The girl stared out her hazy window as they rode. She’d chosen the side with the view of the harbor. Gus’s window, on the other hand, gave out on the cut strata of the hill. He asked where they were going, but all she said was, You’ll see. He called up through the hatch, but the driver didn’t answer.
The silence was irritating. Gus didn’t like being considered superfluous, but he told himself to relax. He would have been more comfortable in uniform, but at least his eyes were open, and his wallet full.
After a while, the driver’s hand appeared with two bananas. The girl gave them to Gus. He peeled one and started eating, but she stared at him until he offered to peel hers, too.
Is the pain very bad? he asked.
The girl shrugged. It seemed she was simply used to having her fruit peeled by others.
They came to a halt at the fortified gates of a private compound. The carriage rocked as two armed men climbed aboard, one on each side of the driver. Then the gates parted, and they rolled into a dusty courtyard, where a handsome marshman with a crooked nose and a carefully trimmed beard waved the carriage to a halt. Gus noticed that the cord around his headscarf was purple. All the other cords he’d seen were black. Then again, virtually all of his exposure to marshmen had been in the form of black-and-white gravures in the pages of his father’s moldering travel magazines.
The girl leaped from the carriage, flung herself into the marshman’s arms, and pressed his hand to her cheek. He was very tender with her. Gus liked the way he swept back her braids as he knelt to inspect her wound.
The marshman rewrapped the bandage and dismissed the girl. Then he turned to Gus and said, “You sewed it well.”
“She was incredibly brave,” Gus said. “She wouldn’t let me numb it.”
“She’s always been afraid of syringes,” the marshman said, but Gus could tell he was pleased with the compliment. “You’re with the fleet?”
Gus nodded.
“By the way, my daughter thinks you’re a spy. She says you take too many pictures.”
“I wish I were a spy,” Gus said. “It would make me a lot more interesting.”
The marshman smiled. His teeth were full of gold. “Yes, I can see why she likes you.”
“Does she?”
“She wouldn’t have brought you here if she didn’t.” The marshman extended his hand. “I am the Magheed,” he said. “My daughter Thali and I are grateful for your attention. You should know that she speaks your language perfectly well. Her mother was a native of your country.”
Gus introduced himself, then bowed and said, Let us rather be strangers than friends.
The Magheed laughed and corrected the saying, which Gus had gotten backward. “I like this one,” he said, turning to his men. “Even if he is a spy.”
The other marshmen smiled uncomfortably.
“Tonight you eat with us,” the Magheed said.
“That’s very kind,” Gus said, “but I have other plans. I hired a guide to show me the ruins.”
“A tour of the marshes? So late in the day?”
“My guide seems to have vanished.”
“You paid him a deposit?”
Gus nodded.
“How much?”
The Magheed winced when Gus told him the figure. “Unfortunately,” he said, “you hired a scoundrel. What did he look like?”
The Magheed called over one of his retainers and translated as Gus described the boy. “We’ll find him,” the Magheed said. “Meanwhile, I’ll send a man to the hotel for your things.”
* * *
Gus spent a pleasant afternoon exploring the Magheed’s compound. Thali was never far away. She’d changed into a robe and headscarf that made her look like a classic marsh girl. She followed him, ducking behind a gnarled cedar or a whitewashed wall whenever he turned around, but never completely out of sight.
Eventually he made his way down to the beach and took off his shoes, the better to enjoy the fine pink sand. There was a promising breaker twenty meters offshore that looked perfect for surf-casting. Gus wished he had a rod and some tackle. He would have liked to present his host with a fresh fish, even if it was pulled from his own waters.
Thali watched from behind an overturned dory as he walked out on the jetty. When he reached the end of the rocks, he dangled his feet in the fabled waters of the bay. The water was full of jellyfish; the sun was unrelenting. He stayed longer than he wanted to. It seemed incumbent on him to prove that foreigners weren’t weak.
She was gone when he got down from the jetty, but she’d laid out a blanket for him in the shade of the dory. There was a tray with almonds and grapes, and a darkening clay pitcher of the same strange drink he’d had at the hotel. He ate a few grapes, which were small and quite sour, then closed his eyes for a while and dozed.
