The leader shouted, “Don’t kill her!”
The man’s fetid breath made her retch as Grug speared another man through his eye, and he went down.
“Drop your sword!” the leader said to Grug. “Drop your sword, you cursed wretch, or we kill the girl!”
The blade pressed against her neck, her captor’s breath hot in her ear. Grug leaped onto a stone bench. The men panted like dogs as they circled him.
“I said drop your sword, or the bitch dies!”
Grug glanced at Rana, and the same eons of utter desolation she had seen in the Mikulalim women spread across his face.
“Don’t, Grug!” she said.
But it was too late. Grug threw down his sword, and it clanked against the stone. The men yanked him down from the bench and shoved him to his knees. The leader approached, his swagger cocksure and offensive.
Rana struggled to free herself of the man’s grip, but his blade was pressed sharply against her neck. “Be still now, my calf,” he said. “Be still.”
The leader pointed his sword at Grug’s heart. “You are a maneater, aren’t you, you vile thing.”
“Yes,” Grug said. “But I have no choice about it. You are vile because you choose to be.”
The man laughed. “As vile as they come!” His men laughed with him. And while they were chortling like pigs, he drove his sword deep into Grug’s heart.
“No!” Rana screamed.
Grug’s candleflame eyes guttered as he looked up at her. “Sing . . .” he wheezed. “Sing, Rana, sing . . .” Blood, black as tar, poured from his chest. The light in his eyes winked out, the candles snuffed as Grug’s head lolled forward.
“Goddess! Rana?” Emod said. “Oh, Rana, forgive me!”
She sagged in the arms of her captor. Mama and Papa, butchered like animals. Liu missing and likely dead. And Emod, her only friend, had betrayed her. She had nothing left, nothing at all.
The leader, the beast of a man, grabbed her chin with an enormous callused and dirty hand. He turned her face left, then right. “What’s a pretty thing like you doing with a maneater?”
She spat in his eye.
He slapped her hard, then wiped the spittle away. Her cheek stung as his dark eyes considered her. “Clean the bitch up. We’ll sell her to the queen of Ektu El for her harem. Tazo, do your magic.”
The white-haired man approached Rana. During the fight, he had cowered like a child. Now he strutted over, his colored robes sweeping across the ground. His eyes were slate blue. One stared right at her, the other peered off at the DanBaer. He clapped his hands and raised them skyward.
“Sleeeeeep!” he droned. “May the winds of sleep descend upon you, so that you will know dormancy of thought and body, as the gods do sleep in their eternal repose.” He spoke Bedu-Besk, the trader tongue, and she knew enough to understand this was no magic spell, but a show for these brutes. He was no magician. He was a charlatan.
She laughed, because laughter was all she had left.
He frowned, then took a small vial from his pocket. He opened the stopper and waved it before her nose. She held her breath, but he kicked her in the stomach, and she gasped.
A curious scent entered her nostrils, like stale tea, baking bread, and strong alcohol. A cold exhaustion spread over her. She was tired of running, tired of hurting, so tired of watching everything she loved be destroyed. The cool ground rested against her cheek as strong hands laid her down. The world grew dimmer, Grug’s eyes stared back at her, and her parents gazed up at the twinkling stars.
“Mama,” she said. “Oh, Mama.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A thousand shades of indigo swaddled the sky as the sun went down, and Daniel remembered his wedding night, when the sky had turned the color of dark wine. What had Gram done after he had run out of the synagogue? Had she been frantic? How had she gotten home? Was there a search on for him? It had been three days since he’d left Earth. He wished he could send her a message, let her know he was safe—as safe as one could be walking with Ashmedai and his cursed slaves across Gehenna—and that he was coming home.
When he closed his eyes he imagined the smell of Rebekah’s hair, the lopsided curve of her smile. They had once eaten at an Italian restaurant in the West Village. At a corner table a young couple’s baby had been crying for most of the meal. The patrons were growing frustrated and gave the parents angry looks. They asked the waiters to intervene. But the waiters were too polite, and the parents of the screaming baby seemed oblivious to all but their meal.
