Demons (28 page)

There was a caravan of four vehicles crossing the sere basin below, about a quarter mile off and coming right for them: one covered Jeep and three twentieth-century SUVs, painted olive, with the insignia of Turkmenistan state on the sides.

She didn’t say
Oh, shit
. But she thought it.

She and Nyerza were pulled up on the edge of a bluff, overlooking the basin.

A crumbling road, not much more than a wide trail, snaked down the side of the bluff into the basin. Across the lowlands rose the foothills of the mountain where the Fallen Shrine was supposed to be. “What do you see?” Nyerza asked her, removing his dusty goggles, as she lowered the digital binoculars. The cold, sleety wind scoured at them.

“Four vehicles—with government insignia. From what I read, a state security roving team.”

Their guides had pulled the tired old truck up behind them—and she knew, without even turning around, what it meant when they gunned their rackety engine. The truck’s suspension creaked in protest as they turned it around.

Nyerza tried to shout after them, but his voice betrayed his resignation. Their guides were running, abandoning them to the tender mercies of Turkmenistan state security.

She and Nyerza couldn’t follow. The nearest help, if any, was at the shrine. And she had to get Marcus to medical help at any cost.

Nyerza sat down with a shrug. “They weren’t much use anyway.” He took the binoculars and had a look for himself. “You’re probably right—state security agents in the field . . . far afield indeed. Perhaps you should try the satellite phone again.”

“I just tried it. It’s no good. There’s some kind of interference—or else it’s broken. I don’t know . . . Ira must be worried.” She turned to look into the nest they’d made of blankets in the back, where Marcus was curled up; she lifted the scrap of canvas that sheltered him from the wet wind. The boy was shaking, pale, sweating. His lips were cracked; his eyes open slightly, seeing nothing, at least nothing in this world. She poured water from a plastic jug onto a cloth and draped it over his head. She tried to get him to drink, but he pushed the jug away. Her stomach twisted, and she wanted to scream at Nyerza,
Get us to help!
But she knew he was doing everything he could. “How far to the shrine?”

“Only thirty miles. But the security men are in the way. We’re clearly in their view. I don’t see a way around them—unless they’re not interested in us. However, I suspect they are.”

She shivered as another spatter of sleet whipped over the Jeep. Long since the Jeep’s canvas roof had been blown off.

“And,” Nyerza added, “I think we’re nearly out of fuel.”

She centered herself, stepped back mentally from her inner agitation. “We shouldn’t assume they are after us. We’ve done nothing. We’re not on any kind of mission that should worry them.”

“You’re speaking as if state security is rational in a country like this, or even efficient. But as you say, we cannot know. Let us go on as if we were not worried about them.”

“Who knows—maybe they can help Marcus.”

Nyerza said nothing to that.

They descended the sickening, twisting track to the basin, where a road graded with sharply broken rock angled through a stony scrubland. The state security men were waiting for them at the place where the road bottomed onto the basin, their vehicles lined up to block the way. Nyerza braked the Jeep but kept the motor idling. Four men in cammies and furry, ear-flapped brimless hats, all carrying assault weapons, approached their Jeep.

Melissa was thinking,
Why am I here at all? I had a vision of the Fallen Shrine. Nyerza said, “Then, we must go there. Yanan feels it, too. He is sending us. And the boy . . . especially the boy.”

Why had they brought Marcus? It had felt so right back in the States, but now . . .

We’re lost . . . we’re lost. It was all hallucination and now we’re lost.

Nyerza glanced at her. “Do not lose faith. Do you not remember the Gold and orb, and what became of Shephard, and how the demons fell away into themselves?”

She was about to answer,
I thought I remembered—but did it all happen, really?

Aloud she murmured, “I was sure of myself, when I was in touch with the Gold . . . but everything’s gone dark. It’s like a radio silence—like with the satellite phone. Only it’s inside me . . . and I don’t know what’s real anymore, what was real then—what to believe.”

“I know,” he said softly, as the soldiers surrounded their Jeep. “Perhaps the darkness is diabolic—or perhaps it is just the rhythm of the spirit. It comes and goes according to its own drumbeat.”

She thought:
It’s like the Cloud of Unknowing, perhaps, or the Dark Night of the Soul that the Christian mystics spoke of: It withdraws so that we can grow, like a parent who steps back from the infant to encourage his first independent steps.

Or perhaps,
whispered another voice, as the men came to point their guns into the Jeep,
perhaps it’s simply darkness. Everything, after all, ends in darkness.

A short, stocky man with gold on his uniform’s shoulder seemed to be in charge. He had a bushy mustache, his eyes shut away in aviator sunglasses. He spoke to the others in one of Turkmenistan’s dialects, and two of them came close enough that Melissa could smell their sweat and clinging cigarette smoke as they leaned to glare into the Jeep. Seeing no weapons, they stepped back, gesturing all-clear to their commander. They stood by, seeming bemused by the sight of a small western woman sitting beside the jet-black giant who was too tall for his vehicle’s windshield.

The commander approached, looking fairly affable. Nyerza gave him a broad smile and spoke to him in Turkish. She had heard their cover story often enough to know what some of the words meant: They were anthropologists, here to study the Fallen Shrine. Nyerza spoke the jargon of anthropology fluently and could sound quite convincing.

The security commander smiled skeptically. He spoke briefly, pointing at the sky, then across the desert.

