by Aaron French
The Perplexed Eye of a Sufi Pirate
Geoff Nelder
Omnibus Exclusive
“Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment.”
—Rumi
Halim Baasim Mukhtar Khoury sent a prayer up into the clear night sky to Allah and smiled at the sailor about to slip the screaming nun over the side.
“Are you certain, my son, that this is wise?”
“Priest, you are testing our patience.” A red lantern on the port side of the stolen modified speedboat made the nun’s face more crimson than it really was. Her blue habit blackened as two Somalian pirates held her tied arms. She was already up to her waist in water.
Oh Allah, and he’d promised her succour. Her fate was certain, but she was Christian with the same Allah, so she’d be looked after when she slipped under, a second baptism. That’s what Halim had assumed when he left the monastery all those years ago, before he was assigned to this speedboat, The Baseem. He thought back to the first day he walked to the dusty fish-smelling dock in Mogadishu. No, too little time to reflect that far back. He could but sneak in a fragment of yesterday.
***
Sister Agnese pointed her shiny white nose in the air at him while insisting the preposterous from the deck of Il Napoli. “In spite of your prejudice, and meek though I am, you see that I am in charge of this vessel.”
Halim appealed to her not-so-common sense. “It’s more a death trap of a World-War-Two, Italian tug. My companions have saved you from drowning, now come down the ladder.”
She hesitated, understandably. The Somalian pirates would scare anyone, especially at night with their machetes raised to find fresh blood. Two of her crew had jumped. He could just see their moonlit splashes in the distance. Untidy swimmers. Two more were hogtied in the bow while the pirates looted, sending roped buckets of Catholic trinkets down to The Baseem. Ah, in a fit of apostasy she’d accepted defeat and scrabbled with her sensible shoes for the rungs.
He teased her with a Sufi saying: “God raises him who lowers himself. Or, in this case, herself.”
She was speaking but the wind took most of her words. “... not treasure... relics and... Mombasa Cath... Light.”
Once her feet were an arm’s length away, Halim was shoved aside. Sister Agnese was grabbed by the captain and pushed into the cabin of the motorboat.
“Zaki, she’s a woman of God, be merciful.”
The brigand, naked except for coral-red Ralph Lauren Bermudas, snarled, “Keep out of it, old man, or you’ll be over the side.”
“Not again, with profound blessings spare me. Ah, but my beloved Captain, you should not be rummaging in the holy woman’s garments.” It was unlikely Zaki heard him over the nun’s screams.
The skeletal pirate held up a smartphone in triumph. The captain yelled to one of his crew, “Petri, back to base. This witch has called the Task Force and the GPS is on. We’ll stuff it in her mouth and throw her overboard. Now!”
Halim raised an arm. “Wait, my flock. Do not seek the obvious. Place the phone on the decrepit tug and watch it depart leading the Task Force away.”
Zaki shook his bedraggled black dreadlocks, his white uneven teeth betraying the biggest smile Halim had ever seen. “We’ll do it. Mohammed, place the phone in the bridge of that infidel hulk—if there’s a charger, plug it in. Hurry, we’re leaving in ten seconds.”
Sister Agnese poked her head out of the cabin. Her hands were cable tied behind her. “Two of my crew, volunteers from the Mission of Truth, are restrained on my boat.”
Zaki laughed a snarling bark. “That’s right, they might get free. Petri, don’t bother with the charger, just set a course 140, full speed, and scuttle. No, that’d take you too long to find. Just turn off the bilge pumps.” The man ran up the ladder like a monkey.
The bandit captain took an AK-47 from the pirate behind him and fired below the waterline. Halim squashed his hands into his ears for the two seconds of gunfire. The silence following was abrupt and equally startling.
“Hey, I’m still on this wreck!”
Zaki sniggered. “It’ll take an hour to sink. Jump, we’re turning now.”
