Infidel (21 page)

At the top of the artificial hill, scrub pine trees grew. There was an old-fashioned transmissions antenna up there next to a metal contagion sensor.
 

Eshe parked the bakkie and turned off the supply of bug juice to the cistern. Nyx picked up her cane and spent a long minute staring at the filtered doorway. There were some chairs on the porch, and a workbench covered in tools and kill jars.
 

Nyx opened the bakkie door and used her cane to help herself out. The sun was merciless. She felt the heat of it even through her organic burnous. Her skin crawled as the bugs in the weave shuddered and dropped their body temperature.
 

“Put up your damn hood, Eshe,” Nyx said as he got out the other side. Suha muttered something.
 

Nyx walked across the dusty road. The air was filled with a pervasive whirring sound, like cicadas, only higher in pitch. She saw a lot of dead, winged insects scattered across the road, large as her palm. They looked like mutated black cicadas, the sort magicians used at the coast for minor repairs to filters.

“I hate this crap,” Suha said.
 

Nyx shuffled onto the porch. She looked for a bell pull or a buzzer or a faceplate.
 

“Suha, go check around back,” Nyx said. “Take Eshe with you, and watch out for traps and scorpions.”

Suha mumbled something in Chenjan again, too low for Nyx to make out. She and Eshe started to trek around the derelict.
 

Nyx looked back down the road they’d come. This time of day, Alharazad should have been inside. They all should have been inside. Nyx found a single round window—a new addition, like the door. It was opaque, like the hull. She saw only her own reflection; a broad-shouldered, hollow-eyed woman in a burnous. It was the first time she’d clearly seen her reflection since Mushirah, and it was like looking into the face of a stranger, sick and starving: soft face gone gaunt, eyes too big. It wasn’t the sort of face she wanted to present to the world. She pulled away from the window, and heard the scuff of feet on stones behind her. It took a great deal of effort not to reach for a weapon. She turned—

—and stared down the wide double barrel of a shotgun.
 

“Get the fuck off my porch,” Alharazad said.
 

14.

R
hys arrived home with the evening train. As a general rule, he could keep time by Tirhani trains, but a section of track had been swallowed twelve kilometers out of Beh Ayin by a swarm of giant acid-spitting locusts, and it cost him hours in the hot, moist air while the jungle around him pulsed and stirred like a living thing.
 

The children were out with the housekeeper. Elahyiah met him at the door. Her hair was tucked under her headscarf. A springy black tendril had pulled free. In the moment she greeted him at the door, he thought that loose curl the most beautiful thing in the world.
 

“You look like death,” Elahyiah said, and laughed.
 

He cupped the back of her head and pulled her to him. He kissed her full on the mouth. Her surprise faded quickly. There was no resistance, no shock, no displeasure. She weakened under him like ripe fruit, a mango left too long on the tree. It was a heady sensation, sweet, like a drug. A kiss. She responded, nearly always, with just a kiss.
 

Memory flushed through him. The bel dames in the rain. The sand churning in the glass, and old horrors. Things better left unseen. Things best forgotten. Another life.
 

Elahyiah and I built this.
 

God, Elahyiah.

He pulled off her headscarf and pushed her further inside, away from the peering eyes of the street. He kicked the door closed. He pulled his fingers through her loose hair. She gripped him like a spent swimmer. They tumbled together onto the cool tile floor.
 

He started to pull away her robe, and she stopped him, cupped his face in her hands.
 

“I think of this,” she said softly.
 

His hands moved up her thigh. “I do too.”

“No, I…” she looked almost hurt. She bit her lip. “I… think of you. I do all that’s expected of me. I clean up the children and mind the housekeeper. I pray. And I sit here and wait for you. For this. I think of this all day. You. Here. Us. It feels…”

He kissed her. “Hush. I know, I…”

“You don’t,” she whispered fiercely. “You’re everything. My whole life. Did you know that? I never thought I could desire a man so much, not even my husband. Is that blasphemous?”

The evening was not long enough.
 

Later that night, long after the children had been put to bed, Rhys sat at his desk and looked out into the garden. His garden. His house. His wife. His daughters. His father had wanted to sacrifice him to the front. Instead, Rhys had fled into the desert, and built this from nothing.
 

In Tirhan, the God they prayed to was not that vengeful desert God, it was the God that gave them this beautiful, clean world. A world without locked gates or security fences or filth or blood. Let Nasheen and Chenja fight their wars and destroy each other. He wanted no part in it.

His father, he knew, would call him coward. His father would call him infidel.

Rhys put his books and papers away. He locked up some notes about his translation in Beh Ayin. Whatever bel dames wanted with Tirhan in the wilderness was something he wanted no part of. It meant a loss of face, and the potential loss of a good deal more, to request that the Minister pull him from such assignments. But it protected Elahyiah. It protected Laleh. It protected Souri. Everything he had built. What if those bel dames had known him? What door could have opened there on that blasted mountaintop?
 

Rhys went upstairs and into the dim of his room. He saw Elahyiah asleep, wrapped in nothing but a silk sheet, the latticed doors open to the ruddy light of the big, round-faced moons, her bare feet exposed. He pulled the gauzy curtain above the bed over another few inches to cover her exposed foot. She would lie like that the same way at midday, heedless of the unfiltered sun.
 

Elahyiah stirred in her sleep and turned onto her side. He saw the fullness of one bare breast in the red moonlight. Her eyelids flickered, and she smiled at him, still sleepy. He palmed her breast, teased the nipple with his thumb, and leaned in to kiss her.
 

“I love you,” he said.
 

She pulled him down next to her. “You say it as if I don’t know.”
 

