The Scorpion’s Bite (6 page)

Chapter Twelve

Jalil and Gideon thanked the elders and said goodbye with florid waving of arms and elaborate bows, and Klaus’ hand caught in the neck of Hamud’s shirt as they rose to leave.

The
bisha’a
was over. The decision was final. Gideon was officially cleared of killing Qasim.

But Lily still wondered who would want Qasim dead? And why? The man with the brown turban? Lily had spotted him watching them in the Wadi Rum before he turned up here at the trial. Did Qasim’s death have something to do with the Rashidi? Something to do with the message that Qasim had tried to give Gideon as the wind carried it away?

Someone had killed him with a knife, but every Bedouin in the desert carries a knife. Even Qasim. Qasim’s knife was distinctive, with a tooled leather handle and sheath. Klaus had a folding knife with a long blade and a stag handle.

Jalil led the way down the slope as they trudged toward the cars. All but Klaus, who had disappeared again, this time into the mourners’ tent.

“I see you met Gerta Kuntze,” Jalil said to Lily.

“The Empress of Mesopotamia?”

“She’s no el Khatan. She doesn’t travel like Gertrude Bell with servants and bathtubs and silver service and Paris gowns.”

“What does she travel with?”

“She travels with cases of Mausers, German rifles. Passes them out like candy.”

“And that’s how she goes from camp to camp as a welcome guest in Bedouin tents?”

“It works for her.”

Laughing, Jalil continued down the slope. He told them that they had to go to Azraq, the oasis in the eastern desert. “
Azraq
means blue,” he said. “And the oasis is blue with water.” He said they had to meet with Colonel Glubb. He called him Abu Huniak.

“There are rumors,” Jalil said, “of infiltration from Syria.”

On the gradient, Lily’s foot glanced off a rock. She skidded along the incline, almost lost her footing, threw out her arms to gain her balance and collided with Hamud.

He cried out, screaming “Scorpion,” and began tearing at his cloak, trying to pull it off.

Lily stood back, astonished, wondering what she had done.

Hamud fell to the ground, rolled onto his back, and writhed on the rocky slope, still screaming. He roared in Arabic, his voice heavy with pain as Jalil ran back to him, shouting for help. Screaming, Hamud gripped Jalil’s leg and pulled him closer, beseeching Jalil in a coarse whisper as he struggled.

Jalil bent down, to grip his shoulder. “Scorpion bit him on the back,” Jalil said. “Inside his cloak.” He dragged Hamud to his feet.

Gently peeling off Hamud’s cloak, first from one side, then the other, he shook the cloth and tossed the scorpion to the ground. Jalil stomped on it with his sandal, again and again, until it was ground into the sand.

“Whoever the scorpion bites will reach the grave,” Hamud said, as if fate had decreed his death. He clutched at Jalil’s arm.

“He wants to go back to his people.” Jalil led the ashen, shivering Hamud to the Buick and eased him inside.

Jalil started the motor, called out to Gideon to meet him in Azraq, and took off in the direction of Amman.

Klaus still seemed to be in the mourners’ tent when Lily and Gideon arrived at the Jeep. They waited. Gideon reached into the Jeep, sounded the horn, and they waited longer.

Lily looked back again at the encampment. Nothing. Klaus was nowhere in sight; she saw only an empty matchbox dancing in the wind along the slope.

Lily and Gideon carefully examined below the seat for scorpions before getting in. Gideon leaned on the horn, shrugged, and tapped the steering wheel impatiently.

“Klaus is gone again.” Gideon started the engine, attacked the horn once more, waited, gunned the motor.

“Let him walk.” Gideon finally put the Jeep in gear and drove off without Klaus, heading eastward into the measureless silence of the desert.

***

They traveled over rolling, flint strewn hills.

Once, the noise of the Jeep roused a herd of gazelle that danced gracefully from crag to crag.

Gideon declared, “Behold, he cometh, leaping upon the mountains, skipping upon the hills. My beloved is like a gazelle or a young hart.”

“That’s from the Song of Solomon, isn’t it?”

Gideon nodded.

“It seems odd to me that something so sensual, so full of sexual desire, would be in the Bible,” Lily said.

“There’s a lot in the Bible. Incest. Adultery. Murder. Most of all, love.” He gave her a sidelong glance. “And lust.”

