by D. J. Niko
Gabriel sat on the cold ground, gathering his knees to his chest. Though his line of sight was limited to a stone wall tentatively illuminated by the anemic fire, their voices bounced and echoed off unseen chambers. Shadows danced around him like the silhouettes of muses, alternately hiding and revealing the texture of the rock.
The young Bedouin stuffed a clay pipe with tobacco and, with a kindly smile revealing his misaligned gray teeth, offered it to his companion. Gabriel used a piece of kindling to light the pipe and drew back, coughing as he inhaled.
“What is this stuff? It’s disgusting.”
Da’ud howled hysterically.
Gabriel laughed too. He drew back again and feigned his pleasure on the exhale so as to not offend his new friend. He was repelled by the substance, but the act of smoking was comforting.
Da’ud wrapped a piece of gauze around a stick and dipped it into the fire to make a torch. He gestured to Gabriel to follow him as he scooted, using his hands and feet like a monkey, toward the far end of the cave. He held the torch close to the wall.
Remarkably, the rock from the base of the wall to the ceiling was covered with strange drawings and what appeared to be characters of a language, all carved into the stone.
“You can write? You know language?” Gabriel was stunned.
Da’ud pointed to the stick figures accompanying the text, which were lined up in storyboard fashion, and with charadelike gestures proceeded to explain their meaning. He pointed to the figure of a horseman raising a spear and emulated a mean expression.
Gabriel watched intently. Though he understood nothing the boy was saying, he could sense his anger. He read the gesture as the description of an enemy.
Da’ud pointed to another scene, showing the horseman and his men trampling people and tents. His voice grew loud—almost frantic—as he recounted his story. The next figure depicted a man lying on the ground and the horse rearing over his body while a small boy stood nearby. Da’ud wrapped his arms around himself and rocked back and forth, his eyes glistening with tears and his voice full of angst.
Gabriel struggled to comprehend. Was the trampled man a relative? His father, perhaps? Was he the small boy watching the scene unfold?
Da’ud composed himself, and his eyes filled with hatred. He thumped his chest thrice and held up his fists. He pointed to another figure that showed two men fighting hand to hand. He clenched his teeth and ran his hand across his throat, a gesticulation that was unmistakable.
The figures, combined with Da’ud’s gestures and wild-eyed delivery, told the story of revenge, the taking of one life to avenge another. The boy before him might have been young but not too young to spill blood for justice. Gabriel was at a loss for words.
Da’ud continued, pointing to another row of figures. His eyes were blank as he told the last part of the story. He pointed to a piece of sharp stone on the ground, picked up the flint, and handed it to Gabriel.
Gabriel protested, but Da’ud’s hard expression told Gabriel he’d better acquiesce. He put his hand on the young Bedouin’s shoulder. The two exchanged glances, a silent understanding between men. They were not so different after all.
Six
Sarah sat at her desk, staring out the window of her cabin at the ceaseless downpour that had kept her crew inside the past three days. The wet season had finally arrived in Aksum.
Two weeks had passed since their trip to Addis, and she was still trying to make sense of the events. She kept thinking of the inscription on the Ezana throne: My medicine man placed himself between my body and the lance-blade and fell in my place. The king’s narrative was consistent with the wound on the entombed man’s rib cage. Could this be the tenth saint? Was that why the warning was etched on the coffin?
She had spent the time indoors researching the battle at Meroe, hoping for any clue about the king’s medicine man, but had found nothing. The only evidence of his existence, as far as she could tell, was what Matakala had shown her.
The brotherhood to which Matakala had alluded also weighed on her mind. She and Daniel had both placed calls to colleagues at Cambridge, Rutgers, and elsewhere, but the responses had come back empty. Either this sect was extremely well guarded or it didn’t exist at all. She hoped for the latter.
She picked up a letter from among her pile of papers. It was from Matakala, on official Ministry of Culture letterhead, and had arrived by certified post shortly after their return to Aksum.
