keen to break the news to him. Eventually, Boss took it out of their hands and nodded for a chosen messenger to go. The man peeled away from the crowd and set off at a run. Daudi could not take his eyes off the blood-smeared face.
Lebna had been missing for a couple of weeks.
Everyone knew he’d met some girl in town and had been planning to set up house with her. Boss hadn’t been too concerned; he hadn’t tried to stop him, which surprised a few of us, but most of them knew that Lebna would be welcomed back with open arms when he chose to return. That was how Boss ran the compound. They weren’t prisoners. No one had imagined his return would be like this.
Boss squatted on his haunches beside the boy. He rubbed a thumb across Lebna’s cheek. “They cut his tongue out,” he said, quietly at first, and then it came out as a roar. “They cut his fucking tongue out!”
He got to his feet just as Lebna’s father came hobbling towards the crowd.
He was not an old man, but a gunshot wound to his left leg had caused damage that would never be repaired.
“Who could do this?” he wailed. “Who would do something like this?”
“The Onisagbe,” Daudi said, knowing it was the truth, even without evidence. A few faces turned in his direction as if he had dared speak the unspeakable.
Who else could it be?
“Perhaps,” said Boss, fixing him with a steely stare. “Perhaps if you had stopped them, or at least given the order before they fled like the cowards they are, we might know that by now.”
Boss placed a hand on the shoulder of the bereaved father, showing him a moment of compassion. “We will have our revenge on whoever did this,” he said. “You have my word. We won’t just take out one of theirs, there will be no simple eye for an eye. We will find the man who held the knife and do the same to him; this is about justice, not simple revenge. In the meantime, whoever was on duty with Daudi, start gathering wood to build a funeral pyre, even if you have to work through the night. It’s only right that a father should have a night to say goodbye to his son.”
Daudi knew that he should have done better; he should have made the call to shoot. They should have riddled the Onisagbe truck with bullets and left the bastards bleeding in the dirt right alongside Lebna.
He motioned for the others who had been with him on the ramparts to follow him back out through the gate, filled with shame.
He knew where the funeral pyre needed to be built and they would do it without complaint.
It would take Daudi a long time to redeem himself.
If he ever could.
The sky remained free of cloud and the light of the moon was enough that they could do their work quickly, three of them working while the fourth kept an eye out for potential threats, rotating the roles to ensure they all shared the work. But Daudi cut and carried word without a break. It was his penance even if the Boss hadn’t demanded it and wouldn’t see it.
They moved Lebna’s body from where it had lain, but even in the moonlight Daudi could make out the darker patch in the dirt. It would be kicked over and washed away for the next few days, but he would always remember where it had been.
He wished that his guilt was as easily washed away.
He would not forget the look on Lebna’s face, his father’s anguish, or the blood.
He owed them both vengeance, whatever Boss said. Justice. Vengeance. It was just semantics. They both meant the same thing. He owed them both a body.