Syfax took a step back, breathing long and slow, listening to the heavy pounding of blood in his ears. His calloused knuckles ached, but not much.
Angry Man slowly got to his feet, staggering up inch by inch. “See!” He spat in the dirt and rubbed his jaw. “Like I was saying! They don’t teach any of that fancy stuff to the grunts. Only the officers. And why? The officers aren’t on the front lines, are they? No, they teach the grunts to fight the enemy, and they teach the officers to fight the grunts. To keep us in line. To keep us down!”
He leapt at Syfax, fist cocked to deliver the blow with his full body weight as he descended. Syfax stepped forward inside the attack and shot the heel of his palm straight up under the man’s chin. The bandit’s head snapped back and he dropped out of the air in a pile of trembling arms and legs.
But Angry Man got up again, faster this time, his eyes wild and breathing labored. He was shaking, his legs threatening to twist out from under him. “What are you all waiting for?!” His voice was a pathetic hybrid of a gasp and a croak. “Get him!” No one moved.
Angry Man raised his fists again and staggered forward. Syfax started to tighten his own fist, but the bandit had nothing left. The major took a quick step to the side and gently shoved the man into the horse. He flopped to the ground, unconscious.
Syfax stood over the man for a moment, his hands still raised and ready, his chest heaving, his heart pounding, his breath thundering through his teeth, but the man stayed down. Syfax dropped his hands and stepped back, and waited for his own body to settle. As his pulse slowed the heat rippling across his skin faded, leaving behind only a cold sweat between his skin and the cool night air. He looked around and saw Calm Man leaning against a tree at the edge of the road, a thin red line slashed down his cheek. “I think we’re done now. What do you think?”
Syfax nodded. “We’re done.”
The men withdrew into a cluster around and behind Calm Man, including the dazed and bleeding Angry Man, who hung on the shoulders of his comrades.
“So you’re all on the run?” Syfax grabbed his horse’s reins and patted the nervous animal’s jaw gently. “What did you do?”
“We did what we were supposed to do. We did everything right.” Calm Man’s shoulders slumped and he dabbed at the cut on his cheek with the end of his scarf. “We got jobs, we got married, we rented apartments, and we had children.”
“But?”
“But all the factories want longer hours, and lower wages, and every day someone loses a finger, or worse. The rent goes up, the food at the market gets worse. We get sick, we get hurt. Every day, everything gets a little worse. So we’re done with it. We’re leaving. Some of us have family in Numidia. They can help us get started out there, farming.”
“You’re leaving? Just like that? A bunch of young, strong fellas can’t balance the books, can’t put a little more time in at work, so you just dump your families and run all the way to Numidia to play farmer?” Syfax spat in the dirt. “You’re pathetic, all of you.”
Calm Man limped forward a few steps, his leg stiff but his back straight and Syfax saw the iron glare in the man’s eyes as he snapped, “Sixteen hours in the godforsaken factories, every day! Sweating to death, surrounded on all sides by huge metal monsters that will tear your arms off if you dare to stretch your aching back. And it’s never enough! We had three families together in one flat, and still we couldn’t put bread on the table! Is that pathetic enough for you? Yes, we’re pathetic, we’re all pathetic, every one of us, slaving away and starving, watching our families starving. Our children starving. It is pathetic. That’s exactly the word, thank you for that. Pathetic!” He stopped to breathe, his chest heaving, sweat pouring down his face. Suddenly his features twisted in anger again. “And we didn’t abandon anyone! Our families are all right down there, waiting for us.” He pointed off into the woods.
Syfax blinked, slowly absorbing the man’s words, painting himself a mental portrait of the conditions he described, wondering how much of it was just angry, youthful exaggeration and self-pity. After a long moment, he decided: Very little. “Show me.”
