by Tim Lees
“On the floor.”
“What?”
“Floor. Now.” Carl wasn’t offering debate. “Our mission is to protect you. Down.”
I sank into the footwell, but kept myself propped partway on the seat, peeping out.
“Might be nothing. Might be legit. Safest to assume not.”
I heard a click, realized Carl had his pistol ready.
“Oh fuck,” I said.
Two old Toyota flatbeds had been pulled across the road. There were four or five men in the uniform of the Iraqi army; a bunch more sitting or standing at the roadside. Carl pulled up a way before them, waiting for them to come over. They beckoned him, but he wouldn’t move. “Down,” he said to me. I was on my hands and knees now. Nouri’s tennis shoes were right next to my face. He wore no socks, and I could make out every detail of his ankles, every curl of hair, the red blotch of an insect bite on one leg, the scabby graze above his ankle.
I heard him wind the window down, call out in Arabic.
Someone threw a sheet across me.
And I waited. I heard talking. Nothing I could understand. I tried to analyze the harsh, guttural syllables, desperate to work out what was happening. Desperate and scared. It seemed to take a long time. Then I caught the salaam of good-bye. I heard an engine start; one of the flatbeds moving out the way. “Stay down,” said Carl. We crept forwards. We were well away before he let me up.
“What’s that about?” I said.
Nouri reached a hand down, helped me back into my seat.
“Nothing, my friend. Just a check. They say there is a car smash up ahead. A mile, maybe two. Is all.”
I looked at the pair of them. “You knew we were going to be OK, right?”
Nouri showed his palms. “If we are good, we are good. If not . . .”
Carl said nothing.
“You knew it was legit? The roadblock?”
“Aye, well.” Carl lit up a new cigarette. “Truth is, the other kind can look legit as well, sometimes. You never know until it happens. Aye?”
“True, my friend. Very true. You never know until it happens.”
We came across the car wreck not long afterwards. There was only one vehicle still there, a farmer’s truck. It hadn’t been moved because it was lying on its roof in the middle of the road. There was fruit or something cooking on the tarmac. Several wicker baskets had been lined up at the roadside. No one about. It was a sad sight. Carl said, “Down,” again, but while I hunkered low, I still kept looking.
“Is anyone hurt? I don’t see anyone. We ought to help—”
Another quarter mile on, we passed a house, a little one-story shack. Sheltering beside a broken wall, an oldish man, wrapped in robes, looked out at us. He had a dazed expression.
A companion lay upon the ground beside him. They were obviously the crash’s victims. Nouri pulled the window down and called a blessing as we passed.
“Could have stopped,” I said.
“Could not,” said Carl.
“Those guys—”
“Aye. Very bad for ’em, no doubt. And likely they’re as innocent as newborn lambs, the pair of ’em. Likely they are. Or else they’re not. And either way, still doesnae stop somebody else coming along, hiding the other side o’ yon brick wall. Dinnae talk or we kill you. Or putting a bomb in that wrecked-up truck, just for the moment we glide by. Eh now?”
“OK,” I said. Then, a little later, “I’m not used to war.”
“No. You told us that.”
Chapter 4
Everywhere Is Somewhere
The dust got in. The dust got into everything.
Fine, fine sand. The finest sand you could imagine.
I’d stop to pee and bring it back, tucked in my boots or folded in my shirt and then, once it was in the truck, it seemed to spread. I’d crunch it in my teeth, dig it out my ears. It gathered in my hair and in my nostrils. It wasn’t as if we were driving into dunes or anything like that; the countryside was rocky, barren, but at times there were patches of scrub, even trees. But the dust and the sand were the biggest thing. Months later, I’d still be finding it among my clothes, or trampled into odd parts of my flat.
The journey was hypnotic. I drifted off, even while I jolted this way and that.
Carl said, “Look sharp.”
I sat up, scared.
“What? What now?”
