“Sir. You must remain here. The way ahead is blocked.”
“I have a sick man with me. I need to get to Srinagar and get him to a hospital.”
In desperation, he reached into the glove box for the official authorization document Walker had presented at the checkpoint the previous evening. He smoothed out the wrinkled stamps and presented it, along with a solemn pronouncement in Hindi.
“We are on special assignment with the Criminal Investigations Division.”
“Accha?” The man’s eyebrows shot up as he took the document. He examined it with interest but then angled his head, frowning with regret. “Very sorry, sir, but not going down this route. Rock fall is there. The way is closed for next few hours. You must reverse and go to the turning on the left, some three kilometers back. It is trekking route and cart road network connecting to Srinagar via Wadwan. By-and-by, you may reach.”
“How long is ‘by-and-by’?”
“Perhaps three hours. Perhaps more.”
Conor expelled a bark of laughter that came close to spiraling out of control before he managed to swallow it and turn the SUV back in the direction they’d just come. He stared ahead, and with a whisper, surrendered to a power he couldn’t compete with or understand.
“Why do you want him so badly?”
He got no answer. And wasn’t sure who he was asking.
Although not as bad as he’d feared, the trekking route was bad enough. It began with another descent, winding around gullies of snowmelt that drained to a riverbed at the bottom of the valley. Alternately cratered and bulging with half-submerged boulders, the trail was at times a notional thing. Occasionally it disappeared altogether, and he drove in a more or less straight line until he found it again. At other times, a crosshatched pattern of intersections forced a choice among too many options.
As long as daylight held, he felt tentatively confident in his decisions. Although the landscape was dry and featureless, it was occasionally interrupted by small settlements, and his sense of direction remained strong; but if the guard’s judgment had been accurate, darkness would overtake them before they reconnected with the main road. He felt far less optimistic about his ability to navigate by the night sky.
Thomas woke at the beginning of the detour. Conor winced at his occasional gasps as the vehicle lurched from one obstacle to the next, but although he begged him to accept further applications of the morphine patch, his brother stubbornly refused. He tolerated the ride for almost two hours, but at a little after six o’clock, as daylight began rapidly seeping away, he summoned the strength to deliver an order that brooked no argument.
“Conor, stop the car now, for Jesus’ sake.”
Conor hesitated. The SUV continued as if he’d lost the power to control it, but then he lifted his foot from the accelerator and braked to a stop. He pulled up the parking brake and switched off the engine. Silence filled the space around them. He dropped his hands, fingers still tingling from the vibration of the steering wheel, and sighed.
“It sounds like you swallowed a harmonica.” His brother’s own breath was shallow, his voice reedy.
“Yeah, I suppose it does.”
“Did the pills stop working, do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve been taking them, though?”
“Thomas, will you ever—” He jammed a fist against his mouth, forcing back a swell of hysteria, and continued more calmly. “I’ve been taking them, yes. Can we stop talking about me, for the love of God?”
“Okay, then.” Thomas began to shift his weight but stopped with a sharp groan. “Come back here where I can see you. Let’s talk about something else.”
He stepped out of the SUV and circled around to the rear door on the passenger side. Lifting the left-hand seat, he moved it back into an upright position and slid inside next to Thomas, who was lying with his head on a duffel bag propped against the back of the driver’s seat. Conor looked at him, and suddenly he was ten years old again, fatherless, clinging to his brother’s side in a freezing churchyard, believing it was the only anchor that would keep him from blowing away. He turned away and slumped forward, letting the memory shake loose emotions he could no longer contain.
Thomas left him alone for several minutes before reaching over to rest a hand on his shoulder. With a shuddering breath, he lifted his face and tried one last time to bend fate toward his own will.
“The main road can’t be too much farther,” he said in a thick voice.
“Perhaps.” A faint smile played over Thomas’s lips. “Never mind about it. I don’t want to go on bumping along in the dark, getting shaken to pieces like a—” He broke off, gasping, his face twisting in agony.
