Riders of the Pale Horse (18 page)

The night closed in upon them with a mist so heavy it was almost solid. Every open surface was swiftly drenched. The air was bitter with a wet cold that seeped to the bones. The river's muted roar and the call of other watchmen who could no longer see one another were the only sounds that pierced the stillness. Wade took the first watch, and every few minutes emerged from the cabin's relative dryness to circle the trucks. He was careful to stay close enough to keep touch with the cold metal. His flashlight's beam showed nothing except an impenetrable white wall.

The mist isolated him, for some reason making him think of home. It was a past so distant from that particular place and time that it felt as though it belonged to another person. Wade smiled to himself and knew it was both true and not true. He was different, and yet somehow the same. He carried his thoughts with him into his bedroll and allowed the voices of his mind and heart to lull him to sleep.

While blackness still reigned, Wade shot awake to the sound of hammering and shouting. He clambered down from the back of the truck just as Robards bolted over the neighboring tailgate, a flashlight in one hand and gun in the other. “What the blazes?”

They came around front to find the man whose wife Wade had treated the night before beating on the hood with the butt of his automatic rifle while Mikhail watched over him, gun at the ready. “There is little time,” the man said. “I saw no movement about your trucks, and my wife said I should come.”

Wade was still foggy with sleep. “Time for what?”

“The air begins to freeze,” the man replied. “Death stalks above.”

“Look!” Robards said. The beam of his flashlight reflected
on tiny pinpoints of white. Frozen ice motes began to dust the windshield. “This what he's talking about?”

“Yes.”

“Tell him whatever debt he owed us has just been wiped from the books,” Robards said, opening his door and swinging inside. “Let's move out!”

Wade turned back to the stranger. “My friend says—”

The man hefted his gun to stop Wade. “May Allah bless your way with safety, healer. Until our next meeting, farewell!” He turned and vanished into the night.

“Get that truck started!” Rogue yelled over the roar of his own motor.

Yuri's head protruded from the canvas curtain as Wade clambered aboard. “What is it?”

Wade stamped on the starter pedal, pumped the gas and nursed the choke as the motor faltered, caught, and held. The engine bellowed, eased, roared again. Wade slammed the gears home as Rogue's truck started forward. Then he shouted back over his shoulder, “Snow!”

10

Ali showed up just as Allison was opening her office door to begin another day. “So very nice to see you another time, Western Lady. You are sleeping good?”

“Quite well, thank you.”

“Insh'Allah sulameh—thanks be to Allah for your well-being. I am so very glad for you. Yes, so nice.”

“And how are you this morning, Ali?”

“Thanks be to Allah, life is good. Yes. You will take something? A cool drink, perhaps?”

“That would be lovely. Thank you.”

“Just a moment.” He was gone and back in no time. “You like anything else?”

“Not just now, thank you.”

“You need, you call me. I help.” He surveyed the semblance of order that her office was gradually approaching. “All people here say you do big work. I think yes, is so.”

“A lot needed to be done,” Allison agreed.

“Yes, you have met with very little of difficulties. All is going very smooth.” He nodded. “Allah must smile on your work, I think.”

She picked up the first form in her box, surveyed the questions to be answered, and said, “I'm not sure how much Allah had to do with this.”

Ali scoffed. “This is opinion of who? You? You are expert? You have witnessed all life?”

“No,” she said, determined to work despite the interruption. Maybe he would get the idea and leave. “But I'm just not sure how the hand of Allah has been busy in this office.”

“This is something not yet revealed,” Ali agreed. “Maybe sometime in future, all will be told for you, but not yet.”

Ben chose that moment to step into view outside her doorway. “Ali, are you bothering Miss Taylor?”

The young man looked positively offended. “I am only standing here. Bring cool drink. I wonder how you can throw on me such accuses.”

“I think your services are required elsewhere,” Ben said.

“You need helps, Western Lady, you call, yes?” With that he was gone.

“Ali tends to linger where he is not wanted,” Ben said.

“So I've noticed.”

“I thought we would visit one of the local camps today. When can you be ready to leave?”

Suddenly Allison lost all interest in the forms. She stood from her desk and replied, “Right now.”

“Camps like these are to some extent a microcosm of the entire Arab world,” Ben told her. “They are small-scale, face-to-face communities, organized in many respects as villages were in the days of our Lord. The inhabitants live in wards or neighborhoods defined by kinship and marriage and destiny.”

Fareed, Ben's driver, drove them in the clinic's only transport, a battered Land Rover. They traveled through the mountains encircling Aqaba and entered the dry desert reaches. Allison tried to pay attention to Ben, yet the surrounding images haunted her.

A lone woman in head-to-toe black djellaba and chador head scarf walked through miles of utter emptiness, following a snaking yellow track down to the main highway. From where had she come? Where was she going? What was the life she led?

Razor-sharp sandstone ridges jutted aggressively from a blank desert landscape—from utter flatness to a thousand feet high and back to flatness in the space of fifty yards.

The silence. Even in a rattling car with Arabic music blaring from the radio, the silence was not dispelled. They traveled in a tiny shell of noise through a vast kingdom of quiet.

And now, unforgettably, the refugee camp.

“What you see before you is true living history,” Ben said as Fareed parked the car in front of a noisome cafe and remained seated behind the wheel as they continued on by foot. “The attitudes of the people in these camps are the same as those of two thousand years ago. Long-suffering. Patient. Hard-bitten. Pessimistic. Shrewd.”

