by Alex Archer
The first assailant was struggling and complaining in energetic Hebrew. Still keeping his wrist twisted and her forearm pressed against his arm Annja brought a knee up into his midsection. The breath burst from him. He doubled over even tighter.
The two still standing had fanned out left and right. They also wore white shirts, black pants and pasty complexions; one sported thick glasses. I’m beating up a bunch of nerds, she thought.
“We can call this off anytime,” she told them.
They rolled their eyes wildly at each other. The one she’d kicked sat rubbing his jaw and weeping.
The two still on their feet issued inarticulate screams and charged. The one to Annja’s left hugged the wall. She spun the man she was still holding and launched him into the man with a thrusting side kick. They went down in a tangle of limbs.
The last assailant closed, flailing punches. Annja ducked down behind raised forearms, fending off the flurry of swipes with motions of her elbows. The young man breathed like a bellows; his spittle sprayed Annja’s face.
“Enough,” she said. She quit blocking with her right, allowing a clumsy blow to glance off her lowered forehead. The hand she’d freed seized the front of the youth’s shirt and yanked him toward her. She met him with a head butt to the bridge of the nose.
She heard cartilage crunch. She pushed the man away. He stumbled back several paces, sat down and stared at her. Blood cascaded from his broken nose and streamed into his lower jaw, which hung slack with astonishment. He gagged as he became aware of the taste of his own blood. Then he covered his face with both hands and began to wail.
Annja shook her head. She wasn’t sure what had motivated the young men to attack her.
A furious shout brought her head up and around. Men crowded into sight around a dogleg in the claustrophobic lane behind her. Those she could see well enough in the thickening gray shadows and velvet gloom wore yarmulkes and protesters’ armbands.
That ended their similarities to the quartet of fervent young students who lay moaning and disheveled in the gutter at Annja’s feet. These men wore the same workmen’s clothes. But these looked used. They were more filled out, too, especially in the area of chest, shoulders, and biceps—and bellies. Their hands were strong and work roughened. They gripped the tools of clubs and staffs and a length of metal pipe or two as if used to wielding hard things.
Burly as they were, they came fast. Annja turned and fled.
She vaulted a pile of crates. She paused long enough to scatter the pile across the narrow passage between stone walls irregular and grimed with not particularly graceful age. A couple of the lead pursuers duly tripped over them and sprawled hard on the cobblestones in sprays of splinters and curses in English and Hebrew. At least she assumed the Hebrew was cursing.
They swore louder as their mates trampled right over them, dogged in pursuit. Others smashed the crates to jagged slats.
Annja had long legs and a runner’s wind. She should have left the mob in her dust with ease; though the deep-tanned look of some of them indicated they had the kind of endurance to labor all day in the hot Holy Land sun, that sort of thing didn’t translate well into running either fast or far.
But with random loose stones underfoot, various cornices or piles of goods intruding in the inadequate right of way, and the constant intrusion of passersby who simply couldn’t get out of the way fast enough, she could run little if any faster than her pursuers. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw one of them stiff-arm an elderly man face-first into a wall.
Anger kindled within her, a smolder fanning rapidly to a blaze. She longed to invoke the sword and dispense some well-earned justice. A dozen armed and burly men pursuing a single woman was not some semiharmless emotional venting but a lynch mob. Why they were after her she didn’t know, but they obviously didn’t intend to sit her down for an earnest discussion of internal Israeli politics if they caught her. She knew she had every right to take their lives if they raised their weapons against her. She formed her hand as if grasping a simple hilt, began to summon her will….
Annja stopped herself. She ducked left down an alley, tripped over the supporting slanting stanchion of a shabby gray-and-black-striped awning, fell, rolled and was up again barely slowed, her trousers streaked with dust and alley grime. Her leading pursuers went down with furious yells, tearing at the cloth that wrapped them up and barking their shins on the planks.
I can’t, she grimly realized. The bruises she had given the angry students were one thing. In the current political climate if she left bodies bleeding in the ancient dust all hell would break loose.