“Show you?” Calm Man glanced back at the woods. “Oh, you don’t believe me. Yes, then, by all means, come and see for yourself, Redcoat.” He stomped off into the woods, trampling fallen limbs and small bushes with a noisy crackling and snapping. The other men filtered after him, glancing nervously at the major.
Syfax followed them, carefully picking his way in the dark, feeling each step with his toes crushed in his too-small boots. After a few minutes tramping downhill away from the road, he reached a small clearing where the men stood beside their wives holding their children, bony little scarecrows in threadbare rags staring up with wide, white eyes in the dark. There must have been more than forty of them all together.
Syfax stared. All he could do at first was stare. And they stared back, some in terror, some in misery, and even a few in hope. “You don’t have any food at all?” He asked softly, his eye locking momentarily with those of a little girl clinging to her mother’s neck.
“Enough for tomorrow, maybe.” It was a young woman who answered, short and slight, with close cropped hair. She rose to her feet beside the Calm Man and handed him a small boy, whom he held close to his chest. “We didn’t have much to sell for money for food in Port Chellah. It’s been slow going. We’ve been walking for two days now. I don’t know how much farther it is to the border.”
Two days? It’s only taken me twelve hours to get here from Chellah. Syfax tried to speak, but an ache seized his throat and the words stuck. How far to the eastern border beyond the Atlas Mountains? Five or six days for a healthy man, but for this bunch? Two weeks? More? “Far. It’s a long way still from here.”
The woman nodded. “We’ll make it.”
No, Syfax thought, you won’t. “Maybe you don’t have to go that far. Maybe you can find better work in Arafez. Or even back in Meknes. You could be farmers right here in Marrakesh, if that’s what you want. You don’t have to leave the country to find work.”
“Yes, we do.” The woman reached back to hold her man’s hand. “This place is killing us. All of us. We can’t do this anymore. We can’t be here anymore. Even if we could be fishers and farmers, our children would end up in the factories some day, somehow. They’ll run off to the city to get rich, and they’ll die in some accident, alone, forgotten. We’ve seen it happen to our friends, to their children. It doesn’t matter what we do, what we say. Sooner or later, the city kills everyone.”
The major scanned the crowd of faces in the darkness, dappled by the deeper shadows of the leaves waving in the wind overhead. He said, “There’s always the army. The army was good to me.” They began to groan and mutter. “No, listen to me. My father worked the docks in Tingis all his life. We had nothing, but when I joined the army I got everything I needed. A home, a job, a future. You could have that, your children could have that.” His words were drowned in more muttering and vague curses against the army, and they battered about old stories of military experiments, expeditions lost deep in the Europan wastes, men and women slaughtered on the Songhai hills alone and forgotten because war had not been officially declared. “Well, I’m sorry you feel that way,” Syfax said to no one in particular. “But for your children’s sake, I’m asking you, don’t try to reach the border. Not on foot. It’s too far.”
“So you say.” Angry Man was awake and alert, wiping the blood from his face and leaning against a tree. “Why should we believe you?”
“Because I don’t want these kids to starve to death, you fucking idiot.” The words made the ache in his throat even worse as he glanced about at those children scattered around him, huddled in the dark forest. “Because there has to be some other way, a better way, for all of you. Think about it. You can’t get to Numidia on grit and will power. You need food and water. With no food you’ll be dead in a week, and with no water you’ll be dead in half that time. If you step up the pace you’ll get t
o Arafez tomorrow. I hear they’ve got plenty to give folks who’ve lost their jobs and their homes. The temples will give you food. You can stay there a few weeks at least, work on the road crews or the rail crews, and save up some food. And better shoes. You have to try. For the kids.”
The young woman looked sharply at the little boy clinging to his father’s chest. “Maybe.”
Syfax took a long, deep breath, wondering what else there was to say. He couldn’t think. His muscles were sore and a few dozen fresh bruises all over his body were starting to throb. His eyelids were growing heavy and the long road to Arafez still lay before him. “I need to go. I won’t send any police looking for you. Just don’t try to rob anyone. And think about Arafez. It’s only a little way up the road. You can get what you need there.”