We were passing by a few low, square-built houses, electric cables strung on poles between them. Dry, dun-colored hills rose in the background. People looked up from the roadside as we passed. There was no question of blending in, no question of Dayling’s “stealth” plan.
“See?” said Nouri. “Up ahead?”
“I thought this place was in the desert somewhere. Like, miles from anywhere.”
“This is the oldest country in the world,” he said. “Here, everywhere is somewhere.”
“Aye,” said Carl. “And we’re nearly there.”
Chapter 5
Thirty-Four Potential Sites
“You must watch for scorpions, my friend.” Nouri had a long stick and was happily flipping over stones with it, inspecting the dimpled bits of earth they left. “Also snakes. There are snakes to be very afraid of: the saw-scale viper, the horned viper” (he pronounced it “hornèd” like some old English poem), “also the cobra. And the giant centipede. And . . . ah.” He gazed around. “Wolves. Hyenas. In rare cases, lions, tigers. We have both, you see. Then too there are bears, which must be very much avoided . . .”
“Are you winding me up?”
“Not at all, my friend. These are great dangers. You must be aware.”
“And isn’t it better not to stir them up, if they’re there?”
He flicked the stick, raising a plume of dirt. “Let us know our enemies, know their positions. A snake bite or a scorpion sting—”
“You’re wearing tennis shoes.”
“Ah yes. I will admit. Not the best choice.” He leaned upon his stick. “The city of Assur is more than four thousand years old, a great historic monument. It has outlasted the Sumerians, the Assyrians, and the Persians. With luck it will outlast us, as well. The Americans placed troops here to defend it from destruction in the war. It would be a bad place to die, I think . . .”
“No doubt.” Dust blew, scouring my face in a hot blast. The low, eroded mounds seemed not so much ruinous as still under construction, as if the builders had just gone for a siesta. I didn’t blame them, either. My back was soaked in sweat; the heat and dust brought tears to my eyes, and I could hardly see.
I took a handkerchief and mopped my face. I pulled the reader from my pocket, switched it on, set the levels. Almost immediately the lights began to dance.
“So, my friend. Where to?”
“Away from the scorpions.”
I left Carl at the truck with the bulk of the gear. Nouri followed me, but after a short time, sat down on a block of masonry and watched as I roamed about the site. It must have all looked pretty aimless, I suppose, and yet it wasn’t. I had the site map in my hand. Each time I took a reading, I’d jot it down, near as I could place to the location. But that seemed to be throwing up more questions than solutions. A census in the seventh century BC had listed three palaces and no less than thirty-four temples in Assur, not all of which have been uncovered yet. Thirty-four potential sites of worship. Thirty-four charged spots. But it had been a thousand years or so since anybody’d actually bothered with them, and things had grown a little sloppy in the meantime. There was power here for sure, but I couldn’t get a clear location. It just seemed to have leeched away into the rocks, diffused across the site and probably beyond. I didn’t have the cable length to stretch that far. Assur might be a small city by modern standards, but it’s still a good couple of miles across. And that was more than I could handle.
/>
I watched a heron strutting through the shallows of the river, the curve of its neck as graceful as the Arabic calligraphy I’d seen since my arrival, its movements delicate, almost hesitant. Then suddenly its head shot forward. It scrabbled in the water, shaking like a dog. The neck swung up, its beak raised to the sky, and it gulped, greedily, too fast for me to catch a glimpse of what it had.
I checked the reader once again.
Flick, flick, flick.
Stood. Took a few steps, one mound to the next.
Flick, flick.
I raised the water bottle to my lips. Perhaps the god was everywhere, melted down into the Earth. Or maybe there was more than one—two, three—thirty-four? Gods in swarms, like birds, like fish . . . ?
I looked back. “Nouri!” I called. I saw his head come up; he’d been playing on his phone. Now he jumped to his feet, gave me a mock salute. “Let’s get the gear,” I said, “and get started!”