“I love you,” he said again, whispered into her ear, against her neck, again and again until she laughed and he had to laugh, too, at the absurdity of it. As if she did not know.
 

“Marry me,” she said.
 

“Yes,” he said. Yes and yes, a thousand times yes. He would choose this again and again, until the end of the world.
 

Now keep it safe, he thought, and moved with her in the darkness.
 

+

Rhys woke from a dream of drowning. Not in water, no, but sand. His mouth was full of it, sharp and chalky dry, ground glass. He tasted blood.
 

He thrashed in his bed and sat up, disoriented, listening to the persistent buzzing from something… somewhere… downstairs. The call box. He wiped at his eyes and looked first for Elahyiah. She lay curled on her side, fingers hooked into a pillow, her face slack and soft. She could sleep through a sandstorm, that woman.
 

Rhys pushed out of bed and slipped on his khameez. The dim blue-gray along the horizon told him it was another hour or so before the first dawn, maybe seven in the morning—they kept time by the twenty-seven-hour clock in Tirhan. Trust the government to wake him a full hour before dawn prayer. He had already sent his brief of the meeting with the bel dames to the Tirhani Minister. He could think of no one else who would call at this hour. Another assignment so soon?
 

The call box was still buzzing as he passed his girls’ room. Souri peered at him from the open doorway.
 

“Da? I dreamed locusts in the hall,” she said.
 

“Hush. It’s just the call box.” He picked her up. Souri was wide-eyed and covered in a thin film of sweat. He was not the only one with nightmares. He brought her back into the room, across the soft organic flooring. Laleh, like her mother, slept soundly in her bed.
 

“Stay here. I’ll stop the buzzing,” Rhys said. “I’ll get you something to drink. I need you to be brave, though. Can you be brave while I get the call?”

“I’m scared, Da,” she whispered, and curled her little fingers into his khameez.
 

“All right, hush,” he said.
 

He brought her downstairs with him, heedless of the creaking steps. The only ones in the house who would wake were already awake.
 

He picked up the call box receiver with his free hand.
 

“Yes?” he said.
 

“Rhys Dashasa?” the voice on the other end said.
 

A cold knife cut through his gut. Rhys hung up.
 

That hadn’t been his name in six years.
 

He stared at the call box a good half minute. Souri began tugging at his khameez.
 

“Da, I’m thirsty. Da?”
 

Rhys set his daughter down and walked with her into the kitchen. His mind had gone coolly blank. He poured her a glass of lime-flavored water and helped her with the cup. He watched her drink.
 

Dreaming. Nightmares. Too many nightmares.
 

The call box buzzed again.
 

“Da?” Souri said.
 

“Stay here, love,” he said. He crossed to the call box again. He took a deep breath, squeezed his eyes shut, opened them. He was awake. He took up the receiver, pressed it against his ear. Said nothing.
 

He heard the soft, chittering mumble of an open line. Then, “Peace be upon you? Rhys? Is Rhys there? This is the Minster of Public Affairs. I need to speak to Rhys Shahkam please.”

Rhys let out his breath. He rested his forehead against the wall. “Yes, Minister?” he said.
 

“I need to speak with you about your report. Were you coming in today? You know I start my day at nine.”

“Of course. Yes. When would you like to meet?”

“If it’s not troubling to your affairs—”
 

“It is never troubling to my affairs to meet with you,” he said, and felt a sudden vague tiredness at the expectation of the dance. They circled a few more times, exchanging pleasantries. He agreed to meet her in an hour, downtown—after prayer of course.
 

Rhys put Souri back to bed.
 

He dithered in the kitchen for some time, cleaning up ahead of the housekeeper. He kissed Elahyiah and the girls. Then he washed and dressed and walked outside to catch a taxi. The way to the taxi ranks was through the park, so he stepped across the street and onto the gravel path. The blue-gray haze on the horizon was beginning to blossom. He sensed a wasp swarm off to his left, patrolling.

The morning was surprisingly quiet. He slowed his walk, listening. A rickshaw passed down a narrow road on the other side of the park, just visible through the trees. Bugs still infested the park; he could feel them vibrating, humming, pliant and prepared to receive direction… but the cicadas were quiet.
 

Cicadas did not quiet for magicians.
 

Rhys paused. He could see the other side of the park from where he stood. Unease filled him. The phone call came back to him… and the white raven in Beh Ayin.
 

Rhys held out his left hand at his side, palm splayed, and called for a wasp swarm. The swarm patrolling the street at his left paused, buzzed, waited. He put out a second thread to the cicadas, but could not contact them. Not for the first time, he wished he were a more skilled magician.
 

Rhys continued walking down the soft path, every part of him humming. His right hand flexed, itching to take the hilt of a pistol he no longer carried. What use was there for a pistol, in Tirhan?
 

My safe country, he thought. My safe little country. What a bloody fool I am.
 

He crossed the park. The sidewalk on the other side was empty. Two belching taxis and a rickshaw waited just up the street. He took a deep breath.
 

Bloody fool, indeed.
 

Elahyiah would laugh at him. Rhys Dashasa. No one knew him here. Bad dreams and call boxes. Too many bel dames and nervous ministers.
 

He tried to smile as he got into the taxi.
 

15.

A
lharazad was a head and shoulders shorter than Nyx, heavy in the hips and jowls. The weathered hands that held the gun were sure and steady. The hood of her shiny green burnous was pulled back, and she wore a white turban and a pair of dark goggles. The hilt of a sword stuck up from a slit in the back of her burnous. Nyx wondered if it was the same one she’d used to behead half the bel dame council. Her gloves covered her from fingertips to elbows, and matched the burnous. Nyx saw something of her son Raine in her aged, sun-sore face: the full mouth and square jaw.