by Harold Lamb
Fingering the coarsely ground wheat, Father Hyacinth listened and made a movement with his hand. Stretching out his hand, he offered her an ivory rosary and a gay silk tassel, not very white. "Take this, and use it when you pray. For many years I have made use of it."
There were endless questions Michal wanted to ask Father Hyacinth, but she felt that he had closed the door to any further questions, if indeed he knew how to answer them. So she thanked him, and asked casually whose portrait Gopal intended to paint on the wall he was preparing.
"He does not know." The priest smiled. "That is why he waits."
Feeling quite happy of a sudden at the prospect of Christmas and wondering what she would do about it, and how to persuade Sir Clement to take a day of rest, Michal immediately forgot what the priest had said about Araman, and ran to find Jacob.
"Christmas in three days, Jacob," she hailed, her cheeks flushed. "And we forgot it and Father Hyacinth's here."
"Yes, it's in three days," he admitted calmly. "The Watchman's checking the sky globe already."
"The Watch—— What has he to do with it?"
Smiling down at her, Jacob explained that it was also an occasion in Araman. He did not know what the people would do to celebrate.
"Don't tell me they hang up their stockings and make egg nog!"
"If Father Hyacinth had eggs, he might at that. But for the people here it's the winter solstice."
"Don't be technical, Jacob. What's a solstice?"
"It's only the day when the earth stops going away from the sun and comes nearer. The sun begins to gain strength, and people know that spring will come around again. It's not marked on our calendars at home. At least not any more."
"I always took the sun for granted. But why Christmas?"
"The solstice was always celebrated. Your church named it Christmas not so awfully long ago. The Santa Claus business is just thrown in by our Anglo-Saxon forebears."
"With the tree?"
"I don't know about the tree."
"We can have one." Already Michal was planning about it. "And we'll have a wonderful Christmas."
Jacob knew she really felt the happiness she spoke of; she shared it with Matejko and the others of Araman. Was there any person whom, in some way, Michal did not share her feelings with?
Curiously enough it was Vasstan who showed keen interest in her search for a Christmas tree. When he found her gathering acorns to use as ornaments—she could think of nothing else—he laughed and said that his salesman-costume jewelry would be brighter on the tree. For the Christmas feast, he said he would bring over brandy and chocolate from American C-ration tins. "For the Anglo-American scientists," he assured her, when she protested.
Michal had her own ideas about Christmas, which had somehow become important to her. Ever since Bigsby had arrived, the German had observed his activity without appearing to do so, and Michal knew that he drew deep satisfaction from the anxiety of the other men.
Coming back from the grove, Michal burdened with her acorns and pine cones, they found an Assyrian from the tents below waiting at the sundial. This man, squat and scarred, with close-cropped grizzled hair, Michal had seen in talk with Vasstan several times. Now he waited stolidly while the villagers kept their distance from him.
"Sergeant Daniel," Vasstan called to him, and stepped to one side in the snow as the sergeant ran up. In this way the two of them could talk without Michal overhearing. She had excellent hearing, and she dawdled on the path, but she caught only the murmur of the two guttural voices, until Vasstan uttered something explosively. It sounded like skis. But Michal could not be sure of that.
She thought that Sergeant Daniel looked old and kind. Smaller than the German, standing rigid, his body appeared stronger. His heavy farmer's hands could grip a rifle or a plow, and no doubt he could use skis.
Suddenly she stopped edging along the path. Jacob had appeared from the pine grove behind her, going directly toward Vasstan and the sergeant. Without hurrying, he made his way methodically through the snow, and Vasstan stopped talking at once.
"Good morning," said Jacob. "I thought you were going to keep the Assyrians out of the village, Vasstan."
Sergeant Daniel glanced quickly from one to the other. The German was not pleased. "I am not informed of your thoughts, Captain Ide. Kindly notice that the sergeant carries no rifle."
"That's right. But you know the custom here, Colonel Vasstan. No strangers allowed. Why not stick to the rules?"
