This book is for my parents,
Arnold and Nancy Flick.
The guns seemed out of place in a country as beautiful as Katkajan. There was the village nestled beneath the snowcapped mountains; there were the sweet and spicy blossoms and the towering pines. And then there was the small band of men and women with guns, passing by on the dirt road. They scanned the fields as if searching for something, or someone.
The villagers heard the people with the guns before they saw them. They heard the clanking of their ammunition belts. They heard the stomping of their boots and their loud, laughing voices. Not again, thought the villagers as they heard these sounds. Not again.
The villagers thought this, but they did not say it. The women looked up from their work in the fields. They saw the guns, and they looked away. The men stopped briefly to stare and to lay their hands protectively on their children's heads. Then they, too, turned away.
There is nothing you can say to a man or a woman with a gun.
···
Farther down the dirt road and outside the village was a cottage, separate from the rest. The young husband and wife who had built this cottage were happy together. They needed no one but each other-each other, and the baby who would soon be born to them.
But that morning, catastrophe had struck this couple.
Inside her small home, the young wife had felt the first of the labor pains that meant their child was on its way. Her husband, who was outside tending their crops, heard her calling. He ran to her across the field. In his haste he did not see the deadly snake that lay in his path. The snake struck. The man fell. Within minutes he was dead.
His wife never knew why her husband did not answer her call. She faced her own mortal struggle, alone. It was a difficult birth, and no doctor or midwife was near to help. A few short hours after her husband collapsed in the field, the young mother delivered her baby. As the little girl drew her first breath and let it out in a piercing newborn cry, the mother drew her last.
Inside the cottage the mother lay dead with her baby by her side. And now the small band of armed men and women came up the road. They saw the father's body, dead in the field. And they heard the wail of the orphaned child.
The strangers stopped and looked at one another. They shared a quick, low conversation, and then-in a slow-moving pack-they approached the house.
They crowded inside, and their voices rose in glee. They had been looking for a baby.
One of the women gave her gun to her companions. She wrapped the baby in the soft cloths that the mother had prepared for the child she was expecting, and slung the little girl next to her body.
The armed strangers continued down the path, moving faster than before. Now that they had the baby, they would have to hurry. They were headed to an orphanage in Taq, the capital city, and it was very far away. They carried the little girl carefully. It was a piece of luck that they had found her so easily. They had plans for this baby-important plans. Nothing must happen to her.
Lulled by the motion of the woman who carried her, the baby slept. She had no idea how much drama she had already experienced, at just one hour old. And she had no inkling of the vast global adventure that lay in store for her.
