by Sacchi Green
“Tell us what you want done,” Ash said, “and we’ll figure out how to do it.” Much as she hated to face it, the minefield would clearly be Cleo’s department one way or another. Would hers be to hurl huge boulders at the city walls? That seemed likely to endanger the women inside, too, though not as much as rockets would.
“So there is a route through the mine fields,” Cleo said thoughtfully, “wide enough for a truck, and wide enough for escaping captives.”
Mac took over. “I asked this morning how far you could throw things, Ash, but it may be more a matter of moving distant stones. Not an entire city wall, but the supports of a massive gate. A gate that has stood for more than a thousand years.”
“How will the women know to be ready to escape through this gate when it falls? Are there guards on the walls with guns?” Ash shook her head, wondering what she’d gotten herself—and Cleo—into.
“Some of our troops…” Razhan paused and took a deep breath. “Some will allow themselves to be captured and spread the word inside.”
“And someone will lead them out through the mine fields,” Cleo said. “That will be my job.”
Ash tensed and turned on Mac. “You had that in mind from the first, didn’t you!”
“So did I,” Cleo said emphatically. “I wouldn’t miss it.”
They glared at each other until Ash looked away. She had known it, too, without admitting it to herself. She still wasn’t prepared to accept it.
Razhan said, her voice close to unsteady, “I wish to go myself, but Mac has persuaded me to remain free so that if Nisreen becomes too ill…if they fear she will…will die, and be of no use to them, they may accept me in exchange, as I have offered several times already.”
A moment of silence was broken by Mac. “There are certainly more plans to be discussed, but first let’s see what is and isn’t possible when it comes to Ash breaching the Lion Gate.”
The Lion Gate. Ash felt Mac watching to assess her reaction. Lions were symbols of Ishtar. Babylon’s famous Ishtar Gate, now in a museum in Berlin, had great lions portrayed in mosaic tiles, but that sort of thing was unlikely to have survived unlooted so long in the desert.
“An Ishtar Gate, then,” she said. Beside her, Cleo tensed.
“Probably,” Mac agreed. “This one has stone lion heads at the top of the supporting pillars on each side. Eroded by time and wind, but still lions.”
What might happen if she destroyed the sacred stone lions? But freeing these women could be the very task Ishtar wished her to carry out, no matter how much destruction it took.
Cleo must have been thinking along the same lines. “Maybe Ishtar sent you here.” Then, with a glance at Mac, she added, “Sent both of us.”
“Ishtar, was it? I thought as much. Does it matter what she thinks?” Mac’s voice, for once, was dead serious.
“No.” Ash was serious, too. “We do as we choose, and we choose to do this.”
Razhan, in the front seat, had been holding herself rigidly erect. Now she let her face slump into her hands.
Chapter 13
They stopped beside a thundering waterfall to eat a cold lunch and stretch their cramped joints. The rocky gorge of the river, spray rising from turbulent white water, was breathtaking. Ariya, sitting beside Cleo and Ash as they ate, waved a hand at the torrent. “This is small next to the flow in spring, when mountain snows melt. You should see it. Many hike here to view the waterfalls.”
Cleo stifled the urge to say that there were such sights in the mountains where she came from, too. It would have been impolite, and not quite true. Few, if any, of the waterfalls she’d known, and climbed beside, and fished beneath, could compare to this. She did go so far as to ask whether there was good fishing here.
“Oh yes, when the spring flow slows. But a favorite fishing rock may be overturned and moved year by year, and tumbled about.” She shot Ash an oblique look. Cleo was amused. Ariya must already know something about Ash’s powers, or Mac wouldn’t have talked so openly on the drive.
Ash strolled to the edge of the gorge. Cleo followed, glad to see that the drop-off wasn’t quite sheer, just a steep, rock-strewn slope. Ariya was right beside her.
Ash pointed at a boulder halfway down, then pointed again at a spot in the river and put her hands in her pockets. As they watched, the boulder twitched, tilted, rose an inch or two, heaved itself slowly into the air, and lurched suddenly out over the gorge to plummet with a great splash, soaking the ground far up the slope.