“Thomas, please will you let me give you another morphine patch?”
Emphatically, his brother shook his head, eyes squeezed shut.
“Why not, for God’s sake?” Conor asked.
“I got to thinking that—ahh,” Thomas cried out as his back arched in pain. “I don’t want to sleep through it. I don’t know why—it sounds mad—but I’m afraid I might miss something. I’m afraid of getting lost.”
“Lost?” Conor repeated the word dully, but then stiffened, listening.
He mustn’t be lost, Conor. you must tell Thomas to come to me.
His mother had issued her final command to him long before he’d had any capacity for understanding it. He heard it again now but not as a tickling, subconscious echo. The directive sounded as clear as the day he’d first heard it, as if she were sitting there next to him, repeating it.
No, it was stronger than that, even. She was there. Everywhere.
Whatever glancing experiences he’d previously had with the uncanny—the flashes of foresight and irrational anticipation, the uneasy encounters with elemental spirit—all of them crumbled to insignificance in comparison with the staggering sense of presence he felt now. Every nerve in his body was charged with her. The air itself was alive with her.
It lasted less than a minute before it began fading, like the tailing arc of a comet. Even then, it didn’t disappear entirely; the essence of her remained. Still shivering, he could feel it hovering around him and knew what she wanted.
Brigid McBride had begun her passage, but she was waiting for her eldest son.
After so many months of angry confusion, Conor at last understood who had really sent him here and what he needed to do. It was time for him to be the anchor now, to deliver his brother safely, and keep him from blowing away. His mother had known it from the beginning. It was the only mission he was meant for in the first place. He smoothed a palm over Thomas’s perspiring forehead and tried to clear the sadness from his voice.
“I won’t let you get lost. I promised her I wouldn’t.”
He persuaded Thomas to accept the pain medication in smaller doses by tearing the morphine patches in half. As they experimented with the first application, Thomas clutched at his wrist fretfully.
“We’ve got to keep talking. Don’t let me fall asleep. Not yet.”
“I won’t.”
He looked at Conor, his face haggard with exhaustion and distress. “I’ll be out of it, soon enough, but what about you? They’ll all be after you now. I wish you could disappear into some new life and leave all this behind, but I don’t even know what place is safe. I don’t know where to tell you to go.”
Where, indeed? Conor pondered the question as he tried to soothe Thomas and settle him down. Perhaps because he was so close to exhaustion himself, he found it morbidly comical to tally up the expanding list of enemies arrayed against him. It began with Ahmed Khalil and Rohit Mehta and continued to include Tony Costino and Vasily Dragonov and almost certainly the elusive Robert Durgan.
And what about Frank Murdoch? His name continued to sit on the list with an asterisk next to it. What was his story? Was he an oblivious pawn in the game of some other dirty MI6 mole? Or was he the lead agent for a blacker operation designed to placate an informant by han
ging him and his brother out to dry?
Conor’s head swam with uncertainty, but when he looked into Thomas’s anxious eyes, his grief sliced through it all. What difference did it make, now?
“Don’t worry about me, Thomas,” he said, softly. “I’ve gotten good at disappearing. It’s time we talked about other things.”
He found a flashlight, hung it from a hook above the door, and turned the car on to provide some heat. Comforted by the warmth and the incandescent glow, they talked—mostly in Irish now—about home, neighbors, and old times, and about their separate and shared experiences with a singularly unusual mother.
Inexorably, Thomas grew weaker, and his temperature soared. The coagulant powder prevented the wound from bleeding through the bandage, but the bruise advancing across his abdomen like a spreading stain indicated that the internal damage was progressing. As the half-doses of morphine became less effective, he began placing the patches on intact, praying the remaining supply would outlast his brother’s strength.
