The Reckoning

by Alma Katsu

  I scrubbed under my eyes with the disintegrating napkin, though my tears had stopped as the reality of what he was saying began to sink in. I couldn’t hide forever and couldn’t bear to live in a perpetual state of fear—on the lam for life—while Adair located everyone important to me and made our lives a living hell until he got what he wanted. Me.

  “Face it, we’re damned to unhappiness,” Savva said, leaning toward me. “Of course we want to have someone with us, to drive away the loneliness. For us, it might even be necessary, since we’re locked in these ageless containers”—vessels, Adair called them—“with the memories of the horrible things we’ve done. Having someone else to live for might be the only way to go on.”

  He was right: that was how I got through all those years without Jonathan. It was only the hope of seeing him again that kept me from losing my mind. “If that’s the way you feel, then why don’t you find someone to live for?” I asked. “Why don’t you do that instead of living by yourself and taking all these drugs to get you through your days?”

  “Love has never worked out for me.” He picked up my cup of tea and drank from it. “I can find someone to love me; that’s never been a problem. I just can’t seem to love them back. I can’t seem to keep from hurting them. I’ve always thought of myself as the scorpion in that children’s story—you know the one?” A sad smile flickered across his face. “A scorpion asks a frog to carry it on its back across the river. The frog refuses, saying that the scorpion will sting him and kill him. The scorpion argues that this would be preposterous: if he kills the frog, the scorpion would drown and die as well. You know the ending, of course: the scorpion stings the frog, and as they both sink into the water, the frog asks the scorpion why he killed them both. And the scorpion replies that he had to. It was in his nature.” Savva held me in his cold blue gaze. “It’s in my nature, too. It’s what Adair looks for, I think. It’s in your nature, Lanny, or he never would’ve been drawn to you.”

  His words settled in my chest like shots of lead. I didn’t want to believe Savva, but of course he was right. I preferred to believe we had a chance at salvation if we fought our natures with all our might, and that the truly worthy would be rewarded with a perfect love. Savva would scorn this as sentimental hogwash, a pretty thought that was impossible to put into practice. It mattered little now what I wanted to believe in anyway: with Adair released, it was unlikely that I’d have the chance to love anyone ever again.

  Savva helped me up from the chair and tucked my arm under his, and we left the comfort and security of the hotel, its air-conditioning and Wi-Fi, for the gritty reality of the Moroccan street. As we stood on the curb, waiting for traffic to pass, he said, “Alejandro has agreed to meet with you, by the way. We should stop by the travel agency and book you on a flight to Spain.”

  “All right.” It was frightening, suddenly, to think of leaving Casablanca. Travel meant making myself vulnerable, like a rabbit popping its head out of the warren when it knows a hawk is circling overhead. I wasn’t sure I was ready for this.

  “There is something I need to ask of you, Lanny,” Savva continued, leading me down the street and refusing to look at me. “I want you to promise that if Adair does catch you that—when the opportunity presents itself—you’ll send him to me. I want to end my existence. For obvious reasons.” I opened my mouth to object, but he jerked on my arm to silence me. “Don’t argue; you did the same for Jonathan, so I know you understand. It would be a mercy. Please, Lanny. Promise you’ll do this for me, if you have the chance. Promise me.”

  With reservations made to travel to Barcelona in the morning, I had just one more night in Casablanca to get through. I longed to sit on the balcony and chain-smoke until dawn, but a voice in the back of my head reminded me that I’d given up smoking to please Luke. I had to laugh at myself: if I couldn’t bring myself to light up, then clearly I wasn’t really free from him, not in my heart.

  I was sick to my stomach over what I’d done to him. Like Savva, I seemed destined to hurt those who loved me. Every time I’ve been in some kind of bad emotional situation, I’ve tried to outrun the hurt. Two centuries ago, I fled rather than be sent to a convent to give up Jonathan’s baby. I’d run from Adair and, over the years, left other men, too, for all sorts of reasons; and now, in the middle of an argument with Luke, I had panicked and fled.