Ariya clapped and beamed. “Ah! So there truly is a Shadow Hand!”
Ash still stared intently into the gorge. Not quite satisfied with her feat, Cleo thought. Ash pointed again, to a bigger boulder on the far side and then a flat rock in midstream, then hid her hands once more in her pockets. This time the rise was quicker, the flight higher, and when the boulder smashed into the flat rock, both split into pieces. Shards of stone rose with the leaping water and fell back in a storm of splashes and clattering as they struck rocks below.
Mac and Razhan had joined them. “Not bad,” Mac said. “Got a touch of Babe Ruth showmanship.”
The younger women stared at her blankly. “Babe Ruth!” Mac repeated. “Baseball legend! He liked to point to where he intended to hit a home run.” She sighed. “Kids these days. No sense of history.”
Razhan, who had looked as puzzled as the others, got serious. “Very good, Ash. Mac is right about your potential.”
“Right? Of course I’m right. Good God, Razhan, she held up a helicopter about to crash and eased it to the ground! I’ve never seen anything like it. Okay, so that was an automatic, adrenaline-fueled reaction.” Mac turned to Ash. “I have to admit, I hadn’t realized until now how much control you’ve learned.” Then, in a less congratulatory tone, “Physical control, at any rate.”
“An impressive display, Ash,” Razhan said. “But you will be much farther from the city walls than you are from these rocks. A very great deal farther.” It wasn’t exactly a question as to whether Ash’s power was strong enough, but almost.
Cleo held her breath. She knew how a burst of pride, an emotional high, surged in Ash when she’d done something this dramatic. Those other times, though, had been genuine accomplishments, freeing people, saving them. This had been entirely a show of power. Cleo herself might get away with calling it “showing off,” but nobody else would. She’d been wondering whether being closer to where all this had begun, to the influence of the goddess, was having an effect on Ash. How would she react now?
“Right,” Ash said after moment’s pause. “We’ll need to experiment.”
Cleo breathed again. She had a fleeting impression that Mac did the same.
“So far, I’ve had to be within visual range of my target, or to have seen it before and know exactly where it is. There’s plenty yet to know about what I can or can’t do.”
“Perhaps with field glasses? But we must have more privacy to try such things. Even in winter hikers come this way to view the waterfalls and mountains, though fortunately there seem to be none today.”
It wasn’t quite a rebuke, just a warning. Ash nodded curtly, acknowledging the reminder for necessary caution.
They left one gas can behind some bushes to refill the truck’s tank on the way back, and piled in after Ariya and Cleo had inspected the tires and undercarriage to be sure the rocky road, hardly more than a trail, hadn’t yet done serious damage. The less they had to carry over such treacherous terrain, the better.
The snow-covered mountain peaks to the north claimed more and more of the sky as the truck climbed up over the hills. By the time they reached the empty herdsman’s hut, their shelter for the night, clouds had gathered in the west, and as sunset approached, they took on intensifying tones from pink to salmon to vermilion, while the highest snowy peaks, still in sunlight, were touched with gold.
“Is there s
uch beauty where you live?” Ariya asked.
Cleo, taking photo after photo and pausing in between to just breathe in the grandeur of the view, told her that there were mountains and brilliant sunsets where she came from, too, but none more beautiful than this.
“It’s different here,” Ash said. “Not just the mountains themselves; all mountain ranges have their own character. It’s the way the light strikes them. Back home in Montana, the spruce forests climb far up the mountainsides, though not to the very tops. And something else…it must be the direction. For me the mountains were always to the west, so the sun set squarely behind them, or nearly, depending on the season. These get more of the sun slanting along them from the west.”
Just random conversation, Cleo thought, but it felt good to share aspects of life as similar as sunsets, and as diverse. It felt good as well to work together unloading what they’d need from the truck, making a game of it. Ariya tossed a bundle to Cleo. Cleo threw it toward Ash, who kept them guessing whether she’d catch it or make it float slowly through the doorway of the hut. It was a good game until Razhan ordered them to treat the gear with more care.
