It was difficult for even Michael to keep moving as the heat grew, so he knew Gantt was struggling. Every so often Michael looked back at the others; the boy was all right, though moving slowly, but Gantt was losing ground. The scorpion’s venom was surely still affecting him. Couple that with the shock of seeing Hartler, and it amazed Michael that the ace could put one foot in front of the other. They were helped by the find of some spindly cactus plants, which when cut open by the razor afforded a small amount of liquid squeezed from the stalks. Still, the need for water began to take over every thought for Michael, to push everything else aside, and he was fully aware that both Gantt and the boy were kindred sufferers. They did not possess the animal drive that kept Michael directed on his path to survival.
Water. One might imagine it in the mouth. One might imagine its cool flow streaming over the head and face and chest. One might imagine lying in a chill pool of it, regaining the strength that the sun had stripped away. Water. At this moment of heavy silence and scorching fire, the dream of drinking it, of getting one swallow through the cracked lips into the dry mouth, was the only thing that could possibly lead them on for endless mile after mile. Water.
At last, as the sun began to sink down again toward the blue world of another night, as the jackals that followed them came sniffing in close for the smell of impending death but did not find it yet and so retreated to wait a few hours more, the three figures crouched on a ridge of rock and surveyed what lay ahead. Michael had seen it first, and cautioned the others to be careful in their approach.
He didn’t want the watchman atop the wooden tower to see them. The man, wearing the traditional robes and a keffiyeh, held a pair of binoculars. The man stood beneath an awning of tan-colored cloth that might have been the shirts of several dead soldiers stitched together, and hanging on a rope behind him was a horn he could blow into to alert the inhabitants of the village at his back. The horn, Michael noted, was a brass cornet probably once owned by some poor dead Commonwealth trooper whose commander valued the stirring music of a military march.
But for the camel trail that passed alongside the watchman’s tower, the village was encircled by a waist-high barbed wire fence. It was a village of many tents, many camels in a corral and many goats wandering about. Michael had already counted thirty-five people, most of them men but a few women and children. At the center of the village a dozen palm trees stood around a waterhole the size of a small swimming pool, which was obviously very jealously guarded. On the far side of the village was a second watchman’s tower. A nice secure setup, Michael thought. Especially since he knew one of those tents down there surely held an arsenal of weapons and ammunition stripped from dead soldiers.
“How the hell do we get into that?” Gantt asked.
Michael had already considered that question.
“After nightfall,” he said, “one of us walks in. He allows himself to be captured. He causes some kind of disturbance while his mission team gets through the wire. It’s up to them to find the tent where the guns and ammo are stored. If there are grenades, the place can be blown. Then everyone’s on their own to get their water.”
“Mission team,” Gantt repeated.
“That’s right. You and the boy.”
“You are mad,” said Gantt.
“You’ll know the time to cross the wire.” Michael kept his intense gaze fixed upon Gantt, not allowing him to look away. He gave him the parachute pack. “Take both guns. I won’t need one.”
“You’re going in without a gun.” Gantt grinned crazily. “Ah, ja! An Englisher’s plan! Make sure you douse yourself with your aftershave and have a spot of tea before you go in!”
“There’s no other way,” said Michael, “but my way.” He caught a faint aroma, drifting in with the cooling air. “Can you smell that? The scent of sweet water?”
“I can’t smell anything and neither can you.”
“Oh, yes.” Michael nodded. “I can.”
They waited behind the rock ridge as the sun went down. When the light faded and the gaudy stars emerged in their millions, torches flared in the Dahlasiffa village. Upraised voices could be heard: shouting, mixed with raucous laughter. Michael looked up over the ridge and saw a group of robed Dahlasiffa standing around what appeared to be a rectangular pit dug into the earth near the waterhole. It looked to him, from this distance at least, that two figures were balanced on some kind of beam across the pit and were grappling with each other.
“What’s going on down there?” Gantt edged up beside Michael to make his own assessment.
