by A. W. Hill
Raszer felt himself draw back suddenly.
“What is it?” asked Francesca.
“That was weird,” he said. “For a second there, I thought I was looking at a movie screen. Everything went kind of flat.” He pivoted around, surveying the mountains and the path behind them. “Okay . . . now I’m back in it, only I can’t seem to find myself.”
He paused. “I mean . . . I can’t find . . . where I’m looking from.”
“Can I have whatever drugs he’s taking?” Ruthie said.
“Just watch the trees and the dog at the same time,” he said. “You’ll see what I mean. It’s like one of those Magic Eye puzzles you have to look at in a certain way.” He turned to Dante. “How far are those trees? I would’ve said a third of a mile five minutes ago, but they don’t look any closer—”
“Wow,” Ruthie said suddenly, shielding her eyes. “It’s really blue here. How the hell did it get so blue?”
“Feels like we’re in the sky, right?” said Dante. “Or like the sky is in us.”
Raszer stopped. “Now what . . . or who . . . is that?”
A small figure had emerged from the grove and stood in the middle of the road, the color of its form only a shade off from that of the trees. Shaykh Adi evanesced from the dazzling blue again, all four legs in accelerated motion, and now did seem to be closing the distance to the mysterious personage. The old dog was running.
“He sees a friend,” said Francesca.
“Is it a mirage?” asked Raszer.
“Not unless Adi sees the same mirage you do,” said Dante. “Which is unlikely.”
Raszer began to walk again, then stumbled and stopped, extending his arms for balance. “Whoa! Shit!” he called out.
“What?” Ruthie asked. “What’s goin’ on?”
“Something’s off with my equilibrium,” he answered. “I was moving forward, but it felt for a second like I was going backward.” He cocked an eyebrow in Francesca’s direction. “Is this it?” he asked. “Is this what you meant by a shift in perspective?”
“It’s the beginning of it,” she affirmed. “It will take some getting used to. When I was in university, I took a class about the language of cinema. One day we studied this thing they called the Hitchcock zoom. It was a camera effect he used a lot. He’d pull the camera back while he was zooming the lens in. It made people sick to their stomachs, totally threw them. Do you know the effect?”
“Yeah. That’s not a bad analogy,” Raszer said, feeling his way forward. “Only this effect is happening behind my eyes, not in front of them.” He looked ahead; the small figure had assumed the proportions of a man. Or a woman—he couldn’t be sure. It was of small stature and seemed to have a lot of hair. Maybe a beard. The impression of camouflage grew stronger; the person’s color was nearly indistinguishable from the color of the foliage.
“Now tell me that isn’t someone we need to worry about,” Raszer said.
“Adi doesn’t think so,” Francesca replied.
“Whoever he is,” said Dante, “he’s king of the grove.”
Raszer felt a tingle up his spine.
“Do we have to kill him to get past?”
“Who is both turtle and hare?” Dante asked. “And shows pilgrims the way in darkest night?”
The figure began to move toward them, and at the same time, Ruthie broke into a sprint. From the cloud of dust she left behind, Raszer heard her shout, “Shams!”
He looked at each of his companions in turn.
“There are more things in heaven and earth . . . ” said Francesca.
“Khezr can assume any form he wants to,” said Dante.
“So can the Devil,” Francesca cautioned. “Go slowly.”
Ruthie called out once more and opened her arms, but she now seemed to be stuck in temporal quicksand, just as Adi had been minutes before. If not for its unsettling weirdness, it might have been funny: the cartoon character locked in a digital loop. Raszer slowed his pace and kept watch—he didn’t want to miss a millisecond. Steadily, the green figure that might or might not be some evocation of Shams of Taos—a magical servitor summoned by their morning prayer—approached Ruthie and passed right through her.
Or, rather, Ruthie passed through him.
She dropped to her knees in the dust and began to sob. The man walked a few steps farther, close enough that Raszer was able to gauge his height and bearing as indeed being like Shams’.
Then he vanished. Just like that.
Raszer increased his pace, wanting to get to Ruthie. His three guides were a few steps behind. It was only the sense and scent of a presence on his immediate right that made him turn, and when he did, he shouted instinctively with alarm.
“Say, rafiq,” Shams incarnate said calmly. “How goes the journey?”
“Jesus,” said Raszer, and looked to make sure the others could see what he saw.
“Hardly,” said Shams. “But now I know what the poor fucker went through. Do you always bring trouble when you travel?”
“Not intentionally. What happened back in Taos . . . God, I—”
“Don’t mention it, Padre. The hurt’s gone. I’m fuckin’ free. Moksha. Liberation. Not that I don’t miss the carnality sometimes. But there are compensations. Like finding out who I’ve been all along.”
