She heard her father mutter something incoherent as he lurched out of the compartment, Duncan clumping behind him, looking confused and half-asleep. She grabbed her backpack and followed them off the train. Climbing down the metal steps, she was hit by a wall of heat that took her breath away. Beyond the crush of passengers, a crimson sun floated behind a row of cypress trees, casting a golden light on the city, turning its ancient walls a deep shade of rose. This is so incredibly beautiful, she thought.
Seeing her father’s safari hat bobbing above the crowd, she ran to catch up with him, thinking how excited he must be, returning to Marrakech after eleven years and traveling to the desert to see his long-lost friend.
“Hey, wait up!” shouted Duncan. “Don’t leave me!”
She glanced back to see a familiar stocky figure in a bright yellow shirt and shark-themed Bermuda shorts, weighed down by an overloaded bag. On his feet were thick socks and hiking boots with flapping laces. Along with his tip to dress in white, their dad had advised them to pack minimally. But predictably, Duncan hadn’t listened. He’d crammed his backpack to bursting, filling it with junk food, astronomy books, stargazing instruments, moon charts, Sky & Telescope magazines and a hundred other useless items.
Pointing a finger at the sky, Duncan stumbled over to Zagora. “See that sun?” he said. “Watch out, because any minute now it’s going to spit out lethal death rays and melt everybody into puddles on the street.”
“Cut it out, Duncan,” she said, annoyed. Why was he making silly comments when he should be noticing all the amazing things around him?
“Welcome to Marrakech, also known as the Red City,” said their father, placing a hand on each of their shoulders. “There’s quite a crowd here, so let’s keep together.” He winked at Zagora. “Aren’t you glad you brought a light rucksack? Less is more, right?”
She grinned, feeling warm and fuzzy inside, thinking how she and her dad were savvy travelers, perfectly in sync. All they carried were backpacks purchased from an online sports outfitter: his idea. Her father prided himself on being a minimalist. She loved the way he used the word traveler instead of tourist, and the British term rucksack. It made her feel more foreign and explorer-like.
“Dad, could you take a photo of me and Duncan?” she asked, pulling out her digital camera. “How about over there?” She pointed to the edge of the platform, where the words MARRAKECH and were painted in bright colors on a large sign. The English word looked rough and chunky next to the Arabic one, which was written in a delicate flowing script.
Pulling Duncan along with her, she laughed out loud, feeling light-headed with excitement as they stood beneath the sign.
“Smile, Duncan,” she said as their father aimed the camera.
“What’s to be happy about?” he muttered. “We’re at the ragged end of nowhere, I’ve got hives all over my legs and this is exactly the kind of place to get food poisoning.”
Forget the desert, thought Zagora, rolling her eyes, Duncan might not survive Marrakech.
As their dad snapped the photo, Duncan sneezed so hard he dropped his backpack and bags of chips and pretzels fell out, followed by a box of candy bars. All were quickly crushed underfoot by people hurrying from the train.
“Oh no!” he cried, trying to rescue everything at once. “Hey, everybody, stop!” He held up one hand like a traffic cop. “Guys, go the other direction, you’re messing up my stuff!”
Embarrassed, Zagora started to walk away, but her brother looked so upset she bent down and salvaged some of the least crushed candy bars. Then they were on their way again, weaving through the hordes of people outside the station. She imagined Edgar Yegen, sweaty and exhausted, climbing off the night train from Tangier and striding into the crowds of Marrakech, dressed in khaki clothes, weathered boots and a rumpled fedora.
As her father stepped into the street to hail a taxi, Zagora experienced a jolt of excitement. This was what her teacher, Mrs. Bixby, would have called a Historic Moment: arriving in a centuries-old city a day’s journey from the Sahara, where anything at all could happen.
The world seemed to twist dizzily around her, and she felt her life spinning off in unexpected directions.
Zagora, Duncan and their father rode in a taxi down a boulevard lined with orange trees. Zagora’s eyes widened as they entered a vast open square in the city center, surrounded on all sides by wooden hotels and whitewashed arcades. Figures moved to and fro in a chaotic profusion of zingy, vibrant colors.