I don’t know how many jobs I’ve done. I daresay there’s a record somewhere. Some were easy: in and out, more time setting up than actually doing them. Still, there are always dangers. “Your biggest threat,” I’d tell trainees, “is you, thinking you know it all.” But sometimes it’s not that. Sometimes it’s just dangerous, and no amount of care and forethought is ever going to make it safe. As a trade, Field Ops has its share of casualties, and everybody thinks, “It won’t be me.” Until the day it is.
I’d had my own slice of the damage, sure enough. Esztergom, in Hungary. I could pretend it hadn’t been my fault, except it had: I should have done the final check myself, and not left it to my trainee partner. A good op checks once, and then again. Another message for trainees. And I bore my share of guilt for what had happened since, and what might still be happening, somewhere in the world. Hopefully a long, long way from here.
I scanned the ground for scorpions and other nasties, then sat down on a rock. Carl and Nouri brought the truck as close as possible and started unloading equipment. A bunch of kids had gathered. Nouri bribed the bigger ones to keep the rest away. I hoped that they were good at it. I didn’t want kids within a mile of the place, especially with the strategy I’d got in mind. That’s if I went with it. Right now, I couldn’t quite make up my mind.
What I wasn’t happy with, though— and less and less so, as the day wore on—was Dayling’s “stealth” plan. It wasn’t terrorists that worried me. There were just too many people round about. Carl felt the same, I knew, but he was careful not to say too much. He came towards me now, a canvas carrier of cables loaded on each shoulder.
“Hey, boss.”
I pointed north. Up where the readings had been highest, by the palace, and the temples, and the big mound of the ziggurat.
Nothing for it now except to carry on.
I joined the other two, lugging the gear up to my chosen spot. I wish I could have called someone, got some advice. One of the older guys. Fredericks, say, or Karen Meier in Frankfurt, both great ops in their day, just to ask them, “Is this smart? Would you do this?” The trouble was that I’d been doing the job so long now, I pretty much was one of the older guys. I was the one the new kids came to for advice, unaware how ignorant I still was, how much I, like them, was flying by the seat of my pants.
How much the guys who’d taught me had been doing just the same.
So I knew already what advice I’d get out of the older guys. If it works, they’d say, then yes, you should have done it. If it doesn’t, no, you shouldn’t.
Then maybe I should trust myself. “Acceptable risk.” Maybe I did know what was best, after all.
“Yanks were guarding it during the war,” said Carl. “Thought they were trying to protect the history, an’ aw.”
“Our history,” said Nouri, “has been mortgaged many, many times. I am surprised, to tell the truth, that we have any left.”
“Ha.” Carl handed him a cigarette. “You’re kind of selling off the family silver here, aren’t you?”
“Silver. Oil. We give it you, perhaps you fuck off, leave us alone, hey? No offence there.”
“Aw, none taken.”
“And you, Mr. Englishman.” Nouri turned on me gleefully. “Already, you have half Iraq, locked away in your Museum. I have been in London, I have seen this! Half our heritage! I tell you, one day—” He leaned towards me, squinting through his glasses, pointing with his cigarette, “one day, I am coming to London again. And I will take it back!”
It was the first time they’d involved me in their banter, and I took it for a good sign. Maybe they’d trust me. More than I could trust myself just now, at any rate.
So we finished off our break. I told them what I wanted: where to put the generator, where I’d start to lay the cables.
“I’ve worked with Registry before,” said Carl. “This isn’t how they did it last time.”
“No.”
“This like, some special method, then?”
“Not really. But I can’t get a proper fix on the thing, the way it is. I’m going to try . . . kind of a trick. I’d like to get it done before the sun goes down. Then we’ll camp, finish off by sunrise, yeah?”
They looked at me. I said, “You might want to keep back once I get started. You know. Just in case.”
Nouri took his glasses off, polishing them on his shirt. “What is your plan, my friend? What will happen here?”