The rest of the party caught up, and Shaykh Adi returned and began to lick Shams’ hand. They walked five abreast toward Ruthie, who remained on her knees and watched their approach wide-eyed, like some tree creature from the dark green grove that opened beyond her like a cave entrance.
“Speaking of trouble,” said Shams, with a nod toward Ruthie, “you’ll want to keep a close watch on that one.”
“I knew it,” Francesca said, not able to conceal a look of vindication.
“Then you know more than she does,” Shams said. “Ruthie doesn’t know if she’s bad or good, damned or saved, ugly or beautiful. She just survives. She’s pure that way, but you gotta be wary. Somewhere in there, though, there’s a soul worth saving.”
“You feel like telling me how to go about that?” Raszer asked.
“No,” said the phantom Shams, “because I might be wrong.” He glanced down at his evanescing form. “I’ll be gone soon. As you can see, I’m starting to pixilate. So listen up: Don’t go by way of the crossroads. You won’t make it through without more blood. There’s a detour a half mile short of it . . . take you around the north side of the citadel. Go straight up the cliff. Make a big entrance. Just you, rafiq. Only you.”
Raszer nodded, mute. Shams’ legs had already become memory traces.
“A few more things,” he said, as if from a dust cloud. “First off, tell Ruthie I sent my salutation, and that her man Henry’s okay with where he is. Second, that little chunk o’ rock in your pack—worth its weight in diamonds. And the Kurd with the big scar and the blue eyes—him, too. If you run across him again . . . ”
“Wait!” Raszer cried out. But the apparition walked on, turning only to say, “You’ll see me a second time . . . if you’re lucky!”
Then he vanished like a puff of smoke. In his path, a trail of violets sprang up.
Raszer turned to Dante, who simply nodded; then he made for where Ruthie knelt in the road. He wanted to deliver Shams’ message before it left him. Six feet away, he suddenly grabbed his head and stumbled, dropping to his knees.
“Christ,” he said. “Where am I?”
Francesca came to his side and asked, “What do you see?”
Raszer put his hands out and felt about for something solid, like a man playing Blind Man’s Bluff. He felt for her, too, and it maddened him that he could not place her.
“I see everything,” he replied, “but it’s all . . . flipped. No. That’s not right . . . It’s . . . ” He wiped his eyes and realized he was dripping with sweat.
“You’re no’ going to be able to describe it,” said Dante, who had joined him. “Nobody ever has. But I know what it looks like.”
“Is it happening to you, too?”
“Yeah, but we’ve adapted.” He chuckled. “We’ve been this way a few times. You learn how to fold it in. One illusion laid on another.”
“So, which one do I pay attention to?” Raszer asked.
“Well, if you can figure out how to watch both at the same time, you might begin to see what’s real.”
“That,” said Raszer, “is going to be one hell of a trick.”
“We’re going to get you on your feet,” said Francesca, “and bring you into the trees. It’s cool in there, and there’s water.” They took hold of him under the shoulders and pulled him up. “This is going to feel strange. Just take one step at a time.”
They guided him into the grove, and Stephan Raszer managed—somehow without retching—to take in the oddest sensation of his natural life. No psychotropic drug had ever come close. It would beggar any artist’s descriptive powers, though it occurred to him that it might have been what M. C. Escher was getting at. With Francesca, Dante, and Ruthie all offering support, he picked up his feet and moved them as he’d been instructed. But they failed him, because he was moving at once toward and away from the grove, as if into the vertex of some impossibly angled mirror. How was he to reconcile these perspectives? On a macroscopic scale, it was as if the galaxies said to be hurtling outward from the primeval big bang were simultaneously contracting to their point of origin.
They stepped into the grove and laid Raszer on a bed of startlingly green moss that bordered the little stream. That the moss was luminous was somehow the least of his surprises. He saw Ruthie remove herself to a distant tree and fold like a doll.
There were birds in the grove, ample shade, and water so sweet and clear that it seemed a soul could be suckled on it. Raszer supposed the place was a kind of oasis, fed by the stream when it swelled, though that could not account for its unnatural serenity. He relished every minute of rest, because he knew they could not stay long. His profoundly altered perception would have to be accommodated, and quickly, as a man abruptly dropped on the moon would have to learn to walk again. He tried to remember the last time he’d thought he might be losing his mind—there’d been more than one occasion—and how he’d gotten through it. Not so much by holding off the madness as by accepting it as another mode of being, like having a cold or being in love.
He felt warmth in his hand and realized Francesca was holding it. Then he put a question to anyone who might have an answer: “How long before this tapers off?”
“About halfway between here and our base camp, you should start to get your land legs back,” Francesca responded. “But it’s not going to go away completely. At least, let’s hope not. It would be a shame to lose a new sense after coming so far to get it.” She squeezed his hand. “What do you feel right now?”
