by R. M. Meluch
There was also a mat on the floor, which was not his but had to be aligned with the crack in the floor or Alihahd was not happy.
In this small area of this particular chamber, things were as Alihahd willed them to be. All the rest was as it fell to random human chance.
When all was arranged, Alihahd stepped back (with his left foot) to inspect his niche, and he saw that Amerika had hung her mirror on the wall.
It had been years since Alihahd had looked into a real mirror and seen more than a ghost image reflected in a glass or a polished metal surface. This was a real, merciless mirror. He saw that the skin of his neck had acquired the plucked chicken texture of old age. Tiny broken blood vessels marked his nose, and rays of new lines etched his face. He’d forgotten how truly unpleasant was the look of white skin on a face—the color ancient Caucasians in their infinite elitism had termed “flesh tone”—not the smooth marble white of the aghara Itiri, but a sometimes ruddy, sometimes sallow translucency that showed tracks of blue-and-purple veins.
Alihahd turned the mirror toward the wall. It became part of his ritual.
On the wide mattress everyone used for a bed, Amerika was now sitting up, her face puffy from sleep and marked with lines from the pillow. Her hip-length black hair had been laced into a single thick braid for the night. She had been sleeping right beside him. He hadn’t noticed.
She was looking at her mirror turned to the wall.
“Is it an instrument of sin?” she asked, childish guilt in her lovely black eyes. “I only use it to part my hair and paint my eyes. And I only paint my eyes against the sun. I swear.”
“No, it is not sinful,” Alihahd said.
“Why didst thou turn it over? So the spirits cannot come out?”
“No,” Alihahd said. “Because some faces are better not faced at this hour.”
He gazed up at the coffered rock over his head, muttered that he could have been light-years away from here if Ben had not gotten off planet without him.
“He was not to have taken that ship,” Amerika said. “The Itiri were upset. He was not to have taken Da′iku either.”
“Da′iku?” Alihahd cried loud enough to disturb the sleepers. Serra stirred under Hall’s arm, then her breath evened again. Alihahd faced Amerika gravely and whispered, “Da′iku—is that what he calls his familiar? The bird?”
“No,” Amerika said. “It is what he calls his sword.”
Alihahd was on his feet. He strode to the battened door. He brought his fist against the stone jamb. The howling wind sounded very near on the other side. Alihahd truly felt the walls closing in on him. He needed to run, to find Ben, to stop him.
“Da′iku is a Na′id name, is it not?” Amerika said.
Alihahd nodded, his fist on stone.
“Thou knowest a meaning,” Amerika whispered, pulling her blanket around her as if cold.
Alihahd faced the door. “It means Killer,” he said.
14. A Slow-Falling Star
LAYLA ABSENTLY PASSED her finger through a candleflame, collecting soot on her skin, the warm light flickering across her rough, impish face.
Serra was seated at the table, sewing a shirt for Harrison Hall, and refilling teacups as they emptied.
Alihahd’s third cup of tea sat half full and growing cold. Alihahd never finished the third cup. He always drank two and a half cups at a time. Always.
On the floor, Amerika was teaching Vaslav a pebble game.
From the adjacent chamber, Harrison Hall was snoring.
Faintly, from Aerieside, Itiri music spun through the wild wind Shandee’s howling.
Layla lifted a pendant on a chain from around her neck and held it out to Alihahd across the table. “What is this symbol?”
Alihahd picked up the pendant from her small palm and rubbed his thumb over the metal face. It was a Na′id cuneiform symbol:
“Where did you get this, Layla?”
“From a dead Na′id.”
“Did you kill him?”
“There were many dead on the field. I know not which of them I killed.”
“I see.”
Layla pointed with her soot-covered finger. “What do the markings mean? Amerika says you know Na′id.”
“It’s a DINGIR. In this case it means God.”
The Na′id had adopted the Jewish/Muslim custom of not depicting God. Christians had a tendency to make God a male Caucasian. The Na′id preferred a deity without form, without color, intangible like the human soul. “This is a religious medal.”
“In this case it means God?” Layla said. “What other case is there?”
“This mark can also represent a sound in a word—an or il,” Alihahd said. He marked on the table with a piece of chalk:
“There it is pronounced ili—literally gods, but this is a name.”
“This is confusing,” Layla said, her cheek resting on her fist.
Alihahd pointed to one symbol at a time. “The first mark is pronounced shad. It means mountain. These middle two are your DINGIR and a plural sign. The last is pronounced ya. It means my. So: Mountain of my Gods.”
Serra put down her sewing. The red chevron on her forehead creased. Ignoring the translations, she strung the pronunciations together in order and said, “Shad Iliya.”
Layla’s brown eyes widened. She pointed at the chalk marks. “That is what this says?”
She scowled at the markings, then methodically wiped them away with the side of her hand. She regarded the resultant smear with satisfaction. In the primitive culture of her origin, to obliterate the infamous general’s name was to obliterate the man himself.
Amerika came to the table and looked over Alihahd’s shoulder. “Oh. I did not see it. Write it again.”
