The Sky Road

“Well, well,” said Druin, as though thinking, as I was: so that’s how it’s done! He slung his rifle on his shoulder, glanced at me and shrugged.

“No point in creeping about now,” he said.

With that he marched boldly out into the light.

10 Forget Babylon

They made their way back from the ossuary, ducking under arches and through hammered holes in the walls, into the church. Beneath pocked, defaced Orthodox murals a Turkish woman sold silver and jade and crochet. They ignored her gestured pitch, stepped outside, stalked past more stalls. Across the hollow from the hilltop where the church stood, a hillside of streets of empty, roofless stone houses fought the slow green entropy of birch and bramble. The light was blinding, the heat choking, the silence intense. The cicadas broke it, the birds, the skitter of a lizard.

Jason wandered around to the front of the church, traced a date in coloured pebbles on the paving.

4912,” he said. That’s when they finished it. How proud of it they must have been. Ten years later, they left. Voluntary population exchange, hah.”

Myra squatted in the sunlight, swigged Evian, sucked Marlboro. “Worse things have happened since.” The dry, ancient ribs and femurs in the ossuary hadn’t disturbed her as much as the fresh bodies she’d seen the evening she arrived.

“No doubt.” Jason shrugged. “But you know, this place, it makes me feel like I’m a Greek, for the first time in my life. Even a goddamn Christian.” He glanced at the hawkers a few tens of metres away, hunkered down beside her and spoke in a low, earnest voice. “As in, you know, Western. It’s a different culture. They don’t like us.”

Myra stared at him, shocked. Karmilassos, or Kaya, or Kayakoi, or whatever it was called (the Turks shamelessly called it “the Greek ghost village”) oppressed her too, but the CIA agent seemed to be drawing entirely the wrong moral from it.

This is what nationalism does,” she said. “And what that kind of thinking does. No, thank you. I don’t buy it.”

Jason looked somewhat hurt. He tilted his hat back and started skinning up a joint. His age—he claimed, and she believed, though who could now be sure?—was twenty-four. The last time she’d been seriously hassled by the CIA had been just over sixty years earlier. There was something awesome about a man following up a file so much older than he was.

(Last time: the man from the Agency had talked to her over lattes in a Starbuck’s off Harvard Square, in July 1998 when she was touting for medical aid to Kazakhstan’s fall-out victims; the campaign’s poster child had a cleft palate. A surgeon she’d met had set up the contact; someone who’d worked at the consulate in Almaty, he’d said, but she wasn’t fooled. She brought a tape-recorder, discreet in the pocket of her blouse. She expected someone who looked like a Mormon, a Man In Black. He was young, dark, bright; blueberry T-shirt, baggy camos. Called himself Mike.

They chatted about Britain. Mike was interested in Ulster. The Orangemen were marching at Drum-cree. Myra told him nothing he didn’t know; he knew more about her than she did, casually name-dropping demos she’d been on in the seventies as he idly turned the foreign news pages of the Boston Globe. They took their coffees outside, sat on a low wall while Myra had a smoke.

Mike nodded at the clenched black fist of a faded black power mural high on a wall on the other side of the street, above the map shop on the corner. “All that’s over,” he said. “No more arguments about the politics, Myra. All of the line-ups are new, now. We aren’t asking you to betray anyone, or anything. Just share information. We have mutual interests. You’re going to a dangerous place, after all.” (Ah, there it was, the threat.) “You never know when the right contacts might be crucial.”

“Indeed,” she said. She was staring abstractedly at a teenage girl with pink hair, sure she’d seen her before. She shook her head. “I’ll bear it in mind,” she said. “Here’s my mobile number.”

Mike gave her his, and went away. That night Myra phoned her tape of the whole conversation through to the office of one of the local sections of the FI, and to a reporter on Mother Jones. The journalist was dubious, the local cadres—after a quick, panicky consultation—told her to play along.

Two weeks later she was in New York, and met Mike again, leaning on the rail of the Staten Island ferry. The last round trip of a day which had been humid, and was now hazy. Commuters dozed on the benches, tourists posed for pictures of themselves with the Statue of Liberty or the towers of Manhattan, the apparat of capital, looming in the background. She agreed to liaise with the consulate when she got back; and in the years that followed, she did, now and then, as she and Georgi clawed their way up the structures of post- Soviet Kazakhstan, through revolutions and counter-revolutions. Mainly she reported on people who were as much her enemies as they were the CIA’s; smugglers of drugs and people and arms, dealers in corruption and mineral concessions and resource looting. She told the FI about every such encounter, and nothing came of it, and it all faded out. After the Fall Revolution a lot of files were opened. Myra had idly run searches on her own name and code-names in them, and found that most of the individuals and companies she’d shopped to the CIA were working for the CIA.

But they still had her down as an asset, the bastards, after all those years and changes.

And the girl with pink hair had been on the Staten Island ferry, too. She never did figure that out, and in the end put it down to coincidence.)

Jason passed her the joint, and they smoked it together as they ambled down the steep, rocky path through neglected olive-trees to the foot of the hill, where they’d left their hired jeep. The dingy little settlement there had consisted of newly built concrete houses, and a few of the stolen stone houses in the first street of the long- emptied Greek town. All of them had been gutted years ago, the Turkish families living there slaughtered by Greek partisans in the last war. The blue-and-white ceramic eyes—for good luck, against the evil eye—above the doors were cracked, the timbers blackened. Myra ground the roach into charcoal ashes that still lay inches deep. She didn’t feel high, just focused, her sight enhanced as if by a VR overlay. She could see why this land was worth fighting over.

Jason got into the driver’s seat as Myra climbed in the other side. He looked at her sympathetically, as though half-sorry for having brought her here.

“Sometimes God is just,” he said.

“Yeah. In a very Old Testament way.”

Jason started up the engine and swung the jeep around on to the narrow road to Hisaronu. The road climbed, scraping trees, edging precipices. Pine and rock and dry gullies—it was like a hot day in Scodand. Myra remembered a day with David Reid, by a river between Dunkeld and Blair Atholl, that had felt just like this. He had talked about depopulation and forced migration in biblical terms as well, she recalled.

“Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin,” she heard herself say.

“What?”

“That thing from the Bible. You know, about the king of Babylon? ‘Thou art weighed in the balances, and found wanting.’ ”

“I’m aware of the source,’Jason said, keeping his eyes on the road. “It’s the relevance that kind of escapes me.”

“It’s the way I feel,” Myra said. She stuck her hand in the air above the windscreen, feeling the cool rush between her fingers.

“That’s how you feel about yourself? That’s bad.”

“No,” she told him. “About the fucking world.”

“That’s worse.”

She laughed, her spirits lifting.

“Anyway,” Jason went on, “it’s just the rejuve talking. People get like that.”

“You would know, huh?”