Rebel Angels

by Michele Lang

  “So I will be your courier.”

  “Yes, and your message for her is so important. Gisele is very brave, but I can sense she is near despair.”

  “Despair? Can you die of it?”

  “It can feel like dying.” I sighed. “It is a special affliction of human beings trapped in bad circumstances. I need Gisele to be brave until I can come to her, and I don’t know an imp anywhere braver than you, Leo.”

  He puffed his chest out at that. “I will go prove it now. Are there dragons in England?”

  “I’m not sure. My guess is that there aren’t any more there now, though there used to be.”

  “Too bad. I would have slayed them to save your sister, but I’ll just keep her away from that despair instead.”

  I was suddenly weary, sleepy beyond words. It was the wound in my back, but also the burden of knowing Gisele was far away and all alone. “Despair isn’t a monster, but something inside a person. Your message will help her. Go to her now, Leo, wake her up if you have to. Look sharp, and warn me quick if you see any demons hanging around.”

  He scratched at his ears, then stuck out a hip and put a hand on it, as the mists rose up around him. “I don’t get it, Mama. But it doesn’t matter anyway. Just think of all the good deeds I’ve done! I have moved way up in the world, thanks to your assignments.”

  He saluted me and with no further ado Leopold shot into the sky and away before I could wish him godspeed or farewell.

  “Good-bye, Leopold,” I whispered after him.

  I was afraid to go to sleep, despite my exhaustion. I was afraid to dream. My efforts to find Gisele had led me to the realm of her dark visions, and terrible scenes of cruelty and murder awaited me as soon as I closed my eyes.

  I curled up around the sleeping Raziel, listened to the sound of his beating heart. I took solace in his untroubled dreams, his solid strength, and his undisturbed serenity. He had not been spared in Poland—horrible things had happened to him. But Raziel had survived, and he was with me in this moment, so very alive.

  As I stared into the darkness, I earnestly prayed that Raziel at least would stay that way.

  8

  “Completely unacceptable,” Raziel said in Hungarian.

  I fully agreed, but didn’t think it made sense yet to share our sentiment with our guide to the East, Mr. Ziyad Juhuri.

  He had met us after all in the lobby of the hotel for breakfast, and for that fact I was grateful. However, with him came two bodyguards, one slim, one stocky, both with black mustaches, tattoos across the knuckles, and the darting eyes of assassins.

  From the look in Ziyad’s eye when I glared at him, it seemed we were going to be their prisoners.

  Ziyad only repeated his plan, louder and faster than he had the day before, as if the problem was lack of comprehension and not the plan itself. “The slave trade is very busy in Baku, even now. The Soviet has done what it could to outlaw it, but still the pipeline runs. Slaves one way, the oil the other. I will stay here, and will help you get out of Azerbaijan again when the time comes. These men will take you into Baku on the slave route. And I will remain in Istanbul.”

  I didn’t have the appetite to even butter my roll, let alone eat it. “What do you think that Bathory would say about this plan of yours?”

  Ziyad shrugged and looked away, but not before I saw that his eyes had gotten a bit bloodshot. “Bathory would surely commend me.”

  “And how do you know these men won’t in fact simply sell us for slaves?”

  He looked at me then, a tic working under his left eye. “They wouldn’t dare. They don’t know who you are exactly, but they know who I am. They know what I am trying to do. And they are being well paid.”

  I translated his words to Raziel. With great gentleness, he rose from his chair, picked up his hat from the empty seat next to him and put it on his head, and offered me his hand.

  I got up, too, and we prepared to leave.

  “No!” Ziyad cried. “You must do this plan.”

  “Sir,” I said, my voice cracking a bit, “we have been shot at. We have been tortured by the Gestapo. And yet we still walk this earth today. Our path is danger. But I do not willingly go into the fire, with men I do not trust. It may be these men are as good as their word. But I cannot speak with them. They do not speak German, I do not speak Russian or Azeri. I cannot entrust my life to them.”

