The Medusa Stone

tej and I’ll forget that my stomach lining has been burned away.”

Selome suddenly leaned across and kissed him full on the mouth, catching Mercer by surprise. He could feel the spicy heat from the wat on her lips and felt a deeper warmth that had nothing to do with the food. The uncharacteristic intimacy shocked her as much as it did him, and she turned away, flustered.

Again the three huge bowls were emptied and again they were refilled, fresh steam rising up in dangerous tendrils that burned like acid. The headman dipped a piece of injera into the fresh stew and palmed a chunk of meat the size of his fist. He handed it to Mercer with another grin. “Fuck?”

“Oh, no problem.” Mercer emptied his tej and jammed the fatty hunk into his mouth with the relish of a native.

Four more times the pots were emptied and recharged. The communal eating platter was mounded with the food the men hadn’t been quick enough to get to their mouths before it dropped. The few die-hards still eating were making a significant dent in these leavings. The Eritreans were doused with grease from their mouths to the tips of their ubiquitous beards and from their fingernails to their forearms. The meal was finally winding down, and Mercer thought it a good time to ask his host a favor. He had kept his notebook with him, sitting on it during the banquet to keep it from either being ruined by grease or accidentally eaten by one of the clansmen. He opened the book to his sketch of the valley and mountain around the kimberlite pipe and asked Selome to translate.

“Do you recognize this place?”

“Yes, of course.” The headman tried to draw himself straight, but the prodigious amount of alcohol made his spine rebel and he slumped against his neighbor. “My father’s mother was born near that place. It is on the western flank of Hajer. We call it the Valley of Dead Children.”

“Why is that?”

“Because that is its name,” the old man pointed out logically.

“But why that name?” Mercer persisted.

“Who knows? That’s what it’s been called since long before time was recorded.” He was starting to fade away from the conversation, his eyes rolling back into his skull and his lips going rubbery around the last few words. “Even before the war, no one went to this place. Evil spirits live in the hills. My father told me that even animals refuse to enter the valley. They could feel the ghosts. Now the area around the Valley of Dead Children is full of mines. A cousin lost his eldest son there two rains ago when the boy went looking for a young goat that wandered away from his herd.”

“Have you been to this valley?”

“No.” And the headman started to snore.

* * *

Years of friendship with Harry White should have prepared Mercer for the next morning’s hangover, but his previous experiences couldn’t have possibly readied him for the pounding in his skull or the maelstrom that churned his gut. Everyone was still in the tent, most snoring loudly where they’d passed out the night before. One clansmen lying in the platter was dangerously close to drowning in the grease pooled at its bottom. Mercer came awake in slow, painful stages, dimly aware that it was still dark outside and the tent was lit with only a single guttering oil lamp.

Selome was curled up in the crook of his arm, her head resting lightly on the pads of muscle. Her face was toward him, her mouth parted and her lips shining in the murky light. Mercer recalled the surprising kiss she had given him the night before and passed it off as alcohol-induced affection. He kissed her forehead and carefully disentangled her limbs from his.

By the luminous dial of his watch, dawn was half an hour away. The moon hung near the horizon in its own bright corona. Mercer shuffled unsteadily to the Toyota. He retrieved a bundle from under the truck and returned to the low stools placed just outside the tent’s entrance. Mercer recalled that the headman’s name was Negga, and he was already sitting, his head hanging limply between his hands. Mercer tapped him on the shoulder and offered one of the Milotti beers he had left overnight in a sodden towel. The beer was refreshingly cold.

“Little hair of the hyena for you.” If Mercer was going to make it through the day, he’d need a beer to push back the effects of the tej. Harry called it the “deferred hangover plan. Party now and pay later.”

Habte and Gibby joined them after Mercer had passed a second beer to Negga.

“Habte, ask our host if he would give us a man to guide us to the Valley of Dead Children.”

“I am taking my family farther east to catch the rains,” Habte translated for the nomad leader. “My herds and flocks have been months without good pasturage. I want to help you, but I can’t delay. But heed my words. You don’t want to go up there. Not only do you have to worry about the mines, but I’ve heard there’s an army stationed on the Sudan side of the border. They arrived about six days ago.”

“Who are they?”

“I don’t know. They’re not regular soldiers, and it was said that there are at least fifty of them, all well armed. A force that size is too big for one of the shifta gangs.” The chieftain shrugged his shoulders. “Their presence is a mystery.”

Mercer retrieved his topographical map of Eritrea and spread it on the ground in front of Negga. “Can you at least show me where on the Hajer Plateau the valley lies?”

Negga stared at the map with incomprehension. Like most nomads, he relied on the accumulated knowledge of generations of wanderers to know his territory. Even after Mercer pointed to the Adobha River as a reference, Negga still couldn’t understand how the compressed lines on the flat projection represented the rugged northern mountains. “I don’t know what this paper means. The valley is on the west flank of the plateau, a long day’s ride on a swift camel from Ila Babu. That is all I can tell you.”

“Would you at least guide my people to Nacfa so they can get another truck I have waiting and then take them to Ila Babu?” There were no roads connecting the two towns.

“We have drunk from the same bottle. Of course, I will do this thing for you. But I will not permit my people to go beyond Ila Babu. I won’t lose any of my family for your search.”

“Fair enough.”

Negga’s expression brightened. “It will cost you only two hundred American dollars.”

In their debilitated state, it took Habte and Gibby a half hour to transfer the fuel from the jerry cans into the Toyota, lashing the spares onto the cargo rack under the stores already there. Mercer went to talk to Negga’s son, who spoke passable English, shook hands when they came to an agreement, and passed over some money.

“It sounds like we are not going with you,” Habte said when Mercer returned to the truck.

“You’re not. I don’t want Selome with us if I run into any trouble, and I can’t trust her alone with Negga’s guides.” Mercer paused. “There’s something else. Yesterday when we were talking about returning here, Selome asked if I thought I had discovered the mine’s location. Do you remember?”

Habte nodded slowly.

“As far as I know, she thinks we’re only looking for a kimberlite pipe, not a mine. It’s the same thing the kidnappers said. Unless she has outside knowledge, she shouldn’t know anything about the mine. I haven’t told her.”

Habte accepted this without a change of expression. “I’ll keep my eye on her, see if she tries to contact anyone in Nacfa.”

“Good. Thank you.”

“What about Gibby?”

“He stays with me.” Mercer secured the last corner of a cargo net. “I can use the help, and I’ll send him to meet you in Ila Babu to direct you to the mine site if I find it.”

“What were you talking to Negga’s son about?” Habte asked.

“Contingency plan B,” Mercer said and handed over his spare sat-phone with instructions on how and when to use it.

At last they were ready. Negga assured Mercer that two of his sons would take Selome and Habte to Nacfa the following morning. Selome was still asleep, and while Mercer felt a twinge of guilt leaving her without an explanation, he didn’t let it show. He swallowed three ibuprofin tablets, drank a full liter of purified water, then mounted the truck. Gibby was already strapped into the passenger seat, his head lolling as if its weight was too great a burden for his neck.