by A. W. Hill
At this moment, while Raszer and Dante secured their climbing harnesses, Ruthie, Francesca, and the wolfhound looked on from thirty feet below, on an overlook that aproned off the main path. Their instructions were to wait until Raszer was on the wall and Dante had descended before moving out. Francesca had his journal and all his documents; Dante had the rest of his belongings. Raszer had taken nothing with him but a liter of water, his cigarettes and Zippo, a photograph of Katy, and a paperback copy of the Qur’an. It never hurt to cite scripture or sura when arguing for the unthinkable, even when the hearer was only nominally pious.
Preparing for the ascent was painstaking. Dante placed a top anchor at about eighty feet, where the first serviceable ledge was located, and belayed Raszer up. They were able to make another hundred feet that way, ledge by ledge, before the wall began to bulge out at something in excess of twenty degrees. There were entire hours when they were barely able to cover twenty feet.
The composition of the rock was inconsistent: Most of the steel stoppers held firmly in good cracks, but a few tore brutally through surfaces that looked and felt solid but proved to be little more than sun-kilned clay. That meant finding much deeper fissures and placing the much larger cam anchors, of which they had only a modest complement. On top of this, Raszer was making a vertical climb at the age of forty-four and after a strenuous four-day trek across mountainous terrain, and, as fit as he was, he felt it.
At 260 feet, with only the tiniest dimple as a foothold and little more than a hair’s width for his fingers above, his strength gave out, and with a shout he flew back from the wall, watched the closest of his stoppers pop out with the force of shrapnel, and then dangled in clear blue over the chasm, well beyond the overlook where his companions waited, and probably a quarter mile from the closest landing. If the second anchor did not hold, he was gone. And that would be the end of it.
Below, Ruthie screamed, and Raszer’s gut froze. The whole point of this rear entry was surprise, even mystification. If someone threw a spotlight on him before he’d made it to the top, he might as well have rung the doorbell.
“Okay,” Dante said, from ten feet above, “this is what you need to do. You need to trust that stopper, the one on the overhang, just above your head. It won’t fail—it’s in a good, solid crack and it can handle 2,500 pounds of pull. You’re going to need to start swinging and build up enough of an arc to get back on the wall. Once you’re on and you can give me a little bit of help, I can belay you up to me.”
“Which means,” said Raszer, not moving, “that you figure the stopper might not hold if you try to pull me up from a dead hang.” The words came with difficulty. His mouth was bone dry.
“That’s the physics of it, aye,” said Dante. “Sorry.”
“Okay. Just wanted it straight. Now, you want me to swing . . . even though every swing will put about 1,200 pounds of strain on that anchor?”
“That’s about a thousand pounds less than if I try to pull you. Check out the angle. D’ya have a better idea?”
“No,” said Raszer. “I guess I don’t.
“Lean back, straighten your legs . . . then push forward and pull your knees up.”
“Oh, Christ.”
“What?”
“I just looked down.”
“Don’t. The rock is life.”
“Do me a favor?”
“Anything but a lap dance.”
“If you have to scratch or shift your stance, do it now, before I start swinging.”
“I’m good.”
“Okay. Here goes.”
“I’ve got you.”
“Fuck.”
“What?”
“My legs won’t move.”
“Fire one neuron at a time, mate. Lean back . . . ”
He saw and heard it all. Saw the rope go taut and zing the air like a violin string. Heard the anchor bite into the rock, and the atoms of steel ping with strain. Watched the fingerhold shift in and out of focus as he reached for it, just a little closer with each swing.
The air whistled past his ears. Finally, he felt his toes touch the wall.
“Go!” said Dante. “Don’t wait. Power up and over. Now. I’ve got you.”
In the end, it was less Raszer’s grit than his refusal to consider rappelling back down to the ledge that did the trick. He was up. Shame has a place in the survival mechanism. So does stubbornness.
There was a shelf of generous width eighty feet below the top, which was where they’d agreed Dante would leave him. The final leg was textbook climbing, the incline of the rock now at last in Raszer’s favor, and they could not risk a second man’s being sighted if Raszer’s plan for arriving out of a cloud was to be realized. They took a break to catch their breath, and spent a few minutes in that silent appreciation of each other’s presence that stands for sentiment among men. Then the boy began his descent, and Raszer, with a hundred feet of rope and a small belt pouch of climbing hardware, set his sights on the ancient wall of quarried brick above.
The voice came when he was still thirty feet below the base of the wall, scraping away at a shallow fingerhold. Because it was nasal in timbre, melismatic, and issued from an open-air loudspeaker, he first thought it might be a muezzin’s call to prayer. Soon enough, it became apparent that it was a woman’s voice, and that her summons was not to prayer. He recognized enough of the Arabic to hear a kind of exhortation: Rise up, young warriors. The drums began to pound in the echoes of her last utterance. It was a rhythm of carnal command. There was a shout and a mass of voices in unison, followed by the ccrrraack of a multitude of palms clapped together.
