M uhammad Top ended his morning prayers with a special flourish, three ascending notes flung to the curved bowl of ceiling above his head. He gave a small sigh, allowing himself the brief luxury of repose. Yes. Allahu Akbar. Mighty Allah had replenished his soul during the night hours and now prayer chased sleep from every cobwebbed corner of his waking mind. As he sat kneeling on the hard wooden floor, with nothing but his thin prayer rug for comfort, he shivered.
But, it was not the deep jungle cold that had seeped inside his bones during the night that stirred him.
No, this was a frisson of pure excitement. Papa Top, as he was known to his adoring legions, felt the electric promise of the coming day as a sharp, tingling sensation, one that raced up and down his spine and sped along nerve endings to his extremities. Every day now promised to be a great day, even an historic one. The Day when all wrongs would be righted. And all sins punished. Inshallah. God willing.
The Hour of Retribution.
The Reckoning.
Hello, there! Is that you?
Yes, this feeling was so delightfully pleasant he looked down, half expecting to see an erection sprouting from his groin. But no, the sleepy serpent had not bestirred himself, had not yet risen from the dead calm of the predawn hours. Alas, there had been no concubine in his bed last night, nor did he feel need or want of having one sent up now. No. There was far too much work to be done this day.
Let sleeping snakes lie.
Dawn was just breaking in the leafy green stillness beyond his opened doors and windows. It would still be an hour or more before any trickle of sunlight managed to penetrate the gloom at the very top of the rain forest. Even though his small room was suspended just beneath the deep green canopy of the treetops, only thin rivulets of watery pink light ever managed to leak down his walls as the sun rose over the jungle.
Upon rising from his pallet, Papa Top lit one of the many iron torches that ringed the wall of his spare circular bedchamber high in the trees. During morning prayers, the light from the single flickering kerosene torch threw stark orange and black shadows upon the thatched walls of his room. Torchlight was both eerie and comforting and he would have it no other way. He had become, after all, primarily a creature of darkness.
Like running water, though, electricity was now readily available throughout this strange village. Early on, Muhammad Top had decided to erect his empire high in the trees. Because of the heavy flooding that swept through this remote area during the rainy season, it was critical to be above ground level. And, as all military commanders know, one wanted the high ground in battle. Not that he ever intended to fight here.
His life’s mission was to take the fight to the enemy.
The newly installed high-capacity power stations meant all manner of wonders were possible. There was a new underground communications bunker, the command center, from which he would soon wage his great jihad on the infidels to the north. Electric powered buggies and troop trams, for instance, now sped across the suspended rope bridges that formed the network of the warlike community. Battery-powered aerial drones patrolled the skies above looking for intruders. And Trolls that spat lead rolled through the jungle looking for invaders.
Still, in his primary bedchamber, he chose not to have power at all. He preferred candles or torches in spaces where he lived his solitary life.
Of all elements, Papa Top vastly preferred fire.
Once, when Muhammad was a child, he had visited his paternal ancestral village on the parched banks of the Euphrates in Syria. One day an old crone came to visit his house. She was a Syrian Hama, a witch, veiled and wearing a black cotton garment, called an ezar. Embroidered with symbols of wind, earth, and fire, the flowing ezar enveloped most of her frail body and head. Little Muhammad Top had seen only the witch’s fierce black eyes and, as she had bent and whispered a strange riddle, smelled her sour breath.
“If your house was burning, Muhammad Top,” the woman said to the small boy, “and God in his wisdom allowed you to rush in to save only one single thing, what would that one thing be?”
“I know the answer,” the boy had said, deep vertical creases of concentration forming above his long, already commanding nose. “Wait, it will come.”
“I am patient beyond words,” the witch said.
“If I could save only one thing,” Muhammad Top said, “it would be the fire.”
“Yes,” she whispered, placing her hand atop the boy’s head. “Guard the fire,” she whispered. “You must save the fire.”
He had made her words his life’s calling.
The big man now stood, rose to his full height, six and a half feet, stretched, yawned, and walked through his opened bedroom door and out onto his circular veranda. A gourd hung from a peg beside the door and he dipped it into a wooden bucket of water. He drank. He placed his hands upon the wooden railing still wet with dew and gazed down with complete satisfaction at the tranquil scene below.
Enraptured by the sight of his sleeping treetop village, he almost missed the black scorpion moving swiftly along the railing toward his left hand. The little beast was feeling aggressive, waving his lobsterlike pincers in the air. The poisonous jointed tail was held aloft, curved over his back, ready to strike. He’d found one of these ferocious and deadly monsters in his boot yesterday. He was ill disposed toward them this morning.
He lifted his hand a few centimeters to allow the insect passage beneath it and then slammed his hand down on the rail and smashed the creature with a satisfying crunch beneath his palm.
Life was short, but good, he sighed to himself, scraping the remains of the insect from his hand.
Swirling spirals of mist rose from the damp jungle floor. The damp air created perfect halos around the bobbing torches, the countless fireflies of light streaming below. These were the servants and guard changes. His men rushed with guttering torches across the suspended ropewalks linking the circular thatched and tin rooftops of varying diameter below. These were called roundhouses. The larger ones, like the mosque, were built nearer the ground.
Wisps of smoke curled from chimneys, mingling with the mist. In two of the larger roundhouses, built only fifty feet in the air, fires were now being stoked for cooking. Fans drew off smoke during working hours, to prevent even a wisp from escaping the canopy above.
The day was beginning.
Around the great blue dome of the central mosque (the only tiled roof he allowed) were the larger circles of the great common roundhouses and storage rooms built in the last few years. They provided barracks for House Guards, food and water storerooms, dining, emergency generators, and, of course, vast stores of weapons and ammunition stockpiles.
Above these, smaller circular structures housed officers of sufficient rank to warrant private quarters. Near the river, a sick bay was adjacent to a small room for special prisoners to be interrogated.
Viewed from this position high above, the village resembled, he had always thought, a bizarre flowering, a profusion of manmade silver mushrooms, growing in the thick fragrant air amongst the towering dark trunks of the Amazonian trees. Poisonous mushrooms, he liked to think, yes, poisonous to be sure. To the core.
In the beginning, when all the magic spread out below him was but a vision, he had chosen a simple Spanish name for his hidden refuge in the rain forest, La Selva Negra. It was, he decided, the perfect name for an empire erected in dark hatred.
The Black Jungle.
19
WEST TEXAS
Y ou think that phone will ring if you just stare at it long enough?”
“No, I don’t, Daisy. It was a crazy idea, going down there and talking to that Mexican boy. I could have easily gotten us both killed. I don’t know what I was thinking. Plain stupid, I guess.”
“Well, stop staring at it then. Listen, why don’t you go on outdoors, honey? Take a nice long walk. Go riding or something. You haven’t ridden Rocket in a month or more now. He could use a little giddy-up and go and so could you. For Pete’s sake, Franklin.”
