The battle washed across the desert as freely as water unbounded by shores, the war’s tidal wrack of ruined bodies, tanks, and planes left like flotsam upon the dunes. The ancient, polluted city lay between the sea and that other, drier beach, and no-one knew yet where the high tide line would be. Already the streets were full of the walking wounded.
Graham had errands to run. His desert boots needed mending, he had a new dress tunic to collect from the tailor – trivial chores that, performed against the backdrop of conflict, reminded him in their surreality of lying with two other soldiers under an overhang that was too small to shelter one, seeing men torn apart by machine gun fire, and feeling the sand grit between his molars, the tickle of some insect across his hand, and his sergeant’s boot heel drum against his kidney as the man shook, as they all shook, wanting to live, wanting not to die as the others died, wanting not to be eaten as the others were eaten by the vultures that wheeled down from an empty sky and that could not be trusted to report the enemy’s absence, as they were brave enough to face the living when there was a meal at stake. In the tailor’s shop he met a man he knew slightly, a major in another branch of Intelligence, and they went to a hotel bar for beer.
The place looked cool, with white tile, potted palms, lazy ceiling fans, but the look was a lie. Strips of flypaper that hung inconspicuously behind the bar twisted under the weight of captured flies. The major paid for two pints and led the way to an unoccupied table.
“Look at them all,” he said between quick swallows.
Graham grunted acknowledgement, though he did not look around. He had already seen the scattered crowd of civilians, European refugees nervous as starlings under a hawk’s wings.
“Terrified Jerry’s going to come along and send them all back where they came from.” The major sounded as if he rather liked the idea.
The beer felt good going down.
“As I see it,” said the major, “this haphazard retreat of ours is actually going to work in our favour before the end. Think of it. The more scattered our forces are, the more thinly Jerry has to spread his own line. Right now they may look like a scythe sweeping up from the south and west,” the major drew an arc in a puddle of spilled beer, “but they have to extend their line at every advance in order to keep any stragglers of ours from simply sitting tight until we’re at their backs. Any day now they’re going to find themselves overextended, and all we have to do is make a quick nip through a weak spot” – he bisected the arc – “and we’ll have them in two pieces, both of them surrounded.”
“And how do we find the weak spot?”
“Oh, well,” the major said complacently, “that’s a job for heroes like you, not desk wallahs like me.”
Graham got up to buy the next round. When he came back to the table, the major had been joined by another man in uniform, a captain also wearing the I insignia. Graham put the glasses down and sat, and only then noticed the looks on their faces.
“I say, old man,” the major said. “Rumour has it your section chief has just topped himself in his office.”
“It’s not a rumour,” the captain said. “Colonel Tibbit-Noyse shot himself. I saw his desk. It was covered in his brains.” He reached for Graham’s beer and thirstily emptied the glass.
Major Healy, the colonel’s aide, was impossible to find. Graham tracked him all over headquarters, but, although his progress allowed him to hear the evolving story of the colonel’s death, he never managed to meet up with Healy. Eventually he came to his senses and let himself into Healy’s cubbyhole of an office. The major kept a box of cigarettes on his desk. Graham seldom smoked, but, eaten by waiting, he lit one after another, the smoke dry and harsh as desert air flavoured with gunpowder. When Healy came in, not long before sundown, he shouted “Bloody hell!” and slammed the door hard enough to rattle the window in its frame.
Graham put out his dog end in the overcrowded ashtray. Healy dropped into his desk chair, and it tipped him back with a groan.
“Go away, captain. I can’t tell you anything, and if you stay I might shoot you and save Jerry the bother.”
“Why did he do it?”
Healy jumped up and slammed his fist on his desk. “Out!” The chair rolled back to bump the wall.
“He sent the whole company to die on that slaughterground, and then he killed himself?” Graham shook his head.
The major wiped his face with his palms and went to stand at the window. “God knows what’s in a man’s mind at a time like that.”