Daniel had said, “I wish I could soothe the kid somehow.”
Rebekah had smirked. “I know a little trick,” she said. She wiped her lips with the napkin, got up, and walked over to the parents. He didn’t hear what she’d said, but soon the parents were laughing with her. Rebekah leaned over the crying baby and swirled her finger before his eyes. She touched the finger to the baby’s forehead and immediately he stopped crying. Rebekah smiled, said something to the parents, then sauntered back to Daniel.
The other patrons thanked her as she sat back down.
“What did you do?” Daniel said, smiling. “Hypnotize him?”
She smiled back at him, eyes bright and dilated. “I cast a spell on him. And if you don’t eat your broccoli rabe, Danny, I’ll turn you into a newt!”
He had laughed, and was even a bit turned on. But now, as Daniel walked across the purpling sands and the sun dipped low, he realized that it actually had been magic. And if she could charm strangers so easily, what had she done to him over the weeks and months, while he had slept beside her, dreaming? Maybe everything he’d felt for her—everything he still felt, despite what Caleb had said—was false.
I was under a demon’s spell, he thought. And maybe I still am.
The heat of the day blew off with a western gale. The sun had been cruel to his skin. His body burned, and he welcomed the night’s cooling air. A furious number of stars blinkered to life above him, and a rising crescent moon spread eggshell light over the sands.
When it was too dark to see clearly, Caleb said, “Let’s camp for the night.” He would not permit fire or lamplight, which might betray their position. So they set up camp in the darkness.
Daniel worried about Rana. Had she made it home? And what about that storm that Caleb said was a door? What had come through? Mashit? He asked Marul, but she said, “Better if we don’t think about such things, Daniel.”
“Aren’t you worried about Rana?”
“Of course,” she said. “But it makes me ill to think of it.”
The Mikulalim pitched four tents and fastened them together with coils of rope. Daniel was curious as to why, when Marul approached and said, “They fasten the tents together so they don’t drift apart in the night. The sands of the Tattered Sea shift like an ocean. If we don’t tie the tents together, one of us could wake a thousand parasot from the other.”
The Mikulalim retreated to their tents, while Marul, Caleb and Daniel sat in another tent under the dim light of a shaded lamp hanging from a rope. They offered Daniel dried strips of ox meat, and he ate it without argument. His stomach wasn’t yet used to the animal fats, but he was beginning to crave the taste.
After the meal, Caleb rolled cigarettes. “Smoke your tobacco. Relax. Then get some sleep. I need to speak with the Mikulalim.”
He left for the other tent, leaving Daniel alone with Marul.
“Let’s go outside,” Marul said. “It’s been ages since I’ve glimpsed the stars.”
They smoked their cigarettes while lying on their backs outside the tent and staring up at the spray of stars. The nicotine made him giddy, and he sighed often. It was so dark the dusty lane of the galaxy was visible. A shooting star flashed across the sky and Marul gasped.
“Oh! How I’ve missed this,” she said. Her voice enhanced rather than diminished the silence, as if she were the desert sighing. He didn’t want to disturb this moment, but he had too many questions.
“Marul?”
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“What is it, my love?”
Her love? “If demons are real, are angels real too?” He used the English word, since there was no cognate for angel in Wul.
“Do you mean the Malachim?”
“The Malachim, yes, I think so,” he said. “’Malachim’ has so many meanings. In Hebrew it means angels. In Wul it means a bystander. Someone who—”
“Someone who watches, but does nothing.”
“So angels exist too?”
“Of course they do.”
“What are they like?”
“There are the Malachim, the angels,” she said, “and the Shedim, the demons. Caleb is a Shed, a being born long before our universes were created. The Shedim are creatures with too much Din, too much wrath. Where you and I see cause for mercy, they see cause for punishment.
“The Malachim are the opposite. They have too much Chesed, too much mercy.”
“How can you have too much mercy?”
“The Malachim would share tea with a murderer of children and not think it strange. They accept the torturer and saint alike. Our human notions of justice are alien to them, because they do not judge. The do not see good and evil. All to them is cause for mercy.”
