Nile Shadows

on and on about Stern, trying to get me to persuade myself I ought to go back there. And Maudie even, hinting at that too. The Three Fates just coming to call as clever as could be.

But I know what I'd run into over there. They've always been at each other's throats and always will be.

Bloody Greeks and Persians and Jews and Arabs and Turks and Crusaders, there's no end to it. And the odd bloated Mameluke floating down the Nile and the odd mad Mongolian whipping his horse into a frenzy, barbarians on their way in as usual to mix it up with assorted Assyrian charioteers and crazed Babylonians intent on the stars, while all the while the Chaldeans are sweeping in on the flanks and the Medes are sweeping out, and the Phoenicians are counting their money and the Egyptians are counting their gods, maybe the high priests of both of them getting together every millennium or so, to compare notes and see if either of them has come up with more of one than the other.

Talk about echoes. Talk about confusion and chaos. If there have been forty thousand prophets since the beginning of time, as rumored, surely most of them have spent their lives careening through those very wastes, shaking their fists and screeching their truths and clamoring on to their very last breaths right there.

Here it is, they shout. The one true God and the one true path at last, and just by chance that one true path happens to be the path where I've always been walking. So just listen to me, for God's sake. Me.

Listen.

Oh help. Why bother with it at all? Confusion and chaos raising a Tower of Babel, that's what He spotted over there a long time ago. The tower to me, not to anybody else. The tower everybody's always been trying to raise, everybody who's a man anyway. Dreadfully proud of our erections, we are.

Mythical spot all right. The birthplace of religions and man's first heavenly erections, and an eternal torment to the rest of us. Must have a lot to do with the desert, I suppose. Nothing like forty days or forty years tramping around in a desert sun to jumble your brains. Water hard to come by and feverish chills shaking you all night, and nothing to eat in the morning but a handful of locusts left over from last night's supper. Do that for a while and how can you help but begin to see things and hear things?

War again over there, I'm told? Most amazing piece of news since the last report that barbarians were scaling the heights of Jerusalem.

War in the beautiful wilderness?

Astonishing news, that's what. Or as Stern used to say, Good morning.

Joe tugged his faded red wool hat down Over his ears and pulled his new black shawl, a gift from his three visitors, more tightly around his thin shoulders. It was cold with the sun setting, cold with the coming of the night in the desert.

A small girl was standing some yards away, watching him. Joe made a sign and she came over and stood beside him, so young she had never known another medicine man in the pueblo. He wrapped his shawl around her against the cold and took her tiny hand and held it.

The little girl said nothing and neither did Joe. When the sun had sunk below the horizon she slipped away, still wearing the shawl, a gift he had made to her. Joe gazed after her as she disappeared in the shadows. He didn't think she had seen them but there were tears in his eyes. He didn't know why.

Ah well, he thought, we do what we can. It makes little difference but we have to do it anyway.

Stern's words, he suddenly realized. Stern's very own words spoken to him long ago, whispered now in the shadows in another time and place altogether.

Strange, he thought. Time is.

***

. . . and just as suddenly he was with Stern and it was a night twenty years ago in a city once called Smyrna, once long ago in the century before the age of genocide, before the monstrous massacres had come swirling out of Asia Minor to descend on Symrna while Stern and Joe were there . . . the massacres ignored then by most of the world but not by everyone, and not by Hitler, who had triumphantly recalled them only days before his armies invaded Poland to begin the Second World War. .

. . Who after all speaks today of the annihilation of the Armenians? The world believes in success alone.

. . . a night, once, in a hell of smoke and fires and screams, Joe lying wounded on a quay and Stern standing over him and everywhere the dead and the dying huddling together, heaped near the sea while the city burned . . . while beside Joe, moaning softly, an abandoned little Armenian girl lay ripped and torn and dying in unspeakable pain.

. . . Joe unable to touch the knife by his hand and shrieking at Stern in his anger, his pain . . . yelling that Stern just wasn't as much in charge as he wanted people to believe, that he could do his own butchering if he wanted to play the great visionary who knew all the answers, the great hero dedicated to a cause of a kingdom come.

. . . Stern staring down with eyes that burned in blackness, Stern wild with anguish and violently shaking as he clutched the knife and buried his hand in the little girl's hair and pulled back her head, the tiny throat so white and bare.

. . . the wet knife clattering on the cobblestones and Joe not daring to look up then, not wanting to see Stern's eyes then . . . a night twenty years ago and forever and but a prelude to the century, but a shadow of the far deeper descent into darkness that was yet to come.

***

Joe shuddered. He passed his hand in front of his eyes.

And who will be Stern's witness now? he asked himself. . . . Who will do that for him, who will look into his eyes? A man with a dream that was just hopeless from the very beginning. A good dream and hopeless, with nothing coming from it ever. . . .

Joe got to his feet. Of course he already knew how it would end over there, how it would have to end for Stern. And he wasn't going because he felt he owed Stern something, because he didn't feel that way.

But after all these years of Stern trying and failing, someone somewhere did. And now when Stern was going to die, the gift had to be repaid.

Silently the greatly revered shaman of the Hopi walked up the path to the pueblo on top of the mesa, to the underground vault where the elders of the tiny nation sat repeating their guttural chants and birdlike whispers, those mysterious sounds of life and death they had heard since the beginning of time, echoing through all things in the universe.

PART TWO

-4-

Vivian

The sky was cloudless above Cairo airport, unmarred at that early hour by even the softest haze from the sun still low over Sinai. The cargo plane swung around and came to rest, bringing into view a pack of military men marching in twos and threes across the runway toward the plane. The men wore wide starched walking shorts and the different shirts and caps of uniforms from several corners of the British Empire.

Brisk and crisp and most of the colors of the species, thought Joe, watching the men. You'd have to know what you were up to, or think you knew, to march around the world looking like that every morning.

The military men advanced rapidly, intent and in step, their right arms swinging high, their left arms cradling clipboards tightly clasped at the ready. Some of them were already pushing on board when Joe reached the door of the plane and started down the stairs. He had only taken a few steps when he caught sight of a bizarre figure in white who seemed to be staring at him. Immediately the man nodded to himself with conviction, barking a silent order as he did so. Then he snapped to attention with parade-drill gusto and marched forward.

Jesus, thought Joe. What is that?

And indeed, the man cut an astonishing figure.

An elegant white shirt, open to the waist and displaying the insignias of a subaltern. White walking shorts and high white socks and snowy white tennis shoes. A regimental leopardskin casually draped over one shoulder, a glittering gold pendant bouncing on the man's chest. And looming above it all an enormous broad-brimmed white hat, one side attached to the crown in the Australian manner.

Christ, thought Joe, as he reached the bottom of the stairs and found his way blocked. The man in white