A small fire inside in a circle of stones was enough to boil water for tea and cook sausages on sticks. Then Razhan and Mac claimed the front and back seats of the truck, while the others slept, or tried to, wrapped in woolen blankets on the earthen floor inside the hut.
In the morning, they gathered fallen branches and twigs from a thicket of stunted pine trees, enough to heat breakfast coffee and leave a little kindling behind for the herdsman who would return in the spring with his flocks.
“I had hoped to travel through the mountains to a wilder area on the Armenian side,” Razhan told them over breakfast. “But we haven’t time for that now.”
Mac stared into the little fire, expressionless, but Cleo, beside her, knew she was thinking of Nisreen lying drugged in the enemy stronghold.
“What’s your Plan B, then, Razhan?” Cleo asked.
Razhan shook her head as though clearing her mind. “Ariya, you’ve traveled often in this area. Is the small valley where Nisreen trained with recruits still isolated? You were there, I think. No drilling for oil yet?”
“Not yet,” Ariya said. “And no roads big enough for the oil company machinery.”
Mac got straight to the essentials. “How is it for our truck?”
Ariya shrugged. “It’s an old goat herder’s trail. It worked well enough two years ago, though we had to climb on foot up the last ridge and even further down into the valley. It was bad up here last winter, so the way may be blocked.”
Mac stood. The others followed her lead. “Let’s get going.”
As Ariya predicted, the way was blocked, but she and Cleo took turns maneuvering the truck and scouting ahead. Ash sent any larger obstructions sliding over the edge, and slowly, they made a zig-zagging, bone-jarring ascent.
When Ariya stopped driving at last, Ash surveyed the terrain with a practiced eye. “The truck won’t get any farther. I used to climb in the Rockies. You guys up for a hike?” Cleo suspected that climbing wasn’t all she had in mind.
“This is the bundle with the food, right?” Before anyone could answer, Ash sent the big canvas sack up the ridge to the first sharp turn.
“That’s one way to motivate us to climb,” Mac grumbled, but looked amused. Ariya grinned and clapped her hands. Razhan shook her head, not so amused, though she said nothing.
Two more sacks went up the trail that way, and soon, stage by stage, bedrolls, more food, and cooking utensils followed. Nobody asked whether Ash could move people too.
The day was cool, but the climb heated them. Ash and Cleo shed their parkas and tied them around their waists. Ariya had stuffed her gray wool jacket into her pack at the start. Near the crest of the ridge, an inch or so of granular snow coated the winter-browned grass and sparse, thorny bushes, making their first view of the valley all the more striking.
Cleo paused with Ash and Ariya, not, she hoped, making it too obvious that they were waiting for Mac and Razhan to catch up. The view below them was well worth stopping to see. She reached for her camera, but paused to be in the moment, absorbing the wild beauty of the scene.
The tapering valley, sheltered from winds by curving ridges, caught the late afternoon sun for most of its length. Clusters of oak, pine, and cedar were interspersed with outcroppings of rock, all taking on a mellow glow. At the very bottom, along a river flowing from a high waterfall at the head of the valley, were swaths of still-green grass that would be flooded at high water in the spring. The far side of the valley was higher and steeper than this one, a series of cliffs soaring skywards, and beyond were much higher peaks already blanketed in snow. A golden eagle circled overhead on an updraft. Cleo finally remembered the camera in her hands and shot several panoramic photos, hoping the eagle would show in some.
Ash seemed as awed by the view as Cleo at first, but soon her mood changed to an edgy impatience, shifting from one foot to the other. More of Ishtar’s influence?
“That’s where we’re heading,” Ariya said, pointing down into the valley. “In summer, the flowers are like a carpet, but more bright and beautiful than any weaving could show.” She spoke to them all, but looked sidelong at Ash. “You should come back to see how beautiful they are.” She ducked her head in shyness, or embarrassment, and suddenly set off downhill like a young mountain goat as the steep trail wound between boulders.