Yet her mission was too vital to be brought to an end in an alley by a band of thugs, whatever their motivation. Roux had warned her to be cautious. Even after half a millennium the terrible death of his first protégée was like an incurable wound within him.
Maybe I can handle them unarmed she thought. She did have advantages, not least of which was that none of her pursuers could possibly suspect just how effective she could be at close combat, with or without a weapon in her hand. But for all her speed, strength and well-honed fighting skills, and even for the fact that such a number of them would inevitably get in one another’s way, particularly in such tight confines, she well knew it would only take one lucky hit to put her down.
She started left down another alley. A knot of beefy men appeared at the far end like a cork stuffed in a bottle. They held clubs, too. “There’s the bitch!” one shouted in pure New Jersey English.
Where did these thugs come from? she wondered. With a shock like a belly punch she realized this was no random outburst of violence. This attack was directed.
At her.
Annja turned and bolted out of the alley. A man loomed up to her right, both hands holding a length of white-painted pipe above a face beet-red from sun and blood pressure. She side kicked him in the midst of his well-filled work shirt. Air blew out of him in a furious shout, but his belly saved him from any serious harm. He did fly back into the faces of his nearest comrades, buying her a few shavings of a second to run again.
The street turned right before her. She darted around.
And found herself staring at the cracked khaki stucco of a blind wall.
She was trapped.
9
Annja looked up. A lot of the one-story buildings in the Old City had fairly low rooftops given that a millennium or two’s accretion had raised the level of the streets. She could climb such. But it was hopeless. The three walls that hemmed her all rose at least two stories. A battered sheet-metal drain pipe ran down from the rooftop to her right. At least one of the clamps holding it in place had come entirely free of the crumbling wall, and the rest were being held in place only by paint or rust or habit for all she knew. Even if she could scramble up the pipe in time, there seemed no way it would ever support her weight. Muscle mass was dense. Especially hers.
Behind her she heard men’s voices braying in unmistakable triumph. The thunder of pursuing boots dwindled. The thugs behind her had slowed to a walk.
They know I’m trapped, she thought. They’re savoring the moment.
She eyed the rickety pipe again. If I can catch it high enough up… She braced herself to spring.
A doorway she hadn’t even seen suddenly opened to her left. “This way, dearie,” a voice hissed in English from the darkness within.
“Who are you?” Annja asked.
“Witness to your demise if you don’t move now.”
A voice called loudly from out of sight around the corner. The words weren’t clear, but their import was.
Annja dodged through the door. It shut quietly behind, sealing off the last gray light of dusk.
FOR A MOMENT IT SEEMED she stood in hot, claustrophobic blackness. She felt panic thrill within her.
“Easy, dearie,” the voice said. “Just breathe deeply. You’re safe now—safe as you are anywhere, anyway. The door’s locked. Also it’s not so easy to see from outside, as you might
have noticed.”
Annja became aware of an orange glow rising before her. It became a brass oil lamp, reflecting the orange light of its own flame, being brought up to the level of her face. She sensed a shadowy form behind it, heard breathing.
“Come with me.” The voice was American. It was that of a woman of mature years, she realized.
The lantern swung around. Butter-colored light glowed in the coarse weave of a hood covering the mysterious woman’s head as she led off down a corridor. A moving arc of light traveled with them, revealing rough stone walls and a low ceiling. The passageway led down a ramp, sufficiently smooth from use to be slightly slippery, then up a set of steps.
Up and down the shrouded figure led her, right and left. Sometimes they passed open doorways, dark oblongs that signaled their presence by making the lamp-flame waver and brushing cool across Annja’s cheek. Once or twice they came upon a side chamber illuminated from within, once by candles on tables and set in niches by the wall, a second by a low-wattage lamp beneath a heavy shade. In both, silent, dark figures huddled, reading or contemplating, Annja could not be sure.
Such directional sense as she may have possessed had long been destroyed by apparently random windings, and incipient strangeness, by the time her guide pushed open a door of age-blackened wood and led her into a small side chamber.