Dear Dr. Weston,
I enjoyed our meeting the other night and look forward to a mutually cooperative relationship.
I trust you have had the time to evaluate my proposal. Please call my office in the next forty-eight hours with your reply.
Most sincerely,
Andrew Matakala
The deadline had come and gone, and she hadn’t answered. She was determined to stand her ground, whatever the consequences. Still, she wanted to know more about her adversary. She poured herself a glass of Ethiopian tej and drew back on her harsh Rothman cigarette. Technically, she’d quit two years ago, but she needed whatever help she could muster.
“Weston here.” The voice was a source of both comfort and angst.
“Hello, Daddy.” She drew the smoke deep into her lungs and exhaled.
“Darling, are you smoking? Don’t tell me you’re so weak willed you’ve gone back.”
Sarah felt the pang but brushed it aside. “Not now, Daddy. I need your help. There’s someone I want you to check out for me. A man by the name of Andrew Matakala. I need to know who he is, where he was educated … whatever you can tell me about him.”
“Is this your new beau, darling?”
“I’m being serious. It’s someone I ran into in Addis. He works for the Ministry of Culture, but there’s something about him I don’t trust.”
“Oh, Sarah, are you sure you’re not being paranoid? This isn’t your overactive imagination speaking, is it?”
There he went again, dismissing her as if she were a child. She regretted calling him. “Listen, if it’s a big deal, forget about it. I’ll get the information some other way.”
“Let me see what I can do. But it will take some time. I have an agenda full of meetings, you know, and then there’s all the travel: Brussels, Dubai, Tokyo. I will try to get to it between things.”
Between things.
She heard a rap on her door. Matakala’s warning came to mind: You don’t know whom you’re up against.
“Fair enough. Must run; someone’s at the door.” She hung up hastily.
Another knock.
“Sarah, it’s me.”
Relieved to hear Daniel’s voice, she opened the door to find her colleague standing in the rain. Drops trickled down his forehead like tiny rivers, skirting his thick black brows and outlining the contours of his face as they fell to the ground. He was pale as the morning fog, his jaw tightly closed.
She let him in and went to a cupboard to fetch some towels. “You don’t look good.”
He stared at her blankly, his eyes completely devoid of their usual luster.
His silence made her stomach tighten. “Danny? What is it?” She touched his forearm.
He was silent for a long moment, then looked at the ceiling and exhaled loudly. “Rada is dead.”
“What?” She had expected him to say he had some bad news from abroad, that he had to leave the camp at once—anything but this. “No.” She sat motionless.
“His secretary called me. She found him this morning. It must have happened late last night. She left at ten o’clock, and he was still at the office. Apparently someone broke in sometime after that and planted three bullets in his chest. Damn it to hell.”
Sarah dropped her forehead to her hands.
“His secretary thinks it was a robbery. Said the place was ransacked when she got there. She found him on the floor, bleeding on a pile of papers.”
Sarah sat up. “A robbery? That’s bollocks.”
“It sure as hell wasn’t a robbe
ry. Rada was onto something, and somebody was trying to silence him.”
“How do you know this?”
“When the secretary left last night, Rada gave her a sealed envelope addressed to me. He told her it was some documents I was expecting and to courier it to me first thing in the morning. She did it on her way to the office, before she found him. What do you want to bet these documents had something to do with the inscriptions?”
“Did the secretary know anything about it?”
“No, she had no idea. He didn’t confide in her.”
Sarah walked to the window and watched the rain, like needles of molten silver, pelt the ground in the light of the full moon. Her thoughts lingered on her conversation with Matakala. What if … ?
She turned to Daniel. “I can’t help but think of what Matakala said about this Coptic brotherhood. That they would stop at nothing to protect what is theirs. If there is any truth to that—”
“There’s no way to know, but something tells me the truth will reveal itself sooner than we think. And we’ll be caught smack in the middle of it like Rada was.”