Distinctly the other was irritated. "Why not?" Carefully he selected words in English. "First, because I am not obliged to be bound by rules made by Sir Clement Bigsby. Secondly, I am not bound to recognize a warning from Sir Clement Bigsby given by you as his—his aide de camp. Do you understand, Captain Ide?"
From the street the villagers watched intently this argument between the foreigners. Michal waited, clutching her pine cones and holding her breath.
Jacob seemed to be laughing, and that was not wise. He seemed to be forcing a quarrel, and that wasn't like him. "I do indeed. Look at it this way. Those soldiers are half frozen in their tents down below. And since they've been posted there the Kurds have left off depositing supplies at the shrine. Why not let the Assyrians go back to the monastery? That happens to be their church, by the way."
Vasstan savored the words and put them aside. To the Assyrian he said, "Return. Carry out the orders." To Jacob he said, "I recall what I have this minute said. No, you are not Sir Clement Bigsby's second-in-command—you are beginning to be a missionary."
And he walked off, after the sergeant had departed, as if impatient of such stupidity.
"You offended him," Michal told Jacob. Her day was not turning out happily.
"He's not offended," Jacob chuckled; "he's angry. I don't think he likes me to talk to the Assyrians."
"But you haven't been talking to them—not until now."
After glancing around, he said, "I met this Sergeant Daniel at the head of the stairs. Daniel's decent, and fairly desperate. And he told me something important—sort of in trade for anything I might do for him."
It was like these men to be so content after a fight, Michal thought dismally. "Jacob," she almost wailed, "what has happened to the place?" Usually he guessed what was in her mind, but now he was thinking about men and guns. "It's important. The light and joy have gone, and we're all going around like hunters and hunted, racking our brains for some explanation."
"Easy, Michal. I know."
"Yes, Captain Ide. It's a military situation, isn't it? You're explaining a military situation. Please tell me just what it is, because I'm ignorant about such things."
He looked at her, and stopped to lean on his cane. She had known he would do that.
"The nine-man army encamped below is a veteran force well equipped. They take orders from Vasstan because he feeds them. They would like to be in British service, but the British Government has demobilized most of the Levies and cast the Poles adrift. Yes, there are Poles without a country and some miscellaneous Russians who don't want their country either in this embryo foreign legion of Vasstan. They are pretty desperate because some of them have families and the families have no food except what they can supply. As Vasstan has one ambition, so they have one loyalty. They will stick by the man who sticks by them as commander. Having been through hell on earth, nothing matters much to them now. What matters much to us is that these nine troopers guard our gateway. They'll pass in only what Vasstan wants passed in, and that's not so good for us."
Shifting her pine cones, Michal began to think about that.
"Five years ago," Jacob went on inexorably, "some of those Poles were making last stands in the Tatra Mountains. In case you've forgotten, they were making their stand against the Wehrmacht which is, or was, the German Army—Colonel Vasstan's army. And the Russians were probably doing the same around Orel or the suburbs of Moscow. Oh yes, and the Assyrians had just helped a thin British battalion to hold the Habbaniya airfield again
st a few Luftwaffe planes and other things. Sergeant Daniel was there." And Jacob added thoughtfully, "I suppose our invisible gods are laughing at us. All we can do is to laugh at ourselves."
By then Michal had forgotten her pine cones. "You're doing something about it, Jacob."
"No, honestly. I merely exchanged grins with Sergeant Daniel. He knows I can't do anything. He just hopes. If I had ten thousand dollars in gold, I might start feeding the Assyrians' families, and we'd have an army a couple of hundred strong. I don't suppose Vasstan really has more than that."
"Where did he get the rifles?"
"They're finding their way even into these hills, after the war. Out here the price of an ex-service rifle that can use the local supply of cartridges is about eighty English pounds. So the rifles turn up along frontiers like these, no one knows how. That's bad, but it will be worse when heavy machine guns follow them. Vasstan could do with a heavy machine gun. He is a very efficient planner, while we merely muddle along."
