Riders of the Pale Horse

by T. Davis Bunn

  The marketplace cracked with sounds like gunshot as young boys popped open paper bags. The boys whipped the bags open with a snap that resounded through the market. Hundreds of these boys, dressed in traditional baggy vests and trousers that were little more than filthy rags, wandered through the market selling bags. The continuous pops were louder than the traders’ cries and the buyers’ answering complaints. Popping bags was the only game many of these boys had ever known. They had been assigned to the task of earning much-needed pennies since they could walk. They flicked the bags open over and over and over with grim boredom.

  The mission stood at the far end of the market from the mosque. Despite the cool shade visible through its wide-open doors, the church was an island of empty calm. The mission was surrounded by a chest-high, lime-daubed wall with a portal of rough-hewn timber. The gate was manned by beggars who won coveted holy spaces by right of age and infirmity. Robards dropped a few pennies into a clawlike hand emerging from a filthy burlap cloak. He was rewarded with a twitch of life and the traditional groaned blessing.

  At that moment a nearby rag heap erupted into life. The crone’s eyes spit a brilliant light as she pointed one shaking finger directly at Wade Waters and began screaming words Robards could not understand.

  With the swiftness of a world whose only entertainment is the public spectacle, people gathered. Faces examined the pair with chattering curiosity. The crowd clustered close, leaving sufficient space for the old woman to dance. The two westerners were trapped within a vacuum of heat and dust and isolation. What amazed Robards as much as the woman’s screaming was Wade’s reaction. He positively cringed, as though embarrassed by some act he himself had committed.

  “Are you the man they call Robards?” Another white face emerged from behind the nearby wall and shouted to Robards over the crowd and the old woman’s continual din. “I am Reverend Phillips. I say, wouldn’t you be more comfortable in here?”

  “Friend, that’s one invitation I don’t need to hear twice.” Robards grabbed the wall and leapt over it, landing with a thud in the dusty yard, then turned and helped Wade.

  The crone danced in through the open gate. She stopped and leveled her scrawny finger within inches of Wade’s chest. The crowd pressed in around the wall and watched with joyful curiosity.

  “Let’s go inside, shall we?” The frocked little man motioned toward the church. His accent was thoroughly British, his manner delicate and offended by all the furor. “They won’t follow us any farther than here. Their religious leaders—the mullahs—don’t allow it. This is a sort of no-man’s-land. Not that we aren’t constantly being harassed by the pestilent mullahs.”

  Once inside the mission portals, Robards found himself surrounded by relative peace. Outside the crone continued her screeching invective. “That old lady was making my skin crawl.”

  “Yes, they do tend to have an unsettling effect,” the parson agreed. “When they’re like that it’s hard to tell when they will go from happy and gay to nasty and dangerous.”

  “Could you tell what she was saying?”

  “Step up here where they can’t see us.” The parson led him up to the front of the church, where a narrow doorway led to a closet-sized vestry. He paid absolutely no mind whatsoever to the sweating Wade. “Oh, she was saying what they always do.”

  “They? Who is they?”

  “I’m sure I don’t know.” Reverend Phillips was clearly distressed by the whole line of discussion. “Some group of troublemakers the local mullahs sent over, no doubt.”

  “They are Christian,” Wade protested in his ever-soft voice. “This side of the market borders the Russian section.”

  “Christian in name only,” the parson countered crossly. “And this close to the border, they pay more attention to the mullahs’ orders than they do any priest or parson. Besides, with these beggars you can’t make any such generalizations. They know no borders.”

  “But what did the woman say?” Robards pressed.

  “Oh,” Reverend Phillips waved distractedly in Wade’s general direction. “They call him a healer of nations.”

  Robards cast an astonished glance toward Wade. “This happens every time you come around?”

  Wade nodded, trapped in painful shame. “I gave her some medicine for a sore on her foot.”

  “Yes,” the parson replied testily. “And look what happened. Just as I warned. You should never have started all that nonsense.”

  Robards looked from one to the other, asked, “What nonsense?”

  “He insisted on going out and treating beggars where they lay on the street,” the parson said, positively incensed by the idea. “As if we didn’t have enough trouble already with those insufferable mullahs and all their idiotic restrictions. I ask you, why on earth would anyone bother to go against their orders and enter our mission if this, this boy is going to turn around and treat everyone he can find out in the gutters?”

  Wade made no attempt to defend himself. He stared silently at the floor by his feet.

  “Oh, my goodness, where are my manners.” Reverend Phillips waved a delicately veined hand at one of his rickety chairs. “Have a seat, won’t you. As big as you are, when you’re standing in these confines it doesn’t leave room for us to breathe.”

  Robards did as he was told. “Aren’t there any local doctors?”

  “Not any more,” Wade replied.

  “All the professionals were Russians,” the parson explained. “Long before this uprising began, the Chechen made the local Russian population extremely nervous. They threatened them on the streets, in the markets, wherever. Those who had the opportunity to make a life for themselves elsewhere have long since departed.”

