The Quest: A Novel (2 page)

Suddenly the artillery began again. He could hear its thump and crash as it walked around the walls of the small fortress. Eventually the artillery spotter made his corrections, and the rounds began to land more accurately within the walls of the compound. The sounds of secondary explosions—stockpiled petrol and ammunition—drowned out the sounds of the incoming artillery. Outside his window, the old priest could hear men screaming in pain. A nearby explosion shook the tiny cell and the lizard lost its grip and fell beside him. The deafening explosions numbed his brain and blotted out every awareness except that of the lizard. The reptile was trying to coordinate its partially severed halves, thrashing around on the reverberating mud floor, and he felt sorry for the creature. And it occurred to him that the soldiers might abandon the garrison and leave him here to die of thirst and hunger.

A shock wave lifted a section of corrugated metal off the roof and sent it sailing into the purple twilight. A piece of spent shrapnel found him and slapped him hotly across his cheek, causing him to yell out in pain. The old man could hear the sounds of excited shouts outside his iron door. The door moved almost imperceptibly. The old man stared at it. It moved again. He could hear its rusty stubbornness over the roar of the fiery hell outside. But forty years was a long time and it would not yield. There were more shouts and then quiet.
Slowly, the pass-through at the base of the unyielding cell door slid open. They were coming for him. He clutched his Bible to his chest.

A long, gaunt Ethiopian slithered through the pass-through onto the mud floor and the old man was reminded of the lizard. The Ethiopian rose to his feet, looked at him, then drew a curved sword from his belt. In the half-light, the old priest could see his fine features. He was undoubtedly an Amhara from Hamitic stock. His hooked nose and high cheekbones made him look almost Semitic, but the tight, black hair and dusky skin revealed him as a descendant of Ham. With his scimitar in his hand and his
shamma
, he looked very biblical, and the old priest thought that this was as it should be, although he could not say why.

The old priest rose, carrying his Bible, and his knees shook so badly he could barely stand. His mouth, he noticed, was quite dry now. He surprised the Ethiopian by deliberately walking across the small cell toward him. It was better to die quickly and to die well. A chase around the cell with upraised arms to ward off the blows of the scimitar would have been grotesque.

The Ethiopian hesitated, not wanting to do his duty in the final analysis and wondering now if perhaps he could circumvent it. But having drawn the short straw, he had become the executioner. What to do? The old priest knelt and crossed himself. The Ethiopian, a Christian of the ancient Coptic Church, began to shake. He spoke in bad Italian. “Father. Forgive me.”

“Yes,” said the old priest, and he prayed for both of them in snatches of long-forgotten Latin. Tears welled in his eyes as he kissed his Bible.

A shot rang out above the dwindling sounds of artillery outside and he heard a cry. Another shot, then the sounds of automatic rifle fire.

The soldier said in Italian, “The Gallas are here.”

He sounded frightened, thought the old man, and well he should be. The priest remembered the Gallas, the tribal people who were as merciless as the ancient Huns. They mutilated their prisoners before they killed them.

The priest looked up at the soldier holding his scimitar and saw that he was shaking in fear. The old priest yelled at him, “Do it!”

But the soldier dropped his scimitar, then drew an ancient pistol from his belt and backed away toward the door, listening for sounds outside.

The soldier seemed indecisive, thought the priest, torn between staying in the relative safety of the cell or going out to be with his comrades, and to meet the Gallas, who were now within the fortress. The soldier was also torn between killing the old priest or letting him live, which could cost him his own life if his commander discovered what he had done—or failed to do.

The old priest decided that he preferred a quick and merciful death at the hands of this soldier; the Gallas would not be quick or merciful. He stood and said to the soldier in Amharic, “Do it. Quickly.” He pointed to his heart.

The soldier stood frozen, but then raised his pistol. His hand shook so badly that when he fired, the bullet went high and splattered off the stone behind the old man’s head.

The old priest had suffered enough, and the strange emotion of anger rose inside him. Here he was, after close to forty years in solitary imprisonment, and all he had wanted in his last moments was to die well and to die quickly, without losing his faith, like so many others did in those last seconds. But a well-meaning and inept executioner had prolonged his agony and he felt his faith slipping. He screamed, “Do it!”

He stared down the barrel of the gun and saw it spit another flame at him. And he thought of the thing that had condemned him. And the vision of that thing glowed like the fire from the gun, all golden and blinding—bright like the sun. Then everything went black.

He awoke to the miracle of being alive. The roof was mostly gone and he could see pinpoints of starlight against the sky. A bluish moon cast shadows across the floor, which was strewn with timbers and stone. Everything was unearthly still. Even the insects had abandoned the fortress.

He looked and felt around for his Bible, but could not find it in the rubble, and thought perhaps the soldier had taken it.

The old man crawled toward the door, then carefully out the pass-through. The soldier lay naked outside the door, and he saw that the man’s genitals had been hacked off. The stripping, the mutilation; this was the mark of the Galla tribesmen. They might still be near.

The old man rose unsteadily. In the courtyard, naked bodies lay in the blue moonlight. His insides burned, but he felt well otherwise. It was hard to feel anything but well, walking now under the sky and taking more than five paces in any one direction.

A cool breeze picked up swirls of rubble dust, and he could smell the burned earth and the death around him. The damaged concrete buildings gleamed white in the moonlight like broken teeth. He shivered and tucked his arms in his
shamma
. His body was cold and clammy. He became aware that his
shamma
was caked with dried blood, sticking to his skin, and he moved more slowly so as not to open the wound.

It had been forty years, but he remembered the way and walked to the main gates. They lay open. He walked through them, as he’d done in dreams five thousand times, and he was free.