***
An hour later the first mishap pushed a wave of worry through The Baseem until it reached Halim in the cabin. Sitting opposite Sister Agnese, with her hands trembling in his in spite of consoling words, Halim heard the roar of the engine scream to an agonizing cry, then silence. Although he was a wadad, an instructor of the Quran, he was an engineer too. A multitasking Sufi. He smiled at the nun and at her amber rosary twirling in her fingers, then he turned and poked his head out of the doorway. No on-board lights so the Milky Way, Allah’s diamonds, revealed the outline of the boat and the silhouette of the lanky Petri at the wheel. That left Zaki and Mohammed down in the engine room seeking to resurrect their getaway. They’d risked a yellow lamp.
Halim dared poking his head towards them. “May I help?” They knew of his mechanical skills yet possessed sufficient of their own to ignore him.
He persisted. “Is that fuel pipe blocked? I could check—”
Zaki banged a spanner on the baulkhead. “No, teacher, you find the omen object and throw it overboard. It must be in the spoils.”
“My flock, I don’t think it works like that. More likely the fue—”
He turned to find Petri handing him a Nike holdall. “This is suspicious, priest. The rest is just gold and silver crosses, cups and such.”
Did they believe him to be a magi? Find a cursed shrunken head, throw it over, and the engine would restart? Umm…
He took the holdall to the only cabin and with the sneaky appearance of a dawn twilight he risked putting a light on. The nun had worried herself into an exhausted sleep on a bunk. Should he wake her? It would be instructive to see her reaction to the sight of the holdall, let alone its contents. He’d take a peep first even if with his only best eye.
The zip wouldn’t move making him think maybe it really was cursed, or there was a lock he’d overlooked in the gloom. He muttered so not to wake Sister Agnese, so much as to subconsciously make her aware, and if she then awoke, well, all right, so much the better. He knew he was in a subliminal self-referencing mode, much practised.
“By my beard, does this modern luggage contain an ancient secret?” He looked at her. A filigree of auburn hair had escaped her white headband. A sharp nose rivalling his in length. Awake? Nothing more than gentle snoring.
“Perhaps a sharp knife or a hammer and chisel would expedite exposure of the treasures within.”
“No, you can’t!” She’d sat up. Her azure blue eyes bored into him. “They’re centuries old.”
“So are many things. This ocean is millions of... ah but they are delicate is your meaning. What is it then, dear Christian?”
Her lips tightened, and yet he saw her worry lines knitting in turbulent thought of what-ifs.
“Ah, I see a second zip fastener at the other end. How convenient. I’ll open it up just a little. We have a Sufi saying: Enlightenment must come little by little otherwise it would overwhelm.”
A whispered, “No,” but he persisted and tugged the tab. An inch and a puff of dust with a soft light made his good eye blink. He re-zipped and rubbed at his now worse eye. “I believe this must be the curse our captain believes in.”
Sister Agnese put her hands together in supplication but to Halim not her God. “I beseech you not to discard those relics. Throw me overboard instead, or allow me to radio the Task Force and withdraw my mayday.”
Halim’s recovering eye nictated between the nun and the bag. His other eye lagged behind, seeing little but blurriness. “Whose are these bones? They possess the scent of antiquity, so not a recent murder.”
She remained silent, quaking in her fear.
“I cannot make a decision without knowing, that is, if you know. Ah, you do. It must be a saint?”
“You are too clever for me.”
He resisted rubbing his hands at the prospect of a saint
in his grasp, but left fingers on the zip to expedite information. “Then of whom? Tell or it becomes interred in the ocean.”
“Ignatius of Antioch, and for safe-keeping en route to Mombasa Cathedral.”
Halim thought for a moment. “Ah, then we should find lion teeth marks in his bones.”
Sister Agnese smiled but perhaps in embarrassment or to diffuse her fear. “Indeed there are. My vocation has been to venerate and guard his remains. He’s spoken to me in my dreams many times.”
Oh dear, a lunatic. “With two millennia as bones he won’t mind where he is. Let’s—”
“Nothing’s working,” Zaki snarled as he entered the cabin. “Have you found the cursed talisman?”