Nyerza laughed dismissively and shook his head, making a brief explanation, his veneer unruffled. He turned to her to explain, choosing his words carefully in case any of these men spoke English. “Like a lot of countries, they buy time on corporate surveillance satellites. They were using them to track those Tekke men who gave us directions. You remember? They were apparently outlaws of some sort, nomadic bandits. They’ve been attacking supply trucks going to the gas fields. Supposedly they’re being paid by environmental terrorists from overseas. Rather an improbable connection, but anyway, the government sent these fellows out here because they saw us speaking with the bandits—they think we have some kind of deal with the bandits. He doesn’t know what our connection might be, but I think he supposes we’re the contacts with the overseas environmental group.”

“But there isn’t any connection! We have nothing to do with any of that!”

“Right. He’s jumping to conclusions. But that is their method.”

She thought:
That is their method.
Meaning they come down like a hammer on anyone who might be even remotely dangerous to the state. A choking cloud of fear provided an effective deterrent.

“Well, tell him that we’ve got to get help for Marcus—he could be dying!”

The Turkmen commander spoke again, his head cocked to one side, looking at them speculatively.

Nyerza responded wearily, shaking his head and pointing at the boy. He spoke a soft aside, nodding to Melissa. She heard the name Greenpeace. “The tribesmen have apparently been getting weapons from someone. He wonders if we’re the ones providing them. He mentions Greenpeace—though they have never given weapons to anyone, they are entirely nonviolent.”

Melissa felt a sickening rage rise up in her. While these fools blocked her way, her son was dying!

“We’re
anthropologists
!” she said sharply to the commander, amazed to hear such self-righteous outrage in her own voice as she repeated the lie.

“Leave off, please, Melissa—”—

The mustachioed man spoke again. The soldiers strode up and gestured with their weapons, reaching to jerk open the Jeep doors.

Melissa understood. They were to be taken into custody. They might take Marcus away from her.

The commander spoke briskly. Nyerza swallowed, and said to her in a tone measured and careful, designed to be all reassurance: “They want to take us to Paskhir for questioning.”

“Oh, no, they can’t! It’s too far! We need help for Marcus now!”

Then another, very different sort of stranger drove up, in a rollicky, three-wheeled electric jitney, its roof a slanting solar-power collector. He was a big, thick-bodied man with a drooping white mustache, long white hair, a hooked nose, big furious brown eyes, a dusty turban, and yellow-and-black robes that flapped in the wind. Shouting in Turkish mixed with Russian, then in English, he leapt from the jitney. “Keep these foreigners away!” He stalked up to the car, waving his arms as if warning of an avalanche. “Keep them away! Take them with you! I don’t want anthropologists here! They are nosy! They want all our sacred secrets! They sniff around for treasure! We have no treasure, we have no artifacts except wretched old ruins, but still they come!”

“We have a sick child—” Melissa said.

“I cannot take care of children! We have no hospital! We don’t like anthropologists!”

The commander, whose name, it emerged, was Akesh, spoke to the angry old man in his own dialect. As they shouted back and forth, Nyerza bent to whisper to Melissa. “He’s asking how this old Sufi dervish knows we’re anthropologists. The old gentleman says he knows full well who we are: ‘notorious’ anthropologists, famous ones of the worst sort, always coming around bothering him. He shouts at the commander to take us away.”

Akesh was shouting back now, not liking to be ordered about. He turned stiffly to Nyerza and Melissa and spoke with disgusted finality. Nyerza translated: “ ‘I have ordered him to take you into his monastery . . . this fallen-in old place here across the plain. He will find that we do not take easily to commands from old fools in stinking robes.’ Something like that . . . Says he will have some men stay with us to keep an eye on things while he and the others go on to find the bandits. The commander isn’t so sure what is going on, but—” Nyerza smiled “—he vows to get to the bottom of it.”

The old man shouted in outrage at this news, swearing in several languages. But, less than a minute later, driving the jitney, he led the Jeep and one of the SUVs back to the Fallen Shrine at the base of a sheer sandstone cliff.

Melissa’s first impression of the shrine was meager—most of her attention was focused on Marcus—but she had a sense of a multitiered edifice carved from the yellow sandstone of the mountainside itself, much of it indeed tumbled down, other parts shored up by wooden beams, with a smaller building of stucco and cinder blocks attached to it, obviously of recent construction. Smoke wisped from a chimney made of cement and tile; long shadows hid the sand-blurred features of a three-armed angel—or demon?—carved from a single boulder, forty feet high.

Then they hurried inside. Nyerza laid the shivering boy on a pallet in a warm room lit only by a lantern and the flames of a stone fireplace that was burning natural gas. The three state security men waited in an outer room where the walls and floor were covered in Persian-style carpets. They were served tea by a silent old woman. They joked with one another, laughing, happy to be given this cushy assignment in a comfortable room.

The hawk-faced old man with the drooping mustache closed the door of the inner room, muffling the raucous voices of the security men, and knelt beside the boy.

Confused, Melissa watched the old man wonderingly. His expression was completely different now. His face conveyed only gentle concern as he touched Marcus’s head, felt his pulse. “The boy is quite sick,” he said in English. “Some form of cholera, perhaps. He must’ve drunk something he shouldn’t have. But perhaps we can heal him. I have some medicines coming.”

He flashed a broken smile at them, and turned to a younger man in contemporary khakis and wire-rim glasses, who had bustled into the room carrying what appeared to be a mason jar. The jar was filled with black liquid in which floated lumps of unidentifiable muck. The word “ball” was written on the side of the jar in calligraphed relief lettering.

Marcus lay, turning his head this way and that in feverish unease, his eyes shut.

The old man sat beside the boy and held the jar in his hands; he winked at Melissa, and closed his eyes. He held the jar up, and his hands trembled as if something were passing from him, through his hands, and into the jar. The dark material in the jar seemed to dance. The old man just sat there . . . sat there for a long minute, and another, holding the jar.