Beneath an Opal Moon (43 page)

‘Where are you from?' the officer asked, and when Moichi told him, he nodded, adding, ‘You make any stops along the way? Were you boarded at sea or did you make a rendezvous with any other vessel?'

‘No on all counts,' Moichi said, somewhat bewildered. ‘Is there a problem?'

‘Not if you've told the truth,' the officer said, eyeing Aufeya. ‘What is your business here?'

‘I am coming home,' Moichi said. ‘I intend to marry.'

The officer watched him for some time. ‘Your vessel will have to be searched.'

‘What for?'

The officer took a step forward, his eyes narrowed. ‘Have you anything to hide?'

‘Certainly not,' Moichi said. ‘But I must have an explanation for this extraordinary action.'

‘In fact it is quite ordinary,' the officer said. ‘You are Iskaman, but I see you have been away from Iskael for a long time. Much has changed in your absence. For some time now our intelligence sources have reported … disturbances in the desert settlements. Deaths and … disappearances under mysterious and suspicious circumstances. Enemy spies have been discovered in Ala'arat. How are they delivered here? They die before they will tell us, so now all vessels seeking to moor must be searched.' He waited a beat. ‘Now may we begin,
Captain?
'

Moichi nodded, abruptly uneasy. ‘Do what you must. I want Ala'arat as secure as you do.' As the officer turned away to instruct his men, Moichi said, ‘This almost feels like war footing.'

The officer turned back to him and, despite his youth, Moichi could see the bleakness of premature age in his eyes. ‘A most astute assessment, Captain,' he said.

The villa of the Annai-Nin was as he remembered it: white-washed stucco walls drenched in brilliant sunlight, jade-green glazed tile roofs glinting like faceted jewels at every angle.

In a land filled with fragrant cedar groves and thickly fruited date palms, it was perhaps surprising to see the great slabs of tiger-grain oak intricately carved and handsomely worked which opened inward, on clever hinges, the imposing front doors to the compound. But Moichi explained that his forefathers had been world merchants even when it had been dangerous and inadvisable to seek trade with the continent of man, and they had fallen in love with many of the foreign products for which they hammered out long-term deals.

The villa was situated atop the highest of the nine hills that overlooked the great curving bay that was one of Iskael's few natural assets. Far below them, the crescent city of Ala'arat spread like the frond of a date palm. It had taken them all day to file the necessary papers with the harbor authorities. For a bustling port, Ala'arat was crawling with security in the unwieldy guise of bureaucratic red tape. Now, in the twilight, the city shone like a jewel, lights twinkling, changing colors in the twists of smoke rising from myriad cooking fires. The air was perfumed by the sounds, distant and haunting, of voices raised in ululating prayer. The cobbled streets of the city's vast markets, choked since dawn, were almost deserted as the sacred hour of chaat, the weekly holy evening approached. Moichi hoped to reach his villa before the beginning of the ritual feast.

‘Once, many years ago, all of Ala'arat was as bare and bleached as desert bones,' he told Aufeya as they walked up the snaking drive. ‘In the space of a generation, the Iskamen made lush landscape out of rock and wind-blown sand.'

‘Why did you settle here, if it was so inhospitable?'

Moichi paused, pointing over the roofs of the villa. ‘Out there is the Mu'ad, the Great Desert. The Iskamen traveled half a year in the Mu'ad wastes. Any other people wandering in the Mu'ad for so long would have died of thirst or exposure. But God was with us. He showed us that we had no choice – the Mu'ad was our destiny.' They began to walk again, toward the villa's great oaken gates. ‘You see, Aufeya, the Iskamen had spent eight generations enslaved by a race called the Adenese, who live on the far side of the Mu'ad. God spoke to the Iskamen elders. He told them they would be safest across the Great Desert.'

‘But even though your people are free, Moichi, there are so many armed guards, so many suspicious eyes at the port and in the streets.'

‘Old fears die hard, and the bitter truth is that the persecution of the Iskamen has never really ceased.'

She cocked her head quizzically. ‘You knew this, and yet you chose to turn your back on it.'

‘I chose to become a navigator.'

‘To take to the seas. To leave your homeland and your people's fight far behind.'

He rounded on her angrily. ‘Are you questioning my courage?'

