The Beginning of Sorrows

by Gilbert, Morris

  “Maybe so, maybe so, daughter,” Jess said cheerfully. “But— Though He slay me, yet shall I trust Him.”

  Little Bird dropped her head, shaking it with evident disgust. But what Jesse and Noemi Mitchell, for all their wisdom, did not know, was that she was hiding scalding tears in her wounded brown eyes.

  Gently Jesse said, “Wake up, Noemi. Look out the window. We’re flying over the Ozarks.”

  Below the jet, the Ozarks looked much like they had on the map: a vivid green swatch of earth, rising and falling in gentle peaks.

  Noemi blinked several times, then said tentatively, “I just had a dream.”

  Jesse was surprised. He was the one that usually had dreams.

  “What was it?”

  “Nothing much. Just a house.”

  “The old house? On the reservation?”

  “No. It was a house I’ve never seen before. I could see it, sharp and clear, though.”

  “Tell me about it, Noe,” he said intently.

  “It wasn’t fancy, and it was old. Just a shotgun house with pine trees in the front and in the back, but it was up high, because I could see glimpses of a valley below. There was a chimney on the west end of the house. On top of the chimney was a brass weather vane shaped like a rooster. It was all turned green from the weather.” She thought for a minute, closed her eyes, and then resumed dreamily, “It was painted white, and even though the house is very old, the paint looked new. The windows were framed in green. It had flower beds all around, and the flowers have run riot . . . but they still bloom. Petunias, lantana, four-o’clocks . . .” Noemi hadn’t been able to have a flower garden in New Mexico. The topsoil they brought in to mix with the red sand outside their stucco hut had of necessity been used for the vegetable garden.

  “Doesn’t sound like any place we’ve ever been,” Jess said thoughtfully.

  “No. Oh, well, it’s probably nothing, Jess. You know my dreams—when I ever remember a minute of them—are usually just a jumble of nonsense.”

  The two sat quietly for some time, staring out the grimy window at the verdant hills below. Finally Noemi said quietly, “But it sure was a pretty house.”

  FOUR

  QADDAR SQUIRMED FORWARD ON his belly, his mouth as dry as the fiery sands beneath him. He had lost his canteen, and wadis, little catches of life-giving rainwater, were almost nonexistent in the southern reaches of the Syrian Desert. Far ahead, shimmering in the hadean heat, the sea of sand broke up into a jumble of small, coarse rocks and undulating dunes with dark splotches along the ridges. Qaddar thought the splotches might be wild caper shrubs, or perhaps desert gourds. Fruits and buds of the caper would be delicious. Gourd flowers would be even better. The wound he had taken in his right calf seared him, and he was lame, so he crawled. He knew that the wound was infected, but there had been no medic, no hospital. All had been blasted out of existence by the deadly Tornadoes of the Luftwaffe.

  A slight movement to his left caught Qaddar’s eye. He froze; he was face-to-face with a serpent, not two feet away. The small, dark, beady eyes locked with his, the forked tongue flickered rapidly. The snake was in a coil, his neck posed in the “S” of the striking arc. Cold fear rushed through Qaddar, energizing him, but for only a few moments. He was spent, used up, his mind darkened with confusion. Three days of incessant battle had robbed him of most of the rational parts of his mind. He tried to think, he tried to plan, he tried to judge the distance the snake could strike . . . but it all seemed too large a task, and too wearisome. Lassitude swept over him and Qaddar embraced it, for it was a sort of release. If he strikes me, at least it will be all over, he thought, eyeing the venomous serpent with only mild curiosity. He didn’t know what kind of snake it was, but it had a fat triangle behind its nose, so Qaddar knew it was a type of pit viper. He himself had been raised in the cities and knew nothing about the ghastly man-killing desert.

  Qaddar had been snatched from his home, the gentle city of Samandagi on the shores of the lovely Mediterranean Sea. Pressed into a makeshift army at the last minute to stop the onslaught of the ravaging German army and the sky-terrors of the Luftwaffe, Qaddar had made a pitiful soldier. He was no mujahedden—freedom fighter—thrilling to die for a jihad. He was a farmer, a simple wheat farmer, with a small square of rich earth, a cozy house, a wife and a son. Still, Qaddar had not run away. He had stayed on the field of battle, until the Syrians were defeated beyond all hope. Uncaring whether a German shot him or a Syrian officer—if there were any left alive—executed him for desertion, Qaddar had started crawling away when it seemed everyone on the blood-soaked desert was dead except for the Germans.