  I hoped I was doing the right thing by giving him up. I wanted to think that we weren’t meant for each other, and I would have left him eventually anyway. And since he protected himself from feeling true passion, from wanting anything too badly, it wasn’t as though my leaving would devastate him. Better to leave now when it would hurt less . . . although did it ever hurt less?

  And, most important, there were Luke’s children to consider. For two hundred years I’d avoided getting involved with a man who had children. Breaking a man’s heart was one thing; removing yourself from a child’s life was quite another. Because of me, it was hard for Luke to see his children, as his former wife, Tricia, was understandably reluctant for them to learn that their father was living with a fugitive murderess. Even if Tricia’s misgivings could be overcome, there would be a day when their father would be very old and I would still appear to be very young—younger than his children—and there would be nothing left to do but disappear. I had told Luke about my immortal condition, but knew I couldn’t share my secret with his daughters and ex-wife. And God forbid what would happen if Adair ever found out that Luke knew our secret. No, I couldn’t put him or his daughters in that kind of danger.

  For our last night, Savva insisted on taking me to a café, where we had a marvelous lamb tagine, savory with ginger and saffron and coriander, and we reminisced about our travels together through northern Africa and central Asia. At the time, we’d chosen this area of the world because much of it was still run by tribes and local strongmen, and it was easier to keep a low profile without a government breathing down your neck. In such a freewheeling environment, we also found ways to make money without the hassle of finding legitimate work, which would require names and histories, the kind of things that could trip us up.

  At dinner, Savva reminded me of the time we sold guns we’d stolen from the British garrison to the very Afghan rebels they were fighting: typical of Savva, to line his pockets while thumbing his nose at those in authority. Our adventure took an unexpected turn, but Savva stood by me loyally and, in the end, took care of me as only a true friend would.

  Unsurprisingly, when I fell asleep that evening, I dreamed about that incident, and the dream led me to an epiphany I would wish had remained hidden from me forever.

  AFGHAN TERRITORY, 1841

  The winds that day coming up the Khyber Pass were unlike anything I had experienced before, I recall, harsher than the dry, hot winds off the Sahara. I remembered standing in full sun, in layers of men’s clothing, breeches and a cloth like a keffiyeh, the headdress that Arab men wore, pulled over my nose and mouth to keep the sand out. I kept my long rifle pointed in the direction of the men with whom we’d come to barter.

  Savva was down in the valley basin bargaining with a Pashtun warlord, our interpreter at his side. He wore white men’s clothes with his head wrapped in a thick cloth the same as I, so we looked like Englishmen rolled in rags. Underneath it all, I was wet to the skin and tried not to let the sweating trigger a bout of nerves; I kept my hands steady on the rifle and tried to keep my squinting, sweat-stung eyes on the twenty tribesmen surrounding Savva and the warlord.

  The Pashtun were known to be excellent on horseback, filthy as dirt itself, near toothless, and violent in the extreme. They wouldn’t be pleased to know that I was a woman. Not unexpectedly, there wasn’t one woman among the group that had come to bargain with us. Apparently, men and women didn’t mingle unless they were family. Once, on a visit to an Afghan village, I managed to catch a fleeting glimpse of a black-clad figure scurrying between mud huts whose diaphanous garment reminded me of Uzra, who used to wrap herself f
rom head to toe in a long, winding cloth. It reminded me of my own village, not so long ago, and how we women were weighed down with layers and layers of skirts and petticoats, tuckers and kerchiefs and all manner of garb, to protect our modesty. Of how, too, we were commonly separated from the men. We were not so different, once upon a time.

  Negotiations had begun in earnest, I was glad to see. Savva had unfurled a blanket on the ground and placed a few rifles on display. The young warlord hefted an unloaded rifle and began investigating its mechanisms, asking if the rifles were as good as those of the British military, his pinpoint black eyes trained first on the translator, then on Savva. “Of course,” Savva laughed. “Who do you think I got them from?” It was brazen of us to sell guns stolen from the British to their foes, but Savva thought it practically patriotic of him as a Russian to undermine the British attempt to colonize Afghanistan, given that the Russians had designs on the area, too. Nevertheless, our primary reason for running stolen guns was profit.