Sarah studied Daniel’s face. Behind the veil of ire lurked anguish, maybe even guilt.
“I’m sorry about Rada. I know he was your chap. But don’t blame yourself, Danny. This is not your fault.” She tried to sound sympathetic, but her tone was awkward, all wrong for the situation.
He gave her a bitter smile, stood, and walked to the door.
The thought crossed her mind that neither of them was safe tonight, but she didn’t want to reveal her vulnerability.
Instead of asking him to stay, she bade him good night and bolted the door behind him.
Seven
The tribe stayed in the basalt lands to wait out the winter. Though the days were never cold, the night temperatures often plummeted below freezing and the tribesmen took refuge in the caves. Gabriel sat with a few men near a fire, shivering though wrapped in two woolen blankets. His mood was somber. Earlier he had witnessed the passing of one of the elders, a frail old creature whose heart had succumbed to the cold. It affected him more than he would have expected, watching life flee like that. But the Bedouins were unfazed by the hardships winter brought, regarding it as an inescapable part of life that they were powerless to change. Their good-natured chatter and the earthy scent of pipe smoke lulled him to sleep.
In his dreams, he could not escape the persistence of his fragmented memory. He was in a big hall, in front of a sea of people. There must have been hundreds, thousands maybe. He could not tell what he was wearing, except that he wore spectacles that kept sliding down the steep angle of his nose. His words were garbled and senseless. The only intelligible thing was a young woman’s question: “But what of the Mediterranean Sea? Haven’t we learned from those mistakes?”
He turned restlessly in the throes of tortured sleep. Dreams kept coming, some incoherent, others painfully real. In one he saw himself inside a steel tube that barely fit around his body. It was cold, but he was drenched in sweat and clearly frightened. He felt claustrophobic, desperate to get out, but couldn’t move his arms enough to push on the steel walls and find an exit. A cold liquid rose from the bottom of the tube, covering his feet, his knees, his thighs, his navel. His lower extremities felt numb. He screamed for help, but no sound came from his mouth. There was only the pained, terrified expression of a man on the edge of unspeakable doom. The liquid reached his bottom lip.
He awoke gasping and was comforted to see the crumple of his tattered Bedouin blankets and the feeble remains of the night’s fire. The more he tried to concentrate on making sense of the images, the more they eluded him, taunted him, made a fool of him.
Hot with anger, he stormed out of the cave and ran aimlessly across the desert until the cold sobered him and he fell to his knees, too exhausted to care.
The pieces of the puzzle that was Gabriel’s life were coming together, albeit in helter-skelter fashion. Judging by his frustration with the laborious life in the desert, he was sure that at home, wherever home was, things happened at a much faster pace.
He couldn’t surmise what year it was. The nomads knew the passing of the seasons and counted the moons of their own lives, knowing, for example, that a person had lived through eighteen summers or another was born forty moons after the passing of spring, but there was no broader concept of a place in time.
As Gabriel learned enough of the language to communicate on a basic level, he unraveled the mystery of his new home. The tribesmen didn’t call it by name. They simply called it the desert as if there wasn’t another desert in the world. What they did know was that there were twin rivers passing through the sands, that there were fertile slivers of land to the north and west, and that traders passed through these parts as they made their way from the east toward the sea to the west.
Arabia. How he’d ended up there, half buried in a sandy grave and left for dead, remained ambiguous, gnawing on his consciousness day and night.
Every passing month chipped away at Gabriel’s impatience, and he eventually became more resigned to the inevitable. A man knows deep in his bones when to give in and go with the flow. As the Bedouins liked to say, the answers came when they were ready to come, to those who were ready to receive them. Fighting the natural course of things would be counterproductive, even destructive. He recalled the explanation Hairan had once offered when the two of them were sitting by the banks of a stream in an oasis, washing their robes.