T
he Jeep bounced slowly over the rutted track, and its filtered headlights picked out the path between the tight jungle growth. In the distance, artillery boomed and illuminated the black sky, like flashes of distant lightning.

Frank Purcell gripped the wheel and peered hard into the distorted shadows of gnarled trees and twisting vines. He hit the brakes, then shut off the hard-idling engine and killed the headlights. Henry Mercado, in the passenger seat, asked, “What’s the matter?”

Purcell held up his hand for silence.

Mercado peered nervously into the encroaching jungle. Every shadow seemed to move. He cocked his silver-haired head and listened, then looked out of the corners of his eyes into the darkness, but he could see nothing.

From the back of the open-sided vehicle, on the floor among the supplies and photographic equipment, came a soft feminine voice. “Is everything all right?”

Mercado turned around in his seat. “Yes, fine.”

“Then why are we stopped?”

“Good question.” He whispered, “Why are we stopped, Frank?”

Purcell said nothing. He started the engine and threw the Jeep into gear. The four-wheel-drive dug into the track and they lurched forward. He moved the Jeep faster and the bouncing became rougher. Mercado held on to his seat. In the back, Vivian uncurled her slender body and sat up, grabbing on to whatever she could find in the dark.

They drove on for a few minutes. Suddenly, Purcell yanked the wheel to the right, and the Jeep crashed through a thicket of high brush and broke into a clearing.

Vivian said, “What the hell are you doing? Frank?”

In the middle of the clearing, gleaming white in the full-risen
moon, were the ruins of an Italian mineral bath spa. A strange, anomalous legacy from the Italian occupation, the spa was built in ancient Roman style and sat crumbling like some Caesar’s bath in another time and place.

Purcell pointed the Jeep toward the largest of the buildings and accelerated. The stuccoed structure grew bigger as the vehicle bounced across the field of high grass.

The Jeep hit the broad front steps of the building, found traction, and climbed. It sailed between two fluted columns, across the smooth stone portico, and through the front opening, coming to rest in the center of the main lobby of what had been the hotel part of the spa. Purcell cut the engine and headlights. Night creatures became quiet, then started their senseless, cacophonous noises again.

The moon shone blue-white through the destroyed vaulted ceiling and lit the pseudo-Roman chamber with an ethereal glow. Huge crumbling frescoes of classical bath scenes adorned every wall. Purcell wiped his face with his sweating palm.

Mercado caught his breath. “What was that all about?”

Purcell shrugged.

Vivian regained her composure and laughed mockingly from the back of the Jeep. “I think the brave man just lost his nerve in the dark jungle.” Her accent was mostly British with a mixture of exotic pronunciations. Mercado had told him that her mother tongue was unknown and her ancestry was equally obscure, though she carried a Swiss passport with the surname of Smith. “A woman of mystery,” Mercado had said to Purcell, who’d replied, “They’re all a mystery.”

Mercado jumped from the Jeep and stretched. “We’re out of the jungle, but not out of the woods.” Mercado’s own voice had that curious mid-Atlantic accent, common to people who have traveled between the British Isles and North America all their lives. His mother was English and his father a Spaniard—thus the surname—though he’d spent most of his youth in boarding schools in Switzerland, and spoke French, German, and Italian like a native.

Frank Purcell cupped a cigarette in his hand and lit it. In the glow of the match he looked older than his thirty-odd years. Lines worked their way around his mouth and his brown-black eyes. Gray
was sprinkled through his shaggy black hair and he looked tired. He slumped back in his seat and exhaled a long stream of smoke. “What is this place, exactly?”

Mercado was pacing around over the mosaic floor of the huge lobby. “Roman baths. What do they look like, old man?”

“Roman baths.”

“Well, there you are, then. Bloody Fascists built them as part of their civilizing mission back in ’36. I did a story on them, as I recall. You’ll find them in the most unlikely places. Come on, then. If the mineral springs are still flowing, we’ll have a nice bath.”

Purcell stepped stiffly out of the Jeep. “Keep your voice lower, Henry.”

“Can’t very well keep it low if I’m over here and you’re over there, can I, Frank? Come along. Let’s explore.”

Vivian joined Mercado at the entrance of a colonnade that led to an interior courtyard. Purcell walked slowly over the rubble-strewn floor. Five years in Indochina as a war correspondent had expunged any fascination he might have once had for ruins. The last ruins he had gone out of his way to see were the ancient city of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and that side trip had cost him a year in a Khmer Rouge prison camp. That year would remain a very big part of his life. He’d lost there, among other things, any illusions he might have had about his fellow man.

He joined Mercado and Vivian as they walked slowly down the moonlit colonnade. A statue of Neptune with upraised trident stood in the middle of the walkway and they had to go around him. The colonnade made a ninety-degree turn, and as they rounded the corner they could hear the gentle lapping of water.

“We’re in luck,” said Mercado. “I can smell the sulphur. The baths should be up ahead.”

Vivian stepped onto a low marble bench and peered across the courtyard. “Yes, I see the steam. There, behind those trees.”

They walked across the courtyard toward a line of eucalyptus trees. The large expanse, once paved in white stone, was overgrown with lichens and grass. A two-faced Janus rose up out of a thicket of hedges and projected a monstrous moonshadow through which
they passed quickly. The courtyard was surrounded by the colonnade, and vines had grown over most of the columns. Broken statuary of Roman gods and goddesses dotted the yard. The impression was of one of those fantasy paintings of Rome as it may have looked in the Dark Ages, with shepherds and flocks passing through great columned imperial buildings overgrown with vegetation.

They walked by a dry fountain in a melancholy garden and passed between two eucalyptus trees. In front of them was a stone balustrade that led to a curved staircase, and they descended the crumbling steps. At the bottom was a pool about forty meters square. Sulphurous fumes made the air almost unbreathable.