  “They said it was because they wished to make the Chechen state truly Chechen,” Wade added. “But really it was just a way of robbing people. They forced the Russians to leave in a panic, then stole everything left behind, and sold rights to the empty apartments on the black market.”

  Robards nodded. It was a story as old as war. “I hear you have a problem.”

  “Quite a large one, actually. You see, there is this rather irritating little war just to the south of us.”

  “Several of them, if I’ve heard correctly.”

  “Yes, well, for some reason known only to God and unnamed officials in London, we have been selected as a dropoff point for medicines intended for a Red Cross center that serves stranded villages.”

  “Where?”

  He waved a vague hand toward distant blue-clad mountains beyond his window. “Somewhere in the Caucasus. I’m sure I don’t know where, exactly.”

  “In the highlands, near Carcash,” Wade said quietly. “In the tribal borderlands between Georgia, Ossetia, and Russia.”

  “Not a healthy place to be raising a family just now,” Robards offered.

  “As you can see,” the parson interjected, “that leaves us with quite a problem. There were supposed to be some people coming down from the center to collect these medicines. They are five weeks overdue—”

  “Nine,” Wade corrected mildly.

  The parson shot him an irritated glance. “What it all boils down to, Mr. Robards, is we have a large portion of our mission space going to medicines that are not ours in the first place.”

  “I’m afraid they’re in trouble,” Wade said, his eyes on his shoes.

  “Nonsense,” the parson snapped. “No doubt they are simply too busy to come down and see to things. Either that or they already have everything they require.”

  “I’ve sent three messages up by local transport,” Wade persisted softly. “I haven’t heard anything back.”

  The little parson looked ready to boil over. Robards interrupted with, “Just how much medicine are we talking about?”

  It was Wade who answered. “Three tons. About two truck-loads. Mostly medicine, but there’s a spare generator and equipment for a portable surgery.”

  “Be that as it may,” Reverend Phillips snapped, “what
is important is that I simply cannot permit this massive pile of goods intended for someone else to continue to clutter my establishment. You cannot imagine the problems this amount of goods has caused. I have had to spend simply staggering sums for twenty-four-hour guards.”

  “Speaking of which,” Robards interrupted smoothly. “You gentlemen might work out of the goodness of your hearts, but I operate from baser means.”

  A gleam of hope appeared in the parson’s eyes. “Then you will deliver it?”

  “If we can work out a suitable arrangement,” Robards replied, “I don’t see why not.”

  “We were also left a certain sum intended for the Red Cross center,” Reverend Phillips said. “If we continue to wait for these miscreants to arrive, the guards will use it up in a matter of days.”

  “Months,” Wade corrected. “It was a pretty large sum of money.”

  The parson stifled a rebuke and instead ordered, “Go find the manifest. I am sure our Mr. Robards would like to see what we wish for him to carry.”

  As soon as the door closed behind Wade, Reverend Phillips leaned closer and said, “I want you to take that young man with you.”

  “Insurance, sure.”

  The parson showed confusion. “I beg your pardon?”

  “As insurance that the goods arrive where they’re supposed to,” Robards said. “No problem.”

  “Oh yes. Of course. Of course.” The parson gathered himself. “I absolutely must have some peace and quiet around here. You saw the disorder he causes. It is the same day in and day out. I simply cannot carry out my work under such conditions. Things cannot be allowed to continue as they are.”

  Wade Waters would never have described himself as a missionary. A missionary in his eyes was somebody who knew enough about God, the Bible, and plain simple faith to feel a sense of purpose. Wade was far too honest to consider himself a good Christian. As far as he was concerned, he was where he was not by design, not even by chance, but rather by sheer mistake.

  Wade’s mother had spent his early years convincing everyone within reach that she was a legend in her own time. Dinner parties were a chance to place Wade on a pedestal and proclaim, “See what I raised, the missionary-to-be, no doubt he’ll go off somewhere and give his life to the unwashed heathens.” She had made monumental scenes at family gatherings over her baby boy’s upcoming demise in darkest wherever. Wade had endured it all with quiet resignation and the feeling that he had learned to hold his breath for hours.

  His father was a lab technician, a nearsighted, quiet little man who felt distinctly ill at ease with anything that could not be studied at the safe distance of a microscope. He had watched his son grow from embryo to teenager with rising confusion, never interfering with his wife’s ideas of child rearing.

  In his final year of high school, Wade had emerged twice from his own protective shell of silence. The first time had come after a ringing sermon from a visiting minister, on a Sunday when his mother had been bedridden with the flu, when he had walked forward and given his life to Christ. The second time had been when he had adamantly refused to remain at home and go to the local university, opting rather for an upstate Christian college. His mother had stomached this surprising burst of independence only because such an education would prepare her boy for his chosen destiny.

  But throughout his college days, Wade felt as if he was a little gray shadow flitting through a scary gray world. He didn’t fit in anywhere. He never felt God’s guiding hand. In fact, Wade was basically convinced there was nothing inside him of any real interest to anyone—not to his parents, not other students, and certainly not to God. He looked into other students’ shining eyes, heard the fervor and joy in their voices, and decided he just wasn’t important enough for God to waste much time over.