As he peeled up one transparent film and prepared to replace it with another, Conor glanced out the window, his eye caught by the gibbous moon appearing over the mountain range. Just two nights earlier, they had watched it rise together, full and luminous, with its light dancing over the Ganges at Rishikesh. Was that where he should go next? Should he take Thomas back to Rishikesh, back to Kavita? He realized he had no capacity yet for considering next steps, but once again, his brother appeared to read his mind.
“Conor, you have to leave me here.” Thomas fixed him with a feverish, glassy stare.
“What? Leave you?” He dropped his eyes from the window, appalled. “I’m not going anywhere, Thomas. Not a chance.”
“Not now, you eejit,” Thomas said. He bit his lip and smiled an apology. “You know I didn’t mean now. I can’t do it properly without you. I mean when I’m . . . when it’s done, you need to just go. Go to the airport in Srinagar and fly somewhere, anywhere. Get the hell out of India before anyone can figure out where you went. Can’t you understand that?”
“No, I can’t understand it,” Conor said and knew he was lying again. There was a logic in the argument, but the idea of heeding it was unendurable. He slammed a fist against the seat in front of him and then drew his arm back and did it again with greater force.
“All right. It’s okay,” his brother said, softly.
“I can’t talk to you about this, Thomas.”
“I see that. I’m sorry I said anything. I won’t do it again. I promise.”
With a thin sigh, Thomas raised his chin and pointed it at the ceiling of the SUV. Conor watched him continue murmuring as though speaking to someone else. “No, I won’t. He’ll know. He’ll see it on his own.”
Not much longer.
Conor pressed the new morphine patch into place and sat back, still watching. His brother sank into its anesthetic fog, his breath now coming in irregular rasps.
A little while later, Thomas looked over at him, lips moving soundlessly while his hand reached for the silver St. Brigid’s cross around Conor’s neck. Conor snapped the leather strap and planted the cross in the middle of his brother’s palm. He closed Thomas’s fingers over it to make a fist and wrapped both of his own hands tightly around it.
He bent his head close to Thomas’s lips, listening. At first, the barely audible words were unfamiliar, but gradually he recognized them and found himself smiling through his tears.
The Bright Prayer. They had both known it from childhood. It was their mother’s favorite. Thomas faltered after the first two stanzas. Conor leaned in closer and placed his mouth next to his ear.
“Cá n-éireoidh tú amárach?” (Where will you rise tomorrow?)
His brother’s smile was broad with relief. “Éireoidh le pádraig” (I will rise with Patrick.)
“Right so, good man” Conor whispered. “Keep going. Cé hiad ar ár n-aghaidh?” (Who are those before us?)
“Dhá chéad aingeal.” (Two hundred angels.)
“Cé hiad in ár ndiaidh?” (Who are those behind us?)
“An oiread seo eile de mhuintir Dé.” (The rest of God’s people.)
“And Ma,” Thomas added. He smiled again, with a happiness that left Conor breathless.
“If you can see her, then go to her, Thomas.” He was shaking, now—in wonder, in sorrow. “She’s waiting for you. Safe home, now. No stops.”
“I can see her,” Thomas said, his voice suddenly clear. “I can sleep now.” The lines of pain fell away from his face and he closed his eyes. “Safe home.”
39
“It’s not the passage tomb at Newgrange we’re making Conor, for all love. It’s only a simple cairn—a tiny bit of a one, at that. It’s a fine day, and you’re a strong lad. It will be finished in no time at all.”
“It seems an awful lot of work, Ma. I’m knackered, just from the climb. Why must we do it?”
“It’s a lesson for you, isn’t it? A lesson I want to teach you.”
“Why? What have I done?”
“Ah, Lord, will you give me strength? A lesson, didn’t I say? Not a punishment, and I don’t know why you’d think— oh, now I see. You’re having a laugh at me. If you were searching out some decent stone instead of sporting around, we’d be nearly done already.”
“Sorry, Ma. What type of stone is the decent sort?”
