The Tenth Saint (25 page)

“Voila,” he said as he handed Sarah the morsel.

She greedily dug in to the meat and was surprised at the mild taste. She gnawed on the bones, eager for any scrap of nutrition. Afterward, they both lay on the ground and looked at the sky. Thousands of stars and the astral dust swirling around them were visible. Beneath, the dark cliffs undulated like lunar forms forgotten by time. It looked like a snapshot of outer space. Under the monumental panorama, words seemed superfluous.

“Are you worried?” Daniel broke the silence.

She didn’t see any need to lie. “A little. What if my father is angry enough to just let me rot in this place?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m sure he thinks you were quite valiant to pursue something you believed in. Most people would have abandoned the quest when told to do so. You risked everything for your convictions. Why wouldn’t that impress him?”

“You don’t know my father. He doesn’t impress easily. Not when it comes to me, anyway. I could give him the moon and he’d say, ‘What? You couldn’t get Venus?’”

“There’s no such thing as the perfect daughter, you know.”

“Tell him that. I’ve been wondering what would be worse—dying here or being rescued and having to face his wrath.”

For a few moments, neither of them spoke.

Daniel turned to her. “What was your mother like?”

Sarah didn’t expect the question. She didn’t speak much about her mother, keeping her memory locked away like antique glass too precious and fragile to handle. As she composed her answer, she felt the familiar knot rise to her throat.

“I’m sorry,” Daniel whispered. “That was inconsiderate.”

“No,” she said, pulling herself together, “it’s okay. It’s just … my mother was my best friend. She was the yin to my father’s yang. When he punished me, she would divert my attention with stories of faraway lands and exotic people. And I would imagine myself there, in jungles and deserts, in the company of native people and mythical beasts. To this day, I think her stories are the reason I do what I do.” She felt a little embarrassed by her revelation. “I know it sounds corny—”

“Sure as hell does,” he said with a chuckle.

“It’s funny. She insisted that I play my hand even when I wanted to fold, yet she did not herself have the strength to stay in the game. I’m sure you know all about it.”

“Well, the tabloids certainly didn’t spare any details.”

She cringed at the recollection of her family’s private life splashed all over the gossip media. The press on both sides of the pond had told the story with varying degrees of sensationalism. They wrote about her parents’ bitter quarrelling in the months prior to the suicide, even details about the arguments. Somehow reporters knew her parents never could agree on Sarah’s education or on money. Her father insisted she receive proper English schooling, while her mother wanted her nearby. Nor could they see eye to eye about money. In the end, Sir Richard cut off his ex-wife, leaving her with no income other than what she earned from her acting jobs, which became scarcer and more insulting as she aged. The combination of his insensi-tivity and her own lack of self-worth led her to take a bottle full of Valium with a vodka chaser.

Sarah had found her the next morning in the bathtub, her long hair floating amid spent bubbles and her slender, red-tipped fingers still wrapped around a rocks glass.

As those stories became public, Sarah had felt exposed, like everyone’s eyes were upon her, judging her for her mother’s suicide.
Scandal is always frowned upon in polite society,
her father was in the habit of saying.

Rather than trying to keep up appearances, she had severed herself from that world and walked her own path.

The more solitary, the better.

”It’s ancient history.” She didn’t want Daniel, or anyone for that matter, to pity her. “Tell me about you. What’s your family like?”

“What’s left of it, you mean? Old man walked out when I was six, so I don’t remember much about him. He liked the ladies. Left my mother for a saucy blonde from the West Coast. Never heard from him after that. My mom worked all the time, trying to put food on the table, so my brother and I basically raised ourselves.”

“You must be close with your brother.”

“Nah. We have nothing in common. He lives in Kentucky, in the backcountry. Works for the electric company, has a bunch of kids. He only calls when he needs money.”

“I take it you don’t get back home much.”

“Not much, no.” He sighed. “That’s not home for me. No place is, really. I have a small place in Newark, my home base. But I’m basically a wanderer. And a bit of a loner.”

At that moment, Sarah felt a deep affection for him. Their backgrounds were as incongruent as the moon and the sun, but life had led them down a similar, solitary path. Their circumstances were different, but she knew they understood each other. “What do you say we get some sleep? We have lots of ground to cover tomorrow.”

”You go ahead. I’ll keep the fire going. There are wolves out there.”

She closed her eyes and listened to the silence of the mountains. Though she couldn’t see in the darkness, she could feel his eyes on her. His breath sounded like the ebb and flow of a distant ocean, and warmth radiated from his body. Even here, in this hostile no-man’s-land, on the path of unspeakable hidden predators, she felt safe.

The days following Brehan’s departure had passed without much progress. As they had every day, Sarah and Daniel started early in the morning when the mountains looked like phantoms, amorphous and cloaked in shadow. The fog was their ally, for it covered the grasses with dew. Even that meager mist was a gift to their parched throats. It was the only water to be had in this arid wasteland, where it hadn’t rained in months. The scorched earth of these mountains was one reason foreign armies had stayed out of Ethiopia over centuries of its colonization; the other was the terrain itself, unwelcoming and unforgiving. It was nearly impossible for any creature, save for goats and birds, to negotiate these jagged teeth of rock. One poorly calculated step could send the unfortunate intruder straight into the rocky abyss.