  Strangely enough, however, he never saw in any of this a reason to doubt God’s existence. Nor did he question his own sense of eternal salvation. Wade more or less decided all he had to do was endure the next sixty or seventy years, and then eternity would be as much his as the next guy’s. In his darker moments of lonely wishing, it was almost enough.

  Pushed by feelings he could not understand, Wade studied public health and minored in French and Spanish. Having nothing better to do, he signed up for optional courses at the local college of nursing. To his surprise, Wade showed a strong aptitude for the work. He loaded up his last two years, and earned dual degrees in public health and nursing. His mother survived the embarrassment of her son becoming a nurse by declaring that he was doing vital research in the medical field.

  Wade proved to have a true gift for working with sick people. He was incredibly patient and infinitely gentle. He took time for the old and the lonely and the frightened. He accepted the most menial of duties without objection and carried them out professionally. When a local hospital gave him a six-month-trial contract, Wade spent more time on the wards than any other nurse and many of the doctors.

  But Wade’s mother stayed after him constantly to fulfill his destiny, as she put it. Wade remained silent and did nothing. Exasperated beyond speech, she finally mailed off for missionary application papers herself. During one Sunday afternoon visit, she slammed them down in front of him and demanded he complete the forms then and there.

  Wade did not mind. He knew the whole thing was an exercise in futility. He had absolutely no aptitude for missionary work. Anybody but his mother would see that immediately, and send him packing. So Wade filled in the papers for the sake of peace, and when it came time to select his destination, he checked the most exotic name on the list: Grozny, capital of the Autonomous Republic of Chechenya, the Russian Federation.

  The review board, however, decided to pay more attention to the nursing director at Wade’s hospital than to their own impressions of the young man. The nursing director wrote and then followed the letter up with an unsolicited telephone call. She said that the young man had the power of a true healer. He held hands and people simply felt better. He did the work of ten and did so without complaint. She actually had been forced to send the young man home on several occasions. He would be missed at the hospital, but the nursing director was a Christian and would never stand in the way of someone called to service.

  It was only at the airport, on the day of his departure for Europe and final mission training, that his mother-the-soap-opera-star had become just a mom. By then it was too late. The fact that Wade was actually leaving hit her with the force of John Henry’s hammer, and she had fallen apart. She had sent him down the departures tunnel with her wails echoing in his ears.

  Wade had never in his life run across anybody like Rogue Robards. Not even close.

  Robards was as solid as he was big—a rock-hard man with skin the color of a well-worn saddle. Though he was in his late thirties, the sheer power of the man made the number of his years unimportant. He exuded an unquestionable confidence, a complete reliance in his own ability to overcome whatever rose up before him. His smile came as easy as the sunrise, but contained neither warmth nor friendliness. It was as cold and confident as the gleam that lit the depths of his gray eyes.

  “What do you make of all that fuss raised over you back there?” Rogue demanded.

  Wade shrugged. “I guess it’s like Reverend Phillips says, they know I tried to help them.”

  “You a doctor or something?”

  “A nurse.”

  “Why didn’t you get qualified as a doctor if you knew you were gonna come over?”

  “Maybe I should have.”

  “Well, there hasn’t been a man born who’s learned how to backtrack,” Robards said easily. “Might as well bury past mistakes and get on with life, right?”

  “I guess so,” Wade said, marveling at the idea that it could really be as easy as that for somebody. Not for him, of course. Just for anybody.

  Wade directed their course along the winding, crumbling streets of Grozny. The city was largely destroyed, almost every building pitted with shell holes and blackened by
old fires. Few windows were intact. Tall Stalinist towers rose like grim tombstones to an era that was no longer. The city was now split distinctly in two, and the Muslim section contained the largest market. The local Chechen tribe, who were Muslim, were great traders. The Russian area contained all the modern stores, because the Russians living in Grozny had never become comfortable with the lengthy bickering required to make a purchase in the Muslim market.

  Here in the lowland capital, Russian soldiers massed at street corners and held the city to a grim semblance of order. Armored personnel carriers, their flat metal roofs sprouting machine-gun turrets, guarded major intersections. The key thoroughfares leading to and from the central city were defended round the clock by tanks, always in pairs, always with soldiers camped on neighboring verges.

  With this show of force, and with more soldiers pouring into the city every day, peace reigned in the lowlands with the deceptive calm of a caged tiger. But at night, startling flashes of orange and yellow and red lit the outlying hills, and man-made thunder rolled down from cloudless, star-flecked skies.

  “Hold it a second,” Robards said. He halted before a rickety street stall. The trader, a bearded hill tribesman, wore the traditional black knit cap with a little top button. The tribesman did not need girth to look imposing. A knife scar slashed down from a mutilated ear to his dark and scraggly beard. An empty bandolier crossed over his shoulder and fell to his waist, hanging with ease on the man who was obviously accustomed to its presence.

  Robards asked, “You speak the lingo?”

  “Some,” Wade admitted. “Russian mostly. I only know a few words of the hill dialects.”

  Robards eyed him anew. “How long did you say you’ve been here?”

  “A little over a year.”

  “You study Russian before you came?”