“Perhaps we should jettison the...” Halim looked at the now sobbing nun, then at the bag. “... the gold. I’m convinced it—”
Zaki shook his head in refutation, spat on the floor, picked up the holdall, took two steps outside and threw it high. It arced neatly on its flight and dived, not so much a splash as a sucking down. A soft green light left the spot and shot up into the ochre sky.
“Pray, you old ascetic, that my cousin reaches us before any destroyer, or the nun will go over, and you tied to her.”
“I have cousins too, young Zaki, and the might of the Islamic Council knows I’m here. They assigned me to keep your mission holy. Remember?”
The captain grunted and turned to shouts from Petri down below. “We’re sinking!”
Zaki savagely kicked a box only to hear glass breaking as another unknown filched treasure became worthless. “This is a nightmare. Whatever curse came from that tug remains with us. The gold is meant for us, so all that’s left is the witch.”
***
Small consolation for Halim that Sister Agnese shared the same fate as her charge, even though the martyr’s watery grave was posthumous.
Shame, he was beginning to warm to her, and he would have enjoyed playing jigsaw with the Saint’s bones and in reverence. After all, a Sufi saying came to mind, Everyone issues from the same light. There is no distinction. Then did he really see the lights? Both from the holdall and the sea? No one else had commented.
The deck shifted, making him grab a rail. Still sinking then. Life jacket time. Thank Allah that the waters remained warm all year round. He ducked to enter the cabin then banged his head as he stood abruptly, for sitting on the bunk was Sister Agnese. Her mouth and eyes were open wide as if just as shocked at her resurrection as he.
Her garb remained blue though blackened wet and her voice had become tremulous. “What have you done to me?”
Halim’s voice too became unsteady just as his stomach threatened revolt. “I? Glad my heart is to see you well, I’m at a loss with explanation.”
“It’s never happened to me before.”
“You’ve died before?” Clearly his understanding of Christianity needed more study.
“You used your heathen magic. At least you ought have brought back his holiness.” Did she mean her Christ? Probably not. Could he have brought life back to those bones?
“I’m perplexed at your outrage at returning to the land of the living. I assume you are alive and not one of those fictional undead creatures?”
She stood and stamped her sensible shoed foot on the floor, demonstrating solidity at least.
“Halim, come and see if you can do any—” Petri shrieked at seeing what he assumed was a ghost. He ran back out of the doorway, yelling incoherently.
Zaki and Mohammed poked their AK-47s in. The captain whispered, “What trickery is this?”
“If you shoot her,” Halim said, “I’ll just bring her back to life again.” He’d become bolder than warranted. Suppose Zaki shot him instead. Could he bring himself back to life? Perhaps but he didn’t know how he’d brought the nun back, if indeed he did. While the crew withdrew in shock and indecisiveness, he thought back to the deed. He’d urged the crew to desist and so willed her not to be killed. Was that sufficient? Perhaps unzipping the holy one’s bag released an emanation he’d received. He turned his back on the nun to see if he’d slipped into a daydream. The trauma of the situation perhaps.
“Thank you,” came a steadier voice from behind him. At last the nun, through her shock, realized that the Sufi monk was on her side. He turned and fell down.
His knees had given way at the sight of the bearded, skinny white man stood besides an unconscious nun. Puddles joined each other on the floor. No wonder the voice possessed a slow, Latin accent.
In keeping with the return of the nun, Halim said, “You—you’re Ignatius?”
“Indeed, and you are Halim Baasim Mukhtar Khoury. It is my extraordinary pleasure to meet you.”
Halim wanted to ask if he performed miracles and if so, get them out of this mess, but his words tripped over themselves like, “Ploosed meet to can extri you us cate?” His vision similarly warped into a deepening black tunnel and he had to lie back on the floor.
“Apologies for startling you, Halim. Rest while I find a garment.”
Halim’s back shivered as water seeped through his white thawb. Perhaps the puddles were deepening as the boat shuddered lower in the ocean. The coolness shook his senses so he could struggle to his knees, and then up to his crooked version of upright. Thus his stature had returned but his mind found itself swimming. Even so he managed a sentence.
