Tourists
     Lisa Goldstein



     A 3S digital back-up edition v1.0
click for scan notes and proofing history


                   Contents
     Dr. Tamir’s House
 •

     War in Borol and Marol
 •

     Twenty-fifth November Street: 1
 •

     In the City
 •

     Casey and Rafiz
 •

     Twenty-fifth November Street: 2
 •

     The Jewel King’s Palace
 •

     Twenty-fifth November Street: 3
 •

     The Jewel King’s Tomb
 •

     A Trip to the Ruins
 •

     A Trip into the Mountains
 •

     Twenty-fifth November Street: 4
 •

     The Book of Stones
 •

     One way to Twenty-fifth November Street
 •

     Casey and Mama
 •
          Another Way to Twenty-fifth November Street
      •

          The Jewel King’s Sword
      •

          Twenty-fifth November Street: 5
      •

          Home
      •



  Other books by Lisa Goldstein
  The Red Magician
  The Dream Years
  A Mask for the General

   This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places and incidents are either the product of the
author’s imagination or are used fictitiously- Any
resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1989 by Lisa Goldstein
  All rights reserved including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
  SIMON AND SCHUSTER and colophon are
registered trademarks of Simon and Schuster Inc.
  Designed by Kathy Kikkert
  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication
Data
  Goldstein, Lisa.
  Tourists / Lisa Goldstein.
  p. cm.
  I. Title.
  PS3557.0397T68 1989
  813'.54—dcl9 88-36721
  CIP
  ISBN 0-671-67531-1
                  To Mikey Roessner-Herman
                    The Peripatetic Woman



          Dr. Tamir’s House
                                                         ^»
Dr. Mitchell Parmenter stood in the middle of a room in Amaz
and looked around him. Why in God’s name was it so huge?
Was it supposed to be a living room? Did Dr. Tamir, with
whom he had arranged to trade houses for a year, do a lot of
entertaining? If so he was going to be disappointed with the
size of the Parmenters’ living room, that was certain.
  The big room was crowded. Tall oak bookshelves, some with
glass fronts, stood straight against two walls, the shelves
stuffed with books, manuscripts, geodes, carved and crudely
painted animals, an African thumb piano, a nest with two
perfect blue eggs. Mitchell recognized a double birdcage from
Indonesia made of jackfruit; the two halves, originally
intended for the male and female birds, were being used as
bookends. Against the other two walls and in the center of the
room were long wooden benches, and on the walls hung
swords, silk-screen tapestries and wooden masks.
  Mitchell ran his hand absently over the back of one of the
benches. He was a tall, large man with the heavy grace of a
sea mammal, with thick brown hair, gray eyes, a fleshy nose,
heavy lips.
  The young man who had brought Mitchell to the house
moved a little, and the polished wooden floor creaked beneath
him. Mitchell turned suddenly; he had forgotten the man was
there. “Well, ” Mitchell said. The word echoed a little in the
vaulted ceiling. “I didn’t really expect—how many bedrooms
did you say it has?”
  “Three, Dr. Parmenter,” the young man said.
   Three, good. One for him and Claire, one for Casey and one
for Angela. He wouldn’t have to worry about Casey, but what
would Angie make of this strange country, this strange house?
  The young man led him through a door at the far end of the
room and down a long corridor. “The bedrooms, Doctor,” he
said. In contrast to the living room the bedrooms were small
and plain, the hardwood floor scuffed, the white paint peeling
in places. And they were too close together, two right next to
each other and one across the narrow corridor. Angie was
always talking to herself or laughing or screaming, and it
would be hard to concentrate. Maybe he could do his work at
the college—he’d have to see what kind of office they’d give
him. And Casey could have the room next to Angie’s—she
didn’t seem to mind her as much as he did.
   The young man showed him the kitchen and the
bathroom—one bathroom for the four of them, but at least all
the fixtures and appliances looked new—and they went back
to the living room. Now he noticed that the walls were made
of massive gray stones, fitted carefully one on top of the other.
He went closer to examine them. No mortar, everything cut
perfectly to match. “When was this house built?” he asked the
young man.
  “Oh, it would be impossible to say—approximately three
hundred years ago. Perhaps more,” the man said.
  “Doesn’t it get cold in the winter?” Mitchell asked.
  “Ah,” the young man said, “but it never gets cold here.”
  The young man let himself out. Belatedly Mitchell
remembered his manners. “Thank you for showing me
around,” he called after him. “And thanks for the ride from the
airport!” The young man nodded and closed the thick wooden
door, bound in brass, behind him.
  The silence settled over Mitchell immediately. Despite the
sun, despite what the young man had said, he was starting to
feel cold. He wished he could remember the young man’s
name, wished he knew what he did. Probably connected with
the college in some way. There had been a hasty introduction
in the car at the airport, but Mitchell hadn’t been used to the
man’s accent yet and the words had mostly passed him by.
   He paced back and forth across the floor, the polished wood
creaking loudly beneath him. Come on, he told himself. This
isn’t like you. At home you’re always yelling for quiet, you
need perfect silence to work. Well, here it is—perfect silence.
Get to work.
   He stopped and looked at a small light fixture shaped like a
candle set into the wall. There were eight of the fixtures, he
noticed, two on each wall. At least there’s electricity, he
thought. It must have been added long after the house was
built. If that ever goes, we’re dead. There aren’t any windows
in this room. He shivered suddenly.
  I can’t get to work, he thought. I have to show Dr. Jara the
manuscript and get him to tell me if he thinks it’s authentic.
There’s not much point in starting to work if it’s a fake.
   He paced some more. Too bad Claire isn’t here, he thought.
Another month, and then Dr. Tamir gets back from his field
trip and goes to the States and moves into our house. I hope
he likes it. I hope the family likes it here. Maybe this’ll get us
out of the rut we’ve been in.


The next morning Mitchell left the gray stone house and stood
blinking in the sun, holding his briefcase in one hand and Dr.
Tamir’s letter in the other. “Across the street,” Dr. Tamir had
written, “is a statue of a man holding an egg.”
   Mitchell raised his eyes from the letter. Sure enough, the
bronze man across the street stood holding a bronze egg
carefully cupped in his hand. His shoulders were thrown back
heroically, and he seemed to be looking out both at the future
and at his egg. Why on earth would the people of Amaz want
to honor a man and his egg? There must be a story behind it,
one of those pieces of folklore that some of his colleagues at
the university loved to collect. He made a mental note to learn
more.
  To the left of the statue a small knot of people stood silently,
doing nothing. No, they were looking at his house—Tamir’s
house. He scanned the letter to see if Tamir had had anything
to say about them, but there was nothing. He frowned. The
group swayed slightly, like a small tide. What on earth were
they doing? They were all wearing turbans.
  He ignored them and crossed the street, following Tamir’s
directions. As he got closer to them he saw that only the men
were wearing turbans. The women wore bright clothes of blue
and red. In the fierce light it hurt his eyes to look at them.
Neither the men nor the women said anything to him as he
passed.
   “Most of the streets in the city have no names,” Tamir’s
letter went on. “Additionally, there was a devastating fire a
few years ago, and small earthquakes occur frequently. It may
seem to you, before you become accustomed, that the city is
moving, that it has a life of its own. But you will soon be able
to find your way to the major landmarks. Though if you wish
to go anywhere else—I confess I have lived in the city all my
life and can still lose my way.”
  Mitchell reread the paragraph and frowned. It had seemed
straightforward enough when he had read it in the United
States, but under the different sky of Amaz it took on a new
character, a mystical tone. Was this the man who was going to
stay in the Parmenters’ house for a year? Maybe he should
have asked for more references.
   A man drove a donkey leisurely across the street and traffic
came to a standstill. Cars honked furiously, a man leaned out
of his car window and shouted, another man got out of his car
and slammed the door angrily, shaking his fist at the man
with the donkey, who was taking no notice of anyone. The air
had quickly taken on the smell of exhaust fumes, but there
was a hint of cinnamon and of something else. The sea?
   Mitchell walked on. “Turn left at the empty field,” he read.
He saw no empty field anywhere on the street, but to his left
there were rows of red woven umbrellas, diminishing with
distance. A loud raucous noise came from beneath the
umbrellas, something like the noise of a carnival—but like
that of no carnival he had ever heard. Curious, he went closer.
It was an animal market.
   A fat woman sat under her umbrella surrounded by cages of
parrots wearing the strange colors of tropical flowers. Under
the umbrella next to her cages of monkeys were piled one on
top of the other, and over them all a monkey hung from the
supports of the umbrella as if he were the proprietor. Snakes
in terrariums. An ocelot, pacing alone in a cage under an
umbrella. And tethered to a stake at the end of the row, all by
itself, an elephant raised its trunk.
  Mitchell smiled to himself. Casey would love this place. And
Angie—would she even notice that she was in a different
country? As always when he thought of Angie he felt uneasy.
He began to walk faster.
   The animal market had to be Tamir’s empty field. Mitchell
turned left, turned right at the old railroad tracks sinking
slowly into the asphalt of the street, walked past what seemed
to be miles of stores displaying nothing but bathroom fixtures.
“Money?” a beggar asked. He held a bowl firmly between two
bare feet, and Mitchell, looking at him quickly and then
looking away, thought he might be missing an arm, or two.
“Money?” the beggar said again. “Hungry?” Mitchell hurried
past him. On his left, on a vacant storefront, someone had
scrawled something in unreadable jagged graffiti, and over
that, nearly covering it, another hand had drawn stylized,
almost circular letters.
   Down a street to his right was the marble building that had
to be the university, endowed by the silver barons at the turn
of the century and since then fallen on hard times. The short
street even had a signpost with a name on it in Lurqazi and
English: University Avenue. He hurried up to the university
and found the anthropology building—low and made of wood,
as they all were, once past the impressive auditorium and
administration building. The directory gave him the number of
Dr. Jara’s office and he went down the hall and knocked on
the door.
  “Come in,” a voice—a familiar voice—said.
  Mitchell opened the door. Behind the desk, in a tan coat and
a brown silk tie, sat the young man who had met him at the
airport yesterday.
  It was the coat and tie that saved Mitchell; otherwise he
would have taken the man for a secretary, and that would
have been unforgivable. He walked into the room and
stretched out his hand.
  “Good morning, Dr. Jara, ” he said. Should he mention the
airport? No, better to pretend the whole thing never happened.
Maybe Jara would assume jet lag. Damn, why did he have to
be so goddamned preoccupied all the time?
  “Ah, Dr. Parmenter,” Jara said, standing to take his hand.
“Have you brought the manuscript?” He had the same accent
as Tamir, Mitchell noticed now, as all the intellectual class of
Amaz, slightly British, with a tendency to use a longer word if
one was available. Casey had gone through a stage like that,
Mitchell thought, smiling as he nearly always did when
thinking of his daughter. Thank God she was over it.
  But Jara was looking at him. Preoccupied again, Mitchell
thought. “Yes, yes I have,” he said. He set the briefcase on the
desk, thumbed the combination and opened it.
  Jara lifted the transparent plastic bag containing the
manuscript carefully out of the briefcase. “And you say you
discovered this—where?” he said. He was already looking at
the colored web of calligraphy, the old Lurqazi letters before
the switch to the Roman alphabet.
  “At the university,” Mitchell said. “In a box labeled ‘Arabic
Studies.’ ” He still could not believe his luck.
  “Yes,” Jara said. He pointed to a colored wheel of letters
that seemed to Mitchell to swirl like a kaleidoscope. “That is
called The Sun Upon the Waters. But of course you have
researched this before you came here.”
  Mitchell nodded. His impatience took over and he said, “Do
you think it’s genuine?”
   The young man sat back in his chair and placed the tips of
his fingers together. “It is too soon to tell, of course,” he said.
“I shall have to perform tests—”
  “It’s been tested,” Mitchell said. “Judging by the materials it
was made some time around the ninth century.”
  “Ah,” Jara said. “But my own tests. But as a guess,
examining it now, I think that it may be authentic. It may be.
” He ran his fingers up and down the plastic. “And it seems to
be, as you said, directions—”
  “Directions to the Jewel King’s sword, ” Mitchell said. He
was almost whispering. “It might be—it might be the Book of
Stones itself, mentioned in the epics.”
  Dr. Jara was silent for a minute, staring at letters as bright
as the Jewel King’s robes. “You know,” he said finally, “I wrote
my thesis on the sword. I examined its archetypal aspects, the
similarity between it and Excalibur, the sword in the
Arthurian stories. And now here you are saying that this
sword is a real thing, that it exists. You will turn us all on our
heads, Dr. Parmenter.”
  “Well,” Mitchell said, unsure of what answer to give to this,
“get back to me as soon as possible. Please. I’m anxious to
begin work.”
  “I should imagine. Yes,” Dr. Jara said, nodding. The nod was
a dismissal. Now that it came to it Mitchell was reluctant to
leave, to hand over the manuscript. He stood for a moment, a
big man looming over the small desk, the slight form of Dr.
Jara—how embarrassing that he hadn’t caught his name at
the airport yesterday!—but Jara said nothing more, and
Mitchell turned to leave.
  He spent a few hours at the library and in his new office,
ate lunch at the university cafeteria, but there was really
nothing he could do until Jara got back to him. He took out
Tamir’s letter and followed the directions home.
   The crowd of people on the corner across from the house was
still there, had if anything grown larger. Looking at them
Mitchell realized that he hadn’t seen anyone else in turbans in
the entire city. He passed the statue, wondering again why
the man was carrying an egg. Or was it a woman? The long
hair made it hard to tell, and he didn’t want to linger near the
crowd, as silent and ominous as the sea. He hurried across the
street.
  The living room was cold and dim as he entered, and he
fumbled for the lights and turned them on. Masks and
tapestries sprang into existence around him. He frowned. Had
that bench always been against the wall like that? Hadn’t it
been in the center of the room? He walked past the bench and
down the corridor toward his bedroom, still frowning, but he
had already forgotten about it. He was used to things moving
around on him: it was what happened when you didn’t pay too
much attention to your surroundings.
   The room looked as if it had been the site of one of Dr.
Tamir’s small earthquakes. His mattress had been tossed to
the floor and slit down the middle; his suitcases emptied and
their contents spread over the room; the few suits he had hung
up in the doorless closet were sprawled on the floor, still on
their hangers, with their pockets turned inside out. He moved
forward like a disaster victim, stood uncertainly in the room,
and then with an abrupt gesture he lifted the mattress back
onto the bed, feeling it buckle in his arms. He left the
mattress half on, half off the bed, ran outside and crossed the
street.
  The band of people was still there. He looked at them,
uncertain of who was the leader, where to start. “Did any of
you see anyone go into my house?” he asked.
  They seemed to shuffle, to shift like the changing patterns
of leaves stirred by the wind. Long years of teaching had
shown him that the best way to deal with crowds was to single
out an individual. He picked out a young man, drawn by the
fact that his turban was on a little crooked, and said, “Did
anyone go into my house while I was gone?”
  He thought the group was moving at the edges, forming
new patterns, but the young man and the people around him
stood still. The young man looked at him like an anthropology
student doing his first year of fieldwork, as if he expected
something from Mitchell. Finally he said something softly in
Lurqazi.
   “Do you speak English?” Mitchell asked. The dialect of
Lurqazi he could read had changed radically in the fifteenth
century, and anyway he had never tried to speak it. “Does
anyone here speak English?” he asked, spinning so that he
could see everyone in the crowd. He stopped, feeling
off-balance and out of breath. “Did anyone see anybody go into
my house while I was gone?” Silence. He had the feeling they
were mocking him, that they could all speak English fluently.
“Why are you standing here?” he asked. “Why are you all
looking at my house?”
   He looked around. Dusk was coming on, though the traffic
was as heavy as ever. Car horns called to each other and were
answered. No one spoke. “I’m going to call the cops,” he said.
The crowd stared back at him, mouths open, eyes wide, as
though fascinated. “And when I do I’m going to ask them if
you have a permit to stand here all day like this. Do you
understand?” He turned and left, hoping he had salvaged
something from the situation, fearing he had made a fool of
himself. He resisted the impulse to look back at the people he
felt massed behind him, watching him.
   Back inside he walked slowly through the living room and
the empty echoing bedrooms, making sure they were
untouched. The cluttered front room seemed the same as he’d
left it, but how would he know if anything was missing?
Damn, now he’d have to write to Dr. Tamir on top of
everything else. Then he went to his own bedroom, picked
everything up off the floor, rehung his suits, checked to see if
anything had been taken. His traveler’s checks were still
there, and so was the watch Claire had given him for their
anniversary. He had taken his passport with him when he’d
left.
  The floorboards creaked under his feet as he went back to
the living room to use the phone. On his first try he heard
nothing but static. He hung up, jiggled the button and listened
to the gabble of another conversation. Finally he connected
with the operator and asked for the police. When a man came
on the line he asked for someone who could speak English. The
English speaker told him they would be right over. He sat in
the darkened living room, the dim lights unable to penetrate
the dark of the groined ceiling overhead, trying to concentrate
on his fourteenth-century Lurqazi dictionary. By eleven it
became clear that the police were not coming. He remembered
he’d had nothing to eat since the afternoon at the university.
He sighed, put down the book and went off to his bedroom.
   Sometime in the night he awoke, hungry and dazed, sure
that he’d heard a noise. He rose, careful to make no sound,
walked down the corridor to the living room, and turned on
the dim lights. Everything was just as he’d left it. He opened
the door, letting in the light of a million stars. Across the
street, darker black against the black of the night, looking as
if they hadn’t moved for hours, stood the group of people in
turbans.


