Book of the Just

by Dana Chamblee Carpenter

  He was asleep when Birhan came back, excited. “I know the bitter mountain!”

  “The cave?” Angelo asked sleepily.

  “Just a mountain. Not a big one. Its name is Maror. Means ‘bitter’ in my tongue.”

  Angelo was suddenly very awake. “Maror? Is that what you said?”

  Birhan nodded.

  “That’s also a Hebrew word. It means bitter, too, specifically the bitter herbs Jews eat at Seder. It is a reminder of their suffering as slaves in Egypt.”

  “I know this,” Birhan said disdainfully.

  “You know where the mountain is?”

  “Yes. Not far.”

  “But there’s no cave?”

  “The old men say no caves anywhere around here.” Birhan started picking at the cold food left on the plate. “But old men do not know everything. Right, Mister? Would they have known there was a stick hiding in the tower at Qohaito?” He shook his head. “We know better. We find cave at the bitter mountain.” He put the plate on the floor beside the bed and stretched out beside Angelo. “But now we sleep.” And he did just that.

  Angelo, however, lay awake, excited again, though it was the pain that kept sleep at bay—the searing shots of flame up his legs and the ache of missing Mouse, which seemed to grow at every step he took toward avenging her.

  Angelo sank onto the rock wall outside one of a handful of low, flat houses on the far side of the plateau of Mount Maror. He bent over, stretching his back and rubbing his legs. A camel was slopping water from a trough behind him. Birhan had thought ahead—when one of the old men he’d asked about caves and mountains had offered the use of his camels, he’d accepted.

  Angelo’s first notice of this new plan had come the next morning when they’d gotten out of the jeep at the foot of the mountain, ten minutes down a well-paved but winding road from Adi Keyh. An old man and three camels were waiting beside a jagged footpath that led up the stony face. Resentful at what he saw as pity, Angelo had let Birhan lift him up to his mount, trying to swallow his bitterness and acknowledge the boy’s thoughtfulness. He’d only managed a muffled “Thank you.”

  But now, a few hours later, he was beyond grateful. He put his arm around Birhan, who sat next to him on the wall. “I couldn’t have made it without the camels. I owe you.”

  Birhan lowered his head and shook it. “No, you owe the old man when we go back down the mountain.”

  “No, I meant I—”

  Birhan laughed. “I got you! I know your saying.” He punched Angelo in the shoulder but then said quietly, “You owe nothing. We have seen the wonders of Allah together. We are brothers now. Yes?”

  Angelo nodded.

  “Now we find more wonders.” Birhan turned to speak with a young boy who lived in the tiny village—he’d been the one to see them coming, had run out to meet them and invite them to come drink and water the camels. Angelo felt his hopes sink when the boy began to shake his head at whatever Birhan was asking.

  “No caves?” Angelo asked Birhan.

  “He says no.”

  “So that’s old men and young telling us there aren’t any caves in these mountains. Can you ask him where the mountain got its name? Why is it called ‘Bitter’?”

  “I bet it was love,” Birhan said, chuckling as he turned back to the other boy. “Love makes everyone bitter, yes?” He looked back over his shoulder at Angelo, then asked the boy how the mountain got its name.

  The other boy did not laugh. He made the sign of the cross.

  “Wait. Is he Catholic?”

  “Yes. These are some of the Irob who live among the Saho. Some Christian—Catholic, like you, and others Orthodox—some Muslim, like me.”

  “Why did he react that way to your question?”

  “I do not know. I can—”

  The boy started speaking again, holding his hand up, and then he ran into one of the low houses. He came out with an old woman and said something to Birhan.

  “She is the grandmother, he says. She tells us about the mountain.”