“You mean it’s a porno book, not a religious tract?”

“It’s the human story. Everything is there. Cain against Abel; Sarah against Hagar; David with all his flaws, and his whole dysfunctional family. And love. Jacob and Rachel, Abraham and Sarah…it echoes the human condition, exposes the human soul.”

They watched the gazelles disappear, passing silently behind the hills like ghosts.

The Bible as ethnography, Lily thought. It fits. There’s an origin myth, genealogies, legal rules, and case studies.

They rode along without speaking, eastward along the ancient track that led from Qusayr Amra to Azraq, the only sounds the whine of the motor and the clink of tools in the back of the Jeep as it bumped along the rutted terrain.

“What are we really doing here?” Lily asked.

“In Trans-Jordan? Observing the area, gathering information about the terrain, doing reconnaissance. And a little archaeology on the side.”

“We’re winning the war here?”

“Everything counts. If we don’t defeat the Nazis, there is no future.”

Lily had seen the future and what it could be. She and Rafi had stopped in New York on the way back from Jerusalem in 1938 and spent a few extra days at the World’s Fair. It was called The World of Tomorrow, all blue and white with fountains everywhere. The trylon and the perisphere as white as clouds, the guides dressed in uniforms as blue as the sky. Lily and Rafi had been interviewed at one exhibit, and the interview had been transmitted, voice, moving picture, and all, to a small glass screen that the interviewer called a “television set” in the next room.

She had spoken to a robot, and the robot had answered in a strange mechanical voice. They had watched the American world of tomorrow from a moving chair, magnificent cities strung along miraculous highways like pearls on a string.

They talked about how they would live in a plastic house with a Bakelite telephone and a Plexiglas table, where machines would wash the dishes, clean the house, turn on the lights, and robots would drink milk and answer the telephone. And then, before the fair was over, the future cracked.

The war began and Rafi left. All of it shattered in a fusillade that killed Rafi at El Alamein. For the two of them, there would be no sleek highways, no futuristic cars, no shopping centers that sold shining nylon dresses.

“And Azraq?” she asked. “What are we doing there?”

“Waiting for Glubb.”

They drove through a valley surrounded by more solitary cliffs and rocky outcrops, over ground covered with scatters of flint. They bounced over bare earth, the gasoline smell of the engine occasionally yielding to the sharp scent of wormwood and dwarfed tamarisk trees that sprouted in the wadis. Here and there, ahead of them, cinder-cones, stood as reminders of small, long dead volcanoes. Along the track, occasional basalt boulders blocked the path. They had to drive around the rough, broken surface, and Lily wondered what it was like the day a volcano erupted, with unwary creatures slithering through the underbrush and angry magma spewing from the bowels of a restless earth.

Once, Gideon pointed toward a stepped dam in a wadi. “Over there, you see it? The Nabateans built that dam and farmed the desert.”

As they drove on, Lily saw the glint of metal against a limestone cliff to the south.

“Look there,” she said. “Stop.”

Gideon squinted where she pointed. “A piece of corrugated tin. Could be covering the entrance to a cave.”

“You think it’s a tomb?”

“Not likely.”

“Then what is it?”

“Could be natural. Could be used for storage.”

“What kind of storage?”

“Sheepskin? Tools?” He shrugged. “Guns?”

“We have to check,” she said, and he turned the Jeep toward the cliff.

***

Lily removed the overburden from the corrugated tin with her trowel, using a few deft flicks of her wrist.

“You do that very well,” Gideon told her.

“Years of experience,” she smiled, remembering the first time she had used a trowel.

It was at an Indian site in downstate Illinois, a WPA project. They told her to show up with a Marshalltown trowel, heavy boots, a hat to keep off the sun, a notebook, graph paper, and an indelible pencil. The next day she went back to the hardware store for a line level, a plumb bob, a T-square, and measuring tape.

“It’s a three dimensional jigsaw puzzle,” the principal investigator had said. “Everything must be measured and recorded in three dimensions from the data point over there.” He pointed to a heavy rebar anchored in a concrete slab. “We take it apart here and put it back together in the lab.”