The rest picked their way more slowly, with Ash moving the gear along bit by bit to wherever she could see a reasonably safe landing spot. Cleo amused herself with her camera, snapping pictures of Ash with her parka hanging down over her rump, planning to compliment her on the casual version of a superhero’s cape. They could both use some lightening up,
At a ledge just before the trail wound into underbrush and small trees, Ash paused, looking down the valley and then up. Cleo took advantage of the chance to shoot features of the valley from this perspective. Where they stood was much closer to the upstream end—with the high waterfall—than to the lower.
When Razhan caught up with them, Ash asked, without turning, “What would you say this valley measures from end to end?”
Razhan studied the land. “Perhaps four kilometers.”
“How close will I be able to approach the walls of the city?”
“We can get you safely to within two kilometers.”
“Then I assume we have plenty of room for whatever training you have in mind.” Her tone was just short of a challenge. “Now we’d better find a place to camp before it gets dark.”
Ash set off down the trail again. Ariya, who had stopped, picked up two of the three bundles of supplies Ash had deposited, slung them over her strong young shoulders, and looked back with her firm jaw tilted upward.
Mac came up beside Cleo and paused while Razhan went ahead. Then, as they saw Ash raise the remaining bundle and make it follow along beside her above the ground like a weightless dog on a leash, Mac said, “Does she do that for show, or for the exercise?”
“Both.” Cleo watched until the others were out of sight around a turn, Ariya forging ahead again. “Sometimes she just has to let off some of the pressure.” She turned to face Mac. “You tell me, with all your talent for reading people; what’s up with Ariya? I though she was beginning to crush on Ash, but that looked like a challenge.”
“Both.” Mac shrugged. “Crush and challenge. Why not? You know that better than anyone.”
Cleo gave a short laugh. “Fair enough.” Not that she challenged Ash, not much, but maybe she should.
Close to the floor of the valley, they crossed a spring-fed stream flowing across a slanting ledge of bare rock and tumbling in a series of cascades in its rush toward the river. On the far side, as the stream veered one way, the trail proceeded in the other direction over step-like shelves of stone down to a grassy plateau.
They could hear Ash and Ariya not far away, but out of sight. Once on the level they noticed a well-built fire circle on bare ground, surrounded by suitable stones for seats. A camping spot.
“Cleo? Mac? In here!” Ash’s voice seemed to come from the steep slope itself. Just a few more steps around to the side and they could see where time and the river had carved a wide cave with a roof of solid rock and a level floor of sand. Here there were signs of use—a stack of firewood, two tin water buckets with other assorted tools and containers, and a smaller circle of fire-blackened stones just far enough inside the entrance to be sheltered from any moderate rainstorm. Ash and Ariya were already burrowing into the supply bundles while Razhan took the individual packets from them and set them into some sort of order.
“Make yourselves at home,” Ash said. “Cozy, right?”
“What’s this?” Mac shrugged out of her pack straps and sat down hard. “A roof over our heads? And I thought we were roughing it!”
A cave. Another cave. Cleo hesitated just outside the entrance. Funny how she could stay calm when Ash needed her, but with Ash apparently at ease it was harder to suppress memories of near-suffocation.
Ash came to meet her, holding her gaze. “Bring your pack over here next to mine. I’m staking out our own little corner of this palatial hostelry. Solid roof, firm walls, plenty of open air.”
Our own corner. No privacy here, of course, but the declaration of their bond warmed Cleo. She glanced obliquely at Ariya—who stared intently at nothing in particular on the ground—and let herself be drawn inside. After a deep breath or two she heaved off her pack and set it upright against Ash’s in a kind of surrogate hug. “Nice! Recommended by former travelers, I see.” She looked along the stretch of rock wall where words, probably names, had been chipped with tools or scrawled with charred sticks in the time-honored tradition of “Kilroy was here.”