“I’m not sure. A celebration of some kind?” It sounded so, from the noise. Though the figures were fighting—or wrestling, to be more precise—there was no anger in the voices of the onlookers. Then suddenly one of the figures fell into the pit, there was an uproar of hollering and laughter and people jumped around with joyous abandon. The man who’d fallen into the pit came out of it, scrabbling up a ladder just for the purpose, as if hellfire had scorched his bottom.
Which was exactly in line with Michael’s plan.
Two more men got out on the beam and started wrestling. Again, the onlookers went a bit wild. “A sporting contest,” Gantt observed. “Maybe they’re gambling on who’s going to win.”
“Hm. Well, we’re going to win,” Michael said. He eased back down to where the boy sat, and Gantt followed. The boy was rolling his dice on the ground, again and again. Michael snapped his fingers in front of the boy’s eyes to secure his attention. Follow him, he said, and pointed at Gantt.
It was time to go get some water.
The hollerings and laughter intensified again. Now a pair of musicians had joined the throng: a drum began to beat and a high-pitched flute began to whistle. The air was fragrant with the aroma of grilled goat. They were having a regular party down in Dahlasiffaville.
Gantt caught Michael’s good wrist. “You can’t be serious. About walking in there without a gun. Even you Englishers can’t be that insane.”
“I was born in Russia,” Michael said, as if that explained it all. He pulled free. “I can promise you that I’ll be attracting all the attention, but you’ll have to be fast and careful getting across the wire. Find that weapons tent as quickly as you can and if you have the chance and means blow it to blazes. Take care of the boy and take care of yourself.”
“They’ll kill you first thing,” Gantt told him. “We’ll never even get down to the wire before you’re dead.”
“I say you will. Look for your opportunity and take it.” He spoke to the boy again:
Remember. Follow him. The boy nodded, the dice gripped in his hand. Then Michael crawled up to the top of the ridge again. He stood up and started down on the other side.
He didn’t look back.
He was apprehensive about what might happen in the next few minutes, but he was not afraid. He was prepared, and he was ready.
The music and the shouting went on. Michael reached the bottom of the ridge and began walking directly toward the watchman’s tower. The watchman had a small oil lamp up there, and a torch had been set beside the entrance to the village through the barbed wire. Michael strolled along as if he owned the desert and knew every scorpion by name.
Then a rifle barked and a bullet kicked up dust in front of him. The watchman hollered at him, probably a command to halt, but Michael kept walking. A second bullet hit the ground close to Michael’s left boot, so this time he decided it was in his best interest to stop.
The cornet was blown several times. A very sour note. The music, laughter and shouting from the village immediately ceased.
It seemed the party was over. Or perhaps, Michael thought, it was just about to begin.
Five
The robed watchman came down a ladder, pointing the rifle at Michael Gallatin’s midsection. Now would be an auspicious time, Michael thought, for Gantt and the boy to start their journey to the wire. Who is your shade? Michael asked. He had to ask the question again, in Tuareg, before he
got an expression of semi-comprehension. He got no reply, but his meaning was: Who is your leader? The chief of a tribe was always known as its ‘shade’, for the amount of protection he offered his people.
Within a few seconds, other Dahlasiffa came running to answer the call of the cornet. Pistols and rifles—British, German and Italian—were in evidence. Some of the robed men carried torches or oil lamps. They got around Michael to keep him from advancing or retreating. They brandished their weapons and hollered at him as if each man fancied himself the shadiest one in the village. Rifle barrels began to push at Michael’s ribs and one brought a hiss of pain from him by touching his injured shoulder. But he kept the pain out of his face, and with great effort he maintained a calm half-smile.
A figure in crimson robes pushed his way through the growing crowd, though when they realized he was there they quickly moved out of his way. He got up close to Michael and stopped. The man had arranged his keffiyeh into a turban, revealing a handsome though somewhat vulpine face. A pair of black eyes under thick black brows glowered at him. He was in his mid-thirties, his flesh burnished dark brown. He had high cheekbones and a long elegant nose that any high-bred Englisher might have envied. In some other world, the man in the crimson robes could have been a Libyan film star. He was cleanly shaven and bore in his deep-set eyes a sharp and cunning intelligence. He spoke to Michael in a smooth voice that carried a quiet threat, using a language that had some elements of Tuareg but was not entirely Taureg and so was foreign to Michael.