* * *
He mistook the call to dinner for a call to prayer, and wound up being late to table, but the Magheed greeted him in high spirits. Throughout the meal, he kept hinting at a special treat.
When an enormous flatfish cooked in a sarcophagus of salt was served, to much applause, Gus was given the honor of cracking it open with a huge iron spoon. The Magheed offered him the choice portion: the cheeks.
The fish was delicious, and Gus thanked his host profusely, but the Magheed’s eyes were still merry. “Just wait,” he said.
At the end of the meal, a bowl of scented water was passed around the table. Gus dipped his fingers like everyone else. The Magheed was the last to dip his fingers. People clapped when he dried them, and Gus thought the evening was concluded.
But then two marshmen came in dragging a hooded boy who was cursing and struggling. At the Magheed’s signal, one of the men struck him behind the knees with the butt of a rifle. The boy fell to the floor. This happened directly in front of Gus.
The Magheed unhooded him, then turned to Gus and asked, “Is this the one?”
The boy’s face was bloody and one of his eyes was swollen shut, but Gus recognized his young guide. “I’m sure there’s an explanation,” he said.
The Magheed smiled ironically. “Of course there is. This little thief wanted your money.”
The boy burst into tears. The Magheed grabbed him by the hair. “You never meant to give this man a tour, did you?” he said.
The boy pleaded with Gus. He said his mother had started coughing blood during the night and begged him to stay with her. He’d tried to leave a message with the waiter at the café, but the man refused to talk to him.
“It’s true!” Gus said. “The waiter at that café doesn’t like the marsh tongue.”
The Magheed yanked the boy’s hair. “By stealing from my guest, you have stolen from me.”
The boy began to blubber. “I didn’t steal,” he cried. “I didn’t.”
The Magheed showed Gus the rifle the guard had used as a bludgeon. “This is a very expensive cape gun,” he said. “I spoke with the dealer who sold it to the boy this morning.”
“Why would he go and buy a gun?”
“Why wouldn’t he?” the Magheed said, handing the cape gun to Gus. “It’s yours now.”
Gus didn’t want to accept the gun, but the Magheed leaned it against the table next to him. “Take it,” he said. “It’s custom-made. Good quality.”
Then he squatted next to the boy and spoke softly in his ear. “Tell my guest what we do to thieves.”
“I’m not a thief,” the boy whimpered.
“I like the gun,” Gus said. “Let’s call it even.”
“I wish we could,” the Magheed said, replacing the boy’s hood. The boy resisted, but the guards held him tight.
The Magheed unsheathed his dirk. He raised his voice and said, “A thief in the marshes forfeits his hand.”
The boy started to choke inside the hood.
Bare his arm, the Magheed said.
One of the guards knelt by the boy, slid back his sleeve, and pinned the arm to the floor.
Gus leaped to his feet. “Please!�
� he cried. “No!”
The Magheed winked at Gus and held his finger to his lips. He took the iron spoon from the fish plate and raised it over the boy’s wrist, then motioned to the guard. The guard silently readied a truncheon behind the boy’s head. Get ready with napkins, the Magheed said. There’s going to be a lot of blood.
Then, in one swift motion, he brought the spoon down on the boy’s wrist. At the same instant, the guard clubbed the boy’s head. He went limp.
The table erupted in laughter, but Gus felt sick. “Thank God,” he said. “Thank God. I thought you were really going to do it.”
“We’re not barbarians,” the Magheed said. He nodded to the guard, who drew a wicked little knife, lifted the boy’s wrist, and in one fluid motion made a shallow incision all the way around.
“When he wakes up,” the Magheed said, “he’ll be told that his hand was indeed removed, but you insisted on sewing it back. You’ll be famous. Tales of your mercy will precede you. Now, as for your tour, anyone in the street could have told you that the marshes are closed.”
“Closed? I didn’t know,” Gus said. Actually, he’d heard something to that effect, but he’d also been told that access to the ruins was routine, a matter of a few simple bribes.
