The Lost Sisterhood

by Anne Fortier

  “Hurry!” Nick pulled me from the tent into the blinding sunshine. We ran toward a lonely horse tied to a post. “I’ll get up first.” He quickly untied the reins and straddled the skittish animal. “Put your foot here.” He let me use the stirrup to climb up behind him, and as soon as my arms were clasped around his waist, he spurred on the horse with ferocity.

  As we galloped away, a series of explosions ripped through the ground right behind us; it was as if we were being strafed by an invisible airplane. In its panic the horse stopped and reared up, throwing us both heavily into a peaked dune in a jumble of arms and legs.

  “Good grief!” I groaned, my head full of sparkles and my mouth full of sand. “Are you all right?”

  But Nick was already up, doing his best to calm the horse. And then I saw it, right behind him: the Bedouin tent collapsing and disappearing, sucked into a thundering funnel of sand. “Look!” I cried. “We’ve got to—”

  As soon as Nick saw what I meant, we both scrambled up the dune, not even trying to get back on the horse. Behind us, the roar of destruction rose in a terrible crescendo, and when we finally reached the crest and I dared look back one last time, all I saw was an omnivorous crater of rushing sand. Everything was gone—the tent, the chute, the scattered drilling equipment; the entire valley had become a giant mouth, hungrily sucking in every bit of the here and now, in order to fill the void of lost millennia.

  WHEN NICK HAD DONE his rounds and made his phone calls, he found me precisely where he had left me: sitting on a bench in the empty cantina, staring into a cup of tea. “Feeling better?” he asked, sitting down across the table with a mug of coffee. He looked calmer now, almost at peace. Or maybe he was just pretending, to cheer me up.

  “I forgot to thank you,” I said, straightening, “for saving my life.”

  Nick nodded. “My pleasure.”

  “You didn’t have to, you know,” I went on, turning the teacup around and around. “I haven’t exactly been your … favorite person. Have I?”

  He took a sip of coffee. “I don’t want any trouble with the Moselanes.”

  I was stunned. “Excuse me?” Only then did I realize he was joking. As always, Nick’s beard kept blurring my perception of him, like a ring of thorny bushes around his true self. I shook my head, suddenly exhausted. “Please tell me what’s going on.”

  He shrugged. “Someone decided to blow up the temple—”

  “Someone?”

  Avoiding my gaze, Nick leaned back and scratched his neck. “Craig got an anonymous call. A bomb threat. That’s why I decided to evacuate the guards. And good thing I did, or I wouldn’t have known you were down there.”

  “But that’s preposterous!” I exclaimed. “Who would do that? Why? How, for heaven’s sake?” The possibilities swirled around in my head, and I had to take a few deep breaths to keep down the nausea. “It’s madness,” I went on, more quietly. “Whoever they were, they must be dead now, mustn’t they?”

  Nick shrugged. “They probably set it off by remote control.”

  “But the sounds I heard—”

  He shrugged again. “There’s no point in speculating. We’ll never know.”

  “Honestly!” I stared at him, desperate for answers. But he merely drank the rest of his coffee in one gulp, pushed aside the mug, and took out a wad of cash. Only when he started counting out bills on the table between us did I realize what he was doing, and I felt an irrational anger at his composure. To Nick, apparently, it was still nothing but business. Bombs, ropes, bruises … just another day at the Aqrab Foundation.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” he said at last, pushing the money toward me. “I believe that is what we owe you.”

  “Why, thank you,” I said, rather fiercely, transfixed by the ridiculous pile of bills. “I suppose that is all I get. No explanations?”

  Nick stood up, his eyes completely void of emotion. “We could keep talking. But you would miss your plane.”

  WE LEFT THE DRILL site in the golden light of late afternoon. Despite everything that had happened, Nick was still determined to get me back to Djerba in time for my flight to Gatwick the next morning—so much so that he was prepared to drive through the night.

  As I sat in the car beside him, too exhausted to feel much beyond a welcome numbness, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and said, “I thought you might like to know that an environmental group has taken responsibility for the bombing. They sent a fax just before we left—the usual brain-dead anticapitalist bullshit.”