  Ziyad scrubbed at his face with both hands, then launched into a rapid-fire tirade with the men in Azeri. They looked daggers at me and I smiled back in response. The three of them conferred furiously with one another, a debate that rivaled the Hungarian Parliament.

  They almost came to blows a couple of times, but decorum prevailed. Finally Ziyad returned his attention to Raziel and me.

  “The men agree with you.”

  “They do?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Yes. I did not tell them about you, but they have heard. They think you are the fire goddess, the goddess of death. They do not wish to anger you.”

  His reply bewildered me. “Goddess?”

  “They are fire worshipers. Believe me, they have reason to worship fire, in the mountains beyond the Five Fingers of God. Perhaps they are right about you, in their own fashion.”

  “So what will we do?”

  Ziyad swallowed, and his eyes became wet with tears. “Because you will not go, they now refuse to take you. I must go with you. It will mean my death. But at least I will see my sister once more. So.”

  My wariness immediately metamorphosed into sympathy. Ziyad did not shed tears for us to convince us of his sincerity. Instead he wept for the life he expected to soon leave behind.

  Raziel did not speak German and could not understand Ziyad’s words without my translation, but he could easily discern the import of what he said. He took a half step forward, and murmured a short phrase in Hebrew that I myself did not understand—but my heart quickened at his words, and Ziyad himself wiped his face, nodded, and even ventured a small smile of resignation.

  “What was that, my love?” I asked.

  “A verse from the Book of Daniel. Ziyad knows it well: ‘The angel came into the lion’s den and shut the lion’s jaws.’”

  Azerbaijan was no primordial garden, with fruits of knowledge and rare delight. We knowingly walked into the lion’s very jaws. This time, the angel walked with us, shorn of his wings. He was in as much danger as the rest of us. And yet the assassins, in the end, insisted on coming with us despite the dangers. Perhaps they, too, wanted to walk with angels.

  * * *

  To my surprise, we traveled by automobile. I half expected camels as transportation, but that was just my naïve ignorance. So far I hadn’t seen a single camel.

  Ziyad drove, with his chief assassin in the passenger’s seat beside him. The shorter, fatter assassin sat next to Raziel in the backseat, with me tucked away on Raziel’s other side. He tried one time to speak to Raziel, but after it became clear they had no language in common the stranger contented himself with a tip of his bowler hat and leaned back for a nap as we sped east from Istanbul toward the eastern border, to Armenia.

  Long we traveled, and far, before we had a place to stop for more than gasoline or a meal. We sped through Armenia and Georgia as if the gates of Hell had opened up just behind us. We stopped each night, for furtive meals served in houses Ziyad had arranged for our travels. The food was sumptuous, fantastic, but we did nothing but eat, wash our faces, lie down, and arise again in the morning for another day of banging along terrible roads from village to village.

  The Armenians and Azerbaijanis had for centuries loathed each other, so much so that it was dangerous to be traveling east. Well it was that we traveled with Ziyad, who could reassure the western Azeris that we meant no harm.

  I expected the passage from Turkey to Armenia, the first of Stalin’s lands, to be a grim one. But instead of barbed-wire fences and bayonets, we found a guardhouse along the side of the road, with a sleepy guard who l
ooked all of fourteen years old. Ziyad and the boy conversed for a long time in Russian, then Ziyad got out of the car and hugged him like a long-lost son. They kissed on both cheeks, shook hands, and that was it. We entered the domain of the great Soviet Union.

  “Not such monsters as you dreamed of,” Ziyad said, and then he laughed bitterly.

  9

  We finally arrived in Baku in the middle of a pelting rainstorm on a bone-chilling November afternoon. “It is more beautiful than it looks today,” Ziyad said miserably from the driver’s seat.

  The city looked forlorn and waterlogged, the Caspian Sea churning just outside the city, the great Bulvar running all along the sea. A few women, wrapped up in black fabric, walked, bent over, along the broad Bulvar, burdened by huge bundles of washing. Otherwise, the streets were virtually deserted.

  “Look,” Raziel said to me under his breath.