By morning everything was clear. His house had been
ransacked for the manuscript. Funny how he hadn’t thought of
that last night. But who had known about the manuscript?
Only Dr. Jara, and anyone Jara might have told. So it had to
be someone at the university. Mitchell wasn’t even surprised.
He’d heard of similar things happening at his own university
in the States, though never so violent. As he went toward the
phone to try the police again he decided that he wouldn’t
mention the manuscript or the university unless he was asked.
It didn’t do to get one’s hosts in trouble, after all.
  He reached the police on the third try. “Hello?” he said.
“Hello, does anyone there speak English?”
  “Hello?” someone said. “Yes, I would receive enormous
pleasure to practice my English with you. Please continue,
please.”
  Mitchell sighed. Another damn intellectual, though what he
was doing working with the police Mitchell couldn’t imagine.
“My house was broken into last night. I called the
police—called you—last night and someone promised to come,
but no one did.”
  “Ah,” the man at the other end said. “And what was taken
during this breaking-in?”
  “Well, I don’t think anything was, but—”
   “Well you see, that is why we did not come,” the man said.
“If there was nothing taken, then it is not a crime, and if it is
not a crime, then we do not come. You see?”
  “You mean—you mean breaking and entering isn’t a crime?”
Mitchell asked. “My mattress was cut open, my things were
thrown all around the room, but that’s okay?”
  “Yes, exactly, sor,” the man said.
  “But what if they come back?” Mitchell said. “What if they
were looking for something, and they come back because they
didn’t find it?”
  “Ah, ” the man said, “then it becomes a matter for the
police. Then you call us, sor.”
  “But don’t you want to—to take fingerprints or something?
Check the locks?”
   “I don’t know how you do these things in America, sor,” the
man said. “But we do it differently here. You must try to be
tolerant of other customs.”
  Even through his anger Mitchell recognized the irony—a
policeman telling a professor of anthropology to be tolerant of
other customs. “Well, what about last night?” he asked. “When
the policeman I talked to promised to come to the house? You
mean he had no intention of coming over?”
  “That is precisely what I do mean, sor,” the man said. “No
intention whatsoever.”
  “But why the hell—why did he say he’d come?”
   “Ah, well, this is Amaz, sor,” the man said. “You must be
tolerant—”
  Mitchell swore and hung up. Now that he thought about it,
he realized that he’d probably been too distraught to give the
man he’d talked to last night an address. No, he definitely
hadn’t given him the address, because he didn’t even know
what the address was. Whenever he’d sent Dr. Tamir a letter
he’d had to write a whole series of complex instructions on the
front of the envelope, instructions that seemed to be directions
from the post office to the house. He had no idea how anyone
would get to the house from the police station.
   He swore again, went over to the heavy wooden door and
examined the lock. It didn’t seem to have been tampered with.
He opened the door and looked outside. Across the street, like
a parade unaccountably come to a standstill, stood the group
of people, waiting, expectant. It appeared to have grown larger
since the day before.
  Mitchell slammed the door. If only Claire were here, he
thought.



          War in Borol and Marol
                                                        «^»
Angie screamed from upstairs.
  “Oh dear,” Claire said in the kitchen, looking up from her
newspaper. She’s still staring at the same page, Casey
thought. That could be some kind of record for her, over half
an hour. Maybe I should time her. Claire took another sip of
her drink and said, “Casey, could you go and see what’s
wrong?”
  “Sure, Mom,” Casey said. She put down her physics book
and went upstairs.
  Angie was sitting quietly on the floor of her room, her black
notebooks spiraling around her. As always, Casey couldn’t help
noticing, with a little envy, how beautiful her sister was, her
long white-blond hair and blue eyes. “What’s wrong?” Casey
said.
  Angie looked up at her slowly. “What are you doing here?”
she asked. “Borol and Marol are still preparing for war. Are
you here to discuss treaty terms?”
  Casey thought quickly. It was one of those days, then, when
Angie would not come out of her imaginary kingdoms. The
kingdoms had been fun even as recently as last year, but now
that Casey was fourteen and Angie fifteen Casey thought it
was time to put them away. But when she’d told Angie a few
months ago that she was no longer interested in playing there
had been fires in Borol, Angie’s country, plagues and invasions
in Marol, Casey’s country, and at the end of it the two
kingdoms had declared war. “No,” Casey said, still determined
not to humor her sister, to try by harshness to bring her back
from wherever she had gone. “I’m here to find out why you
screamed.”
  “A messenger from Marol has opened the War Gate in the
Twelve-gated City for the first time in over four hundred
years,” Angie said. She used as many words as she could in the
language she and Casey had made up together: messenger,
war, gate, city. “The war has begun.”
   “So it’s nothing important then,” Casey said. Angie flinched
a little at the severe tone but said nothing. “Good. I’ve got to
get back to my homework.”
  “Your kingdom is doomed,” Angie said in Bordoril, the
made-up language. Her eyes were hard as stones. “You have
put off your preparations for war for too long.” This time the
only words she could manage in Bordoril were “you” and
“war.”
   “So slaughter me,” Casey said, trying to sound light. She
left Angie’s room and closed the door behind her.
  As she went down the steps she wondered if there was
something more she could be doing to help her sister. Maybe I
could have cooperated more with that psychologist Dad found,
she thought. Well, but he didn’t want to learn Bordoril, even
though I offered to teach him, even though that’s all Angie
was speaking to him. And he didn’t want to discuss Freud’s
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious with me. You’d
think they’d teach psychologists about precocious adolescents.
Apparently not. Anyway he wasn’t too bright. He gave up on
Angie after only a few weeks.
  I can’t think of anything else I could be doing for her. Mom
and Dad say she’ll grow out of it. I did. But there’s a lot Mom
and Dad don’t know.
   She went back into the kitchen. Her mother had almost
finished her drink and was still looking at the same page in
the newspaper. “What happened?” Claire asked absently. She
hadn’t combed her fine pale hair yet, Casey saw, and it hung
in wisps around her face like a tangle of thread. Her round
face was unlined, but when she bent her head, as she was
doing now, Casey could see the soft web of wrinkles in her
double chin.
  “Oh, you know,” Casey said. “The usual thing.”
  Claire lifted her hands softly, fingers spread as though she
had just polished her nails. “I can hardly wait until we leave,”
she said. “Your father knows how to deal with her. Sometimes
I think he’s the only one holding this family together. God
knows I can’t.”
  Oh Mom, Casey thought, sitting at the kitchen table and
picking up her book. Don’t you know I’m the one holding
everything together?


Angie made a mark in one of her notebooks and the messenger
at the gate was dead, killed by a watchman on the walls.
There, she thought with satisfaction. The first casualty in the
war, and he was from Marol, one of Casey’s. If Casey had been
here she could have retaliated, there could have been a good
border skirmish, but since she wasn’t… Angie shrugged. Casey
hadn’t even built up her border defenses. The war would end
with Marol conquered by Borol and lying in ruins, probably.
And then she wouldn’t need Casey for anything. Then she
could explore both countries on her own.
  It would have been more fun with Casey, though. The
thought sneaked past her defenses like a spy in the
Twelve-gated City. Casey had had some of the best ideas, had
made up Bordoril’s grammar, had, after looking through their
father’s anthropology textbooks, come up with the Winter
Solstice festival that the two of them celebrated every year.
This would be the first year she would celebrate it alone.
   Damn Casey anyway! She hadn’t said anything, but Angie
knew that she preferred to be outside, out in the world. But
what was out there for them anyway? They had talked it over
many times, and each time they had come to the same
answer: Nothing. Kids who made fun of them because they did
so well in school. And lately something even worse, boys who
followed Angie home after school, whistling and howling and
calling to her. Why? Because she had long blond hair and
breasts? Didn’t Casey see how stupid that was, how stupid
everyone was?
  Well, she’d solved one of her problems, anyway. She had
stopped doing her homework, stopped doing anything that
didn’t involve the Two Kingdoms. No one could call her brainy
or good in school again. She knew that her parents had been
called in to talk to her teachers but she didn’t care. School had
nothing she wanted, none of the poetry or glittering
complexity of the long histories of Borol and Marol. “But Borol
and Marol aren’t real ,” everyone said, sooner or later. But
what did that matter? They were beautiful.
   So why didn’t Casey want to play any more? She didn’t care
what anyone else said, but Casey had been her only friend for
so long. Her laughter and cutting remarks were like a
reproach. Angie bent over another notebook, her long hair
falling like a curtain over her face, and counted her troop
strength.


