Engraved on the Eye by Saladin Ahmed
“Tummarah,” he said, making the word sound like his Old Country talk. He was loading his Colt with funny-looking bullets. Silver, if I didn’t miss my guess.
“Tomorrow!? We’ve got ’em dead to rights right now! With them powers you got—”
Mister Hadj looked up from his gun and ran a hand over his beard. “Powers? Shut up, you. Just a knack.”
“A knack?! You can—”
I stopped, knowing I’d flapped my gums too much. The old man didn’t like it when I brought up the things he could do. His eyes narrowed like I’d just called his momma a whore. Somewhere out there in the purple early evening, a coyote howled.
Mister Hadj spit at my feet and jabbed a tree-branch trigger finger at me. “Talk too much. Just heed, huh? Tummarah.”
“Now look here,” I said. “You know I respect your experience. And I do try to heed you, but—”
“Should be more,” the old man said, and turned his back to me.
Now, if I’d had half a head on my shoulders, that woulda been the end of it. But I was young, a little fired up, and a lot of stupid. I thought I could make Mister Hadj respect me. And half a whisky flask later I just knew I could do it by bushwhackin’ two outlaws singlehanded. So after Mister Hadj’d turned his back to the sunset, said his ‘Should be more’ rug-prayer to his heathen god and gone to sleep, I snuck down the cliff.
Like I said, young and stupid. If I hadn’t been drunk on top of that, I might have given a second thought to those silver bullets Mister Hadj’d been fiddling with.
Them boys was too smart to set a campfire. But the moon was big and bright and by its light I could see Parson Lucifer’s white preacher’s collar. He was snoring away, but his son James was on watch. I crept up behind James, close and quiet.
Now, even a boy as brash as I was knows that taking on two men at once—even if one of ’em is sleeping—requires getting underhanded. And when it comes to a gang of killers like Parson Lucifer’s, well, I got no problem shooting a man in the back. So that’s what I done. Three shots right up that boy James’s spine.
Excepting it wasn’t James that I shot. It wasn’t James that turned around. It was the other boy. The dead one. I swear it by God and my momma’s grave.
That boy Shambles just stared at me, something like a smile on his rotten, chopped-steak half-a-face. I put another slug right through his eyeball, but the boy didn’t even bleed. Now I’d heard that when he was a natural living man, they called him Shambles on account of his funny walk. But when I shot that boy four times and he ain’t stopped coming at me, well, that name wasn’t so funny no more.
My mouth dried up, my heart hammered hard, and I screamed and ran back the way I’d come. But there was Parson Lucifer cut right across my path, wide awake and a revolver in his gray-gloved hand. His boy James was beside him.
They didn’t shoot me. Just laughed and told me to drop my gun or they’d give me to Shambles. I heard the dead boy laughing through his opened throat and—I won’t lie—I wet myself. Then I dropped my gun.
A half hour later I found myself lying trussed up on the ground with two teeth knocked out. Parson Lucifer’s boot-heel was digging into my cheek, and I was wishing I’d listened to Mister Hadj ‘stead of letting my hot blood send me off half-cocked.
“Don’t look so worried, boy,” the old bandito laughed. “I ain’t going to kill you yet. No, you got to die in a special way. A slow way. That hex what raised my boy Shambles is constantly calling for fresh blood. Having you here, well, it saves me dangerous raidin’ on a town.” He took his boot from my face and strutted slowly into view. He smiled a nasty little smile and looked up at the night sky. “The spilling, though, has to happen at sunrise, when Shambles sleeps. So you got yourself another few hours to live.”
Tears started to burn in my eyes. It’s one thing to get shot, but it’s another thing entire to have your blood spilled for black magic. I swallowed and foolishly tried to play on the guilty conscience of a man who didn’t know what conscience was.
“You know you killed a little girl during that last robbery? Eight years old and you—” I felt fear filling me, but I still wasn’t ready to make the man shoot me premature for naming him for the monster he was. I switched up to make like I was giving him the benefit of the doubt. “Now, could be it was an accident…,” I started.