“This is the infamous Djemâa el Fna,” announced her father, “one of the oldest marketplaces in the heart of Marrakech. Take a look around, kids, it’s a sight you’ll always remember.”
Zagora was instantly enchanted by the riot of colors, the garbled voices of people buying and selling, the exotic smells of burning spices and the relentless blue of the sky. She stared at women balancing baskets on their heads and dark-eyed, copper-skinned men in pale robes with pointed hoods. Tall, stately nomads pulling camels glided past, wrapped in black turbans with only their eyes showing. Merchants spread out their wares on worn strips of carpet. And dust swirled everywhere, adding to the confusion.
“Behind those hotels at the edge of the marketplace lies the city’s ancient quarter, the casbah, or medina,” said their father, “an enormous honeycomb of streets and markets. In centuries past, casbahs confused and slowed down invaders because of their narrow, twisting nature.”
Zagora had seen casbah in her father’s phrase book. Casbah, qahwa, al-qasr—all mysterious-sounding Arabic words. And of course, Edgar Yegen had written at length about it in his journal: the casbah of Marrakech was where he’d discovered the Oryx Stone.
She told herself it was important to follow Edgar’s trail. If she could find the place where he had first seen the Oryx Stone, she might come closer to unraveling the stone’s darkest, innermost secrets. One way or another, she was going to investigate the casbah.
The crowd pressed up against the taxi, some selling handmade goods. Louder-than-life sounds reverberated in Zagora’s head as Berber tribesmen dangled bracelets, scarves and necklaces. Barefoot children waggled their hands, grinning at her, and she waved back. The Djemâa el Fna, she decided, was definitely moving at warp speed.
“Oh, gross,” said Duncan, pointing to a grizzled man holding a snake. Tongue flicking, the snake slithered up the man’s arm and coiled around his neck, its diamond-patterned skin metallic in the sunlight. Zagora shuddered. Snakes, she knew, were definitely bad omens.
Leaving the hectic marketplace behind, the driver turned down a street lined with hotels, restaurants and teahouses, then maneuvered through alleys where cats fought amid piles of garbage and hissed as the taxi rumbled past.
“I hope our hotel has air-conditioning,” wheezed Duncan, leaning back in his seat, gasping a little.
Zagora turned to her brother. His face was paler than usual, and sweatier—not surprising, she thought, since he tended to panic in hot, noisy places. But what if he had an asthma attack right there in the taxi? Sure, Duncan got on her nerves, like, 99 percent of the time, but he was her brother and she didn’t want anything bad happening to him.
“It’s okay.” He held up his inhaler. “I can breathe.”
“Are we almost at the hotel?” asked Zagora, anxious to get Duncan out of the taxi.
Seated in the front, waving Morocco on the Run, her dad shouted directions to the driver, but Zagora could see that the man was having trouble understanding. At last the taxi stopped before a whitewashed building with turquoise shutters and double wooden doors.
“We’re here,” announced their father. “This is the place!”
Zagora clambered out of the taxi. The hotel looked welcoming with its gleaming walls and bright flowers entwined around the shutters. The front doors were gigantic, all arches and panels and hand-tooled wood. There was a brass knocker shaped like a turtle and a huge keyhole, before which their father crouched to peer through.
“Look at these marks,
Dunkie,” Zagora said, sliding her finger over the grooves in the wood—probably made by the blades of scimitars. It gave her a funny feeling inside. She’d learned about scimitars from Mrs. Bixby’s class: they were long sharp swords, curved like the horns of oryxes. “I bet they had all kinds of battles and sword fights here.”
“Yeah, about six centuries ago,” said Duncan, fiddling with the zipper on his backpack. At least he didn’t look quite so pale anymore.
“It’s still creepy to think about,” she said. “I mean, people ended up dead.” Death by scimitar, how gruesome was that?
“This building was a riad before it was a hotel,” explained their father, clearly steering the conversation in a new direction. “It’s a traditional Moroccan house with an interior garden inside a courtyard. Apparently quite a few riads in Morocco have been converted to hotels.”
Zagora grew even more excited at the prospect of staying somewhere traditionally Moroccan. Her father could easily have booked one of the chain hotels, but he said those were for tourists.