“Rumour has it he was the one who spilled our movements to the enemy.” Graham was hoarse from cigarettes and thirst. “Rumour has him doing it for money, for sex, for loyalty to the other side. Because of blackmail, or stupidity, or threats.”
“Rumour.”
“I don’t believe it.”
Healy turned from the window. The last brass bars of light streaked the dusty glass. “Don’t you?”
“Whatever he’d done, I don’t believe he would have killed himself before he knew what had happened to the men.”
“Don’t you?”
“No, sir.”
“If he was a spy, he wouldn’t give a ha’penny damn about the men.”
“Do you believe that, sir?”
Healy coughed and went to the box on his desk for a cigarette. When he saw how few were left he gave Graham a sour look. He chose one, lit it with a silver lighter from his pocket, blew out the smoke in a long thin stream.
“It doesn’t matter what I believe,” he said quietly. “Now give me some peace, will you? I have work to do.”
The sun was almost gone. Graham got up and fumbled for the door.
* * *
Blackout enveloped the city. Even the stars were dim behind the scrim of cooking smoke that hazed the local sky. Though he might have wheedled a car and driver out of the motor pool, he decided to walk. Her compound was nearly a mile of crooked streets away, and it took all his concentration to recognize the turns in the darkness. Nearly all. He felt a kinship with the other men of his company, men who groped their way through the wind-built maze of dunes and bony sandstone ridges, led by a chancy map into what could be, at every furtive step, a trap. He had seen how blood pooled on earth too dry to drink, how it dulled under a skin of dust even before the flies came. Native eyes watched from dim doorways, and he touched the sidearm on his belt. With the war on the city’s threshold, everyone was nervous.
Her doorway was as dim as all the rest. In the weak light that escaped her room her eyes were only a liquid gleam. She said his name uncertainly, and only when he answered did she step back to let him in.
“I didn’t think you’d come.”
“I’m still on leave.” A fatuous thing to say, but it was all he could think of.
She led him into her room where, hidden by blinds, oil lamps added to the heat. The bare space was stifling, as if crowded by the invisible. On her bed, the blue shawl she used as a coverlet showed the wrinkles where she had lain.
“It’s past curfew,” she said. “And . . .” She stood with her elbows cupped in her palms, barefoot, her yellow cotton dress catching the light behind it. Graham went to her, put his arms about her, leaned his face against her hair. She smelled of tea leaves and cloves.
“Of course you’ve heard,” he said.
“Heard?”
“About the colonel. Tibbit-Noyse’s suicide.”
She drew in a staggered breath and pulled her arms from between them. “Yes.” She returned his embrace, tipped her head to put her cheek against his.
He pulled her tighter. She was slight and strong with bone. Some pent-up emotion began to shake its way out of his body. As if to calm him, she kissed his neck, his mouth, her body alive against his. He could not discern whether she also shook or was only shaken by his tension. They stripped each other, clumsy, quick to reach the point of skin on skin. She began to kneel, but he caught her arms and lifted her to the bed.
He came closer than he ever had to ending it.
Weighing her down, hard against the welling heat between her thighs, he wanted, he ached, he raged with some fury that was neither anger nor lust but some need, some absence without a name. Hard between her thighs. Hands tight against her face. Eyes on hers bright with oil flames. No, she said, and he was shaking again with the convulsive shudders of a fever, he’d seen malaria and thought this was some illness as well, some disease of heat and anguish and war, and she said “No!” and scratched his face.
He rolled onto his back and hardly had he moved but she was off the bed. Arms across his face, he heard her harsh breathing retreat across the room. The bathroom door slammed. Opened.
“Do you know about Tibbit-Noyse?”
Her voice shook. An answer to that uncertainty, at least.
“Know what?” he asked.
Her breathing was quieter, now.
“Know what?”
“That I have been ordered,” she answered at last, “to resurrect him in the morning.”
He did not move.
The bathroom door closed.
She had broken his skin. The small wound stung with sweat, or maybe it was tears, there beside his eye.