  As I stood under the cloudless sky, repositioning the rifle to relieve my now aching shoulders, I couldn’t help but wonder why these fearsome men didn’t just overpower us and take the weapons. Both Savva and I were tiny compared to even the youngest among the Afghans and certainly no fiercer than the oldest members, who, though wizened and gray, looked capable of tearing apart wild beasts with their bare hands. Their warlord leader, conferring with Savva at that moment, cut a particularly impressive figure. He stood a foot taller than my friend and was broad-backed and long-legged, and I could easily picture him as one of those Greek athletes the old tutor back in St. Andrew used to rhapsodize about.

  As I watched him, the man impatiently jerked the cloth away to drink from his goatskin, revealing a dark, handsome face. He reminded me immediately of Adair, due in no small part to the mix of savagery and intellect in his expression and the long curls of dark hair that fell over his shoulders.

  Farrar, the interpreter, head down in a show of deference, had been leading the discussion with the Afghans, but at that point he became so animated that it was apparent things were not going well. The locals began to pass one another guarded looks.

  “A box of rocks?” Savva’s voice floated across the hard ground to where I stood. “He wants to give us a box of rocks for good British rifles?”

  The interpreter gestured vigorously at the battered tin chest at their feet. “Not rocks: these stones are lapis. Very precious to these people. They are offering you a fortune.”

  Savva crouched next to the box and pulled out one of the rocks. He spit on his hand and tried to rub off the crusted dirt, but it looked like nothing more than a piece of stone chiseled straight from the earth. When he turned it a certain way, however, the sun lit up a vein of blue.

  “You can sell it in Kabul. I know people who will give you a good price,” the interpreter said to Savva while nodding assurances at the blank-faced tribesmen.

  “This is ridiculous, expecting to trade rocks for guns. They are playing us for fools. I want gold. Don’t these people have any gold?” Savva roared. I repositioned my damp hands on the rifle but felt my arms droop.

  “No gold. They do, however, hold our lives in their hands,” the interpreter warned, drawing Savva close. “Trust me, you will be amply compensated in the city.”

  Savva threw his hands up and tucked the box under his arm as he climbed the hill toward me. “Very well . . . if this is the best we can get. . . . Tell them it’s a deal. C’mon, Lanny, let’s show them how to use these bloody rifles and fulfill our end of the bargain, and get out of here.”

  We used anything at hand as a target—native melons, gourds, a goat carcass—set on rocks in the distance, and then we demonstrated how to aim and shoot. Of the two of us, Savva was by far the better marksman, and most of the men gathered around him; but the warlord I’d noticed earlier came over and watched me, his arms folded. Again, his prepossessing demeanor made me a bit giddy, and I fought my nerves as I raised the rifle, closed one eye into a squint, and stared down the long barrel at the melon in the distance, nearly the exact color of the rock it sat upon. I drew in a breath, held it, and pulled back on the trigger as smoothly as I could. Amid a plume of smoke and a wicked crack of thunder, the melon burst almost instantaneously, pulp hurtling into the air. I couldn’t help but smile in relief beneath my scarf that I hadn’t missed, and when I looked over at the leader, he was smiling, too.

  It was no use trying to show him how to hold the rifle correctly, as he was so much taller than me and I had to reach over my head to position his arms. So I did my best by taking up my rifle, standing next to him, and pantomiming the steps. Several of the other men came over to watch and clap the fellow on the back when, after the first few shots, he sent one of the hard gourds skittering off its rock like a scalded cat.

  By the time they finished up, the sky had shifted from a watery blue to an indigo band falling over the mountaintops, and as both sides packed, the interpreter came over.

  “Owing to the late hour, the warlord has invited you to their camp for dinner and to spend the night with them,” he said, glancing once over his shoulder back at the Afghans.

  “It’s out of the question,” Savva replied.

  “You don’t understand: it would be an insult not to accept.”