  And so he had arrived here, at a crossroads in the desert, with death behind him and death before him. So it seemed Allah had willed it for the wheat farmer from Samandagi by the sea.

  The snake began weaving from side to side slowly, rhythmically, as regularly as a metronome. Qaddar stayed completely still, whether from courage or weariness he didn’t really know. Only his eyes moved, following the deadly, sinister dance of the serpent.

  Thoughts of home drifted airily to him, visions of his young wife and son, and bitterness welled up in his mouth as sharp as quinine. What does this war have to do with me? What does it all mean? he thought dully. He had never really understood how his country had incurred the wrath of the Germanic Union of Nation-States and brought the hordes of merciless, steely-eyed Germans and their other Nordic brothers of war to crush them. None of the men who had been his comrades understood, either. They couldn’t find anyone to explain it to them, and most of them had died without knowing why.

  His wife’s voice came to him, and then that of his small son, as he lay there, contemplating his last enemy, the snake. Qaddar, time and time again, had conjured up their faces and their voices as he fled the battlefield. He had crawled across dead bodies, already half rotted under the fierce sun, covered with the torturous mites and flies and vermin of the sands. Still, he hadn’t exactly connected the grisly remains with men, or with breath, or with living. Life had ceased to have any meaning three days ago.

  The deadly black Tornadoes, swarming like a pestilence, had first swatted aside the Syrians’ few cheap little Mirage 3000 fighters. Then the Luftwaffe, at will, had bombed the Syrian ground forces, blasting brigades, tanks, command posts, field hospitals, and single soldiers into annihilation. Then the bombing had ended, and now the fearsome panzer divisions had come, their great Leopard 5 tanks and Marder APC’s rumbling across the desert like prehistoric monsters. Thousands of Infanteristen swarmed behind them, marching in a deadly cadence, even though they were unopposed. The few Syrians left alive were sitting blank-eyed, emptied arms at their feet, waiting for the first German to arrive to receive their surrender.

  The snake suddenly became still, then raised his head alertly, with the peculiar grace that serpents have had since the beginning of time. As if he had grown bored with Qaddar, he flattened out on the sand and slithered off.

  Qaddar felt weakness overcome him, and again, he didn’t know if it was from relief or the stuporous effects of fatigue. He had reached that point where humans, at the last ebbing of hope, give in to a numbness. Death and pain had been Qaddar’s world for three solid days. He could no longer receive or feel or think in the old logical ways.

  With a groan, Qaddar got to his feet. Fiery pain shot through the calf of his leg, but he ignored it. He took a few drunken steps, his eyes and mind on gourd flowers ahead. But he fell, first to his knees, and then rolled into a shallow, rocky gully. It wandered a little, but it led in the general direction of the promising ridges ahead, so he kept moving.

  The terrain grew more irregular, with more scrub and pebbles and coarser red sand mixed in with the fine golden sands of the heart of the Syrian Desert. The land began to rise and fall somewhat, and was crisscrossed by more of the gullies, some of them as deep as Qaddar was tall. He kept walking, staggering, cursing the pain in his throbbing leg. As happened to so many men in the desert, the
distance to the dunes with the green vegetation was farther than Qaddar had thought, for he was not a man with eyes for the desert. Still, he finally stood at the base of the ridge and looked up uncertainly. The top of the ridge—he could see the tantalizing crimson of wild caper buds—was ten feet above him, and the ascent was slightly undercut. Wearily Qaddar decided to go around to the other side of the dune, to see if it might be easier to climb up.

  He rounded the first small rise—and found himself looking square into the eyes of a German Infanteristen. For one moment Qaddar was paralyzed. The German, his blue eyes widened in surprise, was slow to react. Fumbling a bit, he raised his G12, the compact and deadly rifle of the German army.

  Without thought, Qaddar threw himself forward, snatching the knife from his belt, the only weapon he had left. He hit the German’s chest, and it was as if Qaddar had thrown himself against a stone pillar—but he felt the bigger man stumble, waver, and then crash heavily to the ground on his back. The rifle was still in the German’s hand, but he’d lost his grip on the stock and trigger.