But Parson Lucifer just frowned at me like a disappointed uncle. “Boy, ain’t nothing involving a pistol and Parson Lucifer ever an accident.”
A better man would have called Parson Lucifer a devilish, dog-faced son of a whore just then. But it wasn’t a better man lying there with his face in the dirt. It was just me, and I kept my peace as that devilish, dog-faced son of a whore went on.
“The girl died for a purpose, boy—more than most folk these days can claim. Every man and every child must play his part. I ravage so that our Lord Christ can heal.”
“And I guess you make a nice living doing it, don’t you?”
The old bastard smiled. “There’s a Caesar in all of us, boy, and we must render unto him what is his. But the girl’s was just one life. Even way the hell out here, there’s a lot of lives to go around. Ain’t any one of ’em any more sacred than another, far as God’s concerned. You think our savior cares more about some snot-nosed child than about a sinner like me? You must not read your Bible then, boy. Ain’t no man ever kept Jesus’ love busier than I have.”
That thing he called his son shambled into my view and gibbered something. Whoever it used to be, right then it just looked like a plate of bloody meat walking on two legs. My breath caught in my chest.
“And what about that creature there?” I said, trying to make the bold in me cover up the scared pissless.
“My hex brought my boy Shambles back alive, even after what them snaky deputies done to him. That’s the Lord’s work, boy. Same thing our savior did with Lazarus. This here’s a Christian hex I put on my beautiful baby boy.”
I couldn’t hardly help myself. “Mister, I don’t know what to call that, ‘cept to say that it’s about as Christian as pissin’ in the pulpit on a Sunday morning.”
And at that moment Mister Hadj appeared from I-don’t-know-where, looking to my frightened eyes like an avenging angel of the Lord.
He sang a quick string of words in his talk—sounded similar to his sunset prayers, best as I could tell. The rocks around us wailed right back, and Parson Lucifer looked all around, frantic-like. Then Mister Hadj shot five of them silver bullets into Shambles.
That thing what used to be a living man stopped and dropped to the ground. There wasn’t no blood coming from where Mister Hadj had shot him, but the way he started to moaning, well, it was like all them bullets that he oughtn’t have been able to walk away from had all caught up with him.
There was one last howl, like a demon getting his tooth yanked by the meanest barber in the world. Then Shambles stopped moving, stopped kicking, and died an honest death.
Mister Hadj already had his gun on Parson Lucifer, and now he was whistling “Bright River Valley.” The rocks kept a-wailing. And I swear to y’all that a little piece of flint jumped up and cut my bonds.
But by then the boy James, who’d been off shaking a sagebrush when Mister Hadj showed up, had his gun on me.
James gestured toward me with the gun and growled at Mister Hadj. “Looks like we’re all of us in a fix here. But my Daddy can’t see no hangman.” He said it in that fast-slow Kansas City way that drives a prairie boy like me clean out my mind, and his Pa finally wore a look of real fear. “Now, I don’t know what kind of Injun magic you got hold of here, but my Daddy can’t see no hangman. You hear, old man? Whatever kind of red devilishness you done worked against my Daddy’s hex, you’d best hope you can lift it and bring back my baby brother. I got a clean shot here at your—”
There was no movement that I saw. But there was a shot, and there was smoke coming from Mister Hadj’s gun. And a boy with a hole in his head was lying where a fast-talking
“Hurt alotta people. Price to pay. Should be more.” Nine words. For Mister Hadj it was like a whole sermon. He looked up at a patch of moonlit cloud in the eastern sky and nodded, like he’d been arguing with the Almighty but was granting God a point.
He didn’t even flinch when Parson Lucifer spun around and shot him twice in the chest.
I tried to stop it—fumbled James’s dropped gun into my hands and fired in Parson Lucifer’s direction, feeling like my anger alone could push the bullet through his skull.
I’m proud to say I killed that hex-casting sonuvabitch.
But I wasn’t fast enough. Parson Lucifer and both his boys were dead. But that didn’t change Mister Hadj’s lying there with two holes in him, and it didn’t stop the little red rivers that seeped into the dirt around his old oak root of a body.