This, Raszer thought, must be the equivalent of field exercises at El Mirai.
On the one hand, he was grateful for the cover of sound. On the other, the presence of a very large group of people on the other side of the wall meant that his arrival would hardly be unnoticed. He could hang here until the crowd dispersed or, as Shams had suggested, make an entrance. Time to rethink. Time to be in the game.
The stronghold’s original builders had not anticipated attack from the steep side, but neither had they scrimped on its fortification. The wall was not less than thirty feet high and was, in terms of climbing difficulty, a virtual model of the rock itself. Wind had worn away the edges of the enormous bricks, leaving just enough room for fingertips, though precious few places to get a toehold.
The climb was as lateral as it was vertical. Worse, no place was secure enough to allow Raszer to pause to restore his strength, so by the time he was finally able to chin himself up to a crack wide enough to offer a view of the spectacle below, all of his sinews had been stretched to the fraying point. The ligaments in his right shoulder could not have supported the arm of an infant. He knew well this exhaustion, this place where there is nothing left but a spark in the mind, where flesh is simply dragged along by the engine of the spirit.
This would be Raszer’s state for whatever remained of his journey, but he couldn’t allow it to dull his edge. Even when his body was out of fuel, his mind’s pistons would have to be firing.
What he saw assembled on the vast, open parade ground of the fortress were the Old Man’s acolytes, the fedayeen of this new order of assassins. There were no fewer than a thousand young men and women, most within a few years of Scotty Darrell’s age. It might be a small army, or a very large cell. Their formation was a military rectangle, two equal groups of males flanking the smaller contingent of females. All wore the red-sashed white robes that Scotty had worn on the rooftop in Hollywood on the day of Harry Wolfe’s murder. They were barefoot, and not one was out of step.
The men had pivoted inward so that their collective line of sight formed an equilateral triangle with a raised reviewing platform at its apex. The women stood with feet apart and eyes forward. There were, at that moment, six individuals on this dais, which adjoined the main structure of the fortress. Five of the figures were draped in a finer, pale green version of the garment the supplicants wore, and the sixth
was in black. The headdresses were distinctive, not the common kaffiyeh but something resembling the chain-mail helmets worn by Crusader knights. The robes draping the man in black weren’t those of a traditional sheikh or sharif, but more like those of a thirteenth-century papal legate. There was a green curtain at the rear of the platform.
The music was savagely propulsive, but the movements of the faithful were as tightly choreographed as a Middle Eastern Falun Gong, and some appeared to defy gravity. One movement, at which the women were especially adept, required shaping the spine into an S-curve, with the hips far forward, the midback bent just as far to the rear, and the shoulders and head nearly aligned with the pelvis. It had the look of an evasive maneuver for a knife fight. The most remarkable, however, began with a crouch, followed by an extraordinary upward surge of energy, at the peak of which the fidais’ feet left the ground and remained in midair for a full count of five. The collective clap Raszer had heard from the rock face was what brought them down to earth again.
If this was Islam, it was a very exotic sort. But then, the faithful were far from typical. They might be fearsome as a group, but not one looked individually threaten-ing, which, Raszer supposed, was precisely the idea. Any of them, without raising the slightest alarm, might pass through the gates of the Magic Kingdom with a bomb strapped to their belly. Physical beauty, native intelligence, and a certain malleability.
The curtains at the rear of the dais were drawn apart, and the portal was flanked by two more forms in black. Into the breach stepped a magnificent figure in robes of lustrous green silk, his face masked by a full veil. A roar went up.
The figure to whom the fidai were pledging allegiance could only be that of the Old Man of the Mountains himself.
Summoning up the last measure of strength in his right arm, Raszer pulled himself higher into the gap in the wall—and lost his foothold in the process. As he sought to regain his position, he looked down briefly. Returning his eye to the notch, he received a shock to the brain stem. Standing opposite him on the parapet, his own eye to the chink in the wall, was one of the black-robed lieutenants.
Raszer’s fingers lost their grip, his toe slipped from its crack, and he fell backward, the slack rope only barely breaking his fall.
Near the base, scrambling to avoid the precipice, he slammed headfirst into the stone. With his legs dangling helplessly over the edge of the cliff, the lights in his mind dimmed, sputtered, and then went out. Raszer went limp in the harness. He was semiconscious when they reeled him in.
THIRTY-FIVE
He knew that somewhere, it must be spring, and that he had a large lump on his head. It didn’t hurt, although it should have. Nothing hurt, but he knew he wasn’t paralyzed because he was able to feel the soft ground beneath him. There was birdsong above and a bright light in his eyes. Raszer closed them and tried to remember himself.
When he did, what he spoke was a single word. “Katy?”
Now there was a scent, up close to his nostrils, bittersweet and familiar. He opened his eyes and saw only a kind of splotched, wet redness. His vision was occluded, his depth perception way out of whack. The red object seemed to be located in the center of his skull. Finally, he fixed the scent. Pomegranate. He was being revived with the perfume of a freshly cut pomegranate. The hand holding it was attached to an arm, and beyond the arm was a face, blurry but feminine.
