Broken Crescent (5 page)

He lay there for what seemed like hours, feeling the blood rush through his skull and feeling the burning throb from his kidneys and the bruises across his back. Occasionally a muscle spasm would cause him to straighten himself, and the rope around his neck would attempt to strangle him.

After some time, he heard the wagon return. They tied the stick to the back of the wagon and force marched him back toward the city. Nate had to concentrate on staying upright, keeping his view confined to a narrow strip of road in front of his feet.

Every few minutes he would wonder,
Why are they doing this to me?
But the question fell to the necessity of placing one foot in front of the other quickly enough that the wagon wouldn’t pull him over.

The nightmare seemed to last forever. He kept time by muttering profanities. His captors ignored them. His curses became more and more elaborate as time went on.

Nate was in the middle of calling the quartet a bunch of “inbred, shit-kicking, pig-fucking Tibetan hillbillies” when the wagon stopped.

For a few panicked moments Nate thought he must have discovered a few English words these assholes actually knew. But after they stopped, Nate began to hear an unfamiliar voice. He raised his head slightly—not enough to have the rope tighten on his neck—and stared through the strands of sweat-matted hair that had fallen over his forehead.

Grandpa had come down from his perch on the wagon. He faced someone who belonged more at a Renaissance faire than some Third World Asian plateau. The new man was dressed in black, with a doublet that fit tightly to the chest and gut, closed by brass buttons the size of quarters. A scarlet cape was draped over his shoulders, held in place by a heavy brass chain connecting a pair of medallions embossed with an intricate pattern. On his head he wore a brimless hat that was little more than a tapered black cylinder adorned with feathers.

The clothing ended all of Nate’s speculation about where he might be. He couldn’t make that outfit fit into any reasonable scenario.

Grandpa was acting deferential to him, and the three younger men stood back, silent, not looking at the bizarrely-dressed gentleman. It took a moment for it to sink in—

Nate looked at the new guy more closely. He was armed. While he talked to the old man, one gloved hand rested on a sword that hung from a broad belt that rested on his hips. Nate also noticed a pair of tasseled cords that hung from his left shoulder across the left side of his chest. One was silver, the other gold. It looked like some indication of rank.

Grandpa made a few gestures in Nate’s direction, and it became obvious that Nate was the topic of conversation.

Nate tried to imagine what it was they were saying to each other.

Grandpa finally made a derisive sound and spat on the ground. The officer shook his head as if he couldn’t believe the yokels. The quartet of farm folk stood back as the officer stepped toward Nate. The officer reached out a gloved hand and lifted Nate’s chin so they were eye to eye. The rope cut into Nate’s neck as the officer said something in his guttural language that might have been a question.

“I guess it would be too much to expect for you to understand English?” Nate asked back, his voice wheezing against the rope.

The officer stared at him. His features were of a kind with the farmer’s. Dark skin, vaguely Asian features. In his case, however, his hair and beard were meticulously trimmed, and had some curl to it.

The officer said something else which gave Nate the opportunity to observe that the man’s teeth were in a lot better shape than Grandpa’s, or Larry’s, Curly’s and Moe’s for that matter. The color was yellowish brown, but they all seemed to be there. The guy’s breath was another story; it made Nate’s eyes water.

The officer turned toward Grandpa and shouted something to him. Gramps stared back, glaring at Nate, then said something to Larry, Curly, and Moe.

Moe walked up and untied the rope from the wagon.

Thank God,
Nate thought. For about a minute Nate allowed himself to believe that this ordeal was over.

The officer walked back over to Grandpa and the two had a short, heated exchange, at the end of which the officer reached into a pouch hanging from his belt and withdrew a pair of coins. He handed them to Grandpa, who looked at the offering with the distaste of a man who was hoping for a lot more. Gramps said something short and monosyllabic and waved dismissively in Nate’s direction.

The officer walked back up to Nate, and withdrew a dagger from a sheath that was hidden by the folds of his cape. He said something in his guttural language, pointed at Nate, then at himself, then rested his free hand on the sword at his side.

It was pretty clear. Nate was this guy’s responsibility now, and he wasn’t going to take any shit from him.

The officer grabbed the rope at his neck and cut it free with the dagger. Nate straightened up, and the pole between his back and elbows fell free to clatter on the gravel roadway.

Grandpa was trying to look stoic and unflappable, but the noise made him jump back a bit. The bastard was still scared of him. They really didn’t like foreigners here.

Nate stretched. His neck muscles felt as if they were on fire. He wanted to rub his neck, but his wrists were still bound behind him, and the officer made no move to cut that rope. As Nate rotated his neck, he noticed something that he hadn’t realized until now. He was the tallest one here. He was barely six feet even, but he could stare down on Grandpa’s bald pate, and he could look the officer here straight in the hat. He had six inches on all these guys, even Larry, Curly, and Moe—though that trio made up for it in biceps and necks as thick as their heads.

The officer put away the dagger and picked up the free end of the rope, the end that had been tied around his neck. The other end still bound Nate’s wrists. The officer looked at him with a bemused expression.

Gramps and company boarded the wagon and did a long slow turn around, back the way they had come. It was the first time Nate had gotten a chance to look around at where he was.

They were only a mile or so from the city. If Nate looked toward the ocean, a full two thirds of the horizon was filled by the architecture of the city, piled high on its rock overlooking the mainland. They stood on a road paved with cobbles that, a few hundred yards away, fed downward into a man-made valley toward the narrow peninsula that joined the city to the mainland.

Far away, to the right, the bridge of the aqueduct made its graceful leap from the top of a coastal cliff to the side of the city’s craggy walls. The sky here was filled with the shadows of sea birds orbiting the city.