“But what do the Malachim think of Mashit’s plan? Do they know she is trying to kill the Lamed Vav? Could they help us?”
Her face glowed as she puffed on her cigarette. “I’m not sure how much they know, but I’ll tell you this, I lived on your Earth once, in a city called Shanghai.”
“I didn’t know that you’d been to Earth.”
“Yes. I lived there for several years. And I once encountered a Malach there, and I begged him to help Gehinnom. I told him about our famines, our wars, our disasters that keep this planet forever in the dark ages. He knew about Gehinnom, but he told me he would not interfere, that none of his kind would. It was against their nature as non-judgmental beings. We were walking in the street once when a car hit a mother and her baby. They lay there dying. I tried to save them, but hadn’t enough power. But the angel did, and could have saved them. And he let them die, because he said it was not his place to interfere in the natural course of events.”
Daniel swallowed. “That’s horrible. It’s not the view of angels most people have.”
She harrumphed. “Most people are stupid.”
They stared at the stars for a while, and Marul sighed often, even when there were no falling stars, as if she were making love to the sky. “It’s staggeringly gorgeous,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “Which is why I’m confused. We’re inside a Shard, a fragment from a shattered universe, right?”
“Yes.”
“There are millions of stars out there. So how is this universe broken?”
The silhouette of her head rose before the sky like a dark mountain. “Do you have any idea how big Earth’s universe is? How many billions of galaxies? This Shard is but the tiniest fraction of that size. There is only one galaxy here, and it’s very, very old and tired. Don’t let yourself be fooled by this fleeting vista of beauty. Appearances aren’t what’s broken.”
“Then what is?”
“The foundations.”
“Foundations of what?”
“Civilization began on Earth, when? Ten, maybe fifteen thousand years ago?”
“I think so.”
“On Gehinnom, people have been building cities for fifty thousand years, and some artifacts suggest civilization here may be millennia older. We should have reached those stars by now, but we still have cultures that sacrifice their children to appease angry gods and humans who see no sin in owning another person from birth to death like property. A few of us try to raise this world up, to create a moral and just society. We build cities and make laws. But in a few years, two decades if we’re lucky, it comes crumbling down again. It’s always the same, Daniel, though it wears a different face each time. War, famine, earthquake, plague. We’ve seen them all. We are thrown back into a primitive state. We cannot grow, no matter how hard we try.”
She sighed, a sound like a cinder burning out. “So, you see, Daniel, the sky isn’t what’s broken. It’s the ground under our feet.” She put a hand on his forearm and turned toward him. Her hand was warm and rested lightly, a bird on a branch, about to fly off. “But I’m not broken,” she whispered. “In fact, I’m quite agile, for my age.” She ran a finger down his cheek, making his body tingle. “You’ve been through much recently. So have I. We both could use release.” He hadn’t noticed until now that her other hand was hovering above his groin. And though she wasn’t touching him, he felt soft, delicious waves of warmth caressing him there.
She whispered to him. He couldn’t decipher the words, but the sounds made his thoughts as slow as dripping honey. She rolled him onto his back, climbed on him, and unbuckled his belt.
“Marul, what in Sheol are you doing?” Caleb shouted. “Get off him now!”
Clarity returned, and Daniel blinked away the fogginess in his mind.
“But he wants this!” Marul said.
“No, I definitely don’t!” he said. He shoved Marul off of him. “I’m not your goddamned plaything! I’m, not anyone’s! I’m Daniel Fisher, Lamed fucking-Vavnik!” He stormed away onto the moonlit sands.
“Daniel,” she said, “don’t go far! You could drift—”
“Fuck off!” he said. “All of you, just fuck the hell off!”
“As if you haven’t poisoned the world enough, witch!” Caleb said. “You had to sully Daniel too? Is this cheap magic how you got Grug to sleep with you?”
“Beast!” Marul said. “Daniel wants me!”
“You couldn’t pay a whore to want you!”