She felt the searing heat from his eyes and put her hand gently on his arm, feeling the muscles tense and rippling. ‘Not your courage, Moichi, never that. I owe you my life – more than I could ever know how to repay in one lifetime.' Her voice softened as she kissed him passionately. ‘And I love you as I've loved no other man. It's your commitment to the ancient struggle of your people I'm talking of.'

Moichi was silent for some time. The swirling palm fronds seemed to bend the last of the sunlight, making of it something living and aqueous, like a creature from the sea-bottom slithering out of its coral den. A kestrel cried suddenly, a predator from the desert.

‘“Man the ramparts, the Adenese are coming!” That was my brother's battle cry. It was the rationale for the entire Fe'edjinn, our virulently militant sect. Freedom fighters, they called themselves, but in my mind they were no more than assassins, bent on circumventing the laws of Iskael to achieve power and their fanatical objective: a holy war of retribution against the Adenese. His
commitment
to the cause was more than enough for one family.'

‘Do you really believe that your brother is an assassin?' Aufeya asked.

‘Jesah is …' Moichi bit his lip and turned partially away from her. In a softer voice, he said, ‘I would believe anything of Jesah Annai-Nin.'

‘Moichi–'

‘No, no!' He swung around, his face afire with anger. ‘You would not understand.'

Aufeya opened her mouth to speak, then thought better of it. Instead, she said, ‘At least you must be looking forward to seeing your sister Sanda. You have spoken of her often.'

‘Sanda, yes.' They were almost at the gates. In contrast to the bustle of the packed streets and alleys below, the courtyard of the villa was still and deserted. But there were lights on within the main building itself. ‘I miss her very much. If there was a pain in my heart over leaving Ala'arat, it was that I would not see her for a very long time.' He turned his face to the lights of the villa as he pushed open the gates. ‘How long it's been! How much has happened in her life! When I left she was just a young girl.'

They crossed the courtyard, their bootsoles crackling against the bed of crushed sea shells. As they climbed the enormous steps to the front door, Moichi was aware of a bittersweet swirl of mixed emotions, dragging up memories – some of which he would have preferred not to re-examine.

He was thinking of his father and painful feasts of chaats past when the great doors opened inward and they stepped across the threshold of the villa of the Annai-Nin.

Torches were thrust in their faces and strong fingers gripped their biceps and forearms. Moichi smelled strong body odors, the stench of fear and long waiting.

‘Moichi!'

He took a step toward her, but a sword-blade at his throat stopped him. Through the blinding torchlight he could see bits and pieces of rugged faces creased by wind and weapon. Then a flash of a uniform sleeve set his mind to racing. ‘I am Moichi Annai-Nin, eldest son of Jud'ae Annai-Nin. Who dares hold me hostage in my own house?'

‘Your
house?' The voice was sharp, as quick as the flick of a whip. ‘Make way!'

The uniformed men moved aside, but kept their grip firmly on Moichi and Aufeya. In the shifting light Moichi made out a tall, rangy figure, impeccably dressed in a finely woven uniform of silk and cloth-of-gold. ‘If you are the eldest son of the patriarch Jud'ae you had better be able to prove it. You've been gone a long time.'

The tall officer had thick black hair and a full curling beard. His coffee-colored eyes were deep-set in a hawk-nosed face the color of burnt almonds. It was a face that gave away nothing but which saw everything.

All of these things Moichi absorbed in the space of a split second and they would have gone toward defining the man had he not spotted something that made his stomach turn to ice. Around the officer's neck and over the top of his head he wore the green and brown striped cowl of the Fe'edjinn.

‘I don't understand. Are you state militia or Fe'edjinn?' Moichi asked in a hoarse voice.

The tall officer smiled. ‘I see that you
have
been away a long time. The Fe'edjinn
are
the state militia of Iskael.'

‘But how is this possible?' Moichi asked. ‘The state cannot sponsor murderers and assassins.'

One of the men delivered a heavy blow to the side of his head. ‘Hold your tongue, lout!' he growled. ‘Or I'll cut it out!'

The tall officer cocked his head to one side, said nothing while blood seeped from a cut opened on Moichi's cheek. ‘Bitch of a homecoming,' he said at last.

‘What are you doing in my home?' Moichi said.