  Apparently, her grandson had already told her what they wanted because she started to speak without being asked. Birhan bent close, listening. Angelo watched the old woman tell her story. At times, her eyes grew wide with wonder or fright and other times narrowed in warning or anger. Her hands, knotted with arthritis, held a dark wooden rosary and stayed mostly still except to make the sign of the cross or, at the last, to point toward the northern face of the mountain, shaking her head. When she was done, she kissed her rosary and came first to Birhan and then to Angelo and ran her thumb over their foreheads in blessing, though the look on her face made Angelo wonder if it was meant as a last rite.

  “What did—”

  “First, Mister, I know where we must go.”

  Angelo pointed the way the old woman had pointed.

  “Yes,” Birhan agreed. “And down.”

  “Great.” Angelo was already grimacing, his muscles still tired from yesterday’s climb at Qohaito.

  “She says she knows we will go anyway, but tells us to stay. She says the mountain is bitter because of the dead people who live in it.”

  “Dead people?” Angelo asked skeptically.

  “Is why this big plateau has only this tiny village. No one else will live here but the Irob. They take turns praying.”

  “For?”

  “The dead that live in the mountain. Otherwise, she says, the dead might go wandering and bother other mountains and other people. The Irob Catholics and the Irob Muslims take turns praying for the dead to have peace.”

  “Who killed these people?”

  Birhan shrugged. “She say the story is lost now, but her grandmother say it was long, long ago. People from there”—he pointed toward the Qohaito plateau—“came here to hide. No one knows now what they hid from or why.”

  “What about where? Did she say there was a cave?”

  “She say no one can answer for the north mountain if there is a cave or not. The Irob forbid their own to go to the north mountain. Bad things happen, she say. When she was a girl, her brother knew not to go but he and his friend went anyway, and God sighed, and the boys fell. She says not to go, but—”

  “She knows we will anyway,” Angelo finished, staring out across the plateau toward the north.

  They sat for a few minutes in silence, then Birhan put his hand on Angelo’s back. “Allah calls. Ready, brother?”

  They took the camels with them. When they neared the edge, Birhan took a long iron spike and small hammer from a leather pack slung over his camel. He tethered the camels and then came to stand beside Angelo, looking down over the side of the mountain.

  “There’s no way down,” Angelo said. In his mind, he was cursing God—You broke me and then ask me to do this. What kind of Father are you? They were his words, but it was Mouse’s voice he heard in his head.

  Birhan held out a coil of rope. “Our way down.” He tied one end to the tether stake and tugged on it to check that it held, and in the next breath, he was over the side of the mountain.

  “Wait! We don’t even know if we’re in the right place!” Angelo called down. The northern face was oddly jointed, as if a cat had been at play with the mountain, its claws shearing away bits and leaving behind jagged shards. Angelo moved closer to the edge, sat down, and rolled over onto his belly so he could peer over, trying to get a glimpse of Birhan. He could see nothing except the rope dancing as the teenager scurried along it. Then there were hands and arms. Angelo reached down and grabbed them, his upper-body strength powering him as he pulled Birhan back up.

  “Nowhere there but down, Mister.”

  Angelo was angry. “Don’t do that again. Think about your mother. What if I had to go back and tell her that you—”

  “I just go a little bit to see if there is some place to stand or walk, a path not seeable from up here. Is okay.”

  “It is not okay. If you’re going to take risks like that, we’re going back to Asmara. I won’t have your bloo
d on my hands, too.”

  “Too? What else blood is on Mister’s hands?”

  But Angelo wouldn’t answer. He wouldn’t even look at him.

  Birhan scowled. “I know where to go now, anyway.” He whipped the rope to the left several feet. “There is a ledge maybe two meters down. You can climb rope?”

  “Yes, but I don’t want—”

  Birhan had already gone over the edge again. Angelo gripped the rope and eased over the edge, too.

  Surprisingly, he found climbing down the rope immensely easier than navigating yesterday’s steep footpath. He only needed his legs for steadiness against the rock; his arms and shoulders did all the work. He found himself standing beside Birhan on a narrow outcropping that wrapped around one of the shards of mountain jutting out from the base.