A few voices muttered and a few heads nodded. Syfax took several steps, backing away from the grim congregation in the dark grove. As he passed a short woman holding hands with two tiny girls, he had a sudden urge to grab the children and carry them all the way to the city himself, to put them into the hands of someone, anyone, who could feed them. And their mother. And their friends. If there had only been one or two, he would have done it without discussion, without even thinking. But forty?
Long years on the Songhai border had taught him not to play the numbers game. Not to calculate. Not to weigh two evils against each other. Just do your duty. He trudged past the two tiny girls and found his horse where he left her at the edge of the road. He mounted, gave one last look at the trees hiding two score beggars and starving children, and he rode away.
Chapter 28. Taziri
Taziri awoke with a gasp, her heart racing and her face dripping with sweat. The nightmare vanished before she could remember what it was, leaving her sitting in the dark massaging her fingers and scratching idly at the edges of the brace on her left arm and hand. The room still lay in deep shadows, striped by a few thin rays of lamplight that slipped around the curtains from the street in front of the bed-and-breakfast. The world was still dead asleep except for a few lonely voices echoing in the square outside.
She crept out of bed and pulled the curtain back to watch three young men around a bench beneath the light of a lamppost. Two were sprawled with arms and legs thrown over the bench’s back. The third fellow had one foot up on the seat and he leaned forward as he talked to his half-conscious friends.
Their voices, but not their words, echoed up to the window and Taziri had to settle for guessing at whether they were more happy or shocked at whatever it was that their friend was telling them. The two sleepers perked up, sat up straight, and began asking questions. The conversation grew louder, though no more intelligible for Taziri. A moment later, all three of them dashed away from the square.
What are they up to? I never ran around the city in the dead of night at that age. There was barely time to sleep back then, between school and work. Kids these days.
She wanted to fall back into bed, but it was the wrong bed. The right bed was far away, across miles and miles of empty plains and patchwork farmland, high on a hill above the harbor, in a little house just like all the other houses next to it. Except it was hers. Hers and Yuba’s. This was the second night, she realized. The second night she should have had with him and was now missing. And she was here, in an inn with a handful of strangers while Isoke lay dying or dead in some hospital, while Yuba slept alone, while Menna sat up in her crib babbling instead of sleeping.
Their absence gnawed at her like a starving dog. With her head still half numb with sleep, she pulled on her clothes and slipped downstairs and out to the cold, empty street. She knew Arafez well enough and figured she knew where to go. She could find the walled airfield easily and a few other obvious landmarks, particularly buildings with bell towers and uncommonly large windmills perched on their roofs. There were only a few such sentinels rising above the roofline and she set out for the nearest one, hoping for a little luck.
She crossed three large intersections before finding the closest building with a windmill, only to see that it was an electrician’s shop. Professional curiosity drew her gaze toward the window, but her feet carried her off down another road toward another, farther windmill spinning in the starlight. This too appeared to be a shop, though she could not guess what the name or the logo on the sign meant. Something fashionable, she guessed.
As she wandered the streets with one eye on the shadowed machines rattling overhead, she became vaguely aware of some signs of life around her. She heard the patter of running feet a few streets away, and voices shouting, though she could not understand them. There would follow a long silence and then she would hear some other late night adventurers running nearby and calling into the night.
The third windmill that she found sat on an empty warehouse roof, but the fourth one, nearly an hour’s walk from the inn, creaked atop a telegraph office and Taziri shuffled inside, out of the cold night breeze. A sleepy-eyed clerk squinted up at her from behind a book, his bushy white eyebrows waggling slightly. “Good evening. Or morning, I guess. What can I do for you?”
“I’d like to send a telegram.”
He nodded and pulled out a pad. “Address?”