The next day was Monday, a school day. At lunch Casey was
allowed to leave school and take a bus to the city college. She
remembered the rising excitement she had felt when her
counselor had taken out the college catalog and shown her the
list of courses. “You mean—I can take any one of these
classes?” she had asked.
  That had been a mistake, letting him see how thrilled she
was. They spent more time on the problem kids, the ones who
didn’t react, just like at home. Finally she’d chosen a
beginning physics class. At first it had been a relief to leave
school, to skip lunch, the slow and shallow kids talking about
trivia, the teachers even stupider than the kids. But in the last
few weeks she started to suspect that the students at the city
college were just as slow. She felt cheated. She’d thought that
at last she’d have access to a whole other way of life, to a place
where people finally understood her. But nothing had changed.
  Last week she had confronted the counselor. He mumbled
something about the school’s giving her credit for next year in
Amaz, and letting her start at the university when she came
back. It would depend on her SAT scores, he told her, and on
her behavior. She wondered what he meant by that. Did he
know that she went out after class with some of the kids,
drinking coffee, smoking dope? No, that was ridiculous, how
could he know? She could hardly wait to go to the university,
the place where her father taught, but she wasn’t going to be
blackmailed. Her SAT scores would be good, she knew. She
continued to hang out with the kids at the college. What the
hell, she wouldn’t see any of them ever again after next
month.
   The first thing she had done, when her father had said they
would spend a year in Amaz, was to go to the library. Her
neighborhood library had had only two books on Amaz, but the
librarian, seeing her interest in the country, had put her in
touch with a worldwide network of pen pals. She had chosen
Rafiz at random from a list at the back of a magazine. Now,
sitting by the window on the bus to the college, she took out
her letter to him and reread it.


Dear Rafiz ,
  I’m sorry to tell you that most of your guesses about what I
look like were wrong. I’m fourteen years old, not in my early
twenties, as you thought. I’m very mature for my age, though,
and will probably be starting at the university next year. I hope
you’re not disappointed.
  I have medium-length brown hair, red in certain lights, or
so I’d like to believe. In fact I dyed it red for a while, but a
book I read on Amaz says that women with dyed hair are
considered loose, so I stopped.
  I think my best feature is my eyes, which are large and gray.
My worst feature is my nose, which is too fat, like my father’s.
But you can judge for yourself —I’m sending you a picture .
  Now it’s your turn. What do you look like? I imagine you in
your early twenties, tall, lean, with a narrow face and dark
eyes. Am I right? Send me a picture if you have one.
  I can’t wait to get to Amaz and see for myself what I’ve been
reading about for so many months. My father is already there.
And of course I can’t wait to meet you.
                                                     As always ,
                                                          Casey


P.S. Is it true about the women with dyed hair? If the
guidebook was wrong I can go back to dyeing my hair.


The bus was coming up to her stop. She folded the letter,
sealed it and a picture in the envelope and got off the bus.
   She had fifteen minutes before her class started. The
counselor had suggested that she use the time to eat lunch.
Instead she went to the bathroom and put on makeup she had
stolen from Angie. She knew her sister would never miss it;
her mother had gotten it for Angie back when she had been
trying to get her to socialize more. As if Angie needed makeup
to look beautiful. The makeup and her height (Casey was tall
for her age) helped to make her look a little older.
  As she walked into class she felt the letter in her purse like
heavy treasure. Only a few more weeks, she thought. A few
more weeks and I’ll be in another country. Somewhere else.
Then, suddenly, it was time to leave. Casey packed her physics
book, a guidebook to Amaz, a Lurqazi dictionary and phrase
book, and five or six other books she’d gotten at the campus
bookstore. Angie packed all her black notebooks, the long
history of Borol and Marol. Claire packed clothes for all of
them, unpacked when a phone call to her husband told her
how hot it was in Amaz, unpacked again when she decided it
might turn cold in winter. Casey said good-bye to everyone at
the city college, slept for about two hours the night before the
flight, slept again in the cab to the airport, and woke to hear
her mother say, “We’re going to leave you here if you don’t
wake up, I mean it.”


Mitchell stood in the terminal, watching as groups of people
left the plane. Almost immediately he saw Casey running
down the steps and to the line on the landing field to have her
passport stamped. She looked up and he waved to her through
the window. The landing field, paved with tar, seemed to be
melting in the heat. A few moments later she ran inside and
hugged him so hard she nearly threw him off-balance.
  “Hi,” he said after she let him go. He sneaked a close look at
her when she turned away for a moment. Hadn’t her hair been
redder? “Where’s your mother and Angie?”
  “Oh, they’re still on the plane,” Casey said. Groups of
tourists moved to the left, almost as if they were being
processed by an invisible hand, heading for the taxis and
air-conditioned buses which would take them to the hotels and
beaches up the coast. “I couldn’t wait.”
  Claire and Angie came inside the terminal, Claire waving,
Angie expressionless. At least one of his daughters had turned
out all right, Mitchell thought for what must be the hundredth
time. He looked at Casey again as she stood by the terminal
window, and he felt the familiar love for her, as though his rib
cage had turned to soft jelly. If anything happened to her…
But nothing would; she could look out for herself. Angie was
the one they had to worry about.
   He hugged Claire and led his family to the luggage carousel
and then out the glass doors to the cab waiting for them by
the curb. Angie walked a little apart, as if pretending they
were someone else’s family entirely. In the cab he turned to
the back seat and asked Claire, “Did Dr. Tamir get in all
right?”
  She nodded, looking past Angie at the maze of the city
streets. The cab stopped abruptly and the driver started to
honk, joining the rising crescendo of other horns up and down
the street.
  “Did he get my letter?” Mitchell asked.
  “Letter?” Claire asked, not looking away from the street.
  “What’s that?” Casey asked from Angie’s other side, pointing
to a group of wooden stalls on the sidewalk and halfway into
the street.
  Traffic started to move again and the cab swerved around
the stalls, coming within inches of one of them.
   “I don’t know,” Mitchell said, then to Claire, “The letter I
wrote. His house was broken into. Don’t worry, none of our
things were taken,” he added quickly, though Claire hadn’t
looked worried at all. “But the police won’t come unless
something was stolen, and I sent him a list of everything that
I thought was valuable… If he can spot something missing
then I can finally get the police out here.”
   “I don’t know,” Claire said. “I don’t know anything about a
letter.”
  “What are those?” Casey asked. “All those buildings over
there, by the hills?”
  Mitchell looked up toward the hills and saw pale spires,
marble domes, golden roofs flaming in the sunlight. He
couldn’t remember ever seeing them before. Maybe Casey had
conjured them up. “I don’t know,” he said.
  “Is it always so hot here?” Casey asked.
   That one he knew the answer to. “It’s been like this ever
since I got here,” he said.
  “Where’s Twenty-fifth November Street?” she asked
suddenly, leaning over the front seat. She looked at the driver
and said, “ Lok toi— ”
  “Streets don’t have names here,” Mitchell said, glad that he
was able to tell her something. “You have to find your way
around by directions.”
  The driver had abandoned all pretense of watching the road
and was looking at Casey in amazement. He said something to
her in rapid Lurqazi. She shook her head and haltingly said a
few words. “Little, yes,” the driver said, finally, in English.
“Yes, I speak little English.”
   The driver hadn’t spoken any English when Mitchell had
flagged him down earlier. He’d had to pantomime “airport”
and “airplane,” feeling very foolish, and he’d half expected to
be taken to a bird sanctuary. Where on earth had Casey
picked up a Lurqazi phrase book? He wondered if he would
ever stop being astonished by his daughter.
  “Twenty-fifth November Street, yes, I can find,” the driver
was saying. “Stores of—stores of—” But here his English
deserted him and he shrugged and, to Mitchell’s vast relief,
turned back to the road.
  “What are you looking for?” Mitchell asked.
  “My pen pal,” Casey said. “That’s where he lives.”
   “Oh,” Mitchell said. And how did you go about finding a pen
pal from Amaz? “Over there—I saw an animal market there
once,” he said, pointing out the window. “My second day here.
I never saw it again.”
  “Who are those people in turbans?” Casey asked. “Is that
some kind of religious group?”
   Dr. Tamir’s house was on the left. The knot of people was
still there, standing silently across the street. Mitchell had
called the police about them one night, and a policeman had
politely explained that the group was breaking no law. “That’s
where we’re staying,” Mitchell said, pointing to the gray stone
building. “Over there.”
   “It looks like—it’s a church, isn’t it?” Casey said. “Or it was
a church, and it was turned into a house for some reason, but
it’s still holy to those people across the street. And that’s why
they’re standing there watching it. Right?”
  The driver parked the cab in front of the house and Mitchell
covered his embarrassment by paying him. Casey got out of
the cab. The driver said something to her in Lurqazi and she
giggled and blushed. She’s really very young, Mitchell
thought. That’s what we keep forgetting.
  Once inside Mitchell turned on the lights in the living room
and showed the family the masks and tapestries and figurines,
proudly, as if he had personally collected them from around
the world. Only Casey went over to look at the bookshelves
and tried to read the titles of the books. “I guess he reads
German,” she said, turning away.
  “I guess,” Mitchell said. “Is anybody hungry?”
  “Yeah,” Casey said. Claire and Angie said nothing, but he
thought he saw Angie nod.
  “Okay,” he said. “Next stop, the kitchen.” He had gone to
the corner grocery store before picking them up and had
managed to piece together a small snack of bread, cheese and
milk. It had been a major effort, involving a long bargaining
session with the clerk and no small amount of pantomime, but
none of the family seemed impressed with his ingenuity.
 “Are you sure Tamir didn’t mention the letter I sent him?”
Mitchell asked Claire.
  Claire sat opposite him at the small kitchen table. She lifted
a piece of cheese and then stopped halfway to her mouth, as if
she’d forgotten that she held it. “Wait a minute,” she said.
“That’s right, he did. He said to tell you not to worry about it,
that when he came back he’d see if anything was missing.
That he couldn’t possibly remember everything he owned
anyway.” She put the cheese down.
   “Are you sure?” Mitchell said. If it had been his house he
would have certainly sent along a list of the most valuable
items.
   “Sure I’m sure,” Claire said. She smiled at him and for a
moment she looked like a young girl, mischievous, almost
daring him to contradict her. It was the smile of a wild child,
the same smile that had attracted him in college, and he
looked back, letting himself relax. Then she said, “Did you get
anything to drink?”
   “No,” he said. “They didn’t have anything at the store. But
once you learn your way around the city I’m sure you’ll be able
to find something.”
  “Oh dear,” she said. “I hadn’t thought—I guess I’ll have to
go out in the city to do the shopping.”
  “It won’t be that hard,” he said. “And Casey can help you. I
didn’t realize she spoke Lurqazi like a native.”
  “It’s just a phrase book, Dad,” Casey said. “I got it at the
campus bookstore. You can borrow it any time you want,
Mom. You too, Angie.”
   Angie peeled the crust away from her slice of bread and said
nothing. One of those silences that had been so characteristic
of their dinners at home settled over them. Mitchell looked
from one of his daughters to the other, trying to think of
something light to say, trying to move away from Angle’s
domain of silence. Finally Angie stood up and went back into
the living room, leaving the bread, crust neatly separated, on
her plate.
  Mitchell badly wanted to say something to Claire and Casey
about Angie’s behavior, wanted even to make a joke at her
expense. But he couldn’t. A kind of etiquette had grown up
around Angie’s problems, and Claire’s, and even Casey’s. No
one was allowed to mention them, because it was felt that
mentioning them would somehow make them worse. No
wonder, he thought, he had thrown himself into the work of
decoding words.
  After dinner he showed Claire and Casey the bedrooms.
When he went back into the living room he saw that Angie
had settled on one of the long wooden benches and was writing
furiously in a thin black notebook.
          Twenty-fifth
            November Street: 1
                                                           «^»
On the street of the junk shops, every day begins the same
way. Early light strikes the awnings on one side of the street
and draws shadows beneath them down the fronts of the
buildings. In the shops without awnings the light battles with
the blackened, grimy windows and loses. Whatever is behind
them remains a mystery, secrets not to be penetrated from the
outside. On the other side of the street the buildings still sleep,
drowned in darkness. By afternoon, light and dark will have
traded places, and the afternoon shops will stay open into the
evening while the shops on the morning side fade into the
twilight and the shopkeepers lock the shutters and draw the
awnings. The older residents of the street all have their shops
on the afternoon side.
   Mama, who has been on the street the longest, awakens in
the room where she sleeps with her twelve children, dresses
and goes downstairs to unlock the shop. Although her store is
on the afternoon side she is always the first one to open. A few
birds sing, a few cars rattle over the uneven cobblestones. She
takes whatever she sees first out with her into the street—a
lamp, a fireplace screen, a flower press. In three or four trips
she is done, and on her last trip from the store she pushes out
her easy chair, an old reclining leather chair that over the
years has molded itself to fit her body. She will stay in her
chair, a fat woman wearing an embroidered blouse and a skirt
with coins sewn to every available surface, for the rest of the
day. One of her children will take the money, should anyone
want to buy something.
   If it rains (but it rains very seldom) she will drag her chair
back inside the shop. If no one has come to buy anything by
late afternoon she will wander up and down the street,
trusting her children to keep an eye on the shop, buying and
trading and selling with all her neighbors, except, of course,
Blue Rose. (Sometimes an object travels up and down the
street for months, like flotsam, until it disappears.) Otherwise
she sits in her chair almost every day of the year. There are
only two things that can make Mama close the shop for the
day.
   The first is an English-speaking tourist. Mama has nothing
against the Americans, unlike some of her neighbors on the
street, but she was educated by an American missionary, and
to her mind English is the language God speaks. When an
American talks to her she is so flustered by the thought that
she could be speaking to Jesus himself that she forgets every
word of English except the Our Father. She stammers,
blushes, shakes her head and finally retreats into the darkness
of the store and closes the door on her customer, the coins on
her skirt jingling and flashing.
  Mama’s other peculiarity is her method of divination. While
her neighbors pore over their cards each day before opening
their stores, Mama sits on her chair and studies the letters
and numbers on the license plates of the cars driving by. No
one knows how Mama receives her answers from the license
plates, but on some days, though this happens rarely, she
shakes her head, pulls herself to her feet and goes into the
store. Mama’s influence on the street is so great that if she
goes inside some of the other shopkeepers will shake their
heads and close their stores too.
  Usually the second person out on the street is Blue Rose,
Mama’s neighbor, who got her name from the blue roses
tattooed on the palms of her hands. Blue Rose has been on the
street nearly as long as Mama. She is as thin as Mama is fat.
Her curly hair shakes when she talks. She unlocks the grille
in front of her store, and it makes a hellish clanking noise,
shattering the silence of the street, as she raises it above her
storefront. Mama lifts her eyes silently to heaven.
  Mama and Blue Rose have not spoken to each other for
seventeen years. No one else has been on the street long
enough to know why. Blue Rose says a tourist once returned
something she had sold him to Mama by mistake; that Mama
recognized the object’s value and said nothing to the tourist
about his mistake but turned around and sold it to a wealthy
Greek. Sometimes when Blue Rose tells this story the object is
a necklace. Sometimes it is a vase. Mama has never
contradicted Blue Rose; she has never told her side of the
story. When people ask her, she is suddenly too busy to talk.
  Around Mama and Blue Rose more stores are opening, more
objects being dragged out into the street. People greet each
other, wave good morning. Someone sees a pair of bookends in
a store across the street and goes over to talk with the
proprietor. A stranger comes up, the first customer of the day,
and suddenly everyone is bargaining with his neighbor or
straightening up her wares. No one likes to appear to be too
eager.
   On this day, life on the street—which is called Twenty-fifth
November Street, after a revolution only one man in Amaz is
old enough to remember—started the same as any other day.
By mid-morning Mama sat in her chair, narrowing her eyes to
watch the cars go by. Three of her children were in school. At
some time the government had recorded that Mama had three
children of school age, so every day Mama sent three different
children off to school. The teachers never seemed to notice.
The other children ate breakfast or ran up and down the street
or played in the vacant lot on the next block.
   At noon one of the daughters came out of the house with
Mama’s lunch. Some of the shopkeepers, including Blue Rose,
closed for a nap after lunch, but Mama stayed open. Out of
habit she counted the children: three at school, two shouting
at each other on the next block, five somewhere on the street,
one serving her lunch. Her oldest was missing.
  “Where’s Jarek?” Mama asked her daughter.
  The daughter shrugged.
  Just then a man came up and asked Mama if she had a top
hat. Mama jerked her head toward her daughter and said,
“Show him.” The daughter took the man into the shadowed,
dusty store, and Mama forgot about her oldest son for a while.
   Two hours later an old Volvo drove noisily down the street,
and Mama looked at the license plate and frowned. With an
effort she got to her feet and went inside the store, where her
daughter was still talking to the man who wanted the top hat.
“Outside,” she said to the daughter, and started up the steps
to the bedroom.
  The bedroom was empty. She rummaged through an
elephant’s-foot umbrella stand near the top of the stairs and
found a torn lace parasol and a rusty sword before she found
the heavy wooden cane she was looking for. Breathing heavily,
she went downstairs. Then, for the first time in seventeen
years, she went next door and knocked loudly on Blue Rose’s
door.
  No one answered. Mama tried the door but it was locked.
Cursing softly under her breath, she knocked again, then took
out a ring of keys she kept tied to her skirt. The fourth key
opened the door. She looked around briefly at Blue Rose’s
store. All the lights were off, and so was Blue Rose’s electronic
cash register. The cash register, with its electric-blue numbers
that looked like veins, had been the marvel of the street three
years ago, but Mama had never seen it. Disappointed at not
seeing it lit up now, she picked her way carefully up the stairs.
  The door to the bedroom wasn’t even closed. Inside, Jarek
and Blue Rose lay naked on the bed in a tight embrace. Jarek
opened his eyes, opened them wider when he saw who was
standing at the door. He shouted, jumped off the bed and ran
past Mama out into the street. Blue Rose looked up at Mama
under nearly closed eyelids and smiled a little.
  “Huh,” Mama said and started down the stairs after her
naked son.
  She found him in their bedroom. He had put on a younger
brother’s pants, which ended halfway down his calves. “Mama,
I—” he said.
  “Turn around,” Mama said.
  “I—she made me,” he said.
  “Turn around,” she said again.
   Puzzled, Jarek turned his back toward Mama. Was she
going to beat him with the cane? She pinched one of his ears
tightly and dragged him toward the mirror in the tarnished
gilt frame on the bedroom door. “Look,” she said.
  Jarek looked awkwardly over his shoulder at his back.
There, just below his shoulder muscles, were Blue Rose’s
tattoos.


