Riders of the Pale Horse (19 page)

“I—I don't understand,” she stumbled over the words. “You were locked up? Like in a prison?”

“For nine months,” Sarah repeated. “I was put in a room, and the door was locked. I was not permitted out at all. My brother was very young then, not even seven. One night he slipped in and told me that the family had been discussing plans to kill me. Because he loved me, he helped me escape. The church put me in a school in England because I could
not stay in my country. But now my parents are dead, and I have come back to my homeland with the blessing of my brother, who is head of the family. But still I am not allowed to go home.”

Allison was still trying to process what she had heard. “Your own family was going to kill you—just because you had adopted a different religion?”

“It is not all that uncommon,” she replied. “We hear of such incidents at least once a month. A young woman converts to Christianity. She is locked in a room, and after a while, if she refuses to recant, her food is stopped.” She nodded slowly. “Very common. In every church here there is at least one person whom they know for a fact has been made to disappear. Sometimes they die. Sometimes you never know. Perhaps she has been sold to a wealthy family in another country as a servant. So many people, you see, they become sick, they have a fever, and they die. Such a case does not come to the police. How could it? The police are Muslim, too.”

Sarah was silent a long moment, then said quietly, “Forget the police. Forget the authorities. If you know of such a case, it is better that you dig a hole and bring them out.”

As they left the apartment, Allison said to herself as much as to Ben, “I will never understand this place.”

He smiled sadly. “She told you of her family?”

Allison nodded. “How could parents ever act that way toward their own child? I'm sorry, I simply could never understand that.”

Ben was a long time in answering. “There are few places in the Koran where one finds the word
forgiveness.
The Islamic attitude is, forgive or not forgive—who knows? Even Mohammed had to keep asking for Allah's forgiveness. Mercy is spoken of in the Koran—but only Allah's mercy, mind you, not man's.

“Arabs love to discuss, to argue,” he continued. “It is a favorite form of entertainment in a world where little else is offered, especially to the poor. In my own discussions, I find
that many Arab Muslims simply cannot fathom the concept of Jesus. Why? Because they have little concept of holy love. There comes a point in such discussions when they say something like yes, all right, so you tell me that God so loved the world that he what? He did what? He gave who? His son? No. That is simply beyond their understanding. Unless one first accepts the concept of infinite love, the gift of universal salvation is impossible to accept.

“In the Arab world,” Ben went on, “the family is ruled by the father. If no father, then by the uncle. If no uncle, then the grandfather or the brother or the cousin. It is a male-dominated world, one where domination takes on meanings that cannot be fathomed in the West. Yet these same men have no command to love. Thus many of these families are dominated by fear. When discussing this with young men, I hear so often the response, ‘No, I cannot think of such things, I do not know what my father would say.' And this answer is not given out of family respect or honor or love, but rather out of fear.

“Family ethics are mirrored by religious ethics, you see. The primary command, therefore, is not to love Allah but to fear Allah. Fear his judgment. Fear his condemnation. Fear his wrath. The very word
Islam
means to submit;
Muslim
means the one who submits. Almost no emphasis is given to the
why
of this submission, do you see? Fear, love, societal dictates—the key is not the internal basis, but the act. Submit to this fearsome Allah, and perhaps he will show you mercy.”

A pair of clattering scooters drowned out further talk. Once they had passed, Ben continued, “You can see how this affects personal relationships. Where fear rules, how can a wife give her family a truly loving, joyful home? What urges a husband to grant his family loving compassion and heartfelt guidance? Thus for our Arab converts, the responsibility, the command for lifelong love is a whole new concept. It is the greatest challenge they face in becoming a Christian: to substitute love for fear.”

Three hours later they finally returned to the car. Allison groaned her way into the seat and forced herself to return Fareed's welcoming smile. She was hot, dusty, and tired, her feet throbbed, and her head felt swollen from all she had seen and heard. Twice young fundamentalists had shouted at her, their threat losing none of its force by being in a tongue she did not understand. Once a mullah had raised his staff as if to attack her. Each time Ben had responded with quiet calm, defusing the situation with open-handed respect.

Everywhere she had felt herself followed by eyes, trapped in silent hostility.

Once underway, she found herself unable to relax and release the day's images. She asked, “Why are the fundamentalists so violent?”

“Because,” Ben replied, his own voice tinted with fatigue, “they live in the past.”

“I don't understand.”

“For many fundamentalists the past two hundred years are not important,” Ben explained. “Their minds dwell in the period when Islam ruled their world. They see the humiliation and degradation of the past two centuries as something that must be changed. Fundamentalists insist that all Arabs must return to Islam and submit to Koranic law; then their star will once again rise in the East.”

Allison watched the desert roll past outside their car. A solitary tree grew in the midst of dust and rock and lifelessness. The tree did not offer a gift of green. It merely heightened the desolate loneliness.

“Capitalism and democracy are being declared manmade idols,” Ben went on. “Radical mullahs throughout the Middle East are openly calling for a jihad, a holy war, against Western modernism. The fundamentalist splits the world into two distinct segments. Dar al-Islam refers to the domain of the faithful. Dar al-harb is the domain of war. In other words, you either live as a devout Muslim, or you are an enemy. The Hezbollah faction is typical of this attitude. Hezbollah means
party of Allah; it comes from the Koranic verse meaning the party of Allah is the victorious one. That same verse goes on to say that all who oppose the work of Allah's faction belong to the devil's world. The party of Allah must remain in battle with the forces of darkness that dominate all the world not ruled by Islam. Their mullahs call the faithful to take the western sword of science and use it to cut the West's throat.”

