Gradually I withdrew to the solace of the library, where I sought the cause of my malaise. After countless hours of study, meditation, and even several attempts at augury, I found the answer.
Arriving outside the old manner house, I nearly despaired to find it under new management. Gaudy signs named the former winery as a museum of dubious oddities. But I steeled myself and shouldered my way past the outraged proprietors and into the long hallway.
Leaving the staff’s protests behind me, I came to the familiar door and cursed when I found it locked. My pounding on the ancient wood finally caused the door to be opened from the inside, and I heaved a shuddering sigh of relief to see my friend greeting me with his thin smile.
“Master Lumac,” he all but whispered. “It is a pleasure to receive you again.”
He turned and started down the stairs. I needed no invitation to follow. The large casks were still in place, as was the door to the Prior’s room, which opened when my friend knocked.
An odor both fleshly and artificial hung about the room. It called to mind the specimens preserved in jars that an itinerant natural philosopher had displayed in the town square during my boyhood. I knew the memory as Lumac’s, and therein lay the problem.
The Prior—still dressed like a colorful insect emerging from its cocoon—sat at the table with Flez stationed behind him like a solid shadow.
“Master Lumac,” the Prior greeted me as he rose. “You honor us with your presence. We of course appreciate the generous donations from your library and your purse. May we be of further assistance?”
I marched up to the table and slammed my hands down upon its lacquered surface. “It’s the memories.”
The Prior’s face remained placid. “There are those who find infused knowledge difficult to assimilate. Are you having difficulty digesting Lumac’s?”
“No!” I said. “The trouble isn’t digesting Lumac’s memories; it’s that I am Lumac, but I still don’t regard his memories as my own.”
The Prior steepled his fingers and pressed them to his mouth. “I see.”
“The problem isn’t having Lumac’s memories,” I said, “it’s having Janeth’s. As long as I remember being someone else, I’ll never fully be Lumac!”
“Take heart.” The Prior smiled as he guided Flez around the table to stand behind my chair. “Soon you will have no memory of being anyone other than Marthen Lumac.”
It wasn’t sudden inspiration; more like the dawning awareness of something that had long lain beneath notice—an insect on a ledger that one only sees when it crawls across a number. By the time I’d recognized the idea, it had burrowed too deep under my skin to remove.
For as long as I could remember, I had struggled in the grip of a fierce yearning that I resisted with all my strength. When the battle turned against me I would retreat to my private study. But not even Kethan liquor—worth the outrageous expense of importing to Iye—could drown my envy of Eadoard Scrof.
No. Envy was too weak for my hatred of the fact that I was Marthen; not Eadoard.
I knew that my pain had only one cure.
TEST OF THE PROPHET
By
L. Jagi Lamplighter
How do you save someone who’s fallen in with radicals?
Shazia adjusted her wet hijab for the fifth time and lay the thick wool rug over the barbed wire covering the low fence. She glanced left and right through the rainy gloom, but there was no one around—neither men nor ghosts. Placing both hands on the top of the rug, she confidently swung both legs over the fence. Vaulting had been one of her specialties, back on her high school gymnastics team.
The skirts on the tunic part of her gold and teal salwar-kameez encumbered her, catching on the rug. Her left foot struck the fence instead of clearing it, plunging her face first toward the cement.
Catching herself with her hands, she curled into a roll. Lying on the abandoned street, her palms smarting, rain falling onto her face, Shazia wondered, not for the first time, if coming to Peshawar to save her cousin Kabir had been a tremendous mistake.
“I remember when our city was known as an open city,” Kabir’s older sister Chana had told her four days earlier, as they rounded a corner at breakneck speed, barely avoiding a rickshaw and a brightly-painted bus that looked like a work of tribal art. The two young women were driving to the market to buy fresh fruit, chicken, and perhaps a syrupy Jalebi or two. “Peshawar was a jewel in the crown of Pakistan. The City of Flowers! Travelers came from all over the world to see the Khyber Pass and learn about our place in the Silk Road. And now?” She gestured out the window at the tall, dangerous-looking fence they were passing. “Checkpoints everywhere. Barbed wire. Sand bags. Blast walls. Cousin, it is terrible!”