“Sit yourself down,” the woman said from inside her cowl. She gestured toward a rude round wooden table flanked by two stools in the center of the room. It reminded Annja of nothing so much as a monk’s cell.
When Annja hesitated the woman set the lamp down on one side of the table and said, “We have relatively little time here. Relatively, because it would take a lifetime or so to tell you all you need to know. And I’d have to learn most of it first. So let’s get started with what I can give you, all right?”
She pushed the hood back. Big dark eyes gazed at Annja from a strong-featured, leanly handsome face. A mane of heavy dark hair, maybe black, and marked with a showy silver-white blaze above the right side of the forehead, framed it.
“I’m Tsipporah,” the woman said. “I’m a student of kabbalah. I’ll be your guide for this portion of your journey, so you might as well make yourself comfortable. And you are…?” She stuck out a hand.
“I’m Annja Creed. Pleased to meet you.” She shook the offered hand, then blinked. “You acted as if you knew me.”
“I know what you are,” Tsipporah said. “It practically blazes from you. Be wary, child, because anyone you come across with any degree of real insight can spot you instantly. But my own understanding doesn’t quite extend to names and personalities. Mostly I’m a keen spotter of the blindingly obvious. And while you might want to stand, I’m going to take a load off, if you don’t mind.”
Tsipporah sat. A beat later Annja emulated her. The room was almost claustrophobic, with pale-stuccoed walls and a low ceiling of dark planks. From the cool and earthy smell Annja knew she was underground. She realized the chamber must have been a first floor at some point, or perhaps higher. The street level had risen much farther over the years than she’d first appreciated.
“Excuse my ignorance of Jewish tradition,” Annja said, “but I thought only men could study kabbalah. Or are you—?”
“One of the goofy followers of young Mark Peter up there?” The woman laughed. Picking up the lamp, she put the flame to a cigarette she’d produced from somewhere and puffed it alight. “I’m surprised you recognized him.”
“It’s hard to miss Mark Peter Stern in the media these days,” Annja said. “Although it took hearing the name to jog it into my memory. He’s the flavor-of-the-month guru for all kinds of celebrities, isn’t he?” She shook her head. “Even somebody with as little interest in popular culture as I have can scarcely miss him. His face looks out at you from every other magazine cover in airport newsstands, as well as being all over television and the Internet.”
Tsipporah nodded. “There are two traditional rules about studying kabbalah. One, that you must be at least forty years old. The other that you be a man. Neither was ordained by the Creator. One arises from sound sense, the other from fear. The first is wise—and as you probably gather, Stern certainly failed to honor it. He qualifies now, though you’d hardly know it to look at him. Meanwhile, I’m hardly the first to violate the latter prohibition, nor am I likely to be the last.
“But on to business. Time’s an illusion, but it’s a fleet one. You seek the jar, don’t you?”
Annja hesitated. Roux had warned her almost compulsively about security—as if keeping secrets was anything alien to a kid raised in an orphanage by nuns. Yet Tsipporah seemed to know a lot about her already. Annja got no sense of evil or menace from the older woman—not that she regarded her danger sense as anywhere near infallible. And anyway, she thought, if she knows enough about me to even ask the question, what do I really give up by answering honestly?
“Yes,” she said after processing her thoughts.
“All right.” Tsipporah smiled as if her guest had passed a test. “Then you might benefit from the straight scoop, don’t you think?”
Annja frowned. “With all due respect,” she said, trying to match tone to content, “why are you helping me? I’m a foreigner and a total stranger.”
“No stranger than anybody else in this town,” the older woman said. “And as you probably guessed from my accent, I’m not exactly a local myself.”
“New Jersey?” Annja guessed.
“Right the first time. You seem to have a bit of an accent in your own speech. Well hidden, but it’s there.” She cocked her head to one side. With her triangular chin and big dark eyes it made her look like a shrewd bird. “New Orleans?”
Annja nodded. “I didn’t think any trace remained.”