"But what other people would want to come to Araman now, Jacob? I mean anyone Vasstan would want to keep out?"
Again he hesitated, with a glance into the pines. "Daniel more than hinted at that. What he said was that another Assyrian outpost had sighted a dozen foreigners traveling on skis and horseback. That's all he would say. But it sounded as if they were either searching or exploring, and they must have got around the Kurds some way."
Searching. Michal almost gasped. Of course by now people in Baghdad must be worried about Sir Clement, if not about her. Perhaps the American Legation had begun to wonder what had happened to Jacob.
"If they tried to search for us, from Baghdad," she asked, "wouldn't they send planes ? I haven't seen a sign of one in the sky."
Carefully Jacob considered that. "I don't think so. Sir Clement doesn't expect it. Putting the weather aside, they have only massive transport planes and the British fighters at Habbaniya. Even if they tried, a plane would have to keep at more than seventeen thousand feet, above these peaks. At that distance they could barely spot the lake on this summit."
Michal went into inward communion with herself. Two months before she would have hated the sight of a plane from outside; now she found herself hoping for one, because the authorities in Baghdad would never send a search party into the snowbound mountains on foot. No, the only hope would be an inquisitive plane that might circle Araman and sight the Assyrians' tents, or the smoke from the Watchman's fire.
"Jacob!" A new misgiving assailed her. "Do you believe this Sergeant Daniel?"
"I think he's honest. And then he was putting out a feeler." Jacob's grin turned crooked. "He said the Assyrian Christians had one hope. In the United States. Such a great and all-powerful United States could easily rescue a few thousand men and their families that had fought for the Allies. The United States did things like that."
Although he still looked grim, his eyes had the warmth she was accustomed to. "The situation's bad, Michal, and we can't do anything about it. So that's all right. Now suppose you pile those cones here, and we'll try to find a Christmas tree."
Obediently Michal dropped her burden, and felt better at once. It was just like Jacob to read her mind about the tree. "I don't want too big a one," she said.
When they dragged in the fir and the pine cones, Sir Clement stood at the fire beaming and rubbing his hands. His muffler hung open, and he almost crowed.
"Eureka!"
And he waved his thin arms as if embracing all the room. "The first light, children. The first glimmer of light."
Waiting until they exclaimed, he said quietly that Daoud had broken into the dead language of Araman—he had exchanged the first intelligible words with the people here who used the ancient speech. "And, to borrow an Americanism—what words!"
A wild and intangible hope surged within Michal while she held her breath.
"It was Gopal. Gopal began to answer Daoud's questions. He calls this the Land of the Dawn, and he calls the people the Holders of the Hills and the keepers of the old tongue."
Perplexed, Michal stared. Jacob noticed how flushed the Englishman's face was. "Isn't that what the Kurds say?" he asked.
"The phrases are older than the Kurds, who may have assimilated them. This is the Land of the Dawn, the birthplace of civilization."
What Michal had hoped for, she did not know, now. Jacob thought that Sir Clement's fever was worse.
To celebrate, they set up the tree that evening, and Michal hung Saint Nikolka at its top.
It was bitter cold that night, and she had wrapped a wool dressing gown around her. Usually, after a while the blankets warmed her and she felt comfortable and sleepy, but the wind struck into her and she lay awake. In the pocket of the dressing gown she fingered the beads of Father Hyacinth's rosary for reassurance, telling herself that the next evening would be Christmas Eve.
The embers of the fire glowed when the wind swept under the door curtain. The acorn and pine-cone ornaments were not doing well on the tree; the gusts of air loosened them from the branches, and one by one they plumped down on the floor. They were dismal ornaments, dark and foresty, but she wouldn't have Vasstan's jewelry. . . .Sir Clement thought they were all sleeping upon the portion of the earth where people and time itself had begun—time itself. But there were so many kinds of time, of the earth as it changed, of the unchanging stars, and human inward time that marked the changes within a body. "We grow older," she tried to frame it in words, "in such a few years, but the ancient earth only changes a trifle in a century."