  Qaddar, his eyes locked with the German’s, stabbed him in the heart.

  The man grew still, his face went blank, and still he looked at Qaddar. Trembling, nauseous, Qaddar moved away from him and sank into a huddle on the ground. At least now the German was only looking up at the hard blue sky.

  Finally, with a shudder, Qaddar crawled back to the dead man and grabbed his rucksack and canteen and drank greedily of the warm but sweet-tasting water. He found no food in the rucksack, but he pulled a wallet from it. Suddenly clumsy, Qaddar finally managed to open it. He sat there, dully staring at the holograph of a young woman embracing two small children. She had blonde hair, as did both of the children, one a boy and one a girl. Across the bottom names were written in a childish scroll.

  Qaddar, suddenly angered at the stupidity and bestiality of it all, growled, “It could have been me dead instead of him—and then my wife and my son would have been without a husband or a father. Allah’s curses on these dogs! I wish I could kill every last German pig on this earth!”

  He fell silent, his head bowed, clutching the picture of the pretty blonde woman and the fair children in one grimy hand. It seemed that he sat there a long time, looking at the picture of his despised enemies’ loved ones, cursing the dead man and his family, too.

  He heard something. The muted roar of the spent battlefield was a continual hum in the background, but this was a distinct sound, a single sound . . . a close sound. As soon as Qaddar identified the sound, the fury rose in him, galling and bitter. He grabbed the German soldier’s foot and dragged him around to the other side of the ridge, dumping his body into a small ravine. Then he scrambled to the top of the dune, crawling on his belly. As he crawled he checked the load of the German’s rifle; the pig hadn’t fired one shot. All eighty rounds in the magazine were intact.

  Qaddar of Samandagi, who might, perhaps, have something of the mujahedden in him after all, waited.

  The Vulcan’s diesel engine had a gutsy roar. The German version of a military utility vehicle, the Vulcan was made by Mercedes-Benz and had a certain ascetic military elegance. This one was painted the tans and yellows of desert camouflage, and the top had been removed. A stylized wolf ’s head was painted on the doors. On the rear flatbed a recoilless 100 mm cannon, capable of stopping the middling T-90 Syrian tanks, was mounted.

  A man sitting in the passenger seat stood up to stare into the harsh setting sun over the windshield. He had stars on his shoulders, the mark of a general. The eyes, sometimes a glacier blue, sometimes a shroud gray, were as cruel as the grave. No dross of mercy or kindness diluted his adamantine features.

  General Tor von Eisenhalt sat back down, frowning. Taking out his pistol, he ejected and checked the cartridge, shoved it back into the grip, and reholstered it, deliberately leaving the safety flap unsnapped.

  Major Garant Stettin, squinting into the blinding sunset, risked a quick glance at Eisenhalt. In profile the general was a handsome, distinguished-looking man at his peak. Eisenhalt’s raven-black hair had wings of silver at the temples. His eyes, direct and unflinching, were hauntingly intent. Fair of complexion, Nordic of feature, Tor von Eisenhalt was the kind of man in whom even other men could see masculine good looks. He stood at exactly six feet and weighed a fit one hundred eighty pounds, without a decimeter of fat. He had never been touched by sickness in his life, this soldier-general, and he had difficulty in understanding it in others. “Do you see something up ahead, Mein General?” Stettin asked anxiously.

  “Yes and no, Major,” he answered shortly. “I’m ready for either.”

  Stettin was accustomed to such obscurities from his general. After all, Tor von Eisenhalt was a genius. Such men, who dwelt in planes above other, weaker men, often couldn’t be understood by mere mortals like Garant Stettin.

  Eisenhalt, as if he craved the touch, took his pistol out again. After staring down at it for a moment, he gripped the top milled knobs and pulled the breech back. It made a dangerous metal sound as it chambered the first 9 mm cartridge. Stettin glanced at the gun, then quickly averted his eyes. He was curious about that pistol. It was old, though it shone as though it had never been dirtied by use. He had always thought it curious that Tor von Eisenhalt carried a gun that was almost 150 years old.

  “This is the finest pistol ever made, Major. The 9 mm Luger, the Parabellum model of 1908. It has been used in two world wars by my ancestors, and it has never failed the Eisenhalt name.” Eisenhalt’s voice was rich, and Stettin was glad to know that he hadn’t offended the general by his curiosity, no matter how veiled. Eisenhalt stroked the smooth barrel of the weapon. “I call it Balmung.”