“I told you I’m very observant,” Tsipporah said. “Anyway, about those demons. The story says that Solomon bound them and used them to build his temple overnight. Maybe it didn’t happen literally that way. But take my word for it—there are demons out there. You probably have some idea about that already, although you still probably can’t fully bring yourself to believe. King Solomon bound them to serve him. And serve him they did, in whatever particulars.”
Annja felt her heartbeat pick up. The woman was reading her all too well, so far. “I don’t want to…over-step any religious boundaries. But I thought Solomon was considered a holy man in Judaism, as well as Christianity.”
Tsipporah held one hand out flat, palm down, and rocked it side to side. “You want to know why a righteous man would have traffic with demons, right?”
“Right.”
“The short answer is because he could. Summoning and binding demons to your will is more of a gray area, morally and theologically speaking. It isn’t intrinsically unrighteous.”
“But aren’t demons evil?” Annja asked.
“Absolutely. In ways I doubt you can begin to fathom. Although with a little time I suspect you’ll know far more about them than you want, dearie.”
“Then why isn’t it evil to deal with them?”
“We’re talking about binding and using them, not the other way around. Of course, there’s always the risk of role reversal—gives the whole thing a certain spice. You might think of them, in the proper hands, as tools, morally neutral when under control. For our purposes, I think you can safely take it that King Solomon was indeed a righteous man. And an extremely powerful magician.”
Annja shook her head. “Forgive me. It’s a little hard to get my mind around the concept of magic and evil. Demonology, anyway. In a conventional, I guess, religious conception.”
“Oh, it is evil—to conventionally religious eyes. Remember your illustrious predecessor was condemned for witchcraft. And she never even practiced.”
Annja caught her breath. “How do you know about that?”
“Joan of Arc? Doesn’t every schoolchild—”
“That she was my predecessor. How did you know?”
“I know
the signs. I travel the sephiroth—the spheres, you might call them. Sometimes I have visions. Sometimes I just have hunches. Sometimes I’m just a batty old lady who ought to take up a different hobby, like knitting.”
Annja laughed. She couldn’t help liking this peculiar woman, with her mixture of brashness and what seemed genuine humility. “I have a hard time seeing you knitting.”
“Don’t sell it short, sweetie. Keeps the fingers nimble and arthritis at bay.” Tsipporah blew smoke at an angle up into the air. “To get back to my story, from which I so inconsiderately distracted myself, whatever the demons did for Solomon, when they were done with it—or he was done with them—he bound them in a brass jar. He then sealed it with lead, inscribing in it the sign of the five-pointed star—”
“Not six?” Annja interrupted.
“Nope. The good old pentagram.”
“But I thought the six-pointed star was the shape of Solomon’s seal, as well as the shield of David.”
“That bit of confusion seems to have cropped up late in the nineteenth century. Probably for political and nationalistic reasons more than anything else—to kind of add throw weight to the six-pointed star as the symbol for Judaism. Good King Solomon sealed the demons in with lead, with the pentagram, and threw the jar into the Red Sea.”
“The Red Sea? But supposedly the jar was just recently fished out of the Mediterranean.”
Tsipporah wagged a finger back and forth before her. “Tch, tch. You’re getting ahead of me. Legend says somebody fished the jar out of the Red Sea a long, long time ago. Treasure hunters, of all things, eager to use the demons to uncover riches.”
“How’d that turn out?”
The other woman shrugged. “Don’t know, truth to tell. Might not’ve turned out badly, if the people who uncorked the demons didn’t get greedy and try to control them all, which is a very poor idea if you don’t happen to be, say, King Solomon. Then again, anybody who’d let loose seventy-odd powerful demons on the world to get their hands on treasure is probably too greedy by definition, no? Anyway, I’ve never seen a good accounting for exactly what came next, not that I trusted, nor have I got any kind of insight into it. The key thing is, what with one thing and another, the jar, now emptied of demons but not power, got chucked into the Mediterranean. Where, in the fullness of time, it was discovered by some Greek fishermen who later came to very sticky ends.”