Shazia did not answer immediately. Another near miss—this time with an entire family of four all perched on one bicycle—had caused the car to lurch so violently that it felt as if her stomach were stuck somewhere in her throat. It did not help that the Pakistani drove on the left side of the road, like the British who had once colonized the land. To Shazia, it looked as if all the oncoming cars were in the wrong lane heading right for them.
“Zahilda Kasmi came from Peshawar, you know?” Chana said, noticing Shazia’s discomfort. She turned her head and grinned out from under her red headscarf. “Maybe I will emulate her when my children become old enough for school, hmm?”
It was clear that Chana’s intent was to tease, but Shazia had no idea what the comment meant. All she knew was that there was a horse-drawn vegetable cart coming around the corner, and her cousin was not looking at the road.
“Who?” she yelped, pointing ahead.
“You do not know Zahilda Kasmi?” Chana deftly avoided slaughtering the horse with her automobile. “She is famous! She is Pakistan’s only female taxi driver. No other woman drives a taxi. At the age of thirty-three, her husband died. Taxis were not very expensive, so she bought one and began carrying passengers to support her four daughters and two sons. Her family hated this. They threatened her with death, but she did not yield.”
“No other women drive taxis?”
“None.” Chana shook her head hard for emphasis. “At first, Zahilda wore a burka, to protect herself from unwanted attention, but when she realized her customers were all good people, she stopped wearing it. Eventually, she became president of the Pakistan Yellow Cab Drivers Association—and remained president for twelve years.”
Ahead was a checkpoint. Chana merely looked annoyed, but Shazia’s heart beat rapidly. She was carrying her Pakistani passport, from before she became an American citizen, but it was old, and technically, it was illegal.
She was supposed to have turned it in when she obtained her first return visa. But she had forgotten it that day. So rather than make the long trek to the embassy another day, she had pretended that she had always been American and just handed the clerk her American passport. Now, traveling in Pakistan, she found that she was harassed less if people did not know she was American. She lived in a constant fear, however, that someone would discern something wrong with her old passport and detect her deception.
Despite her trepidations, the guards merely glanced at her name and nodded. Shazia breathed a sigh of relief as they drove on. She wiped her sweaty hands on the silk of the bright peach and gold tunic of her salwar kameez, which she wore for the same reason that she carried her old passport.
It was easier to blend in when she looked like a local.
She sighed.
How cowardly she was being. No one seeing her sweating in a car would have believed that she was the same Marine Lance Corporal Hayak who had distinguished herself so ably in Afghanistan.
She even had a medal—just like the Cowardly Lion.
It was strange how much tiny things like outward garments mattered. It had been easy to feel brave and competent in fatigues and combat boots. Somehow, it was much harder when dressed in pretty silk trousers and a long gold-embroidered, dress-like tunic. She needed to pull he
rself together, salwar kameez or no salwar kameez. If she did not, she would not be able to accomplish what she had come to do.
Shazia glanced over at her pretty, vivacious cousin, one of her favorite childhood playmates from before her family moved to America. Chana was now the mother of two little ones, with a third one on the way. She looked so calm and self-possessed in her cream and fuchsia crepe silk salwar-kameez and her bright red hijab.
“Chana, why do you wear this thing?” Shazia leaned over and tugged on her cousin’s hijab. “You did not do that when we were young. You had such thick, luxurious, black hair! There is no law saying women have to wear head coverings in Pakistan. Why do you wear one?”
Chana’s animated face grew even prettier as she lowered her lashes. “It pleases my husband.”
“But… why?” cried Shazia. “Because it shows he is a bully who can push his wife around? Because it makes him look good in front of his buddies?”
“No! Nothing like that!” Chana looked appalled. “It honors him. He loves knowing that no man but him sees my hair. I tell you, Shazia. Is it annoying? Yes. Sometimes. But not as annoying as high-heeled shoes.”