As I say, I was still half-green back then, but I’d already come to know by sight which wounds a man might walk away from. One look told me Mister Hadj wasn’t going nowhere else in this life.
Any other man would have been screaming hisself silly. But Mister Hadj was so quiet I could hear the wind whispering in the brush. He grit his teeth and refused the rum and laudanum I offered him. “Tufusahal,” he said, and I thought he was speaking his Old Country talk. I wished my Pa—or anyone from the Old Country—was there, just to hear him say his peace. Hell of a thing to have to speak your last word to a man who can’t understand you.
But he said it again and I realized I did understand. “Tough as all Hell,” the old man was saying, the first time I ever heard him talk proud.
“Yeah. You are that, Mister Hadj,” I said to him, “Ain’t no man anywhere can begrudge you that.”
That man bought my life with his, God as my witness. I ain’t seen what I’d done to deserve it, to tell the truth. I told him as much, as he lay there dying.
The old coot spit out some blood and smiled real mean-like. “For you?” he said, and shook his head. He pointed his long brown trigger finger up at the sky, like he was naming a target. “For him. Hurt alotta people. Price to pay. Should be more.” And that was the last thing he said.
I watched the light go slowly out of his eyes, saw that smile go slack. I smelled crushed roses in the air, though I can’t say where the scent came from. For a long time I just sat there, my thoughts mingling with the moonshadows.
I spent that sleepless night burying him with a short-handled shovel, his guns and his little heathen rug beside him. Come morning I was wore out as man could be, but it was time to leave.
“Ashes to ashes,” I said, by way of goodbye to the old man, “dust to dust.” Then I dragged myself eastward, my eyes half-blinded by the rising sun.
The Faithful Soldier, Prompted
If I die on this piece-of-shit road, Lubna’s chances die with me. Ali leveled his shotgun at the growling tiger. In the name of God, who needs no credit rating, let me live! Even when he’d been a soldier, Ali hadn’t been very religious. But facing death brought the old invocations to mind. The sway of culture, educated Lubna would have called it. If she were here. If she could speak.
The creature stood still on the split cement, watching Ali. Nanohanced tigers had been more or less wiped out in the great hunts before the Global Credit Crusade, or so Ali had heard. I guess this is the shit end of “more or less.” More proof, as if he needed it, that traveling the Old Cairo Road on foot was as good as asking to die.
He almost thought he could hear the creature’s targeting system whir, but of course he couldn’t any more than the tiger could read the vestigial OS prompt that flashed across Ali’s supposedly deactivated retscreens.
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will report for uniform inspection at 0500 hours.
Ali ignored the out-of-date message, kept his gun trained on the creature.
The tiger crouched to spring.
Ali squeezed the trigger, shouted “God is greater than credit!”
The cry of a younger man, from the days when he’d let stupid causes use him. The days before he’d met Lubna.
A sputtering spurt of shot sprayed the creature. The tiger roared, bled, and fled.
For a moment Ali just stood there panting. “Praise be to God,” he finally said to no one in particular. I’m coming, beloved. I’m going to get you your serum, and then I’m coming home.
A day later, Ali still walked the Old Cairo Road alone, the wind whipping stinging sand at him, making a mockery of his old army-issued sandmask. As he walked he thought of home—of Free Beirut and his humble house behind the jade-and-grey-marble fountain. At home a medbed hummed quietly, keeping Lubna alive even though she lay dying from the Green Devil, which one side or the other’s hover-dustings had infected her with during the GCC. At home Lubna breathed shallowly while Ali’s ex-squadmate Fatman Fahrad, the only man in the world he still trusted, stood watch over her.
Yet Ali had left on this madman’s errand—left the woman who mattered more to him than anything on Earth’s scorched surface. Serum was her only hope. But serum was devastatingly expensive, and Ali was broke. Every bit of money he had made working the hover-docks or doing security for shops had gone to prepay days on Lubna’s medbed. And there was less and less work to be had. He’d begun having dreams that made him wake up crying. Dreams of shutting down Lubna’s medbed. Of killing himself.
And then the first strange message had appeared behind his eyes.