  I shot a quick look at our minder in the backseat, then craned my neck to the left to squint through the needle-sharp raindrops slicing through the air.

  And gasped with recognition.

  Shimmering through the rain I saw oranges and brilliant purples, barefoot male figures walking together along the Bulvar. One of the men turned and caught me staring, laughed, and shot into the air like a bird. His brothers followed him, and they disappeared into the storm clouds over the Caspian Sea.

  I turned to Raziel, and I couldn’t find my words. Finally I sputtered, “Did you see that?”

  He laughed and leaned back on the dusty seat. “Yes. It has been a long, long time since I’ve seen such a thing. I didn’t know that mortal eyes could see them, too.”

  “What were they?”

  Raziel smiled and shrugged.

  “Raziel!”

  He laughed again, tried to stretch his long legs in the cramped backseat. “These are creatures of fire, what the Arabians call Djinn. Some angels who fall are of the fire, too, you know. In this land, the Zoroastrians call the fire angels Yazata. In the West, we call them seraphim.”

  I looked out the window again to see them, but already they were well and truly gone. “They must hate the rain even more than I do. Are they dangerous?”

  “Of course.” Raziel’s smile faded. “Everything is dangerous here, Magduska. Don’t let down your guard.”

  I reached for his hand and squeezed, hard. He squeezed back, his touch reassuring me more than any words ever could, and I considered our current circumstances.

  Azerbaijan made Turkey look like Switzerland. In Turkey evidence of the West was as plentiful as that of the East; it is the crossroads after all; the history of Turkey was to serve as the place where they met.

  Now in Baku I watched fire spirits fly, and knew that again I was out of my depth. I had faith in my magic, knew that I could draw upon it anywhere I traveled—Hebrew is a wanderer’s language. But how would I find allies, communicate my intentions here, without our guides to intercede?

  We arrived at an enormous caravanserai, where the Silk Road caravans stopped before they journeyed onward to Istanbul.

  “Here we are,” Ziyad said, his voice growing a bit less despondent for the first time since we had left Istanbul. “A good place to get some food and rest.”

  He parked the automobile just past the entrance, and we got out, legs stiff. The rain had dwindled to a misty drizzle. “Now you will see camels,” he said, teasing me. I had asked about camels enough times for it to become a running joke with our strange little band of travelers.

  The courtyard was filled with cross-legged travelers, weary in their multicolored silks and long cloaks, as they sat under brightly hued canvas awnings to ward away the rain. And for the first time, yes, camels, folded up in the courtyard sitting next to their masters.

  A mugam band played odd-looking stringed instruments, plucking and bowing, while a half-naked woman sang a keening wail of a song in accompaniment.

  But the music had stopped once we walked into the courtyard. I soon realized that the people in the courtyard were staring at me, everyone, even the half-naked lady singing the traditional mugam lament. A quick look around solved the mystery of why—I was the only woman traveler in the place.

  Raziel edged closer to me, and the two assassins swept to either side of us, like two hired guns in a gangster movie.

  Ziyad held his palms out to the man standing alone by the fountain that served as a watering trough for the camels. He spoke in rapid Azeri, soft backward-sounding vowels. The man nodded, then laughed and pointed at me. Ziyad said something sharp, and the man’s amusement vanished as rapidly as it had come.

  He stepped forward, and bowed low in front of me. “Greetings, madame táltos,” he said, in halting Hungarian.

  I was impressed. “Hello, sir,” I said slowly as he spoke. “Thank you.”

  He nodded, not quite following my words. I nodded back, and he clapped his hands together, seemingly satisfied about me. He waved for us to follow, and Ziyad nodded to me that it was all right to go ahead.

  As we walked across the courtyard, the back of my neck prickled. Danger! I sent my witch’s sight along the perimeter of the courtyard, saw shimmering lights flickering but nothing more frightening than that. A wave of nausea rose, then receded. I chalked that up to simple tension.

  The stranger ushered us to an alcove in the corner, a low table set against the floor with piled rugs as seats all around. He bowed and waited for us to sit before he turned and walked away.

