Chapter 8

"Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin.
The only vengeance worth having on sin
is to make the sinner himself its executioner."

- George MacDonald

When Sayid arrived, he saw a man arraigned in the garb of a priest running partway into the jungle and shouting, "Who are you? Who are you?" The priest then seemed to give up his desperate cry. He ran back to the plane and began dislodging a woman from the wreckage. Sayid joined his efforts and pulled a man, probably the pilot, from the front of the plane and clear from the fire. He checked the man's pulse, put his ear to his mouth, and decided that he was already dead.

By then, other survivors had arrived. The scene became a jumble of chaos, and it was all Sayid could do to keep the would-be helpers and merely curious onlookers controlled, productive, or simply out of the way. He led without plan, without thought, and without concern for himself. He barely knew what was happening; he acted by instinct, never really seeing the survivors of the propeller plane but commanding others and laboring himself.

Somehow, a makeshift stretcher was fashioned for the woman, who was alive but not responding. Charlie and Eko began to take her toward the hatch and Jack. The dead body was pulled further from the wreckage, for eventual burial, and the fire was at length contained.

Sayid at last turned his attention to the priest, who was yelling, "What did you do with the other man?"

"What other man?" asked Sayid, for the first time really looking at the priest. A hint of recognition crossed the Iraqi's face; then a flicker of what might have been fear rose to his features; it was quickly replace by shame and even more quickly erased by a stoic mask.

A similar process was playing out in the countenance of the priest, but it was rage that followed the recognition and restraint that eclipsed the rage.

Before either of the men could speak to one another, Ana Lucia's voice broke through the tense air with a shout: "Get down on your knees."

Sayid turned to see her leveling a handgun—his handgun—at the priest. She must have taken it off of him in the tumult. He cursed himself for not noticing. She had helped him drag the dead body clear, the second time he had moved it. She had leaned over to double check his declaration of death, and he had felt her touch then, a brush…but Eko had told him they were leaving with the stretcher, and he had been distracted.

Ana snarled at the priest, but he seemed nonplussed by her actions. He acted as though it were an unremarkable occurrence to have a gun pointed at his head.

"Ana," Sayid said, "Ana, calm down." He approached her, but she jerked the gun on him instead. When he stopped, she turned it back to the priest. "How do we know he's not an Other?" she asked. "They came in a boat to the raft, didn't they? Maybe they're sending a plane to us."

Sayid spoke calmly and soothingly. "You are wise to be cautious and suspicious, but show some discipline. I assure you, he is not an Other." And, before Ana could sense his nearness, Sayid had grabbed her wrist and had dislodged the gun from her hand. They wrestled for it on the ground for a moment, and Sayid prevailed. He pulled back the slide to dispense the round in the chamber. He dropped the clip, reloaded the bullet into it, and then thrust it with a click back into the gun, but he did not cock it. He flipped up the safety with his thumb and placed the gun back in his pants.

Ana now tried to reach for it behind his back, and he flashed his arm behind himself, grabbed her own arm forcefully, and whirled her around against his chest. Gripping both of her arms at the sides he held her amazingly still and breathed against her mouth, "You want to be a leader? Learn self-control. I knew the priest in the first Gulf War. He used to be a soldier, a U.S. Marine sniper." He let go of her arms and stepped back.

"What other man?" he called to the priest, who now cautiously neared Sayid.

"There was another man on the plane. The woman's husband. When we crashed, a group came from the jungle and took him away. Weren't they with you?"

Sayid looked at Ana. Ana shrugged. "What did they look like?" Sayid asked.

"I didn't see them. I was still lying on the ground. I only saw their legs. They were barefoot."

"Others," Ana declared decidedly.

"Who are these Others?" asked the priest. "Where are we? How long have you been here? Where did you take the woman?" He raked his hand through his thick, brown hair and then let it fall to his waist where a crucifix hung. He began to fondle it mechanically. "What is happening?" he muttered. Then he ran his fingers across his stomach and realized for the first time that he was bleeding. He lifted up his shirt and pulled out a piece of metal that was lodged just below his chest. His sharp intake of breath revealed that the pain was significant.