When she stayed in the bathroom, and stayed, and stayed, he finally understood. He rose and dressed, and walked out into the curfew darkness where, apparently, he belonged.
Next morning, Graham ran up the stairs to Healy’s office and collided with the major outside his door.
“Graham!” Major Healy exclaimed. “What the devil are you doing here? Don’t tell me. I’m already late.” He pushed past and started down the hall.
Graham stretched to catch up. “I know. They’re bringing the colonel back.”
Healy strode another step, two, then stopped. Graham stopped as well, so the two of them stood eye to eye in the corridor. Men in uniform brushed by on their own affairs. Healy said in a furious undertone, “How the hell do you know about that?”
“I want to be there.”
“Impossible.” The major started to turn.
Graham grabbed his arm. “Morale’s already dangerously low. How do you think the troops would react if they knew their superiors were bringing back their own dead?”
Healy’s eyes widened. “Are you blackmailing your superior officer? You could be shot!”
“Sir. David. Please.” Graham took his hand off the other’s arm.
Healy seemed to wilt. “It’s nothing you ever want to see, John. Will you believe me? It’s nothing you ever want to see.”
“Neither is all your men being shot dead and eaten by vultures while you lie there and do nothing. I owe them this!”
Healy shut his eyes. “I don’t know. You may be right.” He coughed and started for the stairs. “You may be right.”
Taking that for permission, Graham followed him down.
The company’s staging area was a weird patch of quiet amidst the scramble of other units that had to equip and sustain their troops in the field. Trucks, jeeps, men raced overladen on crumbling streets, spewing exhaust and profanity as they went. By the nature of their missions, reconnaissance squads were on their own once deployed, and this was never truer than for Special Recon. No one wanted to involve themselves with the Dead Squad in the field. The nickname, Graham thought, was an irony no one was likely to pronounce aloud today.
He and Major Healy had driven to the staging area alone, late, as Healy had mentioned, but when they arrived they found only one staff car parked outside the necromancer’s workshop. The general in charge of Intel was inside the vehicle with two men from his staff. When Healy parked his jeep next to the car, the three men got out, leaving the general’s driver to slouch smoking behind the wheel. They formed a group on the square of rutted tarmac that was hemmed in by prefabricated wooden walls, empty windows, and blinding tin roofs. The compound stank of petrol fumes, hot tar, and an inadequate latrine.
The general, a short bulky man in a uniform limp with sweat, returned Graham’s and Healy’s salutes without enthusiasm. He didn’t remark on Graham’s presence. Graham supposed that Healy, as Special Recon’s acting CO, was entitled to an aide.
The general checked his watch. “It’s past time.”
“Sorry, sir,” Healy said. “We were detained at HQ.”
The general grunted. He had cold pebble eyes in pouchy lids. “Any news of your men in the field?”
“No, sir. But I wouldn’t expect to hear this early. None of the squads will have reached the line yet.”
The general grunted again, and, though his face bore no expression, Graham realized he was reluctant to go in. His aides had the stiff faces and wide eyes of men about to go into battle. Healy looked tired and somewhat sick. Graham felt a twinge of adrenaline in his gut, his breath came a little short. The general gave a curt nod and headed for the necromancer’s door.
Inside her workshop, the walls and the underside of the tin roof were clothed in woven reed mats. Even the windows were covered: the room was brilliantly and hotly lit by a klieg lamp in one corner. An electric fan whirred in another, stirring up a breeze that played among the mats, so that the long room was restless with motion, as if the pale brown mats were tent walls. This, the heat, the unmasked stink of decay, all recalled a dozen missions to Graham’s mind. His gut clenched again and sweat sprang cool upon his skin. There was no sign of her, or of Tibbit-Noyse. An inner door stood slightly ajar.
The general cleared his throat once, and then again, as if he meant to call out, but he held his silence. Eventually the other door swung further open, and the girl put her head through.