It was Blue Rose’s turn to take in Rafiz. Rafiz moved, slow as
constellations, up one side of the street and then down the
other, taking about a year to complete his circle. He replaced
broken windows, tuned cars, built wooden toys for the
children, added wiring. When someone was sick he would
listen to heartbeats, peel back eyelids, ask questions, prescribe
an herb or two. Occasionally he would send someone to the
doctor. He always did this when he saw death written under
the eyelids; he had never gone to the land of death, and the
doctors, he was sure, went regularly. Or else why did they
have such glorious offices, such elegant cars? No one on the
street had ever complained about Rafiz after one of his visits.
  Jarek wasn’t sure how he felt about Rafiz staying with Blue
Rose. Rafiz had been as much a part of his childhood as his
mother’s leather chair, and he knew that Rafiz was very old.
Still, he felt uncomfortable with the idea of Blue Rose living
with another man. He wondered if Blue Rose never spoke to
him because she was sleeping with Rafiz now, wondered if she
would ever want her tattoos back. Because he was very young,
and because Blue Rose was the first woman he had gone to
bed with, it would be ten years before he realized that she had
had sex with him to score in a complicated game against his
mother. Meanwhile he was too tired to give it much thought.
Mama had started getting him up early and sending him to
school every day, even though he was older than everyone in
the school except the teachers.
  Blue Rose, too, was unhappy that it was her turn for Rafiz,
but for a different reason. She had been one of the first people
on the street to take him in, and he had asked if he could use
her house as a mailing address. Nothing was delivered for him
for years, and then suddenly a letter came for him from the
United States, and another letter every month after that. She
wondered if he would be able to tell that she opened his mail.
   Rafiz looked briefly at her pale-blue gloves when she gave
him the letter. She had taken to wearing the gloves even
during the heat of the day because the palms of her hands felt
naked. He smiled a little as he turned over the envelope. If he
noticed that it had been steamed open and glued back a little
clumsily, he said nothing. Then he took a wooden stool from
her shop and went out into the street to read his letter.
  He smiled again as he looked at Casey’s photograph, and a
third time when he read her guess about what he looked like.
He wondered how surprised she would be when she met him,
an old man with thick white hair that stood straight up like
weeds and eyes so black it seemed the pupils were missing.
   The postmark on the envelope was over a month old. He
closed his eyes, feeling the sun on him like warm, soothing
hands. Even without the postmark he would have known that
she had to be in the city by now. The cards had said so this
morning.
   His eyes still closed, he sank down past older memories like
an archaeologist digging through layers of history. The
Americans, and before them the British, and the Dutch, and
the Spanish. No one had ever tried to start a nationalist
movement in Amaz because no one but he remembered what
it was like not to be occupied. You might as well start a
movement to make the sun cooler, the people of Amaz would
have said, and shrugged.
  He opened his eyes and tried to stand. His legs felt as if they
were made of string. Too old, he thought, his mind always
shying away from thinking how old he was. Old enough that
the doctors would come with their needles and iron
instruments to test him if he ever told anyone how far back
his memories went, and he had no desire to be special, to be
singled out, again. He had been special as a child, treated with
fear and pity and a little awe, when his mother realized that
there were some colors that he was unable to see. A long time
after that, but still a long time ago, he had discovered the
word for what he was in an old book he had found somewhere.
Color-blind. Reading the word, he felt as if a huge burden had
been lifted from him. He was not alone, there were others like
him, enough of them so that their malady was given a name
and written in a book to be read by doctors and other learned
people.
   After that he thought that surely he must die, having
discovered the secret of his existence. But he lived a long time
still, tens, dozens of years. He began to think that death was
like a color that he couldn’t see, to wonder if maybe death had
beckoned him many times through the years but that he was
just too blind to notice. Death-blind. And at the same time
other people, seeing how long he had lived, assumed that he
knew death well and brought him their illnesses and accidents
to cure. He had laughed a little to himself at first, since each
of those people knew death far more intimately than he did.
But they expected something of him, and so he had to live up
to their expectations, pretending that he knew what they
meant when they talked about dying much the same way he
pretended to know the mysterious words “red” and “green.”
And over the years he had learned a little about herbs and
symptoms, enough so that he could help most of the people
who came to him.
  He tried to stand again and this time was able to do it. Blue
Rose wanted him to fix the back stairs and change the locks on
her doors. And Casey would come to see him soon, sometime
this week for certain. He looked at her picture one more time,
wondering why Blue Rose had wanted to read his mail. Then
he put the letter in his pants pocket and went inside.



          In the City
                                                        «^»
Although Amaz had no formal ties with the United States, it
had a large American community, large enough that there was
a school for American children. But the school semester had
just ended, summer vacation had begun, and Mitchell
wondered what to do with his children until school started
again in the fall. He was busy, though, working with Jara on a
translation, trying to match the descriptions of places in his
manuscript to actual locations in the city, talking to experts on
the history of Amaz. The next time he thought about his
children he realized that both of them had left the house and
had gone out into the city on their own. Was that safe? he
wondered. Well, probably Claire was keeping an eye on them.
And it was good that Angie was getting out. He had been
worried that she would do nothing but sit in her room and
write in those stupid notebooks of hers. Maybe she had
changed in the time he’d been away, or maybe the city had
changed her. He hoped so.
  Angie walked slowly through the fish stalls, holding a
notebook tightly against her breasts. She hadn’t realized that
her white-blond hair, in a city where nearly everyone’s hair
was black, would attract so much attention. Men called to her,
laughing, made chirping kissing noises, rubbed their fingers
together in a gesture she didn’t understand but which she
knew was clearly obscene. She should go home, continue the
war. The son-in-law of the king of Marol, third in line for the
throne, was about to be won over by a courtier from Borol, and
his treasonous activities could bring the war to an early end.
   But something kept her in the fish market, and after a
moment she realized what it was. There was a fish market
just like this one in Marol, which was called the Kingdom of
the Sea, just as Borol was the Kingdom of the Plains. Before
the war traders from Borol would come every week on market
day to exchange fish for cattle. Now that relations between
the two kingdoms had broken down Marol must be eating only
fish, and must be heartily sick of it. “Would you throw in your
lot with the fish-eaters?” the sly courtier asked the king’s
treacherous son-in-law in Angie’s imagination.
  “Silk, silver, jewels,” a man said to her, and she looked up.
“Special today, just for you. Gold to match your hair.”
  “Um, no, no thank you,” she said, disoriented. Marol had
gold mines too, and in friendlier times had made one of Borol’s
twelve gates, a gate of amethysts and beaten gold. But this
wasn’t Marol, this was—this was a country her father had
taken them to, she couldn’t remember the name. Why did it
seem so familiar, why did she think she had been here before?
  “Gold, very cheap,” the man said, insisting, and unfurled a
sparkling chain.
  Another man hurried over. “Cards,” he said, reaching into
his sack and taking out what looked like boxes made of cheap
cardboard. “Very new. I give you good price, very good.”
   “No,” she said, walking away, looking at the ground and
trying to ignore the men. Lines of graffiti, strange jagged
letters almost completely covered by more rounded characters,
had been spray-painted on the cement.
  A strange sound made her look up. At one end of the
marketplace a herd of cattle was being driven into pens. They
lowed sadly, as if they could see the future and knew what
was in store for them. “Ah, leather,” the man who had tried to
sell her gold said. “You wish leather, yes? I have a friend, a
very good friend, come this way…”
  She barely heard him. She felt more strongly disoriented
than ever, as if there was another world superimposed over
the one everyone else saw. Suddenly she felt dizzy. The hot
sun, the smells of cattle manure and fish, the buzzing of flies,
the screaming of little children and lowing of cattle, the men’s
unwanted attention, all made her nauseous. She brushed past
the men and started to run, hoping she remembered the way
home.
   After a few blocks she found a street that looked familiar.
She ran past the monument, past the small crowd of people on
the corner. Some of them turned away from Dr. Tamir’s house
across the street to watch her run, her hair flowing behind her
like silk. She ran into the house and down the hallway to the
bathroom, and vomited into the toilet.
   That’s it, she thought, sitting back shakily. I’m never going
out again. I should have known there was nothing for me out
there. Why should this place be any different than home? And
I’ve got enough work to do on the Two Kingdoms to keep me
busy until we get back.