Michael didn’t respond. The man in the crimson robes reached out and plucked at their visitor’s uniform.
“Brit,” said the man.
“An English uniform, yes,” Michael corrected.
“Brit,” the man repeated, because he could. He tapped his chest. “Nuri.” And he added in the King’s tongue for Michael’s enlightment, “Meaning fire.”
“Interesting,” Michael said. That spoke for the crimson robes. The Dahlasiffa’s shade was a showman. A rifle barrel pushed against Michael’s neck and another one pressed against his spine.
“Who is you?” His King’s tongue was not altogether perfect.
“Me?” Michael kept his half-smile. “Oh, I’m the Devil and I’ve come to destroy you.”
“Destroy…me?” asked Nuri. His eyebrows went up. His face was solemn for a few seconds. Then the mouth opened and he began to laugh. As he laughed, so laughed the others. In fact, the others laughed loudest even though they probably had no idea why they were laughing. Such was the power of the Fireman, it seemed. Nuri turned and announced in their language what Michael had said, and then the bottomless pit of laughter stretched wide. Some of the others began to dance, they were laughing so hard.
Some, it appeared, wept tears of laughter.
Michael waited for all the mirth and hilarity to die down. When Nuri ceased laughing, the others stopped too. He said something, very rapidly in his harsh language, that Michael failed to understand. “Say you Devil,” said Nuri, “yet you know not my speech? How is this?”
“Everyone knows the Devil is an Englishman,” said Michael, and when Nuri translated this the crowd went as crazy as any audience at a West End vaudeville show.
But this time Nuri only smiled; he did not laugh. He motioned for quiet and got it.
He examined Michael’s bruised face and swollen left eye at a distance of a few inches. He looked at the arm in the sling. He shook his head sadly. “You no Devil. You hurt, maybe crazy headed fool.”
“This is my disguise,” said Michael. Nuri didn’t seem to understand, so Michael amended it. “My mask.”
The Fireman reached under his robe and brought out a knife with a curved blade. He put it to Michael’s jawline. “Nuri cut your mask off,” he said, his eyes glittering in the torchlight. “Then know your real face.”
Michael had to brace himself. He had to hold himself steady. He had the feeling that now was not the time. The time was coming, very soon, but this was not it.
He said easily, “I’ve come all the way from Hell, Nuri. A long way. Won’t you show me a little of your village before I destroy you?”
The tip of Nuri’s knife dug into Michael’s flesh, but not quite hard enough to draw blood. Nuri began to laugh again. It was a low laugh, a dark and twisted laugh, and it was echoed by only a few of the others. Nuri lowered the knife and grinned. “All Hell,” he said, opening his arms wide to encompass the world. “Everywhere. Me. King of Hell. Me. King of all devils. You only fool with madness here.” He touched his own skull with the handle of his knife. “Where you from come? Do not know. Where you go… Nuri do know.” He called out what sounded like a series of commands. A rifle barrel came up between Michael’s shoulderblades and a pistol was aimed at the side of his head. Nuri turned away and walked through the throng. The rifle barrel shoved Michael forward. A man with three teeth darted in, chattering, and looked to be measuring Michael’s boots against his own well-worn sandals. Michael let himself be moved, as the crowd moved around him. At least, he thought, he was headed in the right direction, toward the waterhole.
He noted that the watchman had returned to his post and that Nuri, certainly no fool, had sent a trio of men with rifles out into the dark to see if any more devils lurked nearby. Gantt and the boy were on their own.