  “What is that, General?”

  “The sword of Siegfried. You should know the history of our fatherland better, Major.”

  Major Stettin was an older man, at fifty-five he was almost fifteen years older than his commanding officer. Still, he did not resent this; Tor von Eisenhalt was a leader of men, and Garant Stettin was not. It was that simple. Also, Stettin knew very well of the Nibelungenlied, the epic poem that related the heroics of Siegfried, son of Sigmund. Nothing, however, would induce him to say this to his general. After all, he hadn’t known the name of Siegfried’s sword. “Balmung . . . ,” he repeated thoughtfully. “You’re right, sir. I should read the Nibelungenlied again. I haven’t read it since I was a boy.”

  “Norse mythology . . .” Eisenhalt pulled a silver flask from his inner pocket, drank two swallows, then replaced the cap. He suddenly gestured with the flask toward the sinking sun. “It was believed that night came first, followed by day; but day had to be preceded by darkness. The night was the ruler, the creator of the day.”

  Flattered by the general’s uncharacteristic sharing of retrospection with his driver, Stettin chuckled. “All German boys—and most German men, I suppose—dream of being one of the old gods. Thor, god of thunder. Vidar and Vali, Odin’s warrior sons. Ull the Magnificent . . .”

  Still staring unblinkingly into the harsh glare, Eisenhalt said with deceptive softness, “Thor the thickheaded, Loki the sneak, Balder the weeping beauty . . .”

  Stettin couldn’t stop a quick sidelong glance of surprise, and he muttered, “But, sir, I thought—forgive me, I had understood that you were a student of German history, both real and mythical.” “I am. And that is why I have only contempt for our so-called gods.” “But, sir, surely you are aware that your men take great pleasure in comparing you to the ancient warrior kings? Far from meaning disrespect, they see you only as a sort of—of symbol of what we once were . . .” Stettin’s voice faded out as he turned to see Tor von Eisenhalt looking at him with narrow-eyed concentration. From a man such as Tor von Eisenhalt, this could mean either that he was giving you the honor of his full attention—which was good; or it could mean that General Eisenhalt was angry—which was definitely not good. Stettin wondered if his general was considering his words, or considering whether to strike him fo
r his insolence. Staring straight ahead with alarm, Stettin said gutterally, “Forgive me, sir. I meant no impertinence.”

  “I know that, Herr Major.”

  The general sounded indulgent, almost warm, so Stettin decided to take a chance on Eisenhalt’s good mood. “So, sir, you don’t wish to be promoted to the status of Odin by your armies?”

  Stettin was again taken aback by the brooding seriousness in Eisenhalt’s answer. “I would never wish to be a motley god such as Odin. Part warrior, part poet, part prophet, part artist. There is no purity there, no clarity. No, I would wish to go farther back, back in the shadows of time, before the weak and frail gods ruled, when the night birthed the day . . . to Wode. Wode, who gave us the word wüten, for frenzy. Wode of the Wild Hunters . . . the god that mortal man never knew, only his frenzied horde of hunters, who rode across the sky leaving traces of flame and no living being behind . . . the stern ruler who disdained jeweled breastplates and golden helmets . . . just a dark horseman whose only battle dress was a long cloak and a broad hat, so no one ever looked upon his face . . . sometimes he rode upon a black horse, sometimes upon a white . . .”

  “But—but I thought that Wode and Odin were actually the same,” Stettin ventured.

  Tor von Eisenhalt looked at him with a trace of what appeared to be pity. “Oh, but you’re wrong, Major Stettin. You’re very wrong. Wode is a much older, much purer god than the half-mortal, ever-dying Odin. And I believe that in the Ragnarok, the Twilight of the Gods, in the last great cataclysmic battle when the world will end, that Wode will stand when all others fall . . .”

  As the general spoke, Stettin somehow was lulled; his lips and mind felt a little numbed. Were they speaking of the world, the real world, this world? No, no, that was the Syrians—that was the war, the great battle that had just taken place . . . why, then, did Tor von Eisenhalt speak of ancient myths as if they lived and breathed and walked this earth, this desert, this lonely desolate road?