Graham felt the shock when her eyes touched him. But she was in some distant place, her eyelids heavy, her face open and serene. He saw that she knew him, but by her response his was only one face among five.
She said, “I’m ready to begin.”
The general nodded. “Proceed.”
“You know I have lodged a protest with the Sisterhood?”
The general’s face clenched like a fist. “Proceed.”
She stepped out of sight, leaving the door open, and in a moment she wheeled a hospital gurney into the room, handling the awkward thing with practiced ease. Tibbit-Noyse’s corpse lay on its back, naked to the lamp’s white glare. The heavy calibre bullet had made a ruin of the left side of his face and head. A ragged hole gaped from the outer corner of his eye to behind his temple. The cheekbone, cracked askew, whitely defined the lower margin of the wound. The whole of his face was distorted, the left eye open wide and strangely discoloured, while the right eye showed only a white crescent. Shrinking lips parted to show teeth and a grey hint of tongue beneath the crisp moustache. The body was the colour of paste and, barring an old appendectomy scar, intact.
The hole in Tibbit-Noyse’s skull was open onto darkness. Graham remembered the Intel captain saying the man’s brains had been scattered across his desk. But death was nothing new to him, and he realized he was examining the corpse so he could avoid seeing the girl. Spurred by the realization, then, he had to look at her.
She wore a prosaic bathrobe of worn blue velvet, tightly belted at her waist. Her dark hair was pinned at the base of her neck. Her feet, on the stained cement floor, were bare. She set the brakes on the gurney’s wheels with her toes, and then stood at the corpse’s head, studying it, arms folded with her elbows cupped in her palms, mouth a little pursed.
An expression he knew, a face he knew so well. Another wave of sweat washed over him. He wished he had not come.
The fan stirred the walls. The lamp glared. Trucks on the street behind the compound intermittently roared past.
The girl – the witch – nodded to herself and went back into the other room but reappeared almost at once, naked, bearing a tray heavy with the tools of her craft. She set this down on the floor at her feet, selected a small, hooked knife, and then glanced at the men by the door.
“You might pray,” she said softly. “It sometimes helps.”
Helps the watchers, Graham understood her to mean. He kne
w she needed no help from them.
Her nakedness spurred a rush of heat in his body, helpless response to long conditioning, counter tide to the cold sweep of horror. Blood started to sing in his ears.
She took up her knife and began.
There is no kindness between the living and the dead.
Graham had sat through the orientation lecture, he knew the theory, at least the simplified version appropriate for the uninitiated. To lay the foundation for the false link between body and departed spirit the witch must claim the flesh. She must possess the dead clay, she must absorb it into her sphere of power, and so she must know it, know it utterly.
The ritual was autopsy. Was intercourse. Was feast.
Not literally, not quite. But her excavation of the corpse was intimate and brutal, a physical, sensual, savage act. As she explored Tibbit-Noyse’s face, his hands, his genitals, his skin, Graham followed her on a tour of the lust they had known together, he and she, the loving that they had enacted in the privacy of her room and that was now laid bare. As the dead man’s secret tissues were stripped naked, so was Graham exposed. He rode waves of disgust, of desire, of sheer scorching humiliation, as if she fucked another man on the street – only this was worse, unimaginably worse, steeped as it was in the liquors of rot.
He also only stood, his shoulder by Healy’s, his back to the rough matted wall, and said nothing, did nothing, showed (he thought) nothing . . . and watched.
When Tibbit-Noyse was open, when he was pierced and wired and riddled with her tools and charms, when there was no part of the man she had not seen and touched and claimed – when the fan stirred not air but a swampy vapour of shit and bile and decay – when she was slick with sweat and the clotting moistures of death – then she began the call.
She had a beautiful voice. Graham realized she had never sung for him, had not even hummed in the bath as she washed her hair. The men watching could see her throat swell as she drew in air, the muscles in her belly work as she sustained the long pure notes of the chant. The words were meaningless. The song was all.
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