He saw that Ignatius had stripped the bed of its grubby sheet. “How... how am I able to restore life?”
The apparition, surely, smiled through his beard. “You are a blessed one, always with this gift in latent form. With your beneficent demeanour, aided by me once you’d undone my containment, you are only beginning your potential.”
Sister Agnese moaned, so Halim helped her sit up. He knew where banned wine was secreted on the boat and thought to raise a bilge board to retrieve it but the sound of feet at the doorway made him look up. He’d never heard such shrieking even in his dervish extremes. The three crew turned and leapt overboard, swimming for their cheap tawdry lives.
In moments the boat lifted and the motor chirped to life.
Halim grinned. “Ah, it was you my departing friends, who carried the curse. Fear not, I’ll radio the authorities to pick you up. I’ll throw over lifebelts. Now I have other souls to rescue from your tug, Sister Agnese.”
He left the nun and her saviour in the cabin while he turned the boat, realising that he had some turning to do in his life. He’d always be a Sufi monk but his future was back in Somalia and he’d confess about his newly discovered talent to his superiors. Would they believe him?
Hah!
He called out to no one, yet everyone, his favourite saying: “Every stage of the voyage is more beautiful than the one before.”
About the author: Geoff Nelder has a wife, two grown-up kids, an increasing number of grandkids, and lives in rural England within an easy cycle ride of the Welsh mountains. Geoff is a competition short-fiction judge, and a freelance editor. Publications include several non-fiction books on climate reflecting his other persona as a Fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society; over 50 published short stories in various magazines and anthologies; thriller, humour, science fiction, and fantasy novels. 2005: Humorous thriller Escaping Reality. Republished 2013. 2008: Award-winning science fiction mystery with hot-blooded heroine, Exit, Pursued by a Bee. 2010: Another thriller received an Award d’Or from an Arts Academy in the Netherlands. Hot Air. Republished 2012. 2012: ARIA: Left Luggage science fiction apocalypse. Voted Best science fiction novel of 2012 at the P&E Readers’ Poll. 2013 ARIA: Returning Left Luggage 2014 ARIA: Abandoned Luggage.
The Bountiful Essence of the Empty Hand
John R. Fultz
Omnibus Exclusive
Four days into the sweltering jungle the Glimmer Faire met the beast-men of Neptu, who greeted the company with a hail of barbed arrows. Somewhere a lion roared its thunder as actors and musicians scrambled for cover. The heads of the raiders were those of black tigers, and their bodies akin
to shaggy apes. Artifice helped a bleeding thespian to his feet as the monsters lumbered into the glade. Kantoh stood still as a stone in the green haze. His right hand leapt up to pluck an arrow from the air in mid-flight. Artifice marveled at the impossibility of this feat as a feathered shaft sang past his own ear.
Before Mordeau could weave his obscure sorcery against the invaders, the beast-men surrounded him and Kantoh, hemming them in with the points of their glinting sabers. Mordeau had recently shaved off his beard to better withstand the heat of the jungle, and the old showman’s craggy face gleamed with sweat. Kantoh dropped the arrow and raised his open palm toward the assailants. The brutes recognized this gesture and took a step back, keeping him within easy reach of their blades.
Artifice found himself at the business end of a similar weapon. Where was Helena? She had scattered with Omina and Tierra. There were three other actors lucky enough to avoid the bite of an arrow, but he had no idea where they escaped to. As for the dozen little woodfolk musicians, they had taken to the trees like frightened squirrels. They peered down at the scene from the safety of vine-tangled branches.
A perilous silence ruled as the chieftain of the beast-men approached Mordeau. The showman hid his fear well. An arrow was tangled in the collar of Mordeau’s yellow robe, an inch from his neck. The chieftain lumbered forward, his waist hung with the skulls of his victims, a plumed helmet of dented iron on his catlike head. Around his bull neck hung a profusion of jewels, bones and talismans. He carried a great axe, notched and scarred from much slaughter.