A door swung open and a tiny wrinkled woman in a head scarf peered out. With a toothless smile she ushered them inside, into a courtyard with lemon and lime trees and a burbling marble fountain in the shape of an octagon. The floor was a pattern of enameled tiles in gold and ice blue, forming geometric designs, none of them repeating.
Inhaling the fresh cool air, Zagora gazed around at the brightly colored mosaics, the rich carpets and polished furniture. Tropical plants grew everywhere, bursting through cracks in the tiles. All the rooms opened onto the courtyard, and there was no roof overhead—only sky.
“Wow, what an awesome hotel,” she said.
“My book gives this place four stars out of five.” Her father beamed down at her. “You kids wait here. I’ll go check in.”
Zagora wandered over to the fountain and sat on the marble, watching birds flit through the trees. Suddenly she remembered her scorpion—the dead one she’d mistaken for a 3-D stamp—and reached into her secret zippered pocket, relieved to find that it was still there. She’d sneaked it into Morocco thinking it might be useful in case anything went wrong. You never knew when a dead scorpion might come in handy.
Duncan clomped over, dropping his backpack on the floor and sitting down next to her. She slipped the scorpion back into her pocket.
“I’m beat,” he said, wiping his brow with the back of his arm. “Hey, is there a turtle under that tree?” He leaned forward. “Holy cow, that’s totally unhygienic.”
Zagora watched a prehistoric-looking creature with orange markings and a domelike shell move slowly across the tiles. “I think a hotel turtle is cute,” she said. Its eyes were crusted over, as if it had just woken up. The turtle looked old but it was nothing like the wise, magical turtle in Magic by the Lake, a fantasy book Mrs. Bixby had once read to the class.
She wondered if Edgar Yegen had taken a room here, since it seemed like the kind of hotel where explorers would stay—though she couldn’t recall reading anything about turtles in his journal.
“Shoo!” said Duncan to the turtle. “Go away.”
Duncan, who had an aversion to animals, usually found ways to avoid them. He’d totally freaked out when it was his turn to bring home the classroom hamster, Galileo, and he always came down with sore throats or stomachaches on the days his class visited the zoo. It seemed to Zagora that her brother was interested only in things he could ponder from a distance, like planets and constellations and galaxies.
The lady with the toothless smile guided them up a staircase tiled in deep greens and blues. Their dad had reserved two rooms connected by a door, and Zagora, to her delight, was given a room of her own. She unlocked her door with an enormous key imprinted with the hotel logo (a turtle, what else?) and rushed inside. The bedroom was simple, white and minimalist. She nodded in silent approval at the rickety ceiling fan overhead, the plain white bureau and the venetian blinds drawn at the window against the glare of the sun.
Flopping onto the white bedspread, she opened Edgar Yegen’s diary, skimming through the pages until she found a description of Marrakech.
A dazzling light falls through the window of my hotel room as the acrid odor of burning oil from braziers drifts up from the street below. Ah, Marrakech! Evenings I stroll through the teeming marketplace, enthralled by the frenzied madness of it all, winding my way through the casbah to the tiny, brightly lit rooms of my favorite café, where I order mineral water and a plate of roasted lamb. Concealed inside my shirt is the Oryx Stone, safe from the pickpockets who roam this city.
In two days’ time I will be setting off for the town of Sumnorum, where I will procure a guide and make preparations for crossing the Sahara, in search of the buried ruins of Zahir and the pyramid of blue stones.
Flipping to another page, she read:
According to eighteenth-century explorer Alexander Serifos, the Pyramid of Xuloc was built of meteorites from Nar Azrak, which contained otherworldly powers. The Oryx Stone, also from Nar Azrak, was especially powerful, as it had been blessed by Azimuth elders. These elders were known throughout the desert as formidable seers, and claimed to possess an ancient magic that came from the stars.
Zagora sat very still, taking in these words, remembering the intense energy of the Oryx Stone. The stone came from another planet! She knew from Duncan’s science fiction comic books that superpowers from outer space were totally different from earthly superpowers, and more mysterious, too. Could the Oryx Stone give humans the outer space kind of superpowers? she wondered.
If only she could have the stone again, just for a little while—maybe then she’d know.