  I looked at him. The sun was setting behind us, and his face was—as always, it seemed—cast in shadow. “How convenient,” I said, surprised by my own sarcasm. “That explains everything.”

  Nick glanced at me. “You’re not buying it?”

  “Did you expect me to? You don’t believe it, either, do you?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense to me. I was hoping it might make sense to you.”

  “Let’s see.” I settled back into my seat, appreciating the unexpected invitation to discuss the incident that had nearly killed us both. “You go all the way to Algeria to protest a drill site, but instead of chaining yourself to the drilling rig, or spraying your slogans on the trailers, you crawl through tunnels infested with unmentionable creatures in order to blow up a world heritage site? No, it makes no sense to me. Whoever sent that fax is trying to cover up the truth.”

  Nick hesitated. “So, what is the truth?”

  I looked out on a passing oasis, or rather five lonely palm trees huddled against the vast nothingness bearing down on them from all sides. “Good question. I suppose the only thing we can say with any certainty is that whoever did it is a friend of neither of us. After all, friends don’t let friends blow up in subterranean temples. Right?”

  “I guess,” said Nick, without sounding too convinced.

  “And while we’re at it—” I took off my boots and put my stocking feet up on the dashboard. “I’m still waiting to hear why it wasn’t some other philologist who got the privilege of nearly blowing up. Why did Mr. Ludwig come for me? God knows you never wanted me in the temple. All his talk about the Amazons … where did it come from?”

  Nick shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “John is a bit of a joker.”

  “You mean, a jester,” I corrected him, determined not to be brushed aside. “A jester has one purpose only: to please the king. So tell me—since you belong to the same court—why did your mighty king tell his jester to goad me on with talk of the Amazons?”

  When Nick did not respond right away, I poked him with my left foot. We were, after all, mere hours away from parting forever, and I knew that if I wanted to complete the puzzle of my trip, this was my chance. “Oh, come on,” I said, trying to be chummy, “you can’t let me dangle like this.”

  Nick smiled, but rather grimly. “You’re assuming the mighty king confides in his lowly knights. Well, he doesn’t.”

  “Then why don’t you take that knightly cellphone of yours and call some duke or prince who does know?”

  “It’s Sunday. The office is closed.” He gave me a sideways look. “Why are you so interested in the Amazons, anyway? Isn’t it enough that you are the only philologist in the world who had a go at an undeciphered alphabet?”

  “Which is now lost beneath ten billion tons of sand.”

  “But still—” Nick took one hand off the steering wheel to count on his fingers. “You have the photos. The text. The narrative. Not to mention ten thousand dollars in your pocket. What more do you want?”

  I sighed out loud, frustrated that we were still on square one. “I want an explanation!”

  Nick’s jaws tightened. “Well, you’re barking up the wrong guy. I’m just a gofer. All I can tell you is that the fax from the environmental group was sent from an Internet café in Istanbul.” He glanced at me, and I thought I saw suspicion in his eyes. “What do you know about Grigor Reznik?”

  I was so surprised by the question, I
started laughing. “The collector? Not much.” I paused to summon my knowledge, then said, “I’ve written to him once or twice, asking for access to an ancient manuscript he purchased last year, the Historia Amazonum. But he never replied.”

  Nick frowned. “That’s usually what happens when you confront a thief about his loot.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When Reznik deals in antiques,” said Nick, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel again, “it’s usually at the point of a gun. Where did the manuscript come from? Who sold it to him?”

  Nick’s questions made me uncomfortable. My mentor Katherine Kent had said something similar when I made the mistake of mentioning my letters to Reznik, but I had brushed aside her concerns as unfounded hearsay. “All right,” I said, yielding to what was apparently majority opinion, “so Reznik is a little unconventional—”

  “To say the least!” Nick shot me a look of reproach. “He’s a crook! Don’t close your eyes to that just because he happens to have something you want.”

