Broken Crescent

by S. Andrew Swann

  Nate looked at his watch. Etched into the LCD display was the time. One-fifteen. The display was odd, cracked, and he noticed that it wasn’t flashing anymore. He tried the button for the date, and nothing happened.

  The plastic case was warm, and the metal buttons were actually hot.

  “Christ, the time is burned in.”

  His watch was dead, victim to what looked like a massive power surge.

  “Holy Fuck!” Nate pulled his PDA out of the pocket of his jacket. He dropped it immediately. The case was too hot to touch. It fell screen up on the ground in front of him. The screen was a burned rainbow, and a wisp of smoke trailed up from it.

  Nate knelt, shaking his head. The damn thing had been top of the line, close to five hundred dollars. His gigabyte, Internet-enabled, custom-hacked operating system PDA had been rendered a static art object. All his contacts, class lists, MP3s . . .

  It took a moment before reason set in. My man, you have worse problems than a dead PDA.

  Nate checked his cell phone, and it was dead, too, and it smelled funny. He looked up, realizing how isolated he was. He couldn’t remember the last time he wasn’t in reach of a cell phone, a text pager, or e-mail. He had no way of telling anyone where he was. Though his equipment all seemed dead, he stowed the PDA and cell phone back in his pockets.

  I still don’t know where here actually is.

  Nate looked around for signs of civilization.

  He found them.

  He saw an old multilevel bridge spanning some deep wrinkles in the terrain; a huge brick and stone arch that supported a series of smaller arches above it. Nate started walking in that direction and realized that there was something wrong with the bridge.

  First, it was too narrow to support any traffic. And the ends of the bridge didn’t feed into a roadway that Nate could see. Instead, it fed into a half buried brick tube that resembled a turn-of-the-century sewer that hadn’t been completely covered.

  “An aqueduct,” Nate whispered.

  No, I can’t be looking at a Roman artifact. That would mean I’m somewhere in Europe. That can’t be right. No way.

  The aqueduct ran in an almost straight line from the mountain range, past him about a mile and a half away, toward what looked to be a coastal city a few more miles away.

  Nate’s relief at seeing civilization ended when he climbed up a hill that gave him an unobstructed view of the aqueduct’s destination.

  “Oh, shit, I am hallucinating.”

  The city wasn’t on the coast. It was actually beyond the coast.

  The aqueduct launched itself off of the mainland from a cliff as tall and sheer—if not taller—as the one by Nate. It arched over the surf with a spidery grace that seemed impossible with stone and brick. The terminus of the aqueduct was a promontory crag, a gigantic stone three miles across, thrusting up from the surf a quarter mile from the mainland.

  The city was on that rock.

  No, the city is that rock.

  Halfway up from the crashing surf, the sides of the rock smoothed to blend with brick and stone walls, fortresses and towers. Buildings of gray stone and white plaster almost spilled over each other, crowding for room.

  The aqueduct fed into the city at a level that seemed to be the top of the rock, though the buildings covered it so densely that it wasn’t possible to see where the original rock had ended.

  The wind was getting colder, and he zipped up the front of his jacket. His breath fogged in the air before him. The air was bracing and smelled of sea and grass. For a moment he believed that he was looking at a ruin, some medieval city . . .

  But he could see smoke rising from various places, and on balconies and roads he could see movement, the people so far away they were little more than specks.

  The place was inhabited.

  Nate had to stare a long time before he could figure out how to get to the city. Barely visible at this distance was a road carved in the flanks of the rock. It spiraled around the crag at least once, feeding into the city somewhere out of Nate’s sight. At the base of the rock, the road unspiraled across a tiny peninsula connecting the rock to the mainland.

  It appeared in constant danger of being swamped by the surf, but it was the only obvious destination he had.

  “Look on the bright side,” Nate said. “Maybe this place doesn’t have any extradition treaties with the US.”