Shazia gave a grudging grunt of acknowledgement. She, too, hated high-heels. Of course, she still wore them when the occasion required.
“It may be annoying at times,” Chana continued, “but it is worth it.”
“Worth it for… what?”
Chana smiled mysteriously. It was a feminine expression, a mixture of secret joy and demureness. With a start, Shazia realized that, while she had read about such expressions in books and seen them in movies, she had never seen it on a real living person before.
“For that moment, behind closed doors, when I take off the scarf,” Chana’s dark eyes shone, “when my hair comes down, all shining, like a black waterfall, and I glance at him over my shoulder.
“Oh, Shazia! You should see his face! It is erotic. It is romantic. You have nothing like that in the West. All the romance has been sucked out of your lives because everything is naked. The hair. The bosoms. The thighs. You have no mystery left.”
“There is more to life than mystery,” retorted Shazia. “I don’t want mystery. I want forthrightness.”
“And that is why you are not yet married,” her cousin replied firmly. “Without mystery, there is nothing between a man and woman but rutting bodies. That I do not want.”
Shazia stared out the window at a man selling green parrots, which he kept under a large wire cage attached to a stick, so the whole device looked like a giant stiff butterfly net. She wanted to object, but she thought of her past relationships with men she had known in high school, at college, while she was serving in the military. There had been no mystery, and, for the most part, there had been no romance.
Her freedom-loving soul cried out against the hijab and all that it represented; however, some tiny part deep inside of her argued that maybe Chana had a point.
They spent the next hour walking among the brightly-colored booths of the market and eating sweet, sticky, vaguely pretzel-shaped jalebi, one of Shazia’s favorite childhood treats. Vegetables of all kinds, including some she had not seen since she was a child, filled the street-side market, the top of which was covered over with ripped burlap that blocked out the sky—so that it almost felt as if they were shopping inside. Other booths held cascades of fish, sizzling round naan cooked over flames in a fire pit built into the floor, ripe mangos and huge yellow melons, and woven baskets overflowing with fluffy, peeping goslings. The sights, the smells, the jabbering in many languages, it was all familiar and yet overwhelming.
As they returned to the car, their arms laden, Shazia found the courage to ask the question she had flown halfway around the world to have answered.
“And Kabir? How is he?” She wanted to sound casual, but her voice shook.
“Oh, Shazia,” Chana’s whole face crumpled. She put down her packages on the back seat of the car and grabbed her cousin’s arm. “I am so worried for my little brother! He has joined the Taliban! Here! In Peshawar! Where those monsters, those butchers, killed over a hundred and thirty of our children—while they were studying in school! The burned the teachers alive and made the children watch! One class was even in the auditorium, studying first aid. And one of the butchers cried out, ‘The children are under the benches. Kill them all.’”
“Oh, Chana!” Shazia put her own bags into the car, before they slipped from her arms.
“They killed our cousin Umar! You never met him, Shazia. He was just a baby when you were last here. But, he was such a good boy! Reliable and strong. He had made house captain!”
Chana shook with rage. Shazia hugged her cousin. The two young women held each other and rocked back and forth, both crying.
“Shazia!” wailed Chana. “I don’t know what to do about Kabir!”
“I will talk to him,” Shazia assured her. “That is why I came.”
In the end, speaking to Kabir turned out to be harder than she had expected. Chana sent a message. Shazia was certain that the moment he heard that she was here, her favorite cousin and dearest childhood playmate would drop everything and rush to her side.
Kabir did not come.
After four days, she could not wait any longer. Her visit would soon be over. Like Mohammad and the mountain, if Kabir would not come to her, Shazia must go to Kabir.
Using Google Earth from her tablet, she mapped out the way to the lot where Chana said Kabir and his cronies gathered. She scoped it out twice, once on foot and once by taxi—Chana’s story of the female taxi driver had given her the idea. She noted all the checkpoints, guard posts, and barbed wire fences. Then, she sat down and made a list of what she would need, relying on her experience serving in Afghanistan.