He considered her question, and then something began to happen. The effort of answering caused something to well up in him. He looked at his companions in turn, doing his best to register them with his crazy double vision, seeing them—against all good sense—as existing both outside and inside him. He became aware of the pulse in his left eye and a needling sensation in the iris.
“I feel,” he said, “like someone here knows me. Has known me. Forever.”
“Na-Koja-Abad,” someone whispered. Was it Dante?
“Of course I know you, Stephan,” said Francesca. “How could I not?”
He didn’t ask her to explain herself, nor did he attempt to articulate the other thing he felt, which was that these people had in an instant become his only world—the sum of all his worlds. He would die to protect them from harm. There was a brief pain in his left iris as the stream of light broke through and hit the leaves above undiffused. Francesca was the first to see it. She leaned in.
“How do you do that?” she asked.
“It’s the hole in my dike,” Raszer said.
“Or the crack that the light gets through,” said Dante, recalling his story.
“Have you always had it?”
“No. It came with a loss.”
“Someone died?”
“Yeah.”
“Someone you loved?”
“You could say that.”
“And after that, your life was different . . . ”
Raszer took a glance around at the fantastical grove. “Definitely,” he answered. A pause. “I think seeing Shams like that set it off. Some kind of resonance.”
She peered into Raszer’s eye and tracked the thread of indigo light that issued from it up to its terminus on the leaves above. A small voice rippled across the grove.
Ruthie, cooling her feet in the stream, called out, “I saw it before. On the night of the big jam. When we were—”
She hesitated, seeing Francesca raise her head, then continued, “So you’re sayin’ that was real back there? If that’s true, where’d he come from . . . and where’d he go?”
“Not a mirage,” said Raszer. “More like what Henry used to talk about.”
“What did Shams say?” Ruthie asked warily.
“He said to tell you that Henry’s okay with where he is.”
Ruthie smirked reflexively, but couldn’t hold it. Despite herself, she was moved.
“He also warned us away from the crossroads. He said we wouldn’t make it through. He suggested we detour around to the north side of the citadel and go straight up the cliff. Can it be done?”
“It can be done,” Dante replied, “with a full kit. We’re carrying less than that. You’d have to free-climb a good part of it. Are you in shape for that?”
“I guess we’ll find out,” said Raszer.
THIRTY-THREE
From the cover of massive boulders five hundred feet above, they observed the fabled crossroads. It didn’t conform to the mental image Raszer had been carrying.
That image—with him since Taos—was more like that mythical Mississippi Delta junction where young guitarist Robert Johnson had pawned his soul to the Devil for the gift of the blues. With date palms and dromedaries. But this place was as far from the Mississippi as you could get. This place was Nowhere-Land, the event horizon of a black hole into which he would soon cast flesh and fate. The roads that intersected here were rutted old camel tracks amid bleak, haunted mountains.
Yet it was hardly deserted.
There was no sign of the Mephistophelian Black Sheikh of whom both Henry Lee and Shams had spoken, but they had plenty of company. On the near side of the dusty crossing, a mixed company of uniformed pesh merga and irregular Kurdish hill fighters, rifles in hand, had taken position. Facing them down from the far side were an equal number of gunmen, of various races but mostly white, wearing black T-shirts and cargo pants. They cradled assault rifles with sniper scopes in their thick arms and wore pistols in thigh holsters. Some had shaved heads; others had heavy-metal manes tied back from long faces bearing chin beards and goatees.
The only one wearing anything like a uniform was the apparent commanding officer, a short, square-shouldered man with the features of a young Jon Voight but lines that said fifty and a haircut that said George Armstrong Custer. Even from a distance, what set him apart from his company was that he looked like an actor who’d been digitally matted into the scene. The effect caused Raszer to blink and check through Dante’s binoculars. Face to face with his Kurdish counterpart at the crossroads, the CO was engaged in heated argument. His alpha body language suggested he was winning, but the Kurd, for his part, was holding his ground with less display. On both sides, there seemed to be a lot of tension. Things looked ready to blow.
“Mercenaries,” Dante hissed.
“And they’re not natives,” said Raszer. “American or European. Can you make out the patch on the CO’s jacket?”
“Green River Security,” said Dante. “The M-rated Blackwater. The top guys are renegades who broke away from PMCs like Jax and Dyncorp ’cause they thought they’d gone soft on the teat of the U.S. government. The foot soldiers are mostly Salvadoran and Columbian. The
top gun—”
“Does not look friendly,” Francesca said.
“No, he doesn’t,” Raszer agreed.
Ruthie came to his side. “If they’re Americans, maybe they’ll—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, girl,” Dante blurted.