  Even as he said it, the reasonable part of his brain kicked in. He wasn’t meant to be a fugitive. He didn’t want to chuck everything to avoid Azrael’s sordid history. Hell, the only crime he had ever committed as an adult was that panicked escape from the Fed. He could probably plead that if he accepted the charges on Azrael.

  Realistically, what could they do? He’d been a juvenile, and the current law wasn’t even in effect back then. Hell, if he’d been smart, he would have turned himself in when he got the first of @’s messages. Now he had an assault and resisting arrest rap, and God only knew where he was.

  Mom must be worried sick.

  Damn @ for pushing his buttons, Nate was smarter than this.

  He looked at his watch again. Still 1:15. Well, we know that I was out for a lot longer than fifteen minutes. . . .

  Don’t we?

  As he walked toward the aqueduct, he saw more signs of human habitation. Long, low stone walls broke up parts of the wrinkled terrain around him. He cleared one rise and had to climb over one. The wall was a pile of black and gray stones, stacked without mortar. The soil was rocky around here, the evidence of the walls said that it was, at one time, much worse.

  On the other side of the wall he faced a tangled mat of vines. At first he thought it was some rampant weed, but after walking a few feet he could see that the vines emerged from the black soil at regular intervals. The vines also bore some sort of fruit, a green fleshy thing shaped like an eggplant but ribbed like a pumpkin. He bent and rapped his knuckle on one. It made a solid thump.

  Some sort of squash, Nate thought.

  He walked through the vine patch, and saw a number of other types of plants, none familiar.

  The aqueduct was larger and farther away than he first thought. He made his way across two more stone walls and three more fields of obscure vegetation before he reached its side.

  Here the aqueduct itself was at ground level. It faced him as a brick wall, slowly curving away from him to reach its apex about twenty feet above his head. He could hear the water within as a nearly subliminal rumble. He placed his hand on the wall. The stone was cool and damp.

  A few feet down, toward the city, Nate saw a plaque. He walked up, hoping for some clue to where he was. He was hoping that he’d at least be able to recognize the language.

  The words—if that was what they were—were completely alien to him. There was some resemblance to Arabic, the way the “letters” seemed to flow into each other, but the strokes of each character were orthogonal in a way that resembled Hebrew, and there were flourishes that joined distant characters to each other that didn’t resemble any language that Nate had ever seen.

  He stared at the plaque. Bronze gone to green, attached to the wall with four square-headed bolts. The embossed text covered its surface in lines not quite wider than Nate’s thumb. He traced the text with his fingers.

  Indian maybe? Some other Asian language? South and Southeast Asia had hundreds, if not thousands, of languages with alphabets to match. The only one he’d have a hope of identifying by sight would be Chinese.

  “Great.” The whisper came out in fog that left a ghost of condensation on the surface of the metal plaque. However he’d gotten here, “here” was looking to be a bit farther away than he’d ever choose to run.

  There was a narrow gravel pathway that hugged the side of the aqueduct. Ahead of him, he saw the path dip down one of the folds in the ground. The aqueduct bridged the small valley with a single stone arch. Nate headed for it, the closest route past the aqueduct.

  The path cut into the hillside diagonally away from the a
queduct, joining a broad road that cut between the two hills, snaking under the arch of the bridge like a river of gray stone. As he walked out onto the main path, he stepped in a pile of brown manure.

  “Ugh.” Nate scraped his boot on one of the larger stones that marked the edges of the roadway. What he thought was mud or dirt on the path turned out to be a minefield of horse droppings. He also saw hoof-prints scuffing the gravel surface.

  At this point he would have felt more comfortable seeing tire tracks.

  As he stood there, scraping horseshit off his boot, the magnitude of his problems were starting to sink in. If he was really stranded in some faraway foreign country, communication was just the first of his problems. What if the local gendarmes decided to object to his lack of a passport? What if he was stuck somewhere really nasty—like North Korea? Even China wouldn’t be too hot for a US citizen without a visa. There was a laundry list of countries who’d make a tour with the Feds look as unpleasant as a boring undergrad calc class.