A cab stopped in traffic in front of Dr. Tamir’s house and
Casey ran toward it. “Twenty-fifth November Street?” she said
to the cabdriver through the window.
  “What?” the cabdriver said in Lurqazi, rolling down the
window.
  “Twenty-fifth November Street,” Casey said, louder.
  “No,” he said, this time in English. “The ruins, yes? You
wish to go to the ruins?”
  “No,” she said. Cars behind the stopped cab were honking
loudly. “Twenty-fifth November Street.”
 The driver shrugged. “I do not know,” he said. “Colonial
House? Very nice. Or the ruins, yes?”
  Casey stepped back and the cab drove away. She wondered
where the driver who had picked them up from the airport
was. He had known where the street was, and she had
thought it would be easy to find. But no one else seemed to
have heard of it, and it wasn’t on any maps.
  One more try, she thought, running recklessly out into
traffic toward an empty cab. “Twenty-fifth November Street?”
she said, shouting.
  “Yes, of course,” the cabdriver said, and leaned over to open
the passenger door. At last, she thought, getting in.
   She sat in front and watched the street unfurl before her
like a bolt of cloth. They passed beggars, street musicians, a
man driving half a dozen cows, monuments, hotels, shops,
burned-out houses and houses being rebuilt. A man slept half
on the sidewalk and half in the street, and the driver’s brakes
squealed like a pig as the car swerved around him. She
smelled cinnamon and ginger and fish, exhaust and manure. A
man ran out to the car and thrust a cardboard box at her and
said something in Lurqazi, but the driver slapped his hand
away and drove on.
  “What was that?” Casey asked. “What?” she said in Lurqazi.
   The driver said nothing. He stared intently at the road as
though determined to set some sort of speed record. She
looked out the window again. Hadn’t they passed that hotel
before? And here was the same man lying out in the road,
miraculously still alive. Should she say something? But the
driver might get angry if she suggested that he was trying to
cheat her, might not take her to the street after all. And she
was eager to see Rafiz.
   Up ahead she could see a group of people in turbans, and she
turned her head in time to see Dr. Tamir’s house go sailing by
on the other side of the street. She was starting to get angry.
Did he think she wouldn’t recognize her own house? She
stared pointedly at the house, hoping he would get the
message. The driver made three left turns, a right, another
left, and somehow there was Dr. Tamir’s house again, this
time on her right side instead of her left.
   She couldn’t help laughing, loudly enough for the driver to
hear her, though he never looked away from the road. What if
there were three houses like Dr. Tamir’s in the city, ten,
twenty, all with their little groups of pilgrims, all with
American families, all with a daughter like Casey? All
converging right now, after a crazy cab ride, on Twenty-fifth
November Street? What if the city mirrored itself, ten,
twenty, a hundred times, like a kaleidoscope? The laughter
was enough to give her courage, and when she saw the man
sleeping in the street for the third time she said, “It’s all right,
you can let me out here.”
  The driver didn’t seem to have heard her. She said, louder
this time, “Please let me out here.” The driver stared at the
road. For the first time she felt afraid. This wasn’t her home
town, where she knew all the bus lines and the phone number
to dial in case of emergency. This was a strange city, a foreign
city, in a country that, her father had told the family several
times, had no formal ties with the United States. Maybe she
shouldn’t have gone off by herself after all.
  There would be a traffic jam somewhere, and then she could
open the door and walk away. No, run away, because he might
come after her and try to collect his fare. She could get her
money ready and throw it at him as she ran from the car. But
he might become suspicious if she opened her purse. Just a
few years ago she had carried everything in her pockets, and
then her parents had given her a purse for her twelfth
birthday. If only she had never gotten that damn purse. But
there was no time to think of that. She would just have to run
faster.
   For the first time since she’d come to the city the streets
were deserted. The driver seemed to be mocking her now,
circling several times around the same block, taking the
corners so fast she felt sick, writing his own calligraphy on the
streets of the city. She thought he might be smiling, his lips
turned up just a little at the corners, but she knew that that
could be her imagination. She tried to look at him now,
memorizing his features so that she could tell someone when
she got safely home, but she was too terrified to concentrate.
Where was he taking her? And who could she tell, anyway?
  Suddenly the car stopped. “Here,” the man said roughly.
She opened the door quickly, afraid that he might change his
mind, that this was one last joke. By the time she turned
around to pay him the cab was already halfway down the
street.
   Okay, she thought. She took a deep breath, feeling shaky. A
small woman in a torn skirt and blouse, holding an armful of
dirty rags, stood up from where she had been sitting on the
sidewalk. She was barefoot, her feet covered with dirt.
“Please, mem,” the woman said, holding the bundle out to her.
  With a slow wash of horror Casey realized that the woman
was carrying a baby. “Please, you want to buy him, yes?” the
woman said. There was a scab down one side of the baby’s face
and dirt caked along the sore, and with one part of her mind
Casey was thinking, You’d better clean his face, that could get
infected. She backed away, shaking her head. “I can’t—I can’t
buy a baby,” she said.
   The woman came after her. Casey raised her hands a little
as if to stop her, then lowered them. “Okay,” the woman said.
“I give you, then. You don’t buy him, I give. Okay?”
  “No,” Casey said. The cabdriver was probably the baby’s
father, she thought. And he’d picked her up because she looked
prosperous and healthy. Maybe he’d even seen her around
with her family. But why the strange ride through the maze of
the city? Was he reluctant to give up his kid? “I—I can’t take
your baby. I’m only fourteen.”
  “Me, too!” the woman said, smiling widely. She had only
four or five teeth. “Me, too. Fourteen!”
  Even allowing for the woman’s wretched condition Casey
didn’t think she could possibly be fourteen. Maybe she hadn’t
understood the English. “I can’t take him. I’m sorry,” she said.
  “Here,” the woman said, holding the baby out to her once
again. “You take. You give to your family, okay?” She smiled
again, as though Casey had already agreed.
   “No,” Casey said, but she was starting to think the idea
might not be so preposterous after all. The baby would
probably die if she didn’t take it, or at the very least grow up
stunted and malnourished. But how would he do in her own
family? And even more important, what would her parents say
if she came home with him? Maybe she could hide him for a
few months and then say he was hers. No, it was ridiculous.
“Look. I’ll give you some money for food, all right? Here.” She
opened her purse and took out a twenty. The woman’s smile
grew wider. Oh God, Casey thought. She thinks I’m going to
buy him after all. “No. No, don’t give me the baby. No, you
keep, okay?” I may not learn any Lurqazi on this trip, but my
pidgin English is getting much better, she thought. “No,” she
said in Lurqazi. “Here. Take.”
  The woman took the money and walked a few steps away,
shifting the baby from one arm to the other. Then she sat back
down on the sidewalk and started to cry. She’s trying to make
me feel guilty, Casey thought. Probably all she wanted was
the money. Ignore her.
   She walked a little distance away from the woman. How am
I supposed to get home? she thought. Her parents had planned
a dinner for a retired colleague of her father’s and his wife
who were in Amaz on vacation, and no one would look for her
until then. But suppose she couldn’t make it home in time?
That would be the last time she would be allowed to go off by
herself, at least until they stopped paying attention to her
again. She wondered what time it was. The woman’s sobs
were louder now.
  She didn’t see any cabs driving by. Probably they didn’t
come to this place, which looked like one of the poorer parts of
town. Houses squatted along the street like derelicts, paint
peeling, windows gone or boarded over, roofs sagging. She had
her guidebook in her purse, but she had no idea where she
was, and the street probably didn’t have a name anyway. She
started to walk.
   The streets twisted and flowed together like rivers. She felt
as if she were walking a maze to which she had lost the key.
The only people she saw on the sidewalks were beggars, and
the cars went by too fast for her to ask the drivers for
directions. After fifteen minutes she felt she had been walking
for several hours and had gotten nowhere near the end of the
maze. Then, finally, just as she was starting to panic, she
came to a street completely destroyed by the fire, and she
could see the hills in the distance, encrusted with glittering
domes and spires. If she kept walking toward the hills, she
knew, she would find a main street. After a few minutes the
streets opened up before her and she saw a main avenue,
clotted with cars and people.
  She ran toward it, waved down a cab, and, after checking to
make sure the driver was not the same one who had gotten
her lost, she got inside. “The university?” she said in Lurqazi,
and to her great relief the driver nodded. She could walk home
from there.
  It was only after the driver had dropped her off at the
university that she realized the danger she had been in. She
started to shiver. That first driver could have robbed me, she
thought. Raped me, stolen my passport. I could still be lost.
  But she had told Rafiz when she’d be in town, and he was
probably wondering what had happened to her. And she
wanted to see him. Okay, she thought. Try again tomorrow,
but this time be careful .
  When she got to Dr. Tamir’s house she went straight to her
room and lay down on the bed, trying to forget the intent look
on the cabdriver’s face.


Claire checked her purse for her wallet, her passport, her
traveler’s checks, her keys. She picked up her shopping list,
put it in her purse and went through her purse again: wallet,
passport, checks, keys. She opened the front door, locked it
behind her, checked it and checked it again. Her fingers shook
as she put the keys back in her purse.
  She had had only one drink a day since they’d gotten to
Amaz. She’d cut down not because she felt she was drinking
too much or because anyone had asked her to—no one ever
seemed to notice, let alone mind, how much she had to
drink—but because she’d hardly been out of the house since
they’d moved in. She was afraid of the city. Mitchell and
Casey helped her do the shopping at a corner grocery store
that seemed to sell only milk, fish, and a kind of sticky sweet
bread. The thought of trying to find a liquor store by herself in
the great maze outside made her turn cold. Every day she
watched Angie and Casey leave the house to go exploring, and
she’d been at first amazed, then envious, and finally irritated.
Everything seemed to irritate her lately.
  During the day she cleaned up after Mitchell and the kids
until noon. After that she would stalk up and down the house,
her fingers shivering as though they were beginning to have
an existence apart from her, or she would go back to bed and
try to sleep. There was nothing to do in this damn city. There
was no television, and, for some reason, no newspapers. The
radio had several broadcasts in English, but in the past few
days she’d gotten impatient with the music they played and
had turned them off.
   Then Mitchell would come home at six o’clock and they
would all go out to a McDonald’s a few blocks down between a
fabric shop and a garage. It was the only McDonald’s she’d
ever heard of that served wine, and she would order a glass
with dinner and feel the tension drain out of her as she drank
it gratefully. Lately she’d needed to order another glass after
dinner; the first one didn’t seem to do much for her. She had
been out of the house by herself only once, to find the
McDonald’s, but she had gotten hopelessly lost.
   But now Mitchell’s friend from the university, Dr. Wiley,
was coming to visit, and they couldn’t very well take him and
his wife out to McDonald’s. She would have to find a good
grocery store, not the tiny one on the corner. And once she
found it there was no reason she couldn’t stock up on some
liquor—after all, she would be entertaining guests that night.
   Casey had looked up “grocery” in her Lurqazi dictionary and
told her the word, but as usual Claire had forgotten it as soon
as she’d heard it. “What’s it like to have such a clever
husband?” people from the university often asked her, and, at
Casey’s school, “What’s it like to have such a bright daughter?”
She usually smiled and made some inane answer, but what
she wanted to say, what she would say some day, was,
“Infuriating. They always know everything. And they expect
you to know everything too.” It didn’t matter, really, what she
said. They smiled at her tolerantly, thinking, Poor woman,
little knowing that there had once been a time in her life, a
long time ago in college, when she had known everything too.
But it didn’t do to think of that… How was she supposed to
find a grocery store when she didn’t even know the word for
it?
   “Stop a cabdriver,” she remembered Casey saying. “Ask him
if he speaks English. Don’t assume that he does or he’ll be
insulted. But a lot of them do. They’ll probably know a good
grocery store to go to.”
   A hot wind was blowing from the south. Somewhere
someone had turned up a radio and she could hear a broadcast
in what sounded like Chinese. Someone else on the street was
cooking fish. Claire raised her hand timidly and stepped up to
a cab that was stopped in traffic. “A—a grocery store?” she
asked through the passenger window. Damn. She’d forgotten
to ask the driver if he spoke English first.
  But the driver was rolling down the window. “Yes, yes, of
course,” he said. She opened the door and got inside. “A
grocery store, yes, of course,” he said. “A store for alcohol.”
   She blinked, startled. He pulled out into traffic without
looking behind him. Someone honked loudly. Maybe he hadn’t
understood the English, Claire thought. “Groceries,” she said.
“To eat?” She pantomimed eating, lifting a fork from a plate
and chewing.
  He looked away from the road to watch her. “Groceries, of
course,” he said. “And alcohol.”
  She shrugged and leaned back in her seat. Maybe every
tourist who came to Amaz ended up looking for something to
drink. She couldn’t blame them, really.
   Five minutes later the driver pulled up in front of a large
glass-fronted building. The glass belled outward a little,
shimmering, making the reflection of her cab and the other
cars in the street rock like ships at anchor. Beyond the glass
she could make out aisles and aisles of bottles, each one, it
seemed to her, sparkling like a diamond. The stores on either
side had burned down a long time ago, it looked like, and
spray-painted graffiti covered the walls still standing. “Super
Shop,” the sign over the glass door said, and something in
Lurqazi.
  She got out of the cab quickly, paid the driver and went
inside. When she closed the glass door behind her, she felt as if
she had entered a dream. The sounds of the city—cars,
strange languages, animals, discordant music—dropped away.
The store was even air-conditioned. The bottles reached out to
her like arms. She walked slowly up and down the aisles,
pushing a cart she had found somewhere, taking bottles off
the shelves almost at random. She had almost forgotten the
Wileys and the dinner she was supposed to make that night,
but at the very end of one of the aisles she found wooden
shelves holding bread and vegetables, and a freezer with packs
of cheese and cuts of meat. Without stopping to think whether
the food was sanitary enough to eat, she took enough for a
meal and went to the checkout counter. She picked up another
bottle on the way out.
   At Dr. Tamir’s house she took out a glass, sat down at the
kitchen table and opened one of the bottles. A hard knot in her
stomach that she’d had ever since they had come to Amaz
dissolved with the second drink. The afternoon seemed to
swim in a golden light. It’s almost like home, she thought, like
when I used to sit at the kitchen table and read, or it would be
if there was anything to read. She laughed a little. And soon
the Wileys would come, and she wouldn’t be nervous about
meeting people from the university the way she used to be,
because after all there was nothing to be nervous about. She
poured another drink. Casey was sure wrong, she thought,
and laughed again. If I’d asked him for a grocery store in his
language he’d‘ve taken me to a grocery store. Super Shop, she
thought. I can remember that.