"We need to get you to the hatch," Sayid said, approaching the priest and taking his arm to drape over his shoulder. "Use me for support."

The priest looked reluctant at first. He studied Sayid's eyes, and then he leaned on the Iraqi. They made their way to the hatch, trailed by Ana, Sawyer, and Kate. Ana had not yet been allowed into the hatch; the survivors did not feel she needed to know about the guns. But Sayid was too preoccupied to prevent her from following.

"So, Padre," said Sawyer from behind them. "Are you going to tell us what you're doing here?"

"Let him save his breath," said Sayid.

"Ain't you just a little bit curious, Ali, as to what a little private prop plane is doing crashing on this island?"

"Sawyer," warned Kate, and it was the only word she needed to utter. He remained silent the rest of the way.

Back at the hatch, the priest was lowered onto a chair. Sun had already been called in by Jack to help with the woman, who had been taken to a bed. Sun told the priest to take off his shirt and began to dress his wounds. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the chair as she began to apply a balm. Sun froze and looked at his chest, which was scarred as if slashed many times by a knife. "This is not from the crash," she said rather than asked.

The priest glanced at Sayid. Sayid could not read his expression, and this troubled him. He could read almost anyone.

"No," said the priest. "They are old wounds. They are healed now."

Sun continued her ministrations while shouting back to Jack, "Sayid is here."

Jack came from the bedroom and asked, "Did you see the woman?"

"No," replied Sayid. "The priest rescued her, and Charlie and Eko brought her back here. Why? Is she badly hurt?"

Jack shook his head. "A slight injury to her leg, that's all. I sewed it up. But for some reason she's feverish and delirious."

The priest opened his eyes and glanced toward them. "Island sickness."

"What?"

"Island sickness. I was a missionary on a small island. Sometimes foreigners there come down with this…the natives call it island sickness. She was sick when we left. But we had to leave…promptly."

"The woman was a missionary with you?" asked Jack with some surprise.

"No," murmured the priest. "She and her husband are Muslim."

"I thought so," said Jack, and when Sayid looked at him questioningly, he said, "She's mumbling Arabic, and she's got one of those…" he swirled a finger around his head. "You didn't notice?"

"I did not notice a lot of things," said Sayid.

"The pilot and I, the one who died—my friend," the priest said, "were the only missionaries who survived. We had to leave because of a riot. The populace was burning and murdering indiscriminately. The Muslim couple was there working for some…Jordanian playboy who wanted to buy half the island for his own private resort or something. I don't know. But they got caught in the rioting, too, and they would have been killed if we had left them behind, so we took them with us." The priest coughed and Sun told him to stop talking until she had finished dressing his wound.

When she was done, she nodded, and he continued, "We got that prop plane, and we started flying. Almost immediately we were blown off course. The fog set in; we lost all communication. We flew for hours looking for someplace, any place to land. Our fuel tank was completely drained when we saw your signal fire, and we tried to land on the beach, but the landing gear wouldn't come out…where is this place?"

Jack and Sun both looked at Sayid. "May I talk to the priest alone?" he asked.

"By the way," said the priest, "my name is Marcus. It's better than everyone calling me the priest. "

Jack nodded. "All right, Marcus. Sayid will try to explain where we are and what's going on." Jack gave Sayid a sympathetic, half-smile that revealed the impossibility of the task. "Sun, can you come help me with the woman? I need something stronger to get the fever to break."

Sayid sat across from the priest and eyed him cautiously. "Do you remember me?" he asked.

"Of course I do," Marcus said. "Your hair was shorter then. So was mine." He closed his eyes as he leaned his head back once more. "We were soldiers then, and young…" he murmured, and Sayid saw him smile. "So poetic, isn't it, to think, Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. So poetic, war…until you're bound to the chair before your torturer. Until you are the torturer." The priest opened his eyes, but Sayid wasn't looking at him. He was staring at the ground.