  I was terribly tempted to use this as a segue to confront him about his employment with the Aqrab Foundation, but decided to leave that particular arrow in my quiver for now. “Well, some claim Reznik has had a moral awakening,” I said instead. “Apparently, he lost his son in a car crash last year and was absolutely devastated—”

  “Let’s not put ‘Reznik’ and ‘moral’ in the same sentence,” said Nick, cutting me off. “And as for his son, Alex, take it from me: The little Satan had it coming. Does ‘snuff film’ mean anything to you?” Seeing that it did, he nodded grimly. “That vicious punk deserved so much more than a car crash. Makes you want to believe there is a hell.”

  “Sounds as if you knew him?” I said.

  “I know of him. That’s more than enough. In some circles he was known as ‘the Bone Saw,’ to give you an idea.”

  “Thanks for that image,” I said.

  “You’re welcome. Now, the more interesting question is why Grigor Reznik bothers with an old manuscript. He is not an intellectual. Explain that to me, please.”

  “Why? Because you think he was behind the bombing?”

  Nick shrugged. “I’m just trying to piece it all together. The fax was sent from Istanbul. Reznik is in Istanbul—”

  “But he’s not an idiot,” I countered, holding up a hand against the dust as we passed a truck on the road. “If he really did send that fax, wouldn’t he have sent it from somewhere else? Anywhere else?”

  “Maybe. Or it could be the sender wanted to implicate him. Why?”

  “All I can tell you,” I said, “is that the Historia Amazonum is believed to hold information about the fate of the last Amazons, and the legendary”—I waved my hands in the air to add a little drama—”Amazon Hoard. Not ‘hoard’ as in a horde of people, but as in a stockpile of valuable objects.”

  “A treasure?”

  “Absolutely. Of course, even Amazon believers think it’s a romantic old legend—just like the idea that the Amazons cut off one breast to be better spear throwers.” I paused to reassess my own opinion on the matter and decided, as I had so often, that I didn’t believe in the Amazon Hoard either. “If this is what Reznik is after, he is not just evil, but crazy. An unfortunate combination. I am not sure where this absurd fantasy came from, that a band of poor, nomadic women warriors would carry around a golden treasure, but I can assure you it is nothing but a fairy tale.”

  “As are the Amazons themselves,” added Nick.

  I nodded. “That’s what most scholars would say.”

  “The Amazons whose temple we’ve both just walked around in.”

  Stunned, I turned in my seat to stare at him. “Five days ago you couldn’t even spell ‘Amazon.’ Maybe now would be a good time for you to tell me what has happened in the meantime?”

  “Maybe now would be a good time for you to tell me about your bracelet.”

  Shocked by the ambush, I put a hand on top of my cuff. “I’m not sure—”

  “Did you really think I wouldn’t notice?”

  I moved uncomfortably, only too aware I was completely trapped in the car with him. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business—”

  “Really?” said Nick, his recent camaraderie falling away as if it had never been anything but a mask. “I see you take after your countrymen. Appropriating ancient artifacts is not even a matter of discussion.”

  Only then did it dawn on me that he was not, in fact, interrogating me about Granny’s jackal bracelet. No, he was accusing me of stealing it from the sarcophagus. However, if I denied the theft, we would still be left with the mystery of how this particular bracelet came to be in my possession. Under the circumstances, that was a subject I would do just about anything to avoid.

  And so I made a quick decision and said, as calmly as I could, “If I hadn’t taken it, it would have been lost forever. Wouldn’t it? But don’t worry, I never meant to keep it, just keep it safe for now.” I turned my head and looked at Nick’s profile again; it was more inscrutable than ever as he listened to my defense. “Anyway, I don’t see why it belongs to you any more than it belongs to me. It should be on display for everyone to see—”

  “Then take it off. I’ll make sure it ends up in a museum. The right kind.” Nick’s scowl told me British museums did not belong in that category.

  We sat in silence for a moment. Despite the cool evening breeze I was sweating all over as my brain did breathless laps to save the situation. In the end I decided to stick with the truth. “I can’t get it off.”

  Nick glared at my wrist, clearly not believing me.