They exchanged insults as Daniel walked away. He stopped only when the tents were faint shapes against a sea of black, afraid to go any further. The sands wavered beneath him, making his gait unsteady. Under the pale moonlight he waited for his erection to subside. But it lingered, painfully so, for minutes. Was this a remnant of Marul’s magic?
He had had enough of being led around like a dog on a leash, yanked this way and that. Under the distant stars he felt free, freer than he ever had. But he had also never felt more alone.
Caleb was walking toward him, calling his name, when he abruptly stopped. In the northern sky, six bright points of light appeared, as bright as phosphorescent flares. The lights fell slowly, and dozens more appeared, each with long, scintillating tails, as if a tremendous firework had exploded in the stratosphere and was raining down.
A sudden wind whipped up, blowing tent and sand. Thunder rolled across the desert, and the ground shook. A low and deep reverberation throbbed at the edge of hearing, vibrating his gut, loosening his bowels.
Each light was a miniature sun. And as he looked he longed for something he couldn’t put to words. Home, perhaps, but not his physical home. The air crackled as a white-hot fragment crashed a hundred yards away and sent up a spray of sand. Glowing pieces were crashing all over the desert.
“What is it?” Daniel shouted. “What are they?”
Caleb’s eyes seemed unnaturally bright as he approached Daniel. “Fragments,” he said. “Pieces of your universe, like mortar. They’re raining down over all the Shards.”
A wave of terror shuddered through him. “Is the Earth gone?” he said. “Is this the end?” He thought of Gram, of Christopher, and of all those countless billions, tumbling into the Abyss, suffering for eternities.
“No,” Caleb said, to Daniel’s great relief, “but your lovely wife has killed another Lamed Vavnik. She is one step closer now.”
——
Daniel tried to sleep, but Marul’s snoring made it difficult. She had promised she wouldn’t try her tricks again, but he didn’t trust her. He slept on the opposite side of the tent, as far away from her as the space allowed, while Caleb slept like a corpse between them.
Afterimages of the fragments streaked through his vision whenever he closed his eyes. What kind of person had this
Lamed Vavnik been? Was she old or young? What country was she from? Did she fall in love, only to be smashed like a glass at a Jewish wedding?
The sand hissed as it blew against their tent. For the last few minutes, someone had been whispering outside. At first he had thought it was the wind sweeping over the dunes. But the whispers lingered even as the wind went still. Eventually he mustered enough courage to creep over to the opening and peer out.
The ropes that bound the tents together were taut and straining. He thought this might have been the sound he’d heard, when he spotted all the Mikulalim sitting in a small circle a short distance from the tent. They murmured as they joined hands. A fire burned in their center, red as a summer’s sunset, its flames licking the air much too slowly.
Daniel had thought Caleb ordered them not to make a fire. So what was this?
The Mikulalim raised their hands skyward and produced a sound like a foghorn bellowing over an empty sea. His stomach shook with the sound, but Marul and Caleb didn’t even stir. How could they remain asleep with such noise?
A column of light, pale as the moon, leaped up from the fire into the moonless sky like a spotlight. A swarm of red sparks corkscrewed up after it. The Mikulalim continued their bellowing horn, when some thing the color of rotten eggs flew through the column of light. Daniel didn’t catch its full shape as its bleak silhouette drifted across the stars. It dipped into the light again, revealing a tangle of hairs on a belly mottled yellow and brown. The object played with the column of light like a moth to a lamp, never revealing itself completely.
A second silhouette joined the first, then a third, and a fourth. Soon hundreds of shadows blotted out the stars. The Mikulalim kept up their dreary note, when a gigantic bird landed at the threshold of the fire’s glow and dragged itself into the light.
It was vile! A huge featherless chicken, twenty feet tall, with red, pupil-less eyes, each like a single drop of blood. A body dangled in its long, sharp beak. A Mikulal in a black cloak.
The ground shifted, the tent ropes groaned, and Daniel lost his footing and fell.
The featherless-chicken cocked its head. Its red eyes focused in on him. It dropped the body and leaped into the air with a flap of its awful wings. The other silhouettes vanished like startled pigeons, and the stars blinkered back to life.
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