“Not to worry,” the Magheed said. “You’ll have your tour. I’ll see to it myself.”
2
The Magheed’s party quit the port city the next day. Gus had hoped to send his parents a cable to the effect that he was being dragged into the marshes by a band of friendly natives, but there wasn’t time. If only his father could see him now, barreling along on a flatbed truck with the Magheed’s men, their long black robes chattering in the wind!
After clearing the city gates, the caravan rolled unchallenged across trackless scrubland, trailing the marshmen’s songs and laughter. The so-called closure of the marshes hardly posed a problem. Most of the checkpoints were shuttered. The few that were open were manned by local militia who took pains to seek out the Magheed and pay their respects.
There was plenty of trading along the way. At each stop, as crates were tossed down from idling trucks and others heaved up and secured, Gus was served food and water in Bakelite bowls from an old picnic set. The other men on the truck passed earthen jugs and baskets of fruit. He would have been happy to share in these communal meals, but was told that the Magheed’s daughter had prepared his portion herself.
By late afternoon, as scrubland gave way to fertile ground, the caravan’s wake no longer boiled with red dust. The ride began to set Gus’s teeth on edge; the tires, which had been bled for traction in the sand, vibrated badly on hardpack. Through a slit in his borrowed headcloth, Gus watched for changes in the drainage ditch that paralleled the road. As the trucks rolled on, the bottom of the ditch grew dark and moist; then the velvety silt erupted in cordgrass, sedge, and cattails. By the end of the day, the ditch ran with water and was choked with phragmites, the typical reed of the marshes, arrayed in an endless picket that swayed as the caravan rumbled past.
When the road finally ended at the trucking dock of a dilapidated warehouse, the Magheed’s party dismounted, filed through labyrinthine gates designed for livestock, then loaded onto several private barges. The boats were tethered in the final lock of a canal that stretched north into the darkness.
Being on the water made the marshmen easy. Once the baggage was secured, some shared silent cigarettes; others arranged themselves on pyramids of rolled rugs and dozed. The tang of goat stew wafted from the women’s barge.
After everyone had fed, the decks were transformed into a patchwork of grass mats and heavy quilts. The Magheed descended from the towpath like a father coming to kiss his children good night.
Gus rose when the Magheed appeared beside his pallet. The Magheed embraced him and welcomed him to the marshes as if this were the first time they’d met. He asked if there was anything he could do to make the journey more pleasant. Gus thanked him and said that Thali was taking good care of him.
The Magheed’s eyebrows rose in surprise, but then he turned and opened his arms to take in the high brick walls of the canal. “Built to accommodate the rainy season,” he said, “but as you see, passable in the dry months, as well. Unlike the old canal.”
“A fine piece of engineering.”
“I asked for gunboats,” the Magheed said, “and this is what I got instead. Thali thinks I should be more grateful. She tells me the canal represents progress.”
“Doesn’t it?”
“Perhaps,” he said, “but for whom?”
* * *
The barges got under way in the night. Gus slept fitfully, his dreams fed by groaning beams, bullwhips, the burble of onrushing water. He was woken in the foggy predawn by a small boy who tugged his sleeve and called him Master. After a breakfast of flatbread and yogurt, the boy led him up a ladder to the towpath, where a hunting party was convening.
Gus was approached by one of the Magheed’s guards, a grizzled elder with a leather eye patch named Fennuk, who knelt and opened a soft rifle case. Your weapon, he said, presenting Gus with the cape gun that had been bought with his tour money, but not before burnishing it one last time with a chamois. Then he stood and gave Gus two pouches of ammunition—a gift, he emphasized, from his own pocket, not the Magheed’s.
Open them, Fennuk said.
One of the pouches had rifle slugs; the other, cartridges of bird-shot. Gus hefted the pouches with an appreciative nod.
Ten of each, Fennuk said. He seemed put out that Gus hadn’t bothered to count them.