The site report was a shock and a disappointment. It had nothing but empty statistics and measurements, graphs looking like battleship curves representing the early presence of an artifact, its rise in popularity, and then its replacement by another, never the reason that it was replaced. The report was about pots, and ignored the potters. There was nothing about what life was like for the Indians, in a world with only stone and fire and clay, life in a lodge dug partly into the ground. None of it was in the site report. It was nothing but a sterile laundry list.

The director of the site declared proudly, “No speculation. This is science, not science fiction. Just the facts. Just the chronology.”

Gideon lifted the piece of metal she freed from the opening. “Looks like something from a tin roof. Wonder where they got it.”

Lily slid the trowel into her pocket and leaned forward. “Look. It’s a man-made opening. Here are the cut marks, made with a metal tool, a chisel, or a pickaxe.”

She stood up to let Gideon peer inside.

“I can see gouges from a chisel on the ceiling. There’s something in there. Could be a cache of some kind. Hard to tell. Pretty deep, over six feet.” He pressed closer, then stood up grinning. “I can’t fit through the opening. Bedouin are smaller than me.”

Lily bent down again in the entrance. In the eerie gray light of the cave, she could just make out the cut marks from the chisel used to hollow it out from the limestone hillside. It was deep but not large, maybe two meters from the entrance to the back of the cave, and three meters across.

“It’s a hand-hewn cave,” she said. “Bedouin don’t bury like this. Could this be a tomb anyway?”

“More likely used for storage. This limestone is friable and easy to work. It hardens after it’s exposed to air for a while and dries out.”

She leaned in farther. “I can fit through.”

“You want to try it?”

“How?”

“Tie a rope around you like a harness. I’ll lower you down.”

“Carefully.”

Chapter Thirteen

Gideon lowered her into the cave, releasing the tension slowly on the rope. She had taken off her new hat and wriggled through the opening, head first, then splayed out her hands on the floor of the cave before she righted herself to sit on the uneven surface.

Something had been stored here. Now silt covered whatever had been stowed.

She scraped with her trowel. Working with it raised dust. She coughed a little and kept scraping. The air, thick and heavy, weighed her down, but she kept moving the trowel back and forth, raising more dust.

She tried to take a breath, heaving her shoulders, and coughed instead.

There’s no air in here. She scratched away more silt.

I can’t breathe. The silt covered her hands, her sleeves, her sandals.

What was it Jalil said inhabited caves? A ghula, an evil witch.

She gasped, wheezed, used all her strength to take a breath.

I can’t breathe.

“Gideon, pull me up. I can’t breathe.”

He didn’t answer. He’s there. She heard a stirring outside, but he didn’t answer.

“I can’t breathe.” She tried to shout and struggled for breath between each word.

The ghula is devouring my soul.

“Gideon. Please.”

Air heavy as darkness.

“Gideon, I can’t breathe.”

She tried to yell out, pulled on the rope to attract his attention.

Someone is out there. He should answer.

The rope went slack, fell loose in her hand.

Where was Gideon?

She called him again. No answer.

Gideon gone. And she was trapped, suffocating in the cave.

Chapter Fourteen

Lily huddled on the floor of the cave, dangling one end of the rope from one hand, shifting the other back and forth in the silt below her.

I’ve got to get out of here. Rocking back and forth, she rubbed against something bulging from the floor. In the cave’s half-twilight, she made out a long strip of wood and metal.

Got to get out of here.

Dust motes bobbed in the shaft of daylight coming from the cave entrance. She shuffled toward the opening, grabbed at the wall, stretched her arms toward the light. She could just reach the edge of the opening.

Pull yourself up. Lean on the ledge and crawl out.

She hooked her fingers around the edge of the opening and strained to pull herself up.

Can’t. Too high.

She slumped back to the floor of the cave, breathless again, and began to shiver. So cold in here, she thought.

Got to get out. How?

She put her head between her knees, closed her eyes.

Relax.

She tried a deep breath of the leaden air, then another. She sat back a moment, thought, felt some of the tension leave her shoulders, opened her eyes.

Some kind of traction. Got to get traction.

She rubbed back and forth again against the object bulging from the silt. She looked down, clawed at the dirt around it.

Nothing but a shotgun, an old shotgun with a rusted barrel and a long crack in the wooden handle. What good would it do?

Still no way out.