Allison stared through the cracked and dusty windshield, the beauty surrounding her at complete odds with Ben's chilling words. The desert landscape was anything but monotonous. She had never imagined there could be so many different hues of yellow. A single cloud flitting overhead transformed the earthbound canvas with its shadow.

“ ‘War, war until victory for Allah,' ” Ben recited. “Perhaps the most chilling verse in the entire Koran. Up until now, the fundamentalists' numbers were limited and their power chained. But the turning point would be if they or one of their sponsoring countries were to obtain nuclear armaments. Small, portable nuclear weapons would be the ultimate terrorist weapon. Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya—were any of these governments to gain control of such weapons, the West would not be able to sleep peacefully. Not ever again. Which is why, my dear,” Ben said gravely, “we must absolutely not fail.”

11

As the morning light strengthened into brooding grayness, the trucks crested a rise and confronted two vast cliffs. A narrow slit between the mountains grudgingly permitted passage to both the river and the road. At that moment the softly falling veil of snow lifted unexpectedly, granting passage to brilliant shafts of early sunlight.

Taking it for a signal, Rogue pulled his forward truck into a turnout nestled close to the right-hand cliff.

By the time Wade climbed from his cabin, Mikhail already had the stove out and was boiling a pot of water for tea. Wade accepted bread torn from a loaf, took more to where the Russians sat in his truck, then joined Robards by the fire.

“Five-minute break,” Rogue said, “then we make like the wind. Ask the old man how long the gorge is.”

“Twelve kilometers,” Mikhail replied when Wade had translated. “This is the Daryal Gorge, known among my people as the Gates of Alan. It is the entrance to South Ossetia, the lands now usurped by the Georgian bandits.”

“Georgia,” Robards remarked with evident satisfaction. “Does that mean the road starts descending on the other side?”

Mikhail poured tea into glasses and set them by the fire for the tea leaves to steep and settle to the bottom. “Beyond the Gates lies yet one challenge more. After that is safety, at least from the beasts of ice and snow. But ahead we still have the two harshest tests of all. This one first. Here, the road climbs along one cliff wall. Soon it will be a thousand meters up to the heavens and a thousand meters down to the river. Wind blows through the gorge like a funnel, seeking to pluck us from the road and hurl us into the waters below.”

“The old man's a real source of light and joy this morning,”
Robards said, picking up his glass and sipping noisily. “Notice there's no wind.”

“Not now,” Mikhail warned ominously, “but there is snow. And the highland folk say that one follows the other as smoke follows fire.”

“Great,” Robards said, not the least affected by the news. “Anything else?”

“Rocks,” Mikhail replied. “The winter beasts pluck them from on high and hurl them at the unsuspecting. In the last century a rock fell that weighed a thousand tons and closed this road for more than two years.”

Rogue grinned. “If we meet one that big, we won't have long to worry about it.”

Mikhail did not wait for a translation. He pointed ahead to a castle perched on the Terek's riverbank just before the entrance to the gorge. “The Fortress of Daryali. A thousand years ago, a line of castles and towers reached all the way across the Caucasus. When invaders swept down from the Russian steppes, fires were lit on their flat roofs to warn the Georgian and Ossetian kings.”

“A line of fire and stories from a thousand years ago told like they happened last week. How can anybody not love this place?” Rogue picked up the last three glasses and headed for the trucks. “If you want a second glass, drink fast. Time to go meet the wind.”

As though on schedule, the moment they wheeled back into the staggered line of vehicles, the snow closed in. Just before entering the gorge, the road passed over a shaky wooden bridge. Beyond it, the pace of traffic picked up, as though all those who drove before them were pushing themselves to the limit, racing to make it through before the denizens of winter conquered all.

Twisting rock formations rose like guardians of the high kingdom, sweeping in and out of view as the snow danced a silent warning to their passage.

Then the walls closed in around them.

They emerged into another world.

Brilliant sunshine fell upon a wide-open valley of verdant green. A small village of ancient wood and stone spread out in the distance. A flag fluttered in the welcoming breeze, gaily announcing the Georgian border.

Wade slowed in time to Robards' truck and stared out in awe as gusts of wind blew the meadows into paths of frothy silver green.

Five hours it had taken them to traverse the twelve-kilometer gorge. Five hours of heart-stopping drops, his wheels barely able to remain on the crumbling road. As Mikhail had predicted, the wind had started soon after their entry and had grown steadily fiercer until it buffeted his truck with angry fists.

Passing other trucks became the stuff of nightmares.

Without warning the veil of blustering snow would part to reveal a marauding behemoth bearing down upon him, horn blaring, the driver's face pressed against the windshield just as Wade himself drove. He had no choice but to move farther and farther toward the verge and the three-thousand-foot drop beyond. Several times he felt the weightless sensation of tires scrambling for a hold on a crumbling edge.

And now this.

Gratefully Wade followed Rogue off the road and into a rest area crammed with trucks and people. Laughing, joking, gesticulating, jabbering people. Pointing back up behind them and shouting abuse at the closeness of their escape. Passing communal bottles around. Sharing cigarettes and tea and laughter. Joined together by the lightheaded freedom of having made it through.

There were several friendly cries as Wade opened his door and slid down onto legs that seemed barely able to support his weight. He recognized several former patients, including the Ingush driver whose wife had been ill.

He walked unsteadily toward them, grinning as their laughter rose at his faltering gait.