Michael was paraded through the Dahlasiffa village. Women, children and dogs kept pace with the knot of armed men who surrounded him. One dog in particular came running up and started barking and spewing spittle with such abandon that Michael thought it was going to take a bite from his leg, and then a man gave it a kick that sent it reeling back amid its more reluctant brethren. These were not gentle people. Michael knew that whatever was in store for him would be a kind of Dahlasiffa hospitality that he might not appreciate.
He was stopped somewhere within the village. Torches and oil lamps ringed him. The guns were everywhere, and they were all pointed at him.
The crowd parted once more as Nuri the Fireman approached. He again got up almost face-to-face with Michael. “Village mine,” he said. “People mine. Nuri rules here. You say different, Devil?”
Michael stared into the man’s eyes without flinching. “I say Nuri will soon be on his knees. I say Nuri will soon be begging for mercy.”
That brought a huge smile and a clap of the hands. Evidently Nuri was enjoying the baiting, as Michael had hoped a hardened killer would. He doubted that anyone in this world had ever spoken to Nuri thus. And who else would have the courage to say this to him, but the Devil himself?
“Devil,” said Nuri, “meet my son.”
A boy about fourteen appeared, hobbling on sticks covered with gauze bandages likely scavenged from a dead medic’s pack.
The boy, wearing a loosely-fitting white shirt and a pair of red-dyed trousers, resembled his father. Except his right leg was gone at the hip, and there was only enough remaining of his left foot to grip a small piece of ground. It was, really, the shape of a cloven hoof. Michael recognized the injury. It was what happened when you stepped on a mine. Even if you survived the blast, some body parts did not. Looking into the boy’s sunken eyes, Michael wasn’t sure how much had actually survived. The right eye was a white, rolled-back orb, sightless. That side of the face kept twitching violently as injured nerves spasmed.
“Hasib mine,” Nuri said quietly, up close to Michael’s ear. “Eldest son. Such pride. Is handsome boy? Say speak, Devil.”
The boy stared at Michael with as much hatred as Michael had ever dreaded to see. If this boy had a gun, the little play would be over. The hate was a living thing. It felt like a lizard with a skin of spines, and it smelled like a world on fire. Michael knew this boy. He knew him well. This boy was every sufferer that war had made, every orphan, every widow or widower, every amputee, every brutalized corpse in a shallow ditch, every piece of flesh that used to be a man, every silent scream.
He knew this boy well, and he felt terror to his soul.
“Handsome,” whispered Mic
hael Gallatin.
“Ah!” said the Fireman, smiling. “Thank you so.”
Michael felt a night breeze blow past. He heard the rattle of the palms and he smelled the enticing perfume of the waterhole. The urge to drink fell upon him, and still stunned by this vision of war’s corruption he was seized by a moment of rare weakness.
“I would like some water,” he told Nuri.
“Thirsty is the Devil? How this?” Nuri’s head cocked to one side. In his eyes evil festered. “Drink,” he said, and he spat into Michael’s face.
The crowd shouted its sincere approval. They hollered and danced, and some of them fired their weapons upward into the night. It seemed to Michael that it was nearly time indeed.
Nuri spoke another series of commands. Hands grasped Michael by the arms—both arms, which caused him to grit his teeth and put his head down so they might not see him on the verge of crying out—and half-pushed, half-dragged him along. The entire Dahlasiffa nation seemed to be out in force, and like a sea in the desert they moved along with him in dusty waves.
They took him to the pit.
He lifted his head and saw that it was about six meters long and three meters wide. Across its length was the trunk of what had been a sturdy palm tree, secured on either end by piles of sandbags. Various clay jars stood alongside the pit. The crowd was festive, the musicians began playing once more, and Michael wondered what the hell he’d gotten himself into.
He was able to have a look into the pit. By the light of the flickering torches, he saw it was about a meter and a half in depth and had a short ladder leaning against one side. At the bottom, some scurrying around and others sitting deathly still, were perhaps three hundred scorpions. Pale brown ones, Michael noted. Those gave a nasty sting but were not poisonous. He was pushed and dragged along to one end of the palm log, and standing there with his right hand on his broken shoulder he saw Nuri take up position on the far end.