“Wide and flat as ever you can find. There, those are lovely ones, now. They’re big though; I’ll just help you, will I? We’ll arrange them so, and then more around here, like this. Good. And that’s the outline, done.”
“Is it finished, then?”
“You know it isn’t. Just you go on with another layer, each stone set a bit in from the edge, do you see? And then you’ll go round it again.”
“How many times? How many layers does it take?”
“Why, until you can set a stone for a cap, right at the very top.”
“You’re joking me. As high as that? It’ll take forever.”
“It won’t. You’ve everything to hand. The builders of Newgrange never had it so easy.”
“The builders of Newgrange probably had a horse and cart, anyway.”
“God love you, they never had carts—they’d no wheels at all! They weren’t invented. They barely had tools and those made of stone as well. Think how it must have been. Stone pounding on stone, prying the boulders up from the ground, chiseling them out of the cliffs. Pulling them up the valley on sleds. Think of the work of it all.”
“I’ve a notion of it.”
“You haven’t. All those men, pulling at the rocks and going on with it for years, and then carrying sand in baskets up from the sea and mixing it with charred turf to seal everything up and keep it dry. The artists camped around, tracing out their spirals and chevrons, and putting up the standing stones; the priests preparing the chamber and lighting the fires, and the people in the fields, growing the crops and tending cattle, looking at it all and wondering what it meant. Why have you stopped now, a leanbh? What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I was just listening to you. It sounded so real, like you were there, watching them build it.”
“Ah, wouldn’t I have loved it. What a thing to see. Such a place of power. And when it was finished, to be sitting in the chamber on that first solstice dawn, watching the sun strike the passage like a sword made of fire. Watching God reach into every dark crevice, fill it up with light, and gather every soul into himself.”
Stone upon stone. Layer upon layer. Like so, love. Do you see, now? Like so.
He’d been staring at it for a while, ever since waking up, and still couldn’t take his eyes from it. He wanted to get closer to it, but the effort of rolling up from the ground to a sitting position had been a skirmish in itself. At the slightest movement, pain blossomed over every inch of his body, and he wondered if the quivering muscles in his legs would even bear his weight.
His hands were especially sore. They were scratched and filthy, like the rest of him, and
appeared swollen. They throbbed in sync with the beat of his heart as he stared at the thing in front of him.
The cairn was shaped like an oblong bowl upended and pushed down into the dirt. It stood around four feet tall, with layers of flatter stones starting from the bottom. At about the three-foot mark, the stones became smaller and irregularly shaped, but the structure was solid right up to the top. It had a capstone.
He had built it—his torn, aching hands were proof enough of that—but he had no idea how and no memory of having done it.
The Range Rover had run out of gas; he remembered that much. It had been a little before midnight, and he hadn’t been driving very long. He remembered tumbling out into the chilly night and pacing back and forth next to the SUV, screaming. Or maybe sobbing? Maybe both. He didn’t remember much else.
Panting, with the disturbing sensation of trying to breathe through a straw, Conor wincingly climbed to his feet. He looked down at the blankets and sweaters scattered around him and had a vague recollection of pulling them out of the car and throwing them on the ground. He had wanted to sleep next to Thomas.
After three circuits around his brother’s grave, Conor eased himself down and lay against the cairn, allowing his back to arch and stretch against the stone. He faced the sun, guessing by its path that it was around seven in the morning.
To the left, the terrain with its rocky trail sloped up in a gradual rise, creating a visible horizon over which smoke appeared—thin, dark ribbons rising, expanding, and then disappearing as they bled out over the sky.
There was a village undoubtedly connected to that smoke. Its inhabitants were lighting their fires to cook rotis and boil water for chai, fortifying themselves for the day ahead. There was life going on, just beyond the rise. It fatigued him to think about it, but he knew he would eventually head toward it. Not yet, though. His dead were all he had left. He would stay with them a while longer, where his loneliness was less absolute.
The Conor McBride Series Books 1-3 Page 32