She pulled at the shotgun. It moved, exposing a desert scorpion, white and gelatinous, startled by the light, scurrying back toward the darkness beneath the rifle. Instinctively, she picked up the trowel, smashed the scorpion with the sharp edge, cut it in half. The entrails of the scorpion squirted on her hand, her sleeve, her cheek. She wiped it off, crouched on the floor, and began to shiver again.

Her reaction to the scorpion had been swift, almost a reflex. It stunned Lily, reminded her that she had a reserve of courage that she could tap.

She focused on the wall, the opening where light flooded in, hot and bright. She thought of the holes gouged into the rock at Petra as footholds for workmen.

She looked back at the shotgun.

Now she could use it.

She cleaned the trowel in the silt, used it to loosen the dirt around the shotgun and tugged at it. She could hardly lift it. Picking up the barrel with both hands, using all her strength, she swung it around, knocking the butt against the wall of the cave. A large flake spalled off the wall, leaving a white scar in the limestone. A narrow notch, enough for a foothold? Barely deep enough for a toe.

The flake that came off looked like an oversized scraper with a bulb of percussion and force lines radiating from it—an enormous clamshell with a pronounced hinge. She picked it up to snap off a piece. It crumbled. Was the wall of the cave that friable?

She picked up the trowel and gouged out a deeper notch.

One foothold, one to go
.

She swung the rifle again as hard as she could, knocked off a flake eighteen inches above the other, stood back, dug into it with the trowel, then shoved the trowel into the belt of her jodhpur.

One end of the rope was still tied around her waist. She secured the loose end to the shotgun and went back to the opening. Standing on tiptoe, she thrust the rifle through, barrel first. She rested, breathless from exertion. Then she pushed until the butt of the shotgun was outside the cave. She turned the gun, paused to breathe, and kept edging it around until it rested against the entrance, parallel to the ground and anchored against the sides of the opening.

She yanked at the rope. A scattering of small limestone flakes rained down, but the rope held.

She put one foot in the first toehold, stepped up. The edge of the foothold gave way. She slipped, dropped the trowel, fell to the ground, the breath knocked out of her. Her elbow hit the edge of the trowel, and she gasped.

Not again. Damn, damn, damn. This isn’t going to work.

She panted, short frightened breaths. After a minute, she relaxed, inhaled. Just winded from the fall. She still held the rope. She pulled herself to a sitting position, fingered the sting in her arm where the trowel had cut her. She was bleeding.

Tugging at the rope, she stood up and tried again. This time, she worked upward, hand over hand, swaying like a pendulum, moving up the rope, stopping for breath, sliding down, the rope burning her hands, moving up again.

Almost at the entrance.

At last, the heat of the sun penetrating from outside. She knocked her wrist against the shotgun and clung to it, ignoring the blisters forming on her hands.

She pulled herself up, crawled out of the cave.

Outside, she caught sight of a Bedouin fleeing over the hill, his cloak flying in the wind. Gideon lay on the ground, groaning, clutching the back of his head.

“You all right?”

“I have a headache,” he said.

“What happened?”

“I’m not sure. Someone hit me. My head hurts.”

“You said that. Who was it? Khaled?”

“I don’t know. He attacked from behind. The next thing I knew, he started running away when he saw the gun you stuck out of the cave. I must have passed out. I have a headache.” He sat up. “And now I’m dizzy.”

“Maybe you have a concussion. You sick to your stomach?”

“No, no. I’m fine. Just a headache.”

With a concussion, Lily knew, people are disoriented, repeat themselves, have problems with vision.

Lily held up two fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“My God, you’re bleeding. Did he hit you too?”

“No. How many fingers?”

“Two. I’m all right. I just have a headache. And a bump on the back of my head.” He raised his hand to rub it again. “It’s going to swell up. You have an icepack handy?”

“Very funny.”

“I told you I’m all right.” He tried to smile and reached into his pocket for the keys to the Jeep. “You drive. I’m a little tired. And I have a headache.”

She hoisted the rusty shotgun, wrapped the rope around it, and bundled it into the back of the Jeep while Gideon watched.

“Looks like it was left over from the last war. Lawrence passed by here.” He handed her the keys. “Just follow the track to Azraq. Can’t miss it.”

He trudged over to the Jeep, got in the passenger seat, closed his eyes, and fell asleep.