  “First you have us trade good arms for a pile of rocks, and now you want us to spend the night in their tents so they can murder us in our sleep. No,” Savva said. I knew what caused him to be so peevish: his ego had been bruised because he had been forced to accept what he saw as a lesser payment for our cache of prized British arms. Savva would chafe each minute in the Afghans’ company.

  “According to our customs, he is bound to offer you his hospitality.” There was a pleading look in the man’s eyes.

  “That’s all well and good to talk about honor and custom, but we’re dealing with a bunch of savages here. I, for one, am not spending the night in their camp. You can do whatever you want. We’re leaving.”

  I’d seen that look on Savva’s face before: he could be foolhardy and stubborn when he felt he’d been taken advantage of. It was impossible to force him to do anything once he’d set his mind against it, and it seemed the more he was pressed, the more he resisted.

  “And if we decline?” I asked, checking the pistol I had tucked in my waistband.

  The interpreter shrugged. “The mountain pass is difficult—you’ve seen that for yourself—and it is even more difficult in the dark.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, hands on hips. “I’ll do whatever you decide, Savva, but I think we ought to listen to Farrar. What’s one night?”

  Savva rubbed his chin. “It’s one more night around them. If we leave, we’re free of them, and I don’t know about you two, but I would feel infinitely better.” Resolved, he clapped a hand on Farrar’s shoulder. “Tell them we appreciate the invitation and we don’t mean any disrespect, but we will have to turn down their hospitality,” he said. Savva and I left on horseback, the box of lapis tethered to his saddle, under the intense stares of the tribesmen. I knew that no good would come of this.

  We’d been riding an hour when we heard the rapid thudding of hooves on the trail behind us, punctuated by the snap of a leather switch on a horse’s flank. Savva, having the hearing of a fox, put spurs to his horse’s side immediately, the prickly gelding almost leaping out from underneath him and tearing down the near invisible trail at a gallop. I held the pommel for dear life as my horse shot after his, lying flat against the horse’s neck and spurring for all I was worth.

  The Pashtun were excellent horsemen, and they were very familiar with these passes, knowing all the shortcuts and which trails dead-ended onto a steep drop. With blackness rushing up to them, I wondered when the road would suddenly disappear underneath my horse and I’d leap into emptiness on a flightless Pegasus.

  The trail began to cut through passes, twisting blindly left, then right, and I could see neither Savva in front of me nor the horsemen behi
nd, though I could hear the thunder of them over the sound of my own mount’s hooves. Just as the trail emerged into a clearing and I could see Savva once more in front, two figures on horseback suddenly cut in from the left, steering Savva off the trail with them. The riders had apparently taken a shortcut and were able to catch up to us, and just as I thought about ducking off the path and hiding in the brush, I was tackled from behind.

  I rolled over and over in a flurry of flapping scarves and dust clouds on the ground with my attacker, and scrambled away from him before he got to his feet and chased me. Several more horses rushed by in the darkness as my pursuer made a second leap, knocking me to the ground again, but this time he pinned me flat and reached up to pull off my scarf. A gasp of surprise escaped him as my long blond hair tumbled out, and he relaxed the grasp on my arm the slightest bit, allowing me to pull the pistol from my waistband and press the nose of it to the underside of his jaw.

  We remained frozen in place as I tried to calculate quickly whether any more horses were coming up the trail or if the rest of the men had gone off in pursuit of Savva. At the same time the man released me and held his hands away from his body, seeming to indicate that he was giving up his claim. As he backed away, I saw that it was the warlord I’d taught to shoot, a half-suppressed smile on his face.

  We were still standing that way, neither making any overture, when the rest of the riders emerged together out of the darkness at a slow trot. Savva was in the midst of them, led by a rope around his neck and his hands tied behind his back, looking as though he’d been through a struggle.

  “Now what?” I called to Savva, my pistol still pointed at the warlord.

  “They might swap him for me, but I’m afraid we’ll never know, because they don’t speak English and we don’t know their blasted tongue.” The group came to a stop when they saw a woman pointing a gun at their leader’s chest. “I’d give up,” Savva called out. “You can’t shoot all of them.”