  It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  That thought was almost enough to make him retrace his steps, steal a squash, and head directly away from the city.

  “Get a grip, if they don’t have an American embassy, they might have a Canadian one, or a British one—”

  Nate trailed off. He heard hoofbeats approaching.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MATE TURNED toward the sound. He couldn’t see the approaching horse yet. The path in that direction curved around the hillside under the aqueduct. He stood still, pulse racing in his neck. He wasn’t ready to meet the locals.

  He had less than a second, not enough time to decide to run for cover. Barely enough time to step to the side before the brown head of a draft horse appeared around the curve. The animal was taller than Nate’s head at the shoulders. Its eyes looked down from a height of seven feet.

  A black, complicated-looking harness wrapped around the animal’s neck, connecting to a flatbed wagon with high wood walls. Between the horse and the body of the wagon, an old man sat on a spartan bench, gripping the reins.

  The horse saw him before the driver did. It slowed and veered away from Nate. Then the old man noticed him, and the wagon came to a stop.

  Welcome to Butt-Fuck Egypt, Nate thought.

  Nate and Grandpa stared at each other for what seemed to be a long time. Grandpa’s appearance seemed to confirm that Nate was in some part of Asia. His eyes, at least, were almond-shaped. His skin, however, was very dark. East Indian or African dark. He was bald, and had full gray facial hair that fell down to his chest.

  After a moment, Nate decided that it was up to him to break the ice. He smiled, raised his hands, and said, “Hello? You wouldn’t happen to speak English, would you?”

  Grandpa shouted something in a harsh, guttural language that reminded Nate of German, or Arabic, though he doubted it was either. Whatever the guy said, it didn’t sound friendly.

  If at first you don’t succeed. “Look, I’m lost here—” Nate kept talking, even though the guy wasn’t understanding a word. He hoped his tone of voice and his body language would calm Grandpa down, maybe convince him to help the stranger out. “I don’t know where I am. I’m an American. I need food, lodging, maybe a telephone?”

  Grandpa started repeating himself. He sounded agitated.

  Nate raised his hands and took a few steps toward the wagon.

  That proved to be a mistake.

  Grandpa’s shouting became shrill and he turned in his seat and started slamming his fist up against the wall of the wagon behind him. The man seemed to be on the verge of panic.

  Nate lowered his hands and backed away, but it was too late to try to do anything to calm down the situation. The reins cracked and the horse almost leaped over Nate as it shot ahead faster than something that size should be able to go. Nate stumbled back out of its way and watched the wagon pass him.

  There was a gate hanging open, banging against the rear of the wagon. The back was half loaded with bushels of green and red vegetable matter, some of which was tumbling out of the back.

  Great first impression.

  He turned to continue on the way he’d been going, and stopped.

  Three very young, very large men were blocking his path. They all must have come off of the back of the wagon. The trio were all shirtless and wore black, mud-spattered, canvas pants. They all resembled the old man, dark skin, semi-Asian features, and straight—in their case black—hair.

  Most immediately important, they all held long poles tipped with wicked-looking metal blades and looked at Nate with expressions showing that they didn’t like what they saw.

  “Hold on,” Nate said. “If I’m trespassing, I can leave . . .”

  They started moving forward.

  “Look I’m sure we can come to some sort of under—Fuck it.” Nate turned and ran.

  Suddenly it was very apparent, to his body at least, that it had not been very long since he’d left the corridors at Case. His muscles objected to the sudden exertion, and his side cramped badly. He heard a shout from behind him, in that same guttural language, and before he had an opportunity to trip and fall on his own, something large and heavy fell across the back of his head.

  Nate never quite lost consciousness, but the blow stunned him. He slammed into the ground, the impact taking the breath out of him. More blows landed on his back and kidneys, forcing him into a fetal position.

  They pulled his arms out behind him, painfully bent backward, and thrust a wooden stick between his body and his elbows. They tied his wrists behind him with a rough hemp rope. They pulled the rope between his legs and tied it around his neck so he couldn’t straighten his back.