Here she was, trying to hold fast to inward time, to her treasures of the house and her hopes, while outside, beyond the winds, the ceaseless inexorable time of the stars was mocking at her.
It was inescapable, following her, coming out of the emptiness beyond the clustering stars. It was like the water wheel, groaning and turning without thought or meaning. . . .When she heard the whistle of the wind again, she peered around the room. Jacob lay motionless under his blankets, and Sir Clement did not stir in the dark alcove. Only their bodies lay in the room with her. Their minds were gone, in the wind gusts, off somewhere away from her. And she was alone.
Something crashed down from the tree, and Michal caught her breath, seeing that it was Saint Nikolka. She began to push at her blankets.
"What is it?" Jacob asked.
Michal did not answer, trying to keep from crying. His hand caught hers, and he got up, to stir the embers of the fire and look for more wood.
"I'd like to sit up," Michal heard herself saying.
They were alive again. Badr hurried in with his arms full of wood and knelt by the hearth. From his alcove Sir Clement emerged, filling his pipe from his pouch. After a searching glance at her, he sat down on the divan.
"I'm sorry," Michal began miserably.
"What was the dream like this time?" Jacob urged her. "Have your fetches been knocking at the door?"
She managed to smile. "You all went away and left your bodies——"
Over his pipe, Clement eyed her curiously, and she went on hastily, "It wasn't a dream. Oh, I just grieved because I've lost my paradise. Not that, of course, but something I hoped for."
Now Clement's voice quieted her. "Michele, I think you've found your paradise."
When she shook her head mutely, he leaned forward toward the blaze. "It sounds fantastic, but I believe it to be true. It's here."
This time no one spoke. Badr, having got the fire going, squatted by the door, waiting.
"There are the legends, of course," Sir Clement's voice went on. "They were always about far places—the Ultimate Thules, the Blessed Isles, just beyond the horizon. Such remote islands were only mysterious because they were hard to reach, and the human imagination filled them with wonders."
"Cathay," said Michal, remembering.
"Quite. Cathay was really China. When Messer Marco Polo and his brothers visited it and brought back a realistic account, the home bodies refused to believe it, because it did not corresp
ond with their imagined Cathay. An explorer has no honor in his own country unless he brings back a tale of wonders, so most of them do just that."
Over his pipe he considered them benignly. "The myth of the earthly paradise is something quite different. Our ancestors in the West hoped that it might exist somewhere above the earth, in the highest mountains under the sunrise. They could imagine just what it was like because it did not exist—bestowing upon it the fountain of life which gave immortality and the tree which gave knowledge. They peopled it with angelic shapes, breathing ethereal air."
"And the New Jerusalem was there," Michal assented. "I feel better now, and I thank you for the story. But this wind is not ethereal, and the snow and wet are all around us, outside this fire, and most of us are beginning to be afraid. I know how frightened I am."
Jacob started to say something, then poked at the fire instead. He is letting Sir Clement answer, she thought.
"Yes, Michele," said the Englishman after a moment. "You are cold, and the wind has frayed your nerves. This rather desolate Christmas tree mocks you because at the moment you can see no hope anywhere of something better. Isn't that your case?"
Mutely she nodded.
"Very well. Now I am going to tell you the story of other women who were here seven thousand years ago. Afterward you can tell me if there is not something to hope for."
He spoke slowly, as if guarding his strength, his thin head resting on his hand. "It is really the story of a miracle. They were like you physically, these women. Their brain structure was similar. If they could explain little about themselves, it was merely because language itself was new to them. And thought itself was new—their waking hours were spent in physical labor with little rest. Such things as ease of life, or luxuries, or effortless transport they had never imagined. They collected the grains of wild emmer wheat which grows in this region, and nowhere else, not because they had any concept of the advantage of agriculture but because it simplified matters for them to scratch up the earth near their homes and scatter the seed grains there, instead of searching for it elsewhere.