  Blowing out a sigh, Angelo looked up. He’d left his crutches on the plateau. He couldn’t carry them and climb the rope. But his legs could hold his weight for short periods. The crutches offered support when his legs tired—support and balance. Who’d need that on the side of a mountain?

  He looked down. A sharp angle and long descent ended at a thin line of river. He looked forward. The outcropping was less than a meter across.

  “What can I do?” Birhan was watching Angelo’s face.

  Angelo shook his head. “Let’s just move slowly and see how it goes. I may have to stop and rest a lot.”

  Birhan turned around and took a few wobbly steps along the rock shelf, Angelo following in his wake. He felt fine until they got to the rocky shard and the path turned sharply to the left. It got narrower as it twisted around the jagged front. Birhan went around the corner and Angelo got a glimpse of his face—sweat shining and his eyes full of fear.

  Angelo felt the world tilt as his balance shifted. His body started to sway to the right into open air, but he caught himself and willed his weight toward the rock face, landing heavily against it, panting, and trying to find some handhold in the crevices.

  He inched his way around the corner, trying not to think about his quivering legs or his pounding heart. He would not look up or down or out—just a few inches ahead and then a few inches more. He tried not to think about having to come back the same way, with or without a new treasure.

  Birhan took him by the arm as he came around to the other side.

  “It gets wider here. Better.” Birhan’s voice was still shaky, but Angelo looked up and saw that he was right—the path stretched out wide enough for two to walk side by side. Birhan offered his arm to Angelo, who took it, leaning on him lightly for balance. His legs were growing tired. He would have to rest soon.

  They had gone just a few steps down the path when the wind struck. It whipped at their clothes and tugged at the satchel hanging across Angelo’s chest. The gusty wind of the plateau dropped down into the channel between the two narrow slivers of mountain and hammered against them like a torrent, stealing their breath, blinding them with blown grit, and pushing them back little by little to the shard’s edge.

  Birhan dropped to his knees and pulled Angelo down with him. Though still fierce, the wind softened just a little, lower to the ground. Birhan motioned for Angelo to stretch out on his stomach. They pulled their shirts up over their mouths to filter out the dirt and sand, and they inched their way forward through the tempest.

  Finally, Angelo saw it. He clapped Birhan on the shoulder and pointed to a large round stone pressed flat against the mountain face. It looked like it had broken off from the cliff above and landed on the outcropping. To anyone not searching for a cave or a secret, it would look like any other slightly odd rock formation in a land of mountains. To Angelo, it looked like a door.

  He tried to stand as he neared the stone, but the wind here was especially fierce. He felt it fill his shirt and threaten to lift him up and away. He remembered the old woman’s story—God sighed and the boys fell. Angelo lay back down and pushed against the stone, but it wouldn’t move. It seemed fitted into place, as if it had always been there, as if it would always be there. He and Birhan could not fight the gusting wind and force the stone away from the mountain. They’d be blown off the ledge.

  Angelo had one choice left and it terrified him. In this wind, at this height, if he was wrong, he would lose it all.

  He pulled the stone box carefully from his satchel. He found Birhan’s eyes for a moment, looking for courage. And then he opened the front edge of the box. Just a little. The wind snatched the ash like a vacuum, all of it lifted into the air and spread on the wind. Angelo felt his stomach flip, sure it was all gone.

  The wind gathered the fine ash in a cloud, then rained it down on the stone, where it slithered along the edge like fingers of a hand feeling for purchase. Angelo heard a hiss of air, and then a last, mighty push of wind shot back at him, black and silver with ash, and thrust through the opening of the stone box once more. Everything went still.

  Angelo bent to close the stone box, filled again with ash, when Birhan reached forward and squeezed his calf. “Mister,” he whispered. “Look.”

  The stone had rolled to the right. It left a small gap of darkness in its wake—an opening wide enough for a person to crawl through.

  Angelo looked back at Birhan, who was grinning.

  “Old men do not know everything,” the young man said.