  He lay there for what seemed like hours, feeling the blood rush through his skull and feeling the burning throb from his kidneys and the bruises across his back. Occasionally a muscle spasm would cause him to straighten himself, and the rope around his neck would attempt to strangle him.

  After some time, he heard the wagon return. They tied the stick to the back of the wagon and force marched him back toward the city. Nate had to concentrate on staying upright, keeping his view confined to a narrow strip of road in front of his feet.

  Every few minutes he would wonder, Why are they doing this to me? But the question fell to the necessity of placing one foot in front of the other quickly enough that the wagon wouldn’t pull him over.

  The nightmare seemed to last forever. He kept time by muttering profanities. His captors ignored them. His curses became more and more elaborate as time went on.

  Nate was in the middle of calling the quartet a bunch of “inbred, shit-kicking, pig-fucking Tibetan hillbillies” when the wagon stopped.

  For a few panicked moments Nate thought he must have discovered a few English words these assholes actually knew. But after they stopped, Nate began to hear an unfamiliar voice. He raised his head slightly—not enough to have the rope tighten on his neck—and stared through the strands of sweat-matted hair that had fallen over his forehead.

  Grandpa had come down from his perch on the wagon. He faced someone who belonged more at a Renaissance faire than some Third World Asian plateau. The new man was dressed in black, with a doublet that fit tightly to the chest and gut, closed by brass buttons the size of quarters. A scarlet cape was draped over his shoulders, held in place by a heavy brass chain connecting a pair of medallions embossed with an intricate pattern. On his head he wore a brimless hat that was little more than a tapered black cylinder adorned with feathers.

  The clothing ended all of Nate’s speculation about where he might be. He couldn’t make that outfit fit into any reasonable scenario.

  Grandpa was acting deferential to him, and the three younger men stood back, silent, not looking at the bizarrely-dressed gentleman. It took a moment for it to sink in—

  Grandpa is acting like the cops just pulled him over.

  Nate looked at the new guy more closely. He was armed. While he talked to the old man, one gloved hand rest
ed on a sword that hung from a broad belt that rested on his hips. Nate also noticed a pair of tasseled cords that hung from his left shoulder across the left side of his chest. One was silver, the other gold. It looked like some indication of rank.

  Grandpa made a few gestures in Nate’s direction, and it became obvious that Nate was the topic of conversation.

  Nate tried to imagine what it was they were saying to each other.

  “It’s like this Officer . . .”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “This nut jumped out of the bushes and attacked my wagon—”

  “Attacked you, huh?”

  “He’s a madman!”

  “Looks mighty fierce, Gramps.”

  “If it wasn’t for Larry, Curly, and Moe here—”

  “Yeah, yeah, you didn’t have a choice.”

  Grandpa finally made a derisive sound and spat on the ground. The officer shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the yokels. The quartet of farm folk stood back as the officer stepped toward Nate. The officer reached out a gloved hand and lifted Nate’s chin so they were eye to eye. The rope cut into Nate’s neck as the officer said something in his guttural language that might have been a question.

  “I guess it would be too much to expect for you to understand English?” Nate asked back, his voice wheezing against the rope.

  The officer stared at him. His features were of a kind with the farmer’s. Dark skin, vaguely Asian features. In his case, however, his hair and beard were meticulously trimmed, and had some curl to it.

  The officer said something else which gave Nate the opportunity to observe that the man’s teeth were in a lot better shape than Grandpa’s, or Larry’s, Curly’s and Moe’s for that matter. The color was yellowish brown, but they all seemed to be there. The guy’s breath was another story; it made Nate’s eyes water.

  The officer turned toward Grandpa and shouted something to him. Gramps stared back, glaring at Nate, then said something to Larry, Curly, and Moe.

  Moe walked up and untied the rope from the wagon.

  Thank God, Nate thought. For about a minute Nate allowed himself to believe that this ordeal was over.