“The same thing can be written a slightly different way—without the DINGIR,” Alihahd said and marked on the table again:
“This language cannot make up its mind,” Layla said.
“Shad-ili-ya,” Alihahd voiced the symbols.
“That cannot be.” Serra pointed. “The middle two marks are the same.”
“NINI means ili,” Alihahd said.
“That is stupid,” Layla said, and she erased Shad Iliya from existence again.
“It’s an ancient language. It went through several evolutions. Humankind was then only developing the concept of the written word,” Alihahd said. He tossed the chalk over his shoulder. “Anyway, it was not my idea to use it.”
“It is stupid,” Layla said and fastened her DINGIR pendant back around her neck.
Hall stopped snoring in the adjacent cave, and Serra brought him some strong tea.
Talk switched to other things, and Alihahd toyed with a nail, using it to scratch signs into the stone wall, until Layla noticed what he had written:
“What is that?”
“Ashar Ari. Place of Eagles,” Alihahd said. “All Na′id planets are called Ashar something or Mat something—Place of this, Land of that.”
“You gave us a Na′id name?”
Alihahd put down the nail. “In Na′id culture, to name a place—to give it a Na′id name—is to legitimize it. The name officially recognizes this planet as Place of Eagles—that is to say: place sovereign to nonhuman aliens.”
“In that case, I like it,” Layla said. “Ashar Ari.”
“The Na′id would hate it,” Alihahd said.
“The Na′id may go to hell.”
• • •
Flames raked the sky over the recruiting station, consuming the myriad dead which littered the compound blackened with blood. Mushabriqu’s charred body dangled, a grim banner over the blaze, until the flagpole melted and fell. The outrush of heat singed leaves on trees far away.
Beyond the inferno, freed conscript children were running into the surrounding forest.
The kil
ler had been this way before. He knew where to go next.
He boarded his ship, Singalai, flew over the flames, and set course for the nearest Na′id reloc center, to kill again.
• • •
The caves grew colder. Snow had covered some of the solar collectors outside, and the captives of the storm could only hope it would blow off again.
To make it worse, Layla and Serra were telling ghost stories. Inevitably, they came to the Flying Dutchman and Marauder stories. Hall just listened and smiled. He relit his pipe. One of its fire-opal eyes was missing, giving the fox a winking look.
“They say that at the battle for Jerusalem the whole galaxy came to the aid of the Holy City, and all the ghosts of those buried in the hills rose and fought. And they say Shad Iliya saw the ghost of a brigantine ship sail over the city. He died right after that. They say that is what killed him.”
“Truly?” Amerika asked, breathless and enthralled.
“So they say,” Layla said. “Something got him. It may as well have been the Marauder ship.”
“I saw the Marauder,” Alihahd said. He set aside his third, half-finished cup of tea and did not touch it again.
“You never struck me as a teller of tales,” Serra said.
“I saw it,” Alihahd said.
“I saw it, too,” Vaslav said.
Amerika’s eyes were huge. “And then you were shipwrecked!” she exclaimed in a whisper.
“Very shortly afterward, yes,” Alihahd said. “Though I think I was equal bad luck for the Marauder. I believe he wrecked soon after I did.”
“How can you wreck a ghost?” Layla asked.
“Because my luck is very, very bad,” Alihahd said. “And because this Marauder was not actually a ghost. It was a hologram that a pirate used to frighten Na′id ships before he destroyed them. Unfortunately, we two curses crossed each other’s paths and that was the end of us.”
“Did you see the Marauder?” Serra asked Hall.
Alihahd sat forward. He was interested in how Hall would answer that question. Hall said only, “I was on a different ship from these two.”
A neat evasion that one—neither yes, I am the Marauder, or no, I am not. The man would not be pinned down. He did, however, admit to garroting a Na′id captain with his own hands. He went into graphic, relished detail about it. He had no regret. He waved his hand at the cuneiform Alihahd had engraved into the wall. “It is written in those ancient chicken scratches somewhere, ‘an eye for an eye.’” He looked to Alihahd for verification. “True?”
“True,” Alihahd said.
If a citizen has destroyed the eye of a citizen, his own eye shall be destroyed. If he has injured the limb of a citizen, his own limb shall be injured. If he has destroyed the eye of a subordinate or injured the limb of a subordinate, he shall weigh out a recompense in silver. If he has destroyed the eye of a slave of a citizen or injured the limb of a slave of a citizen, he shall weigh out half the slave’s buying price.
“The principle, I believe,” Alihahd said, “behind the law ‘an eye for an eye’ was, at the time it was written, not that the punishment be severe enough for the crime, but that the punishment not exceed the crime, which was rampant practice in those days.”
“You think me excessive?” Hall asked.
“I was not there.”
“You think me excessive.”
“I think you excessive.”
Hall sat up and moved in closer. Low, so only Alihahd could hear, he said, “You didn’t tell me you beat a man to a bloody pulp down in the valley.”
“It slipped my mind,” Alihahd said frostily.
“Why are you so cool toward the idea of vengeance, Captain?” Hall said with oily insinuation.
He was surprised to receive straight out the answer he sought.
“Lest it fall upon me.”