She told him the street name and number in Tingis, suddenly realizing how rarely she ever uttered them since there were no telegraph offices outside the country where she and Isoke usually flew. The words felt so alien compared to the familiar home they marked.
“Message?”
She wanted to say something strong, poetic, romantic, memorable, but her brains were tired and frozen. “Everything is fine. Sleeping in Arafez. Still helping marshals. Please check Isoke in hospital. Be home soon as able. Miss you. Love you both.”
The clerk read it back to her and the words sounded hollow and wooden and wrong, but they were all she could think of. She paid him and watched him tap out the words one letter at a time on the little telegraph mounted on the table behind the counter. Then she stood there as he went back to his book and she stared at the telegraph, half hoping a reply would come clacking back through at any moment. But it sat very still and silent, and with her hands buried in her jacket pockets she shuffled back toward the door.
“Seems like a lot of kids are out running around tonight.” She glanced back at the clerk.
He didn’t look up. “I know. I’ve been hearing them at it all night. Some went by a few minutes ago. I think they said something about a fight. Seems like there’s a fight every night, somewhere or other.”
“Oh.” Taziri stared through the glass at the dark buildings across the way, and then she stepped outside to begin the long walk back to bed, but before she had moved out of the light of the telegraph office’s front windows she stopped short. There were several young men standing in the middle of the street less than twenty yards up the road. They were talking. Laughing, yelling, pushing each other. Taziri felt her gut tighten.
One of the youths shouted, “Hey!”
There were no streetlights nearby and she could not really see them, but Taziri knew they were yelling at her. “Hey yourself.”
“Hey, you, give me some money. Come on, I want to send a telegram.” The youths laughed and started coming forward. “Hey, seriously, give me some money. Come on, just a little, so we can get something to drink.”
“I don’t think so. It’s late. Why don’t you all head home for the night?” Taziri rolled her fingers into sweaty fists in her pockets. Her left hand only made half a fist and the metal plate across her palm was freezing.
“Nah, I don’t think we want to go home.” The young men spread out a little as they came closer, their empty hands dangling at their sides. They were all barefoot and dressed in loose clothes that dangled and flapped from their knobby shoulders and hips. “There’s some big fight down in the next district. We’re going to go take a look. You should come.”
“No thanks.” Taziri buried the urge to start walking, to disappear into the darkness, to put distance between herself and them. S
he thought of the old man sitting in the very well lit office just behind her and wondered if he could see her. “You go on without me.”
“Okay, okay, but give us some money. Come on. You’re like, a firefighter, right? Government job. Big money. Come on, help us out.” He held out an open hand.
Taziri felt a sharp little shove from another one standing to her right, a little push to her shoulder, and she looked over to see a leering, sleepy-eyed skeleton of a boy edging closer to her. They were all edging closer, all grinning slightly. “Back off. Go on, get out of here.” Taziri backed up to the telegraph office’s door and grabbed the handle behind her back. They kept coming forward, and then the heavy one to the left lunged at her.
Taziri jerked the door open so that the youth’s hand collided with the heavy wood, and as the young man recoiled and swore, Taziri slipped back inside and locked the door.
“What are you doing? Don’t bring them in here!” The man at the desk was fumbling at a locked cabinet behind the telegraph machine. “This is expensive equipment. I can’t have a bunch of drunks breaking in and wrecking everything!”
“Drunks?” Taziri stared out the window at youths, who were now arguing loudly and shoving each other just outside the door. A body crashed into the door. Twice. “There’s no alcohol in Marrakesh!”
“Just because it’s illegal doesn’t mean it’s not here, miss. Hellan wine, Songhai rum, Espani ale. My God, where have you been?” He yanked the cabinet open and began shoving his papers and tools into it. When the cabinet was full, he locked it and stood up. “So now what? Are they leaving?”
“Not exactly.” Taziri looked back at the shadowy figures in the street and grimaced. “Get back!”
Halcyon (The Complete Trilogy) Page 23