Zagora found Duncan in the lobby, sitting in a tapestry-backed armchair, absorbed in Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere while working his way through a bag of peanuts. Turtles crowded around his feet, and she could see him pretending not to notice them.
“Want to explore the hotel?” she asked. Duncan was boring company, but he was better than nobody. When he didn’t answer, she said, “Do you think this is where they filmed Casablanca?” Casablanca was her dad’s favorite movie. “I don’t see a piano.”
“Nope, no piano. No elevators or Internet, either, so I can’t check the Nar Azrak site. This hotel is so retrograde I give it minus three stars.” Duncan glanced down at the turtles, quickly tucking his feet underneath him. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this place.…”
Zagora frowned. It seemed that no matter where they were, her brother always had a bad feeling about things. But hotels weren’t the real issue here: Morocco was just too far off the grid. Nothing here matched Duncan’s version of reality, not even the constellations.
“Come on, Dunkie,” she said, “we can go exploring.”
“Go-away-I-am-busy,” said Duncan in his robot voice, the voice he used when things got unpleasant and he wanted to zone out. “Don’t-call-me-Dunkie-it’s-very-annoying.”
“Hey, space boy,” she said angrily, “forget your books, we’re in Morocco!” She snatched Constellations of the Southern Hemisphere out of his hands and danced away with it.
“Give that back!” hollered Duncan, jumping out of his chair. She watched with grim satisfaction as peanuts, pencils and star charts went bouncing across the tiles. The turtles ran for cover, moving surprisingly fast.
Hearing the desk clerk shout, Zagora dropped the book and raced away, running up the stairs, certain that Duncan—consumer of doughnuts, cheese curls and sugary cereals—was too out of shape to catch her.
Three flights later, feeling overwhelmed, she stepped onto an outdoor terrace, inhaling a heady scent of grilled lamb, perfume, spices and burning oil. She gazed out over the uneven rooftops, across patios and lines of wash flapping in the sun, watching the golden city unfold on all sides. In the distance rose the high minaret of the Kutubīyah, one of the city’s most revered mosques.
With a start she saw her father sitting at a wrought-iron table beneath a sun umbrella, studying his Kummerly & Frey map. He�
��d had that map forever. It was even older than his guidebook. He peered up at her over his plastic-rimmed reading glasses, but she could tell he wasn’t focusing on her. A part of him was still inside his map, exploring the far reaches of the desert.
“Hello, Zagora. Are you kids having fun?”
“Duncan’s in the lobby with his star books and a gang of turtles, but he’s in a bad mood,” Zagora said. “He keeps talking in his robot voice and it’s annoying.”
“Duncan has a few social behaviors to iron out, that’s all. I was like him at that age, shy and bookish. Right now he’s hit a rough patch, but that’s normal.”
Zagora raised her eyebrows. Somehow normal wasn’t a descriptor she’d apply to Duncan. Nerdy, yes. Dorky, yes. Paranoid, absolutely. But adults viewed him differently. Duncan was the brainy toad in the family: the geeky golden boy, adored by teachers and camp counselors alike. Aunt Claire called him “brill” (magazine-speak for brilliant), and his room was filled with science fair ribbons, debate club trophies and awards for programming a computerized depiction of the universe.
“But he’s got no life and no friends,” she argued.
“Well, you worry about Zagora, okay?” said her father with a chuckle.
She looked down at the map, torn at the creases, taped and retaped, red Xs marking the strange and important places her father had visited in Morocco. She never tired of hearing his desert stories, especially the ones about eating sheep’s eyeballs and seeing a camel go mad.
She tapped a red X two-thirds of the way down. “Is this Zahir, Dad?” Her mind was overflowing with questions.
“Ah, Zahir, a place of strange and frightening beauty,” he replied dreamily, “its hidden treasures lost beneath the sands. The most unforgettable of ruins, and the most mysterious.”
Zagora smiled to herself. He’d lifted those sentences straight out of Edgar’s journal.
“In Arabic, the word zahir means ‘sparkling’ or ‘luminous’—and also ‘obsession,’ ” he continued. “Zahir supposedly has the terrible effect of being unforgettable.”
The Scorpions of Zahir Page 3