• • •
The drillmaster enjoyed his work. He had survived yet another summons before the review board on suspicion of excessive and brutal disciplinary measures. He said all the right things, admitted he was often severe with his young charges but only to train them to survive in the field in harsh environments, combating aliens. He said he was strict out of concern for his recruits and that most of them respected a tough master. However, there were whiners in any group. The board found his explanations acceptable. The drillmaster always knew what to say.
In reality, he liked to beat children. Real torture and sexual abuse he reserved for those children already on record as compulsive liars and unwilling conscripts. He’d worked hard to get where he was—to be commander and not the commanded, the abuser, not the abused—and he knew how to preserve his position.
He had been master of the juvenile wing of training section Alpha 4 for twenty-five years. He could handle squealers.
But the last little girl from Qiatte had come across as entirely too credible. She’d been responsible for his latest trip before the review board. It was a pity that her class was gone, moved on to Omonia Station, and he was unable to get back at her.
That whole class had been trouble. Qiatte was a little mining village on a grade four planet. That world turned out some of the most recalcitrant hellions ever to come through this training station. The reloc center always sent the children from Qiatte here. The reloc center had very recently met with a mysterious catastrophe that killed everyone on the base—may they all burn in hell. The drillmaster was glad. He would get no more ungovernable conscripts from that place.
Still unsettled over his inquiry, he soothed himself with food. He ate another honey roll with tearing bites. Then he swiveled in his chair to the water fountain to rinse his sticky fingers.
He turned on the fountain, and the water ran thick red. It looked like blood.
He shut it off, but continued to stare at the red splashes in the basin. Practical joke. Sick one. Someone would hear about this.
He reached back to his desk and pattered around the messy piles of records, feeling for his transceiver.
Suddenly there was a movement and a bouncing clinking as the transceiver arced over his head into the fountain basin.
He grabbed for it, but before he could swivel around to see who had tossed it, a fist closed on his hair atop his head. There came a whistling swish and a current of air on his face. He blinked his eyes shut.
Instantly, he lost all feeling in his body—except for the damnedest dizzy sensation of rising. And he couldn’t swallow.
Upon opening his eyes, he saw that he was rising, being pulled up, weightlessly, jiggling and bobbing, by his hair.
His eyes shifted down to a body falling from his chair and spurting blood from a sheared stump of a thick neck.
The severed head remained conscious only fifteen seconds.
It was a long fifteen seconds.
• • •
Nineteen days passed, and time stopped. The last day of Shandee seemed to drag on forever. Layla rapped the hourglass on the table until it broke because it was not moving.
Alihahd still kept Earth time—as valid a schedule as any in this sunless prison. For him the days—Earth days—numbered twenty-four and a half so far. His rituals were rigid and changeless. His patience seemed limitless, his temper ever cool day after day. He was coping best of the group in confinement.
The heat was on again. Harrison Hall took off his coat. He pulled a gold thread from the frayed lining of his vest. Without his heavy rawhide redingote one could see how tight was his waist and flat stomach. He was a powerful man.
“What country is Jerusalem in?” Hall threw out the question casually, all his attention seemingly on the loose threads of his vest.
Alihahd laughed with more bitterness than he had ever let show. “God knows,” he said. Then, “Depends on whom you ask.”
Hall knew that. It was why he had asked the question—to discover
where Alihahd’s loyalties lay. And he’d received his answer: nowhere. Alihahd was not radical anything. His sympathies were everywhere, allegiance nowhere.
“That little shred of land on the coast has always been a hotbed of violence and contention. Whoever has it is perpetually at war to keep it,” Alihahd said.
Layla was listening while she combed her hair, ripping out the snarls rather than untangling them. “If the land is so hard to keep, why does not everyone move?” she said.
“Why, indeed?” Alihahd said with a sorrowful laugh, his blue eyes watery, bright, sad, mystified. “It is God’s land, you see. Everyone’s religion bids him fight to keep that land.”
“And what are you?” Hall said. “Religion.”
There was a hesitation. “Baha′i,” Alihahd said.
“What is that?”
“A renegade branch of Islam, but rather similar to the Na′id without the imperialism and without the armies.”
Hall did not believe it. Perhaps—just perhaps—Alihahd was a convert, but Hall was dead certain that Alihahd had not been born into that faith. Alihahd had been in an army. He had been disenchanted with something. Baha′i was a later choice. Or a lie. Hall did not think Alihahd believed in God at all.
Besides, there had been no Baha′i at Jerusalem.
Alihahd had finished drinking two cups of tea. Harrison Hall poured the third round. Alihahd lifted his third cup to drink, looked inside it, and froze. The cup was half full.
All color drained from his face. His lips twitched. Nothing else moved. Some part of him was shredding away behind his glassy blue eyes.
Hall held the kettle with an expression of false innocence: Is something wrong?
Alihahd set the cup down clattering, spilling the tea. He pushed back from the table with quaking hands, stood woodenly, knocking his stool backward, and he stumbled over it to get away. He staggered toward the doorway to the bedchamber. Long arms reached for the lintel to hold himself up and drag himself through.