“And then he made a stop to pick up his girlfriend,” Mrs. Wiley
said. Claire blinked. Her eyes looked unfocused and a little too
bright, Casey thought, suddenly depressed. She’s found
someplace to buy her drinks. Now she saw that her mother
had set a drink behind her on one of the bookshelves, hidden
almost out of sight. Another one of her tricks, Casey
remembered. And she’s been so good for so long. I guess it had
to happen.
  “Well, I said I wasn’t going to pay for the extra mileage,”
Mrs. Wiley said. “I said he picked the wrong tourist to cheat,
because when I got in the cab I asked him to take me to the
ruins, and I happened to know that he’d driven miles out of his
way just to pick up this woman. Actually I don’t know where
the ruins are, but he believed me and he took a five off the
fare. You have to watch them all the time, you see. He wasn’t
the only native who tried to cheat us, right, Al?”
   She sat up straight and reached for a slice of the local bread,
changed her mind and took a piece of cheese instead. She was
young and tall, with tinted brown hair brushed back in a
fashionable cut. She wore a dark-red evening gown trimmed
with dark gold, and diamond earrings that winked in the light
like a second pair of eyes when she turned her head. Casey
watched her and tried hard not to dislike her. Whenever she
blinked she saw not Mrs. Wiley, thin and sleek in her red
gown, but the barefoot woman offering her the baby that
afternoon.
   Casey thought Dr. Wiley had heard this speech before. He
looked around at the masks and tapestries and swords glinting
on the wall and then back at the appetizers Claire had
prepared using one of the benches as a table. “How do you like
it here in the city?” he asked. He was much older than his wife
but still handsome, with white hair and black-rimmed glasses.
  “Oh, very much,” Claire said. “It’s so interesting.”
  “I don’t know,” Dr. Wiley said. “We couldn’t do it. It’s so
much cleaner up in the tourist city, and the service is much
better, everything works, and when you step out of your hotel,
there’s the beach, right at your doorstep. I admire you in a
way, Mitchell.”
  Mitchell shrugged. “It’s closer to my work, that’s all,” he
said. “The commute between the hotels and the university
would have taken hours, so when Tamir offered us this house
we jumped at the chance. And the kids like it.”
   Dr. Wiley looked around at the far walls, the high ceiling.
“It’s—interesting,” he said.
  “So what’s there to see here?” Mrs. Wiley said. “We’ve done
the ruins and the beaches, and what else is there?”
  “I’m afraid my wife doesn’t like traveling very much,” Dr.
Wiley said.
  “Oh, that’s not true, Al,” Mrs. Wiley said. “I did see
something I liked today, when we were coming into the city.
You remember, we saw those natives on the outskirts, living
in huts, washing their clothes in the stream. I always like to
see the way people really live.”
  “I don’t know—I sort of feel sorry for them,” Claire said,
reaching back for her drink.
  “Oh, but they live that way because they want to,” Mrs.
Wiley said. “They’re probably happier than we are. Why do
you feel sorry for them?”
  Claire took a sip of her drink and said nothing. “Because
they’re hungry,” Casey said.
   Mrs. Wiley ignored her, as Casey knew she would. When I
grow up, Casey thought for the hundredth time, I’m never
going to ignore anything people’s kids say. I’m going to talk to
them as if they were adults, as if they had brains too. “Al was
talking about renting a car and going down the coast,” Mrs.
Wiley said. “I hear you can get good bargains on leather in
Qarnatl. There’s no place in the tourist city to shop, really.
Everything is just as expensive as at home. But I don’t know.”
She took another piece of cheese and sat back. “The idea of
breaking down on one of those roads out there, so far away
from everything… Well, maybe I’ll just stay on the beach and
work on my tan.” She smiled at everyone, even Casey.
  Casey looked at her mother’s watch. “Mom,” she said, “I bet
dinner’s ready.”
   They went into the kitchen to eat, the six of them barely
fitting at the kitchen table. Claire offered everyone a drink
and then took the roast out of the oven. Dinner was delicious;
Claire was a good cook. She can function when she wants to,
Casey thought, watching her closely. Dad would probably
divorce her if she couldn’t. What would that be like, divorce?
No, better not think of it.
  Mitchell and Dr. Wiley talked about university politics
during dinner. Dr. Wiley had been in the biology department.
Casey felt enormously glad to hear it; she would hate to think
that someone with his attitude toward the people of Amaz
could be an anthropologist.
   After dinner Dr. Wiley sat back and said, “That was
wonderful, Claire. I don’t know how you did it. I couldn’t begin
to find a grocery store in a strange city.”
  “Oh, it was easy,” Claire said.
  “Who are those people out on the corner, the ones in
turbans?” Mrs. Wiley said. “They looked like they were staring
at your house. Are they dangerous?”
  “Oh,” Claire said, laughing. The wine had made her
expansive, Casey saw. “No, they’re not dangerous. We’re not
really sure what they are, but we think they’re some sort of a
religious cult. This house used to be a church, you know.
Casey figured that out.”
  Somehow the talk turned to Casey. She had seen her
parents in this mood before. All the anecdotes from her
childhood were brought out like treasured baby pictures, the
ones she had devoutly hoped everyone had forgotten. Look at
us laughing and talking, Casey thought.
   The Wileys are probably going to go home thinking we’re a
model family. No one will notice that Angie hasn’t said a word
all evening, or that Mom drinks too much, or that Dad has
hardly been home since we got here.
   “And then the kindergarten teacher said, ‘That must have
been a frightening experience for a young child, having to
jump out of an airplane like that,’ ” Claire was saying. “And I
said, ‘What?’ and the teacher said—well, apparently Casey had
told her this story, that Mitchell was a pilot with the air force,
and that he’d taken her for a ride but the motor had conked
out, and she and Mitchell had to jump from the plane. But
there wasn’t a parachute small enough for Casey, so Mitchell
had to hold her in his arms as they fell.”
  “What did you say?” Mrs. Wiley asked.
  “Oh, I just laughed,” Claire said. Her face was very red now.
“What could you say? And then one time Casey was very sick,
and she was sure she’d eaten something that was poisoned,
but she didn’t want to wake us up in case she was wrong. So
she got up and wrote us a note that said, ‘If I die, it was the
chestnuts.’ ”
  Everyone laughed. No one had looked at Casey the entire
time her mother had been talking. I might as well not even be
here, she thought. Maybe I can get away, go to my room and
study Lurqazi.
  Angie stood up. She leaned over to talk to Casey, her head
so close that her blond hair brushed Casey’s cheek. “You will
die in this war,” she said in Bordoril. “Soon.”
  Casey watched her as she walked down the corridor to her
room. Mrs. Wiley watched her too, a puzzled look on her face.
Of course, Casey thought, angry at herself for not seeing it
before. Angie always hates it when they talk about me. She’s
always been the quiet one, the one nobody notices. I should
have said something about her.
  The Wileys were saying their good-byes now. “We’d better
get back before it gets really dark,” Mrs. Wiley said. “And we
have to look for a cab, and you know what that’s like.”
  “How long are you staying here?” Mitchell said.
  “Four more weeks,” Dr. Wiley said. “Why don’t you come on
up and visit us? We can show you the beaches, and we’ll take
you out to dinner. Bring the kids.”
  Kids, Casey thought, disgusted.
  After they had gone, Mitchell put his arm around his wife
absently and looked down at the empty plates on the table, as
though he believed the facade of the happy family he had
shown the Wiley’s. Then he turned and walked down the
hallway to his room to study his manuscript.