The same man lifted a fist to strike Moichi again but the officer signed to him. ‘If you, indeed, are the eldest son of the Annai-Nin then you have a legitimate right to know.'

‘Shall I take you through the villa?' Moichi asked. ‘Shall I show you where my brother Jesah and I hid when we were eight and our father was blind with rage at what we had done? Shall I show you where I found my sister Sanda sitting and crying over a bone she broke in her left wrist? Shall I show you the spot where my mother is buried? And my father?'

The tall officer nodded. ‘All this and more you shall show me. As much as I ask of you.'

‘Let us go, then, so we may walk unbound through the villa of my family.'

After a moment, the officer nodded. ‘This much I can do. But my men will accompany us with weapons drawn.'

‘It is a sacrilege to draw weapons on chaat.'

The officer shrugged, held out a hand to indicate that Moichi should lead the way.

They went slowly through the villa of the Annai-Nin, and at every turn shadows and ghosts assailed Moichi. Memories, long buried beneath carefully woven cobwebs, reappeared, thrusting their snouts rudely into his consciousness. He saw himself again as a child, the dour, lanky Jesah, the beautiful blue-eyed Sanda, and everywhere the world of the Annai-Nin as it had been – his father's world, full of prestige and accolades, riches beyond a child's limited scope of understanding. The parade of dinner guests from the worlds of politics, philosophy and religion had been endless, then, with lavish, glittering parties each week welcoming the most famous into the sumptuous villa of the Annai-Nin. It was a world against which Jesah had chosen to rebel. The great successes of their father in business meant nothing to him, the contacts Jud'ae had managed to forge, the respect he had labored to build with the peoples of the continent of man across the sea, had no meaning for him. He had early come under the spell of the fanatic Fe'edjinn, finding in their strict interpretation of the Tablets of the Iskamen, their obsession to avenge themselves on the Adenese, a lightning rod for his own inner rage.

Had he and Moichi ever found reason to offer one another a kind word or even the most rudimentary sign of affection? Hadn't they hidden together in this spot behind the larder that Moichi was now showing to the Fe'edjinn officer? And hadn't they fought each other bloody in the blackness of the hidey-hole?

Better by far to recall Sanda and how she'd cling to his waist, how he protected her from the bullies at school, how he taught her the fundamentals of religion – how to interpret the sacred scriptures writ on the Tablets that had been brought down from the summit of that holiest place of the Iskamen, the Mountain Sin'hai.

But it was impossible to get away from Jesah's treachery for long. Dark, snakelike memories continued to intrude into his consciousness. Hadn't it been Jesah who had abandoned the family, leaving for the Fe'edjinn boot camps in the wilds of the sere Mu'ad wastes? Yes, but it had been Moichi who had been berated by Jud'ae and Sanda for taking to the seas, for forsaking not only the Annai-Nin but all of Iskael.

‘For my part, I can never forgive you,' Jud'ae had said only months before his death. ‘As eldest, you have a sacred responsibility to me and to the family. Who will run the business after I am gone? Jesah? He has only blood-lust in his eyes. Sanda? She is a woman. Soon she will marry, yes, but I will not take a stranger into my confidence. Blood is blood, Moichi. You of all people must know this and abide by the covenants.'

What Sanda thought of all this Moichi did not know. She had been witness to his humiliation, but her silence had been absolute.

It had been dark two hours by the time Moichi completed his tour to the satisfaction of the Fe'edjinn officer. At that point, the officer dismissed his men to other parts of the villa, nodded almost imperceptibly. ‘Moichi Annai-Nin, I, Tamuk, First Darman of the Fe'edjinn, welcome you home.' He did not extend his wrist to be grasped in the Iskamen manner and Moichi marked this well.

‘Where is everyone?' Moichi asked. ‘And why are you here?'

Tamuk offered a hand. ‘Please sit down.'

Aufeya sat, nervously glancing at Moichi, who remained standing. His eyes had never left those of the Fe'edjinn officer. They were in Jud'ae's study, a smallish room in the rear of the villa, filled with scrolls and books and the mementoes of a lifetime. The air was thick with imaginings of what might have been. Moichi had brought them here to show Tamuk the hidden recess that held his father's most precious possession: a hand-writ copy of the Tablets of the Iskamen which had taken five years to create. Oil lamps had been lit, their perfume triggering yet more memories.