  I held my hand toward him. “Be my guest.” It wasn’t a bluff; I knew he wouldn’t be able to remove it, either.

  He didn’t even try.

  THAT NIGHT, ASLEEP IN the car, I dreamed about Granny again.

  We were standing together on a cliff, looking out over a desert dreamscape. I was in pajamas and Granny was wearing her frayed old dressing gown, her gray hair hanging loose down her back. Behind us, my parents were sitting in the Mini, arguing loudly, thinking we couldn’t hear them. “It cannot continue this way,” my mother was saying. “This morning I found another one of those drawings in Diana’s bed.”

  She was referring to my sketches of imagined Amazons, most of which were a joint effort between Granny and me, produced in a creative frenzy on those few, precious days when we weren’t being watched by the imaginary men in green clothes. Seated at Granny’s dining table, she and I would draw Amazon warriors in great detail, using every color of pencil in the jar.

  Usually I was careful to stash away all evidence of our cloak-and-dagger activities at the bottom of my wardrobe, but occasionally I would be so enamored with a particular drawing that I slept with it underneath my pillow at night. Undoubtedly, it was one such sketch that had fallen into my mother’s hands, and undoubtedly she would have preferred to come upon a note from a lovesick classmate rather than a mounted woman wielding a battle-ax.

  “Suppose she were a boy,” proposed my father, in a rare moment of objection. “Would you worry about the drawings then?”

  My mother groaned with exasperation. She was not accustomed to contradiction, and certainly not from her doting husband. They had met on a sightseeing bus in London some twelve years earlier; she was the American tourist with a checklist, conquering the Old World one snapshot at a time, he the absentminded bachelor who had boarded the vehicle by accident, mistaking it for the N19 to Finsbury Park.

  Those roles had never changed.

  “It’s not easy for me to say these things,” my mother went on, in the voice that ended all arguments. “You’re her son after all. But she is ill, Vincent—”

  I pressed my palms against my ears, trying not to hear what came next. But there was no blocking out the inevitable. Granny knew it, too. “Don’t cry, my little one,” she whispered, touching my cheek. “It was always meant to be this way.” She tightened the belt of the dressing gown and squinted agai
nst the vastness of the desert. “I must return to my own kind—”

  “But I don’t want you to leave!” I threw my arms around her. “And they can’t make you. If they do, I’ll run away from home—”

  “No!” She unfastened my arms. “I need you to grow big and strong and wise about the world. Learn everything there is to know about the Amazons, but never reveal that you are one of us.” She took me by the shoulders and transfixed me with her blue stare. “Don’t forget I have left you instructions.”

  I mashed away my tears. “What kind of instructions?”

  I never got a response. With the surreal panache so characteristic of my dreams of her, Granny stepped right over the edge of the cliff and disappeared. Leaping forward, I caught a glimpse of her dressing gown as it fluttered to the ground far, far below me and eventually came to rest on a pristine wave of sand. Of Granny herself, there was no trace. And within the blink of an eye the dressing gown was gone, too, swallowed up by a sudden whirlpool of sand and disappearing, completely, into the ever-hungry bowels of the desert.

  NICK ESCORTED ME ALL the way to the security checkpoint, ensuring everything went smoothly so I wouldn’t miss my flight. As I saw him walking away at last, across the barren airport hallway, I felt a brief throb of regret. Despite his demurrals, I was convinced he knew the answers to most of my questions, and now I would never get another chance at extracting them.

  Just as I had cleared security, my phone rang. It was Rebecca.

  “I’ve been so worried about you,” she said, after listening to my jumbled report. “I couldn’t understand why you didn’t call.”

  “Well, here I am,” I assured her as I walked to the gate. “Going home.”

  “Wait! You have got to come and see what I’ve found.” Despite everything I had told her, Rebecca sounded jubilant. “And bring Granny’s notebook.”

  I stopped dead in the middle of the concourse. “Why?”

  “Because—” As always, Rebecca was torn between her desire to remain mysterious and her compulsion to blurt out everything then and there. “Just come. Change your flight. I really have to show you this.”