Like God-alone-knew how many vets, Ali’s ostensibly inactive OS still garbled forth a glitchy old prompt from time to time
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will pick up your new field ablution kit after your debriefing today.
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will spend your leave-time dinars wisely—at Honest Majoudi’s!
But this new message had been unlike anything Ali had ever seen. Blood-freezingly current in its subject matter.
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will go to the charity-yard of the Western Mosque in Old Cairo. She will live.
Ali’s attention snapped back to the present as the wind picked up and the air grew thick with sand. As storms went, it was mild. But it still meant he’d have to stop until it blew over. He reluctantly set up the rickety rig-shelter that the Fatman had lent him. He crawled into it and lay there alone with the wail of the wind, the stink of his own body, and his exhausted, sleepless thoughts.
When the new prompt had appeared, Ali had feared he was losing his mind. More than one vet had lost theirs, had sworn that their OS had told them to slaughter their family. Ali had convinced himself that the prompt was random. An illustration of the one-in-a-trillion chance that such a message could somehow be produced by error.
But it had repeated itself. Every night for a week.
He’d told the Fatman about it, expected the grizzled old shit-talker to call him crazy. Half wanted to be called crazy. But Fahrad had shrugged and said “Beloved, I’ve seen a few things in my time. God, who needs no credit rating, can do the impossible. I don’t talk about this shit with just anyone, of course. Not these days, beloved. Religion. Hmph! But maybe you should go. Things sure ain’t gonna get any better here. And you know I’ll watch over Lubna like my own daughter.”
So now Ali found himself following a random, impossible promise. It was either this or wait for the medbed’s inevitable shutdown sequence and watch Lubna die, her skin shriveling before his eyes, her eyewhites turning bright green.
After a few hours the storm died down. Ali packed up his rig-shelter and set back to walking the ruined Old Cairo Road, chasing a digital dream.
There was foot traffic on the road now, not just the occasional hover-cluster zipping overhead. He was finally nearing the city. He had to hurry. If he was gone too long, Ali could count on the Fatman to provide a few days of coverage for Lubna. But Fahrad was as poor as Ali. Time was short.
Running out of time without knowing what I’m chasing. Ali blocked out the mocking words his own mind threw at him. He took a long s
Eventually, the road crested a dune and Old Cairo lay spread before him. The bustling hover-dock of Nile River Station. The silvery spires of Al-Azhar 2.0. The massive moisture pits, like aquamarine jewels against the city’s sand-brown skin. Lubna had been here once on a university trip, Ali recalled. His thoughts went to her again, to his house behind the jade-and-grey marble fountain, but he herded them back to the here-and-now. Focus. Find the Western Mosque.
The gate guards took his rifle and eyed him suspiciously, but they let him pass. As he made his way through the city, people pressed in on every side. Ali had always thought of himself as a city man. He’d laughed at various village-bumpkin-turned-soldier types back when he’d been in the army. But Old Cairo made him feel like a bumpkin. He’d never seen so many people, not even in the vibrant Free Beirut of his childhood. He blocked them out as best he could.
He walked for two hours, asking directions of a smelly fruit-seller and two different students. Finally, when dusk was dissipating into dark, he stood before the Western Mosque. It was old, and looked it. The top half of the thick red minaret had long ago been blown away by some army that hadn’t feared God. Ali passed through the high wall’s open gate into the mosque’s charity-yard, which was curiously free of paupers.
God willing, Faithful Soldier, you will remember to always travel with a squad mate when leaving the caravansarai.
“Peace and prosperity, brother. Can I help you?” The brown, jowly man that had snuck up on Ali’s flank was obviously one of the Imams of the Western Mosque. His middle-aged face was furrowed in scrutiny.
Ali stood there, unable to speak. He had made it to Old Cairo, to the charity-yard of the Western Mosque as the prompt had said, and now…Ali didn’t know what he hoped to find. A vial of serum, suspended in a pillar of light? The sky splitting and a great hand passing down cure-money? He was exhausted. He’d faced sandstorms and a tiger to get here. Had nearly died beneath the rot-blackened claws of toxighuls. He’d traveled for two weeks, surviving on little food and an hour’s sleep here and there. He started to wobble on his feet.