“I’m not going to go for the catch. Not right away. I’m just going to . . . nudge it a bit, see?”
“Nudge.”
This didn’t fill them with delight.
“Yeah,” I said. “Just try and . . . kick it into shape. You know. See if it’ll start behaving.”
Nouri put his glasses back on, frowning through the lenses, looking like an anxious gnome.
“My friend. It sounds like you plan to wake it up.”
“Just a bit,” I said. “Only a little bit . . .”
Chapter 6
Chopped Out of the World
They’re not alive, or at least, not like we are. They’re not born and they don’t die in any sense we’d recognize, though their power will drain away with use, like anything else. The gods go on, but in their timelessness the world flows round them, shaping them, molding them, like rocks in the river. It may be they erode, but slowly, crumb by crumb. It may be that they sleep, for centuries, or for millennia. Who knows? The gods have eons in them. Pieces of everything they’ve ever done, everywhere they’ve ever been. Everyone who’s ever come in contact with them. There are people in there. Animals. There is, in some way that I still don’t understand, an ecosystem, and we’re a part of it, each and every one of us.
I’ve seen incarnates—I’ve seen the energy and will that makes a god convert to matter, take on solid form. I’ve seen gods grown to the size of houses at the GH9 facility in the States. I’ve seen things have never yet been caught on camera; things that remain legends among field ops, denied by others higher up.
Sometimes, when you face the gods, it’s like they take your thoughts and turn them back on you. It’s like they know you. Our lives and theirs are interlinked, bound up with one another. There are people who will tell you that the gods are nothing without us—literally nothing; that they’re a residue laid down by centuries of worship, of wailing, moaning and wringing of hands. Emotional fallout, nothing more. And there’s truth in that: these are the things that make them strong, that make them grow. But they were here long, long before. They were here before us all.
Rousing one, as I was planning to do now, is like taking a stick and poking at a sleepy old bear. Maybe it’ll just roll over and doze off again. Or maybe it’ll yawn, reach out, and take your head off.
Maybe.
One other possibility, however, was the one Dayling had held out to me. Maybe, and in what way I could not, so far, imagine—maybe it would want to talk.
I left Carl and Nouri to get the generator set. In the meantime, I took the cables and began to spread them out across the site. They reflected the sky in an odd way, not so much mirroring the deep, hot blue as absorbing it, silver and copper colors melding with a sharp azure. It was like dribbling ropes of sky across the ruins, and even as the day began to wane, the sky itself to darken, the cables kept a glimmer of their light, a core of power, as if eager to begin their work.
Yet there were problems. The gradients were slight. I’d little clue as to positioning. I checked the reader time and time again, but still, I’d almost nothing here to go on. Without some hint, some kind of guide, instinct and experience refused to kick in. I didn’t know what kind of pattern to put down, where to place the net. I couldn’t feel it. So I improvised.
I spread a run of circles through the north part of the city. I didn’t link them to the flask. The flask could catch and hold a god, but first I had to have some sense of where to place it, and that, so far, I didn’t have. Everything took time. Soon the light was dimming. Nouri got the generator started. We’d set it at a distance, off towards the arch of the Tabira gate. Its hum would seem to follow me among the ruins, always in my ears, a constant white noise.
I waved Carl and Nouri to move back. I scanned the landscape. I was still worried one of those kids might have come back. A bird was crying somewhere, a short, repeated sound, like a hiccup. I went to the control box and synced up power for the nearer loops. Then I blasted them. Just for a fraction of a second, nothing more.
A breeze brought the scent of the river. The Tigris, where the modern world began. The first stars were now visible off in the east. They twinkled in the lazy air. Deep shadows had begun to fill the trenches in the city, gathering behind the low, ruined walls, crouching there like naughty children. I synced the loops again, this time splicing in the far ones, too. I let the power build, took a look around, and blasted it again.