“Katy?” he said again.
He tried alternating between right eye and left, and was finally able to fix her nose with his right. Then he closed both lids. Time passed. He might have drifted.
When he opened his eyes again, the hand and the face had left his frame of vision. Raszer laughed softly, and then wondered where the laugh had come from. Then he realized he was high. Very high. How had they gotten him high? And when? He felt a trickle of panic, but it ebbed quickly in the blossom-scented warmth.
There was some rustling, and the sense of a new presence. He glimpsed a face, and, as with the first scent of the pomegranate, it was foreign and familiar at the same time. There was a hand on his thigh. Warm breath. Suddenly, a series of neural circuits closed and he registered the nose, the mouth, and the hair, as if digitally reassembling a face from a damaged photo. He pushed himself up and took her head in his hands.
“You’re Katy,” he said.
She shook her head. “Am not,” she said, and began to caress him.
“Are too,” he said. “You answered to it.”
“My name is Aïcha.”
“It suits you,” he said. “Did you choose it?”
She shook her head no.
“That’s too bad. A person should choose her own new name.”
A scarlet macaw preened its feathers on the branch of a plum tree not six feet from where she sat. Beyond that, a small, clear stream trickled over crystals of green quartz. On its near bank were varieties of orchid he had never seen before, and on the far side, a skinny young man lay curled into a bare-breasted girl.
The garden appeared to have no boundaries. It was a superb optical illusion, an overturned bowl with a cyclorama of pale blue sky stretched from horizon to horizon and a sun—or what looked like a sun—pulsing heat through cirrus clouds near the zenith. No physical structure, no matter how grand, could ever have enclosed such a space. As Raszer’s pupils contracted and returned some depth of field to his vision, he realized there were hundreds of pairs of eyes on him, staring like jungle creatures from the extravagant undergrowth. It was Polynesia as imagined by Henri Rousseau.
“This can’t really be heaven,” he said, “or they wouldn’t have let me in.”
He thought he saw a smile. It revealed itself stealthily, like the royal blue underplumage on the macaw’s wing. Like new skin beneath a bruise.
“Do you want something?” she asked, as she had probably been taught to.
“Like what, Aïcha?”
“You know,” she said, and moved her hand a few inches up his thigh.
“Oh, that,” he answered, shaking his head. “No. But I am thirsty.”
She rose and padded over to the stream. A cacophony of birdsong burst from a nearby kumquat tree. A few of the more curious girls had ventured closer to observe the stranger. He felt like a sailor beached after a shipwreck. It was unsettling—the natives could eat him if they chose—but, at the same time, not entirely unpleasant.
Katy returned with water in a scooped-out pomegranate shell. It was sweet and cool, with the faintest alkaline undertaste. He took one swallow, rinsed the rest, and spat it out. He became aware of the lulling, almost musical sound of trickling water everywhere. It was as if the quartz over which the water flowed was tuned to consonant frequencies and resonated by the current. “I can see how this place—and whatever they put in the water—could weaken your memory.” He drew himself up to a sitting position and took her hand.
“Listen, Katy,” he said. “They’re not going to let me stay here long. There are some things I need you to know. I’ve seen your mother . . . ”
A muscle twitched beneath her left eye.
“She’s keeping a safe place for you. She hasn’t forgotten you. Do you remember her, Katy?”
She shook her head and rocked back. From the far side of the little stream, two girls with plaited hair drew near enough to listen and sat down cross-legged on the mossy ground. Very soon, a third emerged from beneath the kumquat tree, while a boy of Dante’s age and build looked on protectively. She appeared to have an entourage.
“I’m a queen, you know,” she said, matter-of-factly.
Raszer smiled. Now that his vision had cleared, he saw how she both was and wasn’t like Ruthie. The structural beauty of the face made them close kin, but where Ruthie was the wench, Katy was every bit the lady in the high window. Her skin was the color of cream; her eyes were large but heavy-lidded and languid.
“Who made you a queen, Katy?” he asked.
“Why do you keep calling me Katy?” she asked. “Katy’s dead.”
“No
. I’m looking at her. But if you’d rather I called you Aïcha, that’s fine.”
“I couldn’t rather because I am,” she said. “Or, rather, would be if you’d quit trying to stumble me.”
“Ah . . . there you go: ‘stumble’ you. That’s from the Witnesses. That’s when an outsider comes and tries to trick you out of your faith. You’re remembering.”
“No. I’m forgetting,” she recited. “Forget to remember, remember to forget.”
“Is that what they’ve taught you here? What else have they taught you?”
She gave no answer but looked around, as if for approval to continue the dialogue. Raszer kept his eyes on her, but was peripherally aware that he had attracted a small audience. He’d have to move quickly. “Ruthie’s here,” he said.
Katy narrowed her eyes. “Where?”