No sign was needed to announce that they had crossed an invisible barrier separating the town from the refugee camp. The buildings did not change, save by degree. Yet it was clear even to Allison that they were entering another world.

“As you probably know, the first Palestinian camps were formed in Lebanon and Jordan in 1948, after the founding of the state of Israel,” Ben explained. “Nowadays the remaining Jordanian camps resemble enclosed, crumbling suburbs, with shops and apartments and families who have lived there for two generations. They no longer require papers. The strongest chains of imprisonment are invisible, down deep where none but the other camp inhabitants can see.”

The road was hard-packed clay and lined with mud and refuse. The fences were rusted and crumpled, more lines of demarcation than barriers.

“The refugee camps are Middle Eastern ghettos at their most brutal,” he said. “And the greatest tragedy is that the money is available to transform them right now, this very day. But to do so would rob the Arab world of their greatest propaganda weapon against Israel and the West. So these Arab states that wallow in oil wealth and decry the Palestinian plight at every opportunity sit back and do nothing. They allow the people trapped here to remain pawns in the game of international politics.”

The rubble grew and formed into crumbling walls. Gradually the walls tightened their grip upon the dusty road until its width was halved and then halved again.

“If the Palestinians' situation were to improve,” he went on, “then Israel and the West could say there is no need for us to do anything; they are all okay.” He breathed a weary
sigh. “There is a vast chasm between the human potential for change and the political reality of hatred between peoples and nations. By politicizing the situation, they have dehumanized the people trapped here.”

The fitful breeze chose that moment to back around, surrounding Allison with the stench of rotting refuse. She stumbled, almost blinded by the reek.

“There is no drainage whatsoever and only the most rudimentary of sewage systems,” he explained. “Whenever there is a heavy rain, the water turns these streets into filthy knee-deep torrents.”

Buildings rose and sent corroding balconies out overhead, draping the street with shadows and trapping the fetid air. Mangy dogs and cats scurried furtively down alleyways so narrow that Allison could have reached out and touched both walls. At each turning, crowds of children scampered and played and watched her passage with old-young eyes. Oncoming cars and trucks announced their passage with blaring horns and black clouds of exhaust. Donkey carts added to the confusion. Wherever a doorway or building corner allowed a fraction of space, there sprouted a tumbledown stall selling fruit or dry goods or cigarettes or papers. Allison squeezed her way down the cramped, squalid way and felt eyes follow her everywhere.

The road was now so narrow that women could pass articles overhead from balcony to balcony. Old men sat on upturned crates beside crumbling doorways, smoking hookahs and cigarettes, sipping tea, eyeing the strange western woman with blank expressions. Their faces spoke of a lifetime's experience at giving nothing away.

Their passage suddenly opened into a large, unpaved square. To one side, a large group of men were digging at the dusty earth.

“The local radicals do great good as well as great harm,” Ben told her quietly. “They do not simply harangue crowds. Right now, for instance, they are gathering many of the jobless
young men and putting them to work building a new communal mosque. They pay the families with food and medicines. They give the young men a sense of purpose, of belonging. And they use this time to draw them into the fundamentalist fold.”

He stopped her with a single finger on her shoulder, pointed with a minute jerk of his head, and murmured for her alone, “There ahead of me. The most radical of the local imams. Sheikh Omar.”

The imam was a white-robed older man crowned with a bright scarlet turban. He wore a long gray beard and carried a silver-tipped cane. When he spotted Allison he glared fiercely, shook his cane at her, then turned away in disgust.

“What was all that about?” she demanded.

“You are western,” Ben answered very softly. “You are infidel. You are female. By your very presence you challenge his hold over all the males and tempt them into sin.”

“That is the most preposterous—”

“Come,” he murmured. “It is no longer safe here.”

They reentered the winding series of nameless alleyways. Allison walked as closely behind Ben as she could, fighting off a sense of suffocation.

They entered an apartment block festooned with black electric cables. They climbed crumbling concrete stairs up three floors. Their knock was answered by a young woman whose pinched features looked aged far beyond her years. She did her best to smile for the doctor, opened the door, and softly invited them in.

“This is Sarah,” Ben said, “a special friend.”

“It is the doctor who is special,” she replied in softly accented English. “Would you care for tea?”

“Why don't you two see to refreshments,” he said. “And I shall see to our patient. How has he been?”

“Better, thanks to you and the Lord above,” she replied. “He awaits you.”

When Ben had disappeared into the bedroom, Sarah led
Allison into the kitchen alcove. It was as bare as the living room and just as spotless. The enamel top of the vintage stove had been scrubbed so hard and so often that the enamel had been worn away in places. Sarah asked, “You are American?”

“Yes. Are you Palestinian?”

“My husband is. I was born in Amman.”

Allison glanced at the only adornment on the walls, a crucifix, and wondered at her own surprise. She had heard that many Palestinians and other Arabs were Christians. She asked politely, “Do you mind living away from your family?”

Sarah hesitated in the act of lighting the stove, then said quietly, “I have not returned to my home for twenty-one years.”

“Why not?”

Again there was the hesitation, again a quiet reply. “Conversion is a very big problem for young Muslim women.” “You converted to Christianity?”

Sarah nodded. “In the strict Muslim world, the unmarried woman is not considered independent. She is just a part of her family. So for some who become Christian, the family simply makes her disappear.”

Allison was not sure she had heard correctly. “What do you mean, disappear?”

“I have a friend who went to Bible study with me. We were caught together with the forbidden Book. I was locked away for nine months before I escaped and went to England. I never heard from my friend again. I have looked everywhere, as hard as I know how. She has simply disappeared.”