Luck

PROMPT: An ancient god of war had always seen women as boring, weak and inferior. But in the modern times there are less and less people who remember his cult, until he's left with a single follower: a young and motivated pacifist woman.

“Sadiq!” Her own name, shouted across the office, jerked her head up and out of the piece she was working on. Her supervisor -- big, red-faced, always angry seeming -- stood in the doorway to the bullpen where she worked, glaring at her. As she looked up, he jerked his head toward himself: Come with me, the gesture said, you’re in trouble.

She reached out and set her hand on the tiny statuette on her desk: the tiny God her parents had worshipped, had carried across the desert, had tucked into their daughter’s dress, to watch over her, when she was taken to America with a plane-load of “orphans” after the war. She remembered the practice of the men in the village, where her father had been headman, who made this obeisance to the shrine in the center of the village, before a fight, or before practice.

They had regarded themselves as fierce warriors, worth ten of any neighboring village, and it might have been so, but it wasn’t a neighboring village who’d come for them, and they’d been outnumbered by a lot more than ten to one.

She took a breath. “Give me luck,” she whispered, “I will do the rest.” It was the cheeky incantation that the men had spoken, each in turn, the night the Janjaweed came; most of them had not been lucky that night, although her father and a few more had come back for her and her mother and led them out across the desert under the stars and away to Ethiopia and then Kenya, which had to count as luckier than most.

Walking across the room under the gaze of her fellows was difficult: she hated to be the center of attention, it made her feel exposed and vulnerable, as though she were a small rabbit caught running between bushes. Her supervisor stepped aside for her, careful to keep a distance that Human Resources would describe as respectful.

The tiny God had to be disappointed with his sole remaining follower: thin and small from childhood malnutrition, a trace of a limp from an injury on that long walk that had not been treated correctly, her doctorate in the history of East Africa carrying her into this job in a research backwater, a foundation run by an American political party to spin the news to suit the party’s ideology. Her job was to write research pieces which supported the party’s policies for East Africa; stabbing people with sharp sticks or shooting them with AK-47s was no part of her life.

She watched her supervisor sideways as she waked past him, paying attention to his body language, to his stance, which was forward on the balls of his feet, ready for action. She had never seen anyone struck, physically, in American academia, but her life before had trained her to expect it nonetheless. She did not flinch away from him, she did not give him more than his minimal respectful distance.

The last piece she had written did not jive with the party’s view, quite; it was critical of the ideas it was supposed to be critical of, but it was more militant than the mainstream party leadership was approving of; and her supervisor was nothing if not a tool of the mainstream of his party.

The conference room was glass on all sides, easy to see into but soundproofed. She could see the people waiting for her inside: Her supervisor’s manager, and the Director. They were both reading through her piece, which advocated more direct military intervention, which would never happen, of course, but if the stance became more mainstream, it would raise the profile of the still-smoldering conflict, and would cause people to think about it, to talk about it; it would cause preachers to preach sermons about it from the pulpits of their churches across America, and that would cause people to think about the desert in Eastern Africa when they were thinking about where to give money, and that would mean pallets of rice arriving in camps like the ones her parents lived in in Kenya.

The Director was smiling as he read her piece. He agreed with her, she knew; or rather, he was a member of a more militant wing of the party, a follower of a more militant leader, and what she said validated his ideas, made him feel as though he had known all along the reality of the situation, although of course he didn’t know anything about it except what his party’s ideology told him.  Her supervisor’s manager leaned over and spoke to the Director in a low voice; the Director chuckled.

She had, she knew as she put her hand on the door and pulled it open for her Supervisor, read everything correctly. She would sit in the room and she would listen to a lecture on the importance of hewing close to party ideology, even when the ideology was clearly outdated and wrong; she would watch her Supervisor’s face out of the corner of her eye as his eyes widened, seeing the threat only now, as the pieces were firmly set on the board.

Her father had taught her the spear; he had thought that it might come to that, and she was the only one left to be chief when he died, so during that long walk across the desert he had shown her the motions, the thrusts and the counters; and together they had worked out a modified version of the village’s spear drill, for someone who was small and thin but fast and smart, a version that focused on balance and the point of the spear being in the way of the unbalanced motion of a larger, heavier opponent.

She watched, now, as her supervisor’s angry charge, this meeting to reprimand her, drove him onto her spear; as the changes she could see happening in the party aligned her with the manager and the Directory and set her supervisor firmly on the sidelines.

War, she thought, was fought on many grounds, and a wise warrior found her footing and knew how to move and what to expect. As she sat back at her desk, after, she lay three fingers on the little God’s head and whispered the words of thanks: “Luck was with me,” she said, in the rusty, dusty, desert language of another lifetime. “It was enough.”