“She knows what to wear,” said Miandra coldly. “You don’t have to explain every little mite to her.”

“Darling, Amanda says she’s never been in the mountains before.”

“Yes, she has,” fussed Miandra. “They have mountains in the U.S.A. They have plenty of mountains in the U.S.A.”

“I’ve never been,” I said. “I’ve seen a lot of mountains, that’s all. I’ve never been in one.”

She grunted, stirred the rice tea. She had browned the rice and then strained it.

“You see,” said Vinandratsy.

She grunted again. “Well, I hope you don’t get lost. Vinandratsy has no sense of direction. I hope he doesn’t take you all over the damn mountains before you find the place you want.”

She put the rice tea into thermos bottles, then made beef sandwiches.

When we were ready to go, Vinandratsy kissed Miandra’s jaw.

I nodded to her. She looked at me a moment, then said, “It used to be called the holy mountain, but it’s not holy anymore.”

“Some of the mountain people still believe it’s holy,” said Vinandratsy.

“What they believe doesn’t count anymore. Not in today’s world.”

Vinandratsy shouldered the backpack. Miandra stood in the doorway, waving at us, her forehead painted with sun.

In a moment, she was running after us holding out a little jar.

“Here, you forgot this,” she said to Vinandratsy. “You don’t want the anopheles mosquitoes to eat the girl alive.”

She handed him the jar. “Well, she looks like she’s been in plenty of mountains to me, but you show her how to use this concoction, Viny. Just a little bit goes a long way. I’m sure it’s just the mosquitoes she wants to frighten off.”

It’s talk like that that makes you want to salute, but of course you don’t dare.

47

“Do you still believe it’s holy?” I asked, as we lay in sleeping bags against a crag of gray rock. The stars were so bright and near in the black sky that they seemed as if they’d been painted on.

“Yes,” he said. “I still believe it’s holy.”

He unzipped his sleeping bag and came into mine.

He dotted my forehead and behind my ears with the insect concoction. He dotted himself.

“It doesn’t have any odor,” I said.

“To us it doesn’t, but if you were a mosquito, you’d head for the other mountain.”

We made love and then I closed my eyes and dreamed. We were on the same mountain, but I was someone else and he was another: and he was whole—the bottom of him as dark as his top. We were both wearing shirts and trousers, and though I had no X-ray vision like Superman’s, I knew he was whole, that he had healed himself.

We were both on guard duty. I wore trousers, but I was still a woman. The fugitive slave women were warriors too. A strange conversation we had, the sort of conversation that one finds in dreams, and that would speak for madness in the real world.