  Angelo laughed and crawled through the opening. The cave ate his laughter and sent it back to him in a hollow echo, but it was what he could see in the faint light filtering through millennia-old dust in the newly disturbed air that silenced him.

  Most of the cave was swallowed in darkness, but along the walls near the door, Angelo could see a cairn, rectangular, about three or four feet long and a couple of feet high. Some of the stacked stone had shifted and fallen, and a skeletal foot lay exposed to the air. Beside the first was another burial cairn.

  Then a beam of light blinded him. Birhan had crawled into the cave after him and turned on his flashlight. Angelo reached into his satchel and pulled out his own.

  “Peace be upon you, people of this abode.” Birhan muttered the Muslim prayer when he saw the cairn. “These are the dead people in the mountain old grandmother tell us about.”

  Angelo nodded. He ran his beam of light along the wall of the cave, exposing cairn after cairn in a ramshackle line, farther back into the dark. Birhan helped Angelo to his feet, and they made a solemn, slow progression through the dead. Bowls and clay pots and even desiccated woven baskets lay scattered in the open spaces between graves.

  “Who are they?”

  “Based on what the grandmother said, if the oral history bears any truth, they are the people who once lived at Qohaito,” Angelo replied.

  “Why come here when there is better?”

  “There must not have been better for some reason.” Angelo shrugged. “Maybe they were invaded? Driven out? And they came to hide here until it was safe to go somewhere else.”

  “Why die?”

  “Maybe they fought a battle before they came and these were the wounded who didn’t make it?” Angelo sighed. “I don’t know.”

  But as they moved farther back into the cave, he was noticing something unusual about the cairns.

  “They were small people,” Birhan said before Angelo could give voice to his own thought.

  Angelo let go of Birhan’s bracing arm and knelt at a particularly tiny stack of stones. “A child, a baby.” He looked around at the cluster of graves. “I think many of these were children.”

  “Who would kill children?”

  “It was probably starvation or disease. The group came here to hide but didn’t have enough to eat or drink. Dehydration affects children first. They got sick.” His vision blurred as he imagined the horror of being a parent trapped in the cave, hiding from death outside only to find it had crept into the dark with them and was stealing the children. The agony of trying to decide what to do must have torn them apart. The words of the gold-book poet came to him—Deep in the mountain, bitter with loss. The
author must have been here. He must have watched these children die. Had one of them been his own?

  Angelo reached out and picked up a loose stone that had fallen from the infant’s cairn. Tenderly, he stacked it again, a prayer on his lips. As his light flickered downward, he saw the words scratched into the cave floor at the base of the grave—a name, this one Anaiah.

  Angelo crawled to the next. Lemuel. He reached out for Birhan to help him stand.

  “Look at the names. Look for anything that stands out.”

  “Like what?” Birhan asked.

  “I honestly don’t know. I just hope we know it when we see it.”

  “Maybe you should open box again.”

  Angelo considered the idea and then said, “I don’t think so. At the obelisk, it unlocked the door. Here it rolled away the stone. I think it’s done what it’s supposed to do. The rest is up to us.”

  It was Birhan who eventually found it, and it wasn’t with one of the cairns. A small table of stone jutted out from the wall at the far back of the cave. “I found sticks, Mister,” he called out to Angelo, who was replacing more fallen stones at another grave.

  The sticks were slightly thicker than the one he’d taken from the obelisk. There were four of them protruding from holes that had been carved in the stone. They looked like the legs of a small table or stool, all of them even so whatever rested on them lay flat. They all looked the same.

  Angelo reached into his bag and pulled out the stick from the obelisk.

  “Hand me one, please,” he said to Birhan, who tugged at one of the four sticks and passed it back to him.

  Angelo measured each one against the original. They were all the same length. In the dim light, he couldn’t make out whether the grains of wood matched, but they all felt the same. The four were all a little thicker than the first.

  “See if they fit together, like puzzle,” Birhan suggested.