The officer said something and tugged on the rope.

Nate sighed and followed the man’s lead. “Okay, my man, I’m with you now.”

The officer shook his head and headed him to a narrow dirt track that headed away before the main road made its abrupt descent to the sea.

“Thanks for saving me from Gramps and the Stooges back there.” Nate shook his hands so the rope swung a little between them. “Any chance of you finishing the job and cutting me free?”

The officer turned and said a few incomprehensible words. However, his expression and the way he shook his head made Nate think that the guy understood the gist of his question and that the answer was “No.”

“
Y
OU HAVE a problem with me entering the country without a visa, right?”

It was the latest in a long series of unanswered questions. The officer ignored Nate as he led him over another wrinkled hill. When they crested the hill, Nate saw a trio of men, all dressed similarly to the first officer, with black doublets and shorts that belonged in some art book on fifteenth century Germany. Unlike the officer, these guys didn’t wear cloaks, or have gold cords on their breasts.

The three new officers stood up to greet them, shouting questions at the officer, who shouted back at them. For a few moments he was surrounded by curious eyes and hands.

“None of you guys ever see an American before?”

Nate was beginning to worry about these guys. They seemed fascinated by his clothing. That wasn’t right. There shouldn’t be anyone on the planet outside some Stone Age tribes in the rain forest that wasn’t familiar with T-shirts or denim.

“Come on, you guys must know some English, right? I mean the United States dominates the world. Any of you understand, George Bush? CNN? Baseball? Michael Jackson? Levis?”

They didn’t give him a single sign that they understood.

The first officer held Nate still while one of his men searched him. Nate was still trying vainly to spark some sign of recognition. “Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn Manson, David Hasselhoff,
Baywatch
,
Dallas
,
X-Files
, CIA, hamburger, blue jeans . . .” He kept rattling stream of consciousness at them. He found it hard to believe that there was anyone on the planet who didn’t know a single English word.

While he babbled, they took his keys, his dead PDA and wristwatch, his wallet, and all his change. Everything went into a little sack. The guy emptying Nate’s pockets gave everything barely a passing glance, but he seemed fascinated by the photos in Nate’s wallet. He flipped through them until the officer said something sharp, reprimanding him. After that, everything went straight into the bag.

When it was over, the officer grabbed the black bag and walked Nate briskly to the top of the hill, where the others had been. The guy seemed pissed now, and Nate wondered why.

The officer tied the end of Nate’s rope to a stout tree about fifteen yards away from the remains of a campfire. He checked Nate’s hands, then turned to face the others. His crew looked disgruntled as the officer laid into them with what had to be one hell of a dressing-down. He gestured with the little bag and pointed at Nate a few times.

Nate began to worry about what was going to happen to him.

After the outburst, the quartet finally sat down. After a while they started chatting quietly among themselves, passing a wineskin shaped like one of the squash, ignoring Nate.

“Any of you figure on just letting me go with a warning?” Only the officer looked in his direction, and his expression wasn’t pleasant. “Like you’ve had a worse day than I’m having?” Nate asked.

The officer shook his head and turned back to the others.

“Great,” Nate tugged at the rope, but beyond a foot or so of slack, it wouldn’t budge. “What are you bastards planning to do with me?”

Nate tugged, but only managed to get his hands to fall asleep. He leaned back on the tree.

Fortunately, the officer had tied the rope close to the ground, so Nate wasn’t forced to stand. Nate bent his knees and half sat, half fell, onto a flat white rock near the base of the tree.

Nate sighed with relief, even though a concavity in the rock had gathered enough stagnant water to soak through the left cheek of his jeans. It didn’t matter. His leg muscles were so tight that they were vibrating and his body ached from the exertion and abuse he had suffered over the past few hours. It was a godsend just to sit and rest.

“At least tell me where the hell I am.”

Even if they had been able to understand him, they were making a point of ignoring him now.

Nate stopped trying to get their attention and started looking around, trying to fit this place in his personal catalog of the known.

It didn’t work.

He now had time to think about what was happening, and that wasn’t really a good thing. He couldn’t come up with an explanation for anything that had happened. Not a sane, reasonable one, anyway. And, as someone who lived a good part of his life in his head, he did not want to blame everything on hallucination.

But what the hell else was @? Did he really think that thing in the darkness might exist outside his own skull? He might just buy that the traveling Renaissance faire in front of him was really there, but @?

You just
remember
that someone sent you those messages. . . .

“That line of thought isn’t going to get me anywhere.”

Nate shook his head and looked around the camp-site. The officer and his men had chosen to camp out on a hillside overlooking the road to the city. The hillside was littered with white stones like the one Nate was sitting on. The site was some sort of ruin.

The white stones were uncharacteristic of the terrain, and formed a near circular pattern on top of the hill. Beyond the innermost circle, the stones were more randomly distributed, as if a tower had fallen long ago.

Nate looked at the stone he rested on. Might be limestone. Water had pooled within the depressions of a bas-relief so worn that Nate hadn’t recognized it as a carving at first. He slid aside so he could look at it.

Any fine detail was long gone. Nate could discern smooth humanoid forms striking flat, two-dimensional poses reminiscent of ancient Egyptian carvings. However, to Nate’s eye, there was something wrong with the people carved here, the proportions seemed elongated and misshapen, the heads stretched and flattened, and the joints knobby and swollen.

The figures in the carving seemed to be facing—worshiping? fighting? making offerings to? Nate couldn’t tell from the weathered stone—some central object. The object at the carving’s focus was where most of the water had collected. Nate wished his hands were free so he could brush some of the algae and leaves away and get a better look.