“Do you see those two rocks?” Hairan pointed to a round, smooth stone beneath the surface of the flowing water. Then he pointed to another, one whose crown was above the surface. The water parted as it hit the stone, flowing around and past it. That stone was slighter and had sharper edges. “The first rock submits to the water. It does not fight the current. That’s why it is whole. The second rock stands against the current, but it doesn’t change anything. The water still flows as it always has; it just takes a different course. But the rock itself is eroded. Soon there will be nothing left of it.”
Gabriel was humbled by the statement. A man like Hairan might not have seen much of the world outside these expanses of sand, but his wisdom ran far deeper than that of those who called themselves civilized men.
Gabriel liked spending time with Hairan. He saw kindness in the old chief’s ebony eyes and an uncommon calm in his manner. Nothing ruffled him, not even painful memories.
Gabriel had asked him one night why he did not have a wife and children.
“I had a wife,” Hairan said, a wistful smile crossing his lips. “Ain. Her beauty was more radiant than the evening star.”
Gabriel was certain by Hairan’s use of the past tense that Ain was no longer living. “What happened to her?”
“She passed to the other realm. It was her destiny.”
Gabriel respected the silence.
“Ain became pregnant on the night of our wedding. There was much joy in the goums. The men slaughtered a lamb and cooked it on a spit. Everyone ate and drank and danced to celebrate the arrival of the shaykh’s heir. I was very happy. It gave me great pleasure to see Ain with child. My child.”
“You loved her.”
“More than the grasses love the water. She was destined for me. I had seen it in a vision once. I was walking through a lush orchard. I tried to pull the fruit off the branches but couldn’t. Then Ain appeared from behind a tree and handed me the juiciest orange in the orchard. I knew then she was the woman I would marry.”
“And she had a good pregnancy?”
“She did not. She was sick all the time and could not eat, could not sleep. Her pains came early. The elder women tried to save the child, my son, but he was already dead. There was nothing they could do.”
“I’m so sorry.” Gabriel felt his heart beat in his throat. He felt genuine empathy for the man, as if he had been in that place himself.
“It was not meant to be. Things always happen the way they should.”
“And Ain?”
/> “She died from grief some moons later. She wept every day. I could not console her. She stopped eating and drinking. She lost the will to live. All she wanted, she said, was to be with her son. So she went to him.” Hairan sighed and trained his eyes on the evening star.
Gabriel closed his eyes and lowered his head, uncertain why the story sounded so familiar.
Gabriel was by nature an analytical man. What the nomads knew by instinct, he knew by mathematical exactitude. His mind dwelled in the realm of reason and order. On a steaming summer day, his logic told him a sandstorm might be approaching. He could tell this by the temperature of the air and ground and the direction from which the rare breezes came. The air was so dry breathing felt like a gasp for oxygen in a fire, the sand so hot it could not be traversed even by those with the most calloused feet. He knew, before the Bedouins themselves knew, what would happen: in nature’s inimitable way of attempting to achieve balance, the heat would distribute itself upward and outward by organizing convection currents. If the heat was intense enough and the currents strong enough, a fierce wind would be formed and move mass quantities of sand with no regard for anything or anyone in its way.
Gabriel went to Hairan to relay his suspicions. He bowed his head and pointed his eyes toward the ground. “Shaykh, it has not rained in months. The air is still and hotter than I have ever seen it. The camels are restless. I fear great walls of sand are coming.”
“And how is it,” he said with a harsh tone, “that a man who has never lived in the desert knows so much?”
Though he had been there almost a year, he was still considered a visitor. “I humble myself to your wisdom and that of your tribesmen. I do not know the desert like you do, but this I know. I am certain of it.”
“Abyan.” Hairan used the name Da’ud had given Gabriel. Everyone had adopted the epithet. “I believe you are sincere, but you have to respect the knowledge of the people who live and die by this desert.” In an apparent show of courtesy, he made an unusual concession. “I will call the council of elders together this evening. You may state your concerns before everyone. Then the elders will make a decision, and you must abide by that decision whether you agree with it or not.”