She had limited her walking and taxi rides to places she could see without having to pass through a checkpoint. The main reason for her convoluted approach was that she did not want to meet any guards when she was alone. Without Chana, she might be called upon to talk, and she was not certain she could remember her old accent. If they caught an American woman traveling alone, she would be retained for questioning for sure.
This had not been the case when she was a girl. When she had first planned this trip, she had not been afraid to use her American passport. Two weeks ago, however, she had run into her neighbor, Sumaira Elahi, who had just returned from visiting Pakistan with her husband. They came from a village not too far from Peshawar. Taliban fighters who had been pushed out of Afghanistan now resided in their village. Her husband had been forced to spend his entire visit hiding in his family home. They would have hanged him in the town square had they caught him, merely for the crime of living in America.
Things were not as bad in Peshawar; at least she did not think so.
Still, she would rather not put the matter to the test.
When the next day dawned chilly and gray, Shazia greeted it with a grin. A cold, rainy day was just what she needed. In times of relative peace, she knew, guards had a tendency to get sloppy. They did not like to venture out of their posts when the weather was nasty.
This meant that of the three routes she had considered, the one that ran close to the old tenth-century Khyber Gate would be the best. The nearest guard posts were farthest from the places she wanted to go. It was her best chance of crossing over undetected.
Eager to draw as little attention as possible, Shazia had chosen a dull teal and gold salwar kameez. Then, taking up a matching dull teal scarf, she had asked Chana to show her how to wear a hijab. Her cousin had been delighted to do so, demonstrating how to put up one’s hair and chatting on about the joys of catching a good husband.
When Chana had withdrawn to put her children down for a nap, Shazia had grabbed her bag and slipped away.
Now she laid on her back on the wet street, in the shadow of the Bab-e-Khyber—an immense, castle-like gate that marked the beginning of the Khyber Pass, beyond which was the no man’s land between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
This ancient pass through the Spin Ghar Mountains had been part of the trade route known as the Silk Road. The pass was so old that it had been traveled by the forces of Alexander the Great.
Beyond the towering stone gate, with its round, crenellated pillars and top bridge, stretched the barren wastes of the Spin Ghar. From her vantage point, as she rolled to her knees and rose, she could see the muzzle of machine guns nestled between the crenellations on the top of the round towers.
Shazia stuck her rug back in her large cloth bag and hurried onward. Crossing the road that ran east of the great, stone Khyber Gate, Shazia headed toward the old fort. She walked head down with a brisk sense of purpose. She had learned as a young girl that if you acted as if you were in your rightful place, giving no sign of furtiveness or uncertainly, you could go many places that might otherwise be off limits.
It was Kabir who had taught her this.
Her thoughts wandered backward, recalling a time, two decades before, when she had been a little girl, and Peshawar had still been a happy place to live. This was before her family had moved to America. Having but one sibling of her own, a much older brother, Shazia had spent all her time with her cousins, Chana, her older sister Fabiha, and their younger brother, Kabir.
Of all of them, of everyone alive, Kabir had been her favorite.
They had been inseparable.
Memories flooded her: Kabir laughing as they rode a bicycle together, nearly crashing into their uncle’s longsuffering donkey; Kabir squatting in the dust, teaching her to shoot marbles like a boy; Kabir seated beside her at the feet of their great grandmother, listening with huge eyes to tales of Arabian Nights of Saladin and Solomon and Aladdin and dangerous djinn.
Great-grandmother Anahita was of Persian blood. Her family claimed descent from the Magi of old. This, she explained to her spellbound great-grandchildren, was why they could see ghosts. She charged them never to speak to anyone, who was not of Magi blood, of what they saw—not even their fathers—or they would find themselves the recipients of a very unhappy fate. She emphasized this point with six grisly stories of the tragic fates that befell those who revealed that they could commune with spirits, stories that had caused Kabir and Shazia to shiver with horrified delight.
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