Fennuk and the other marshmen of the Magheed’s inner circle carried brand-new automatic rifles. Gus examined the markings on one of the barrels; the weapons had been manufactured in a suburb of the capital city, not far from where he grew up.
The marshmen shouldered their rifles when Gus walked by, assuming stern expressions and sometimes even offering salutes, which he reluctantly returned. The deference made him uncomfortable. Yes, he was an officer, an ambassador of the nation that had sent rifles, but hadn’t his people also built the canal?
The foreign guns were for the Magheed’s retinue, but every marshman had a weapon, although some of them were so thick with rust that Gus doubted they could be fired. Even the youngest member of the party, the little fellow called Hamza who’d woken Gus that morning, carried a reed slingshot. In fact, Hamza’s slingshot was responsible for the day’s first kill: a thrush the boy managed to shoot through the eye with a lead pellet.
A steady walking pace outstripped the barges. When the fog burned off, Gus was finally able to photograph the ancient alluvial plain he’d spent so many hours daydreaming about as a child: an Eden of reeds and silver waterways, where ruined Bronze Age palaces seemed to doze like exhausted parents, oblivious to the joyful birds that ran riot along their spines.
The marshmen waited patiently while Gus composed his pictures, but he felt guilty for slowing the hunt. He kept telling himself to put the camera away, and even managed to slip it back in its leather case a few times, but it never seemed to stay there long.
After nearly an hour of walking, someone gave a signal, and Gus was rushed up the towpath to a clearing, where space was made for him atop a crumbling clay wall.
Fennuk pointed out a disturbance in the grass at a hundred meters. Wild pig, he said.
Gus was handed a battered spotting scope whose optics flattened the animal into a tiny menacing silhouette. The pig was rooting in clumps of arrowgrass. Gus waited for someone to take a shot, but apparently that honor fell to him. Fennuk motioned for the marshmen to step aside, then fished a slug from one of Gus’s pouches and pressed it into his hand.
Gus was willing, but there was a problem. He held up the cape gun and confessed that he didn’t know how to open it.
Pursing his lips in disbelief, Fennuk worked the latch behind the barrels. The gun broke soundlessly. Gus tried to load the slug, but it was loose in the barrel, and the action wouldn’t close. He wondered if Fennuk
had given him slugs of the wrong caliber.
Fennuk exchanged puzzled glances with the other marshmen. He took the cape gun, pulled the slug from the left barrel, and slid it into the right barrel, where it fit perfectly. Then he took a bird-shot shell from Gus’s other pouch and loaded the left barrel. Bird-shot, left; slug, right, he said, closing the action and handing the gun back.
By the time the gun was loaded and Gus had taken a kneeling stance, the pig had moved farther off. Now it was a tiny blur in the V of the open sight. Gus doubted he could hit it from such a distance, but he lined up the shot; rested his finger on the trigger; took two deep breaths and held the third; then fired.
He wasn’t prepared for the recoil, which knocked him over and somehow bloodied his nose. A hit? he asked. At this, the marshmen couldn’t contain their laughter. Fennuk shook his head. Wrong trigger, he said.
Gus had fired bird-shot instead of the slug.
The shot startled the pig, but didn’t spook it. Instead, it turned to the noise, twisting its huge head and snorting.
As if to prove there was nothing wrong with the gun, Fennuk took it from Gus, swung it to his shoulder, and quickly fired.
The marshman with the spotting scope raised his hand and whooped. The party fanned into the swamp grass, the young men racing ahead, the older ones chatting excitedly. Fennuk brought up the rear with a confident unhurried gait.
Gus supposed he was embarrassed, but he was happy for Fennuk and thrilled with the sight of the marshmen celebrating around the fallen pig, which made for some excellent pictures.
* * *
When the barges finally caught up with the hunting party, most of the men climbed down to the decks to rest. Gus stayed on the towpath, where there was at least a breath of wind. Fennuk made a place for him in the shade of a defunct tollhouse and offered him boiled water from a canteen. For once, Gus was happy to be singled out for special treatment. The typical solution for a marshman’s thirst was a leather bag dipped in the canal.
Marshlands Page 11