          Casey and Rafiz
                                                       «^»
Casey waved at a VW Bug with the word for taxi painted on it
unsteadily in half a dozen languages. The cab pulled up at the
curb and stopped abruptly enough to stall itself out. Casey
looked at the driver carefully, trying to decide if she could
trust him. “Twenty-fifth November Street?” she asked. The
driver nodded and Casey got inside.
  The cab jerked forward. Up ahead, two cars were blocking
an intersection, honking loudly at each other. Without slowing
down the driver pressed a button mounted near the shift lever
and a loud police siren sounded from the cab. The two cars
backed away and let the cab through.
  “But—isn’t that illegal?” Casey asked.
  The cabdriver looked at her and grinned. When he looked
back at the road they were a few feet away from another,
larger, traffic jam. How is he going to get us out of this one?
she thought, holding tightly to the door handle. The driver
sounded the police siren again and drove up onto the sidewalk
and around the stopped cars. “Okay!” he said to her, still
grinning. She noticed that he was missing two fingers on the
hand that pushed the button.
  Fifteen minutes later he stopped at a street and let her out.
She looked around her cautiously. The sidewalks sprouted
strange junk like fantastic gardens. Shops stood shadowed and
mute behind them. Was this what the first cabdriver had
meant, a street of junk shops? Did Rafiz really live here?
   She went up to a large woman sitting in an easy chair in
front of one of the shops. “Excuse me, do you speak English?”
she asked. “Do you know a man named Rafiz?”
   But the woman was shaking her head and pushing herself
off the chair. “Wait, please!” Casey said, frantically trying to
remember the Lurqazi words for what she wanted to ask. The
woman backed into her store, still shaking her head, and
closed the door behind her.
  Well, that was strange, Casey thought. If they didn’t like
Americans she was going to be in a lot of trouble. A thin girl,
thick black hair like smoke almost covering her face, came and
sat in the old leather chair, looking regal. Her skinny legs,
which looked to Casey like the sickly legs of March of Dimes
poster children, did not reach the ground, but she didn’t swing
them back and forth the way other children would have. Now
Casey remembered the Lurqazi phrase: “Do you know Rafiz,
please?” she asked the girl.
   Three or four other children came up behind the chair and
climbed on the back and armrests, giggling. “Satl,” one of
them said to the girl in the chair, and then a Lurqazi phrase
Casey didn’t understand. The girl in the chair—Satl?—pointed
to the shop next door. The other children giggled loudly. The
girl sat back, a bright amused expression on her face.
   “Next door?” Casey asked, pointing. The girl nodded once,
slowly.
  No one sat in front of the store next door, and Casey went
inside hesitantly. She blinked a few times, waiting until her
eyes adjusted to the light.
  “Can I help you?” a woman at the cash register asked in
surprisingly unaccented English.
  “Yes, I—Do you know a man named Rafiz?” Casey asked.
  “Yeah,” the woman said. “Just a minute.” She stepped
behind a curtain at the back of the store and Casey heard her
yell, “Rafiz!” and a few words in Lurqazi. “He’ll be right out,”
she said, reappearing in front of the curtain like a magician’s
assistant.
  “Thanks,” Casey said. “Do you know—Why was that woman
next door so unfriendly to me?”
   Casey thought she saw the woman’s expression change a
little, open up, as if she were leading Casey past the entry way
of her mind and on into the next, more spacious, room. “Oh,
that’s just Mama,” the woman said. “Don’t worry about her.
She’s a little crazy, that’s all. But don’t go into her shop—she’ll
rob you blind.”
  “Really?” Casey said.
  “You bet,” the woman said. “When I first came to this street
I sold someone something very valuable, a very valuable book.
I was young, I was new at this business, and I let him have it
for almost nothing, you see. And then he came back—”
  An old man walked out from behind the curtain. “Hello,” he
said.
   “Rafiz?” Casey said. His appearance, so different from the
lean young student she had imagined from his letters, was like
the punch line of a joke, and she laughed out loud. His pants
and shirt, both the same brown color, looked clean and new,
but when he bent under the counter she saw he used an old
fraying rope as a belt. His sandals were made of the same kind
of rope. “Hi,” she said. “See, I found you at last.”
  “Hello, Casey,” he said, holding his hand out to her. “It’s
good to meet you finally. Come—we will go out to the street
and talk. I can show you around.”
   “How come you never answered my last letter?” Casey
asked, taking his hand. It felt warm and dry, not at all the
way she would have expected an old man’s hand to feel. He
smelled of burnt cinnamon. What luck, she thought. He
probably knows the city intimately. I’ll have great stories to
tell everyone back home.
   “I just got your letter,” Rafiz said. “You looked different
from what I expected too.”
  “You never answered me about my hair,” she said. “I let it
grow out anyway. See, it’s not so red any more.”
  He nodded without looking at her.
  “Is that woman your wife?” she asked.
  “No, she is not my wife,” he said. “I live with her for a few
weeks, fix things for her, and then move on to the next house.
That is what I do. Where do you want to go today?”
  “I don’t know,” she said, looking around her at the street.
Someone had put a rusted postcard rack out on the sidewalk,
showing old postcards, bloated with water damage, of the Arc
de Triomphe, the Taj Mahal, the Golden Gate Bridge.
Clustered around the rack, making it impossible to get to the
postcards, were a radiator, a dentist’s chair and a clothes
wringer, none of them younger than fifty years. “Don’t you
have to work?”
  “I have the day off,” he said. “Because I knew you would be
coming.”
   “How did you know that?” she asked. The fat woman was
coming back out of her store, the coins on her skirt glinting
like moons. She dropped like a weight into the leather chair,
not looking in Casey’s direction. “I tried to get here last week.
This crazy cabdriver took me around in circles, and then
dropped me off somewhere, and this woman, I guess she was
his girlfriend, she wanted me to buy her baby.”
  She had thought he would laugh at the story. Perhaps the
young student whose imagined face she still saw superimposed
over Rafiz’s face would have laughed, but Rafiz only nodded
solemnly. She could have kicked herself for being so stupid.
  “Yes, some women in the city will do that,” Rafiz said. “They
will sell their babies, because they have no food for them.”
  “I gave her some money,” Casey said. She realized how
inane she sounded, the well-fed pampered American liberal.
  “Good,” Rafiz said. “We will go for food, is that all right? Are
you hungry?”
  She looked at him carefully for irony, saw none, and said,
“Yeah. Yeah, I am.”
  He led her down past the storefronts to what looked like a
dead end. At the last instant he ducked between two tilted
buildings which nearly met overhead, and she saw that there
was a small alleyway there, at first large enough for only one
person, but then widening out into a street nearly as big as
Twenty-fifth November. On both sides of the street stood
houses the fronts of which had been peeled away by fire,
displaying rooms and furniture, mirrors and carpets and old,
faded photographs. “There was a terrible fire here,” Rafiz said.
“Long, long time ago.” As he spoke Casey realized with a shock
that people hadn’t moved from those houses, that they stayed
and lived their lives here, naked and exposed to the street.
“They were too poor to move,” Rafiz said, as though reading
her mind. The different bright colors of all the walls made the
buildings look like a paintbox.
   “Where are we going?” she asked. They passed a woman
sitting on the sidewalk, her head between her knees and her
hand stretched out, a cardboard sign in the old Lurqazi script
at her feet.
   “Right here,” he said, opening a door on a room that had
miraculously escaped the fire. As they went in Casey looked up
to see a section of the roof overhanging the gutted second
floor, pointed downward like a knife. “The Sun and Stars,”
Rafiz said. “Because you had better have good luck to eat here.
How is yours?”
  “My what?”
  “Your luck,” he said. “Is it good?”
   She frowned. She had noticed this strain of mysticism once
or twice in Rafiz’s letters and she hoped that he wasn’t too
superstitious. Of course, his customs probably differed from
hers. When you’re the daughter of an anthropologist you have
to learn tolerance, if nothing else. “I don’t know,” she said.
  “Well, mine is good enough for two of us,” he said. “People
on the street sometimes buy me a meal just to be able to eat
here.”
  “Is the food that good?” she asked dubiously.
  “It is not the food,” he said. “It is the—to be able to say you
have eaten here. I do not know the word.”
  “Courage?” she said.
  “Perhaps.” It was clear he didn’t understand.
  The one-room restaurant was hot and smoky, and deserted
except for three men and one woman sitting at a table
drinking. One of the men shuffled cards and dealt them slowly
around the table, stopping to puff on a cigarette wrapped in
leaves. He looked completely unconcerned as to how the game
would come out. Calendars for the last eight or ten years and
posters for Coca-Cola showing pale American families walking
through tame forests, holding bottles and each other’s hands,
covered the walls. Overhead a fan turned lethargically,
stirring the smoke only slightly.
  Rafiz greeted the four people playing cards and sat down at
the table next to them. As Casey passed them she noticed that
the cards were nothing like the ones she knew. Each card
showed a different picture, a woman, a man, a ruined building
by moonlight.
  Rafiz called something to the woman who had stopped to
pick up the cardplayers’ empty beer bottles. “That is okay?” he
asked Casey. “You will have the same thing that I am
having?”
  “Sure,” she said.
  One of the men slammed his hand down on the table, said
something and then threw back his head and laughed. In his
hand had been a card, now face up on the scarred wooden
table, with a picture of a young woman stepping down from a
train. The others dropped their cards on the table, looking
disgusted or indifferent, and the man who had won raked the
money on the table toward him with his forearm.
  “That card?” Rafiz said, nodding to the winning card on the
table. “That is the Traveler. I saw it in the deck this morning.
That is how I knew you would come today.”
  “By the cards?” she asked. “Those cards told you I was
coming today?”
  “Of course,” he said. He reached into his back pocket and
took out a small dirty cardboard box. “Here.” He pulled the
cards from the box and spread them in a rainbow arc across
the table. “The Traveler,” he said, pointing to one of the cards.
“That is you.”
   “Well, she looks a little like me—” Casey said. The picture of
the young woman stepping down from the train, eyes widened
in anticipation, made her uneasy.
  “Not a little,” Rafiz said. “She is you. See?”
  “Well, it’s an interesting coincidence,” Casey said. She took
the box and turned it over, looking for a brand name, a
manufacturer’s mark, but it was blank. A strange pattern, a
maze of interlocking letters, covered the backs of the cards.
“Where did you get this?”
  “The street vendors sell them.”
  “But where do the street vendors get them?”
  Rafiz shrugged. “We do not know.”
  “Well, then, how—” she said, exasperated—“how could
someone—you don’t even know who—know that I was coming
today? Not only that, but know what I look like?”
  “We do not know,” Rafiz said again. “But that is the way the
cards work.”
  “It’s hard to believe, that’s all,” she said.
   “Ah, well,” he said, smiling broadly. His teeth were even and
very white in his brown face. “Sometimes I do not believe in
television either. After all, I have never seen it. Pictures from
all over the world, right there in the living room? No—you are
asking me to believe the impossible.”
   She noticed that he said “the living room” and not “my
living room” the way other people would have. She wondered
if he had always lived in other people’s houses. “But I can
show you a television,” she said, trying not to become
impatient with him. “I can take it apart and explain to you the
way it works, and it’ll work the same way every time. But
cards—”
   “But here—I am showing you the cards,” he said, running
his hands across their bright colors. “I am showing you how
they work. Here is the Traveler, your card, and here you are.
There is nothing mysterious about it. The cards are the way
we get our news—our television, if you like. And at the same
time they are, like television, our entertainment. We play our
games with them. And furthermore, we can tell the future
with them, which is something you cannot do even with
television.”
  The waitress came over and set what looked like fried fish
in front of them. Casey took a bite of hers. The fish tasted
bland as water.
  “Look,” Rafiz said, nodding to the cardplayers. The woman,
smiling a little, set down a card showing the sun surrounded
by a dark-blue sky set with stars. “Ahh,” everyone at the table
said, a sound of satisfaction, leaning back in their chairs.
  “The Sun and Stars,” Rafiz said. “It is always lucky when it
appears. Another sign that the roof will not fall on us.”
   The other players pushed their money eagerly toward the
winner. “But you didn’t show me how they work,” Casey said,
not willing to let go of the argument. She took another bite of
her fish. “You showed me one card that looks like me, that’s
all.”
  “All right,” Rafiz said. He gathered up the cards in his hand,
shuffled them and held them out to her. “Take one.”
  Casey pulled a card from the deck. It was the Traveler, her
card. “You do magic tricks,” she said, smiling.
  He shook his head. “Another one,” he said. “Where are we
going today?”
   She took another card from the deck, this one showing a
large ancient stucco house. A porch ran along the entire front
of the house, and tiny people, represented by five or six dots
connected together, stood in a line that trailed down the
porch’s steps.
  “Colonial House,” Rafiz said. “A good choice. Many tourists
go there. Where next?”
  “Put the deck down,” Casey said. Rafiz set the cards on the
table and Casey picked another one, a card filled with clouds
and a heavy rainstorm.
  “Ah,” Rafiz said. “We will have time for only Colonial House
then. The rain will drive us home.”
  “It’s not going to rain,” Casey said, indignant. “Look at the
sky. There aren’t any clouds.”
  “But the cards say it will rain,” Rafiz said.
  “I’ll bet you,” Casey said. “I’ll bet you it won’t rain.”
   “Only a fool bets against the cards,” Rafiz said. It had the
finality of a proverb.
   “Okay, then I’m a fool,” Casey said. “Come on. If you believe
in the cards so much, what have you got to lose?”
  He started to say something, stopped as a small shabby man
came in the door. The man held something cupped in his right
hand, shaking it like dice and then bending over to peer
through the closed cage of his fingers. The four players threw
down their cards, gathered up their money and left.
   “Sotano,” the waitress said warningly, and then something
in Lurqazi. Sotano stood his ground, holding up his closed
fingers like a talisman. The waitress called to someone in the
back.
  Rafiz stood up. “We should go now,” he said.
  “Now? Why?”
  “The—the roof,” he said nervously. His tanned face had gone
the color of newsprint. He grabbed her hand and pulled her
out the door.
  The cardplayers stood in the street outside the restaurant,
nervously watching the beam poised to break through the roof.
One of the men started to pace back and forth.
  “What’s wrong?” Casey said. “Did you hear something?”
   “Sotano,” Rafiz said. “He is very unlucky. It is bad luck to be
in the Sun and Stars with him.”
  “You mean we left just because some guy came in?” Casey
said. “You mean the roof isn’t going to fall down after all?”
  “Quiet,” Rafiz said. His black eyes darted like fish. “That is
bad luck, too, to speak of it. And Sotano is not ‘some guy.’ He
is—”
   “Very unlucky, I know,” Casey said. “I wish I could have
finished eating.”
  “You do not believe me,” Rafiz said. “But if I tell you his
story you will agree. He was not always unlucky, Sotano. A
while ago, nine, ten years—”
   Someone in the restaurant shouted. Sotano fell out the door
and hit the street. His fist came open and Casey moved
forward, fascinated, to see what he had in his hand. It looked
like a bunch of small brown twigs. Disappointed, she went
back to Rafiz. “Now we can go inside and finish our meal,” he
said.
  Sotano got to his feet, dazed. He closed his hand and Casey
heard a small clacking sound, like two billiard balls just barely
touching each other. Rafiz shuddered as they went inside.
   Sotano had taken all the sound and excitement of the Sun
and Stars with him. The cardplayers dealt and discarded in
silence. The waitress disappeared into the back of the
restaurant. Even the overhead fan seemed softer. The quiet
felt oppressive to Casey. She and Rafiz finished their meal
without speaking.
  “To Colonial House?” Rafiz said when they were done.
  “All right,” Casey said.
  They walked back to Twenty-fifth November Street and
Rafiz stopped in front of a pile of cinder blocks. Apparently
this was the bus stop; she wondered how you could tell. When
the bus came he put out his hand and pointed into the road,
and the bus stopped. So that was how you did it. She had
stood at a bus stop for an hour once while two buses went past
her, and she’d wondered if they hadn’t stopped because they
could tell she was a tourist. The new information pleased her,
made her feel like an experienced traveler. If only Rafiz would
stop insisting on his ridiculous superstitions everything would
be perfect.
   Even with all the windows open, the heat inside the bus was
stifling. Casey sat next to an old woman with long gray hair
and earrings made out of silver coins. Between her feet she
held a crumpled brown shopping bag on which Casey could
read “Macy’s San Francisco.” She grinned. The bag moved
suddenly and two chickens bobbed their heads out of it and
then retreated.
  Rafiz moved to a seat farther back and started talking to
the man sitting next to him. After fifteen minutes he stood
and banged with his fist on the bus’s stamped-tin ceiling. The
bus stopped. “We are here, Casey,” he said, moving forward.
  Colonial House looked exactly like the picture on the card, a
large white stucco building. A few white clouds floated in the
bright sky, like melting ice cream. They paid and went
through a hallway lined with dark portraits and into a large,
echoing room where chandeliers glittered overhead. A smaller
room off to one side had been converted into a souvenir shop,
and they joined a group of people milling around the shop
waiting for the tour to start. Rafiz was the only native among
them. A group of Japanese men and women looked at the
jewelry in the shop and took pictures of each other, glancing
every so often at a man carrying a small flag on a stick who
seemed to be the leader. Two women behind Casey were
speaking German.
  “It is not a good idea to buy jewelry here,” Rafiz said to
Casey. “If you wish jewelry, you can get better in the
marketplace.”
  The two German women looked up at Rafiz with interest,
and once again Casey felt knowledgeable, experienced.
   The tour guide came up to them and began leading them
through the cool white rooms. The German women’s high
heels clattered on the wooden floors. As they walked the guide
pointed out the differences in architecture, the layers of
Spanish, English and Dutch influence, one layer for each
foreign occupation. Ahead of them Casey saw an American
family, a mother and father, a boy of about nine and a girl a
little younger than herself. The boy was listening raptly to the
guide’s account of the Revolt of 1860, watching closely as the
guide pointed out the bullet holes in the walls. The girl, bored,
had pulled a mirror from her purse and was practicing
expressions. The mother, who had the glazed, slightly guilty
expression of someone who knows she is not enjoying
something that is supposed to be good for her, noticed her
daughter and pinched her lightly on the arm. “Stop that and
pay attention,” she said in a carrying whisper. “We didn’t
bring you all this way to stare at your face.”
   A current of longing passed through Casey, a desire to be
part of that family, to exchange places with the girl. In the
evening the family would eat at a real restaurant and discuss
all the things they’d seen that day. The boy would eagerly
mention the bullet holes, and then Casey would astonish
everyone by remembering perfectly everything the guide had
said. The mother would say, “I’m so glad we brought the
children along—they seem to be getting so much out of the
experience.” The boy would punch Casey, though not too hard,
because she’d seen more than he had, and she would punch
him back, and then when one of the parents told them to stop
they would talk about the ruins they’d seen by moonlight last
week. The fantasy was so real that when Casey looked up she
saw they were in another room entirely and the guide was
pointing out Victorian furniture.
   As they circled back to the large room they’d started from
Casey heard what sounded like cannon fire. The boy, who had
been making loud squeaking noises by jamming his tennis
shoes against the smooth wooden floor, looked up. The guide
stopped a moment, confused. “A thundershower,” he said
finally. “Very unusual, especially for this time of year.”
  As if the thunder were a signal, everyone started talking at
once. Rafiz, who had started to lag behind when the guide had
pointed out the cramped servants’ quarters, moved through
the group toward Casey. “A thundershower,” he said. “Very
unusual.”
  “It’s a coincidence,” Casey said.
   “Very well,” he said. “A coincidence.” He pronounced the
word so badly Casey wondered if he knew what it meant. “But
it is good that we made no plans for the rest of the day, yes?”
  The group moved back into the main room. The guide
described the ballroom during the English rule, the men and
women sweating in fancy dresses meant for a much more
temperate climate. Casey shrugged. “I guess so,” she said. “It’s
probably time to go home anyway.”
  The tour guide moved over to the next group of tourists. The
Japanese man with the flag led his party over to the souvenir
shop. Casey and Rafiz went out onto the porch, where the
overhang shielded them from the rain. Lightning cracked in
the distance, and the spires and domes on the hills jumped out
at them briefly. “What shall we do next time?” Rafiz asked.
“Gaudi Park, would you like that? Or the marketplace, for
jewelry? Or shall we let the cards choose once again?”
  “Whatever you want,” Casey said. “Is there a bus that can
take me back to the university? I can walk home from there.”
   “Of course,” Rafiz said. “I will show you.” He seemed a little
disappointed, probably because Casey didn’t sound enthusiastic
about her next visit. She didn’t care. The improbable
rainstorm Rafiz had predicted had disoriented her. But the
whole day had been strange, starting with the discovery of her
picture on a card played by gamblers in a dilapidated bar. And
although she firmly believed that the rainstorm and the card
were coincidences, the number of coincidences in one day had
left her feeling a little strange, as though she were coming
down with the flu or had smoked too much dope. She
wondered if she would come back and visit Rafiz after all, if
the feeling of unreality was somehow tied to him and his weird
superstitions. Now that Rafiz had shown her how to take the
buses maybe she could explore on her own.
  They walked down the steps to the bus stop. Rain pelted her
hair and drenched the flimsy shirt she had picked out that
morning. The bus came and Casey pointed out into the street
as she had seen Rafiz do. “Good-bye,” Rafiz said, standing on
the curb. He looked even wetter than she was.
  “Good-bye,” she said.