  “Now you will have a feast,” Ziyad said. He smiled at us, but his eyes looked more desolate than I had ever seen them.

  Why did Ziyad despair? Was it simply fear, or something more dangerous than that?

  “Who was that man?”

  “Enos, the man who runs this place,” Ziyad said. “His family has maintained this caravanserai for centuries. It is the most famous one in all of Baku.”

  I looked out from my corner and saw alcoves like the one where we sat, rising four levels up like balconies of an apartment building, all around the courtyard. In the four corners, shops sold tea, knives, rugs of course, and bolts of silk. “Why would traders need silk?” I asked.

  “They often pay in silk,” Ziyad replied. “And there are other items in the back that the traders will always need.” He shot me a quick glance and pressed his lips tightly together.

  I didn’t need my witch’s arts to tell he knew something important he didn’t want to tell me. So be it. I would dine, and enjoy the outlandish hospitality of the Azeris.

  He didn’t have to tell me to stay on my guard. The many pairs of eyes watching every move I made were sufficient reminder.

  “We need to travel north,” I said.

  Ziyad nodded, not surprised. “You want to visit my people.”

  I was going to demur, but held myself back. I wanted to visit the place that physically corresponded to where the Garden of Eden had once stood at the beginning of things. As far as Raziel and I could both tell, that was somewhere in the northern Caucasus, not all that far from where Noah’s Ark had, much later, come to rest.

  Life has a way of bringing possibilities to the surface, just when they might make all the difference. It was a huge coincidence that Ziyad’s people came from the mountains north of Baku. Too huge to be random.

  “We want to visit your people,” I repeated to him, with my own small, private smile. “I hear your country is very beautiful.”

  “Yes,” he replied, his smile becoming genuine. “It is beautiful, and full of secrets.”

  * * *

  After a sumptuous meal, our host, Enos, cleared away first the plates, then the tables. Time to sleep.

  Raziel and the other men dragged out the piles of rugs and arranged them into sleeping pallets. We climbed into the alcove and went to sleep. The courtyard of the caravanserai grew amazingly quiet considering the number of men, and camels, massed inside.

  * * *

  The men from the Institute attacked that night.

  The first sign of trouble was the sm
ell of cigarettes. My guardian angel, Viktor, had not been in Heaven long. When I knew him as a man in Kraków, Poland, he smoked incessantly, preferring cigarettes to food in times of trouble. As a result, he was as lean as a hound and you could often smell him, smoking away, before he appeared in the flesh.

  It was the same now. Viktor’s place was in Heaven, not on earth. He could not manifest, not without a great deal of difficulty (he was a new angel, after all) or unless I expended a lot of concentration and energy on a spell of seeing. I could see him with my witch’s sight if I truly looked long and hard, but he could not easily communicate with me even then.

  He spoke to me the way guardian angels generally do with mortals, with glimmers of encouragement, with whispers of hope in the night. And he bent the rules of angels, a bit—Viktor always tried to warn me when trouble was imminent.

  So when I suddenly smelled the smoke of unfiltered cigarettes I sat up sharply and strained to see in the near-total darkness enveloping us. I touched Raziel’s shoulder and he was up in an instant, and Ziyad a moment after that.

  Viktor robbed our enemies of the element of surprise. That did not make them any less dangerous. A band of a half-dozen men dressed in black and armed with truncheons were swinging them down with a savage intensity. The men couldn’t see any better than I could, and I dodged the first intended blow by flinching away from the sound and the whoosh of the truncheon coming down.

  One of Ziyad’s assassins wasn’t so lucky—he grunted in pain when one of the other men’s blows connected with him, an arm or leg I would guess, since it wasn’t completely incapacitating.

  Raziel’s knife sliced through the air with a whiffing sound, and he connected with his attacker. The man’s hoarse screams unleashed an unholy commotion throughout the caravanserai. In retrospect, I assume such attacks were not unheard of there; after all, these traders carried rare spices, silks, and other treasures and the temptation to steal their wares must have proven overwhelming to the more desperate denizens of Baku.