For Sarah and Daniel, the handicap of bound hands and scant food and water made it even more difficult to gain ground. Sarah was beginning to worry they would not be found. Every time she felt the fingers of despair reaching for her throat, she fought to hold on to her ever more tenuous lifeline of hope.

That afternoon, the worst setback came. She felt cramps in her abdomen so severe that she couldn’t stand, let alone walk. She knew from experience it wasn’t good.

“Dysentery,” she said, sweating and weak. “That dodgy water finally caught up to me.”

There was alarm in Daniel’s eyes. They both knew that, without medical intervention, dysentery was a death sentence. “We’ll rest for a couple of days. You’re tough. I know you can beat this.”

She smiled weakly, her body temperature creeping up as the bug established its presence in her bloodstream. Her mouth was drier than cotton, and her intestines were being twisted by some invisible hand. She had no choice but to rest.

As days passed, she grew weak and gaunt. Dehydrated, her skin shriveled like an old woman’s. Her legs could no longer carry her even short distances. She was certain it was the end, and yet among the silent massifs she felt a strange sense of peace. For the first time in her life, she didn’t try to make sense of events. There was no real reason to. Their chances of escaping this lonesome wilderness were slim, her chances of survival even slimmer. There was nothing to do but accept that.

When the pain was too intense to bear, she said, “Danny, I need you to hear what I’m saying. I can’t make it out of here. You have to go on without me.”

“Nonsense. Even if I have to hoist your corpse out of here, I am not leaving you.”

“Stop being idealistic about it. I’m asking you for selfish reasons. I want you to get out of here so you can deliver this to UNESCO.” She strained to reach into the pocket sewn into the lining of her trousers and pulled out a memory card, letting it drop to the ground.

His eyes widened. “The photos you took in the library? I thought those were lost with everything else.”

She laughed. “They never looked inside my trousers. This is our only proof those inscriptions were the prophecies of the tenth saint. Everything else has been destroyed or is in the hands of the enemy.”

“I will deliver this to UNESCO with you standing by my side. Look. No principled southern gentleman would abandon a damsel in distress. It’s entry number two hundred seven in our code of ethics: never leave a lady to die of diarrhea in a remote mountain.”

Smiling, she shook her head.

”Now you wait here. I’m going to see if I can find some firewood and maybe some crickets to eat.” He winked at her. “Back in a flash.”

Sarah lay on the scant grass and tried to meditate her pain away. In her feverish state, she drifted in and out of consciousness. Her dreams were misshapen but vivid. She saw her father flying on the back of an eagle, swooping in and out of the austere Ethiopian mountains. She stood directly below him waving her arms in a desperate sign of distress, to no avail. He didn’t see her and flew away in the other direction. She let out the bloodcurdling cry of the doomed and heard it bounce off the walls of the prehistoric granite amphitheater, amplifying to such a high pitch she covered her ears in horror. In another sequence of images, she saw the scrawny silhouette of a tiny girl. Her white robes flapped like sails in a strong wind, but she stood on a high rock, immoveable, resolute. To Sarah’s delirious, impaired mind, it was an omen. She was jarred awake, certain the girl was there.

She saw no one. Not even Daniel.

It felt like ages since he’d left her side. What if he wasn’t coming back? Fear gripped her, and she was too weak to fight it. Soaked through with sweat, she trembled as a sudden deep chill penetrated the depths of her flesh and bone. She gathered her knees to her chest to draw on whatever warmth her body would afford her and turned to her side, resting her face on the cool dirt. She heard the squawk of a large bird, some kind of raptor she could not name. It was her last awareness before she passed out.

A roar pierced the silence of the highlands. Through the haze shrouding her vision, Sarah saw the outline of a helicopter hovering above. She lifted her hand feebly, then dropped it.

The violent air current from the rotating blades rushed across her wretched body as the helicopter landed on the plateau.

“You’re safe now.”

With no small effort, she focused on the man leaning over her.

Daniel wrapped her in a woolen blanket and nodded toward the helicopter. “Scotland Yard. Sir Richard came through after all. Your plan worked, clever girl. It worked better than you know.” He lifted her limp body. “Now let’s get out of this hellhole.”

Seventeen

T
he
baghlah
arrived in Adulis in the middle of the night. Gabriel had stolen only a few winks of sleep. The air was frigid on the open sea, and the passengers had huddled together for warmth. It made the cold more bearable, to be sure, but sleep was impossible with no personal space, relentless snoring, and the stench of unwashed traveling men.

Gabriel went to the bow and watched the storied port city of Abyssinia approach. He could tell by the bustle of activity, even at such an hour, this place was different from any he’d seen in Arabia. It was prosperous and dynamic and bristled with the promise that any man could be whatever he chose to be if he had the wits and the heart for it. Shivering, he wrapped his blanket tightly around him and inhaled deeply. The air tingled the back of his nose and chilled his throat. He remembered the feeling from home. It had always reminded him he was alive.