          Twenty-fifth
            November Street: 2
                                                        «^»
Ten years ago Sotano had had the shop on the other side of
Mama. Then his wife died, and he closed the store and went
into mourning. For over a year no one saw him except when
he left the store for food, once or twice a week.
   One day Mama noticed that Sotano’s shop was open again,
and she went inside. Everything was the same as it had been
before his wife had died: the piles of old magazines on the
floor, the mannequin leaning against one of the walls, the long
high counter down the center of the shop behind which Sotano
stood, adding and subtracting columns of numbers on a large
piece of yellow paper, just as he always had. “So,” Mama said,
not quite knowing what to say, “life goes on, eh?”
   “Life goes on,” Sotano said, looking up from his yellow paper
for just a moment.
   “Good luck,” Mama said, and turned to go. Like everyone
else on the block she had an almost photographic memory
when it came to stock, her own or her neighbors’, and she was
a little surprised that Sotano had not changed the contents of
his shop at all since his wife died, had not gotten a single new
piece or sold an old one in over a year. But as she was leaving
she saw, on the high counter next to Sotano’s ashtray, a small
piece of what looked like bone. “Anything new, Sotano?” she
couldn’t resist asking.
  “No, nothing new,” he said, not even looking up.
   The rumor that spread quickly up and down the street was
that Sotano had kept a piece of his dead wife’s finger, the bone
between the first and second joint. (Opinions on which finger
it was varied from person to person, and from day to day.)
Suddenly Sotano was busy from morning to evening, besieged
by shopkeepers who stopped by “just to talk.” But he managed
to ignore all their hints about the piece of bone, and when they
asked him outright he evaded the question. When the man
across the street offered to buy it Sotano told him it was not
for sale.
  A few weeks after he reopened Sotano took on an assistant,
a young man studying at the university, “to help me out with
a few things the wife used to do,” he explained. The young
man was questioned, was invited into every house for sweet
sticky bread and cups of thick cinnamon coffee. But he knew
even less than the shopkeepers, and the invitations soon
stopped.
   Finally one day the young man had news. An American
tourist had asked about the bone, and Sotano had told him it
was a replica of the finger bone of a saint—the patron saint of
Amaz, Sotano had said. The young man couldn’t remember
what name Sotano had used for the saint. Now at last it was
clear what Sotano was doing, something they had all done at
one time or another. He was having a laugh at the expense of
the tourists. The patron saint of Amaz, the shopkeepers said to
each other, and chuckled, and started home.
  “Wait,” the young man, Sotano’s assistant, said. He stood in
the middle of the street, gesturing, attracting more and more
people. “There’s more. Sotano made up this long story about
the saint and how he was martyred and everything, and the
American said he wanted to buy the bone. And Sotano said
that that was his bone, that it brought him luck, but he’d have
more next week. And the American said he’d be back.”
  The shopkeepers looked at each other and shrugged. Who
knew what the crazy Americans would want to buy? Well,
that was what kept them in business. Thank God for the
Americans.
  By next week Sotano had replicas of the bone, crudely
carved wooden copies, in a chipped china bowl on the counter.
The American didn’t seem to notice how badly made the copies
were. He bought three.
  By the end of the week Sotano had sold all his copies. He
went away for the weekend, and when he came back he had
much better versions, made of ivory or, it was hinted, human
bones. Blue Rose was sure Sotano had robbed a graveyard.
  The invitations to the young assistant began again, and this
time he had much more to tell. Sotano made up a new story
for every customer. The bone was the finger of the man who
had started the turbanned cult and had been killed by the
Jewel King. It had belonged to a revolutionary, shot down by
the British. A young woman who had been promised to an old
tyrannical king had cut off her finger rather than wear his
wedding ring. The story of the young woman was the favorite
of nearly everyone on the street, including Mama.
   Those days nine years ago, when Sotano sold the finger
bones, were good times for the shopkeepers on the street.
Never before and never again would they be so united on
nearly every subject, never before and never again would
almost all their differences be put aside. There was even talk
of forming an organization, The Associated Antique Dealers of
Amaz, but nothing ever came of it. The only feud on the street
was that between Blue Rose and Mama, who hadn’t spoken to
each other for eight years, but everyone said that that would
be resolved soon. It was winter and the evenings were cool,
and people would build huge bonfires out in the street and talk
and drink rum and coffee, and repeat to each other Sotano’s
latest story on the bone.
   Mama’s six children would run up and down the street, from
fire to fire. Every so often Sotano would come out for an
evening walk, and the shopkeepers would yell at him, “A
revolutionary, eh, Sotano? Keep it up!” and he would smile
and wave and keep walking.
  And a steady stream of Americans came to Twenty-fifth
November Street to visit Sotano’s shop. Everyone saw Sotano
staying up late into the night, smoking and adding long
columns of numbers on his yellow pieces of paper. The finger
bones, the young assistant reported, were now being made of
plastic, and every weekend Sotano would leave the street and
return with a large bag of them, sometimes two bags. Finally
Sotano bought a car to carry the bags in. He was the first
person on the street to own a car, and the shopkeepers had
something new to talk about. “It won’t last,” they said to one
another, sitting around the bonfires after a day’s work. “Now
he’s getting ahead of himself.” When Mama saw the license
plates on the car she shook her head, but she said nothing.
  With Sotano’s new car, envy came to the street. A few of the
shopkeepers tried to sell their own replicas of the finger bone,
but for some reason the Americans only bought them at
Sotano’s store. And these Americans didn’t wander up and
down the street looking into other shops, maybe buying a few
postcards, the way normal tourists did. They bought their
bones and got back into their cabs and drove away.
   A year later the assistant came to the bonfires with the
most astounding news of all. Sotano was going to sell all his
stock and move away. At first no one could believe it. It was
only the poor shopkeepers, the failures, who left Twenty-fifth
November Street. The successful ones stayed on, especially the
ones who had such a good spot on the afternoon side of the
street. But when Sotano put a sign in his window that said,
“All Stock, 50% Off,” they knew it was true. They fought over
his mannequin, his counter, his piles of aging magazines.
Several people approached him privately and asked, in
whispers, if he had more of the finger bones, but he shrugged
and said they were all sold. His shop was broken into one
night and ransacked, but nothing was taken. Two shopkeepers
claimed the cracked china bowl the bones had been displayed
in, each believing it would bring her luck, and finally one of
them managed to break it.
  Sotano sold the shards. Jockeying started for his location,
one of the prime spots on the street. When he drove off in his
new car, no one said good-bye. The good mood of the street
was broken entirely, like the bowl.
  Rumors started again, slowly at first and then faster as
each shopkeeper added his or her embellishments. Sotano had
been seen coming out of a marble house in the hills, walking
an ocelot. He had moved to the tourist city in the north. He
had moved to America. He had given the assistant a new car
in exchange for his help. He and the assistant had become
lovers.
  Seven years later Sotano came back to the street. His pants
were torn and stained with oil, and his shoes came from two
different pairs. He would tell no one where he’d been. He
wanted to open a new shop on the street, but because he had
lost his seniority the only place he could get was on the
morning side at the very end. While he waited for the previous
shopkeepers to move he walked up and down the street,
playing with what looked like the old finger bones, though
smaller, darker and more worn. A new rumor started, the last
one ever to be told about him. In the excitement of selling the
bones seven or eight years ago, people said, he had forgotten
which one had belonged to his wife, and that had brought
about his downfall. Some people even swore they had seen her
haunting him, late at night. Whatever the truth was, they
saw him on the street nearly every day, looking closely at one
or the other of the bones and then shrugging, almost in
despair. And he never tried to sell the bones again.


Satl, Mama’s fourth child and second daughter, was the quiet
one. Mama always thought that Satl was so quiet because she
had been conceived in absolute silence. She remembered Satl’s
father better than most of the other fathers. He was a tall,
thin, intense man who once said to her grandly, as though he
were giving her an expensive present, “I should like to marry
you someday. Even though you already have three children.”
He looked so hurt when she laughed in his face.
  But he took her to visit his parents, something none of the
others had done. She had to call in favors up and down the
street to get people to watch her children for the three days
she would be gone.
   His parents lived high in the mountains, in a large cool
white house surrounded by palm trees and gardenia and
hibiscus flowers. His mother gave them rooms at opposite ends
of the house, but on the first night, as she lay stiffly in the
huge brass bed and worried about her children, she heard the
creak of the wooden floor inlaid with green marble and knew
that he was coming to visit her.
   Satl was conceived on that night. She remembered moving
slowly so as not to shake the brass bed, remembered holding
her breath during her orgasm so that his parents would not
hear her. When she told him later that she was pregnant he
looked at her horrified, as though she had some sort of
contagious disease, and she never saw him again. Some of
them stayed through the pregnancy and some of them didn’t.
One had even tried to get the child away from her.
  Now Mama looked at Satl as she played quietly in the
street. Where had they all gone, all the men, none of them
ever staying to father more than one child before moving on?
The first one she thought she would marry, and the second one
she thought she might marry, and by the third one she
realized she didn’t need to marry them at all. One of them had
gone on to become a cabinet minister; she heard about him or
saw his face among the cards every so often. Rafiz was
another, but he had never acted as though he knew it, never
made any claims on his child, and Mama was glad. That was
the way she preferred it. The children were what she wanted,
after all.
  Rafiz came slowly across the street toward where she sat in
the old leather chair. “Listen,” he said, squatting beside the
chair. “That child who came here to visit me, you remember
her?”
 For a moment Mama, still half in reverie, thought that he
meant his own child. Then she nodded.
  “She’s very important,” Rafiz said. “To this street, maybe to
Amaz. Please, next time she comes, if she comes, don’t be so
rude to her.”
  “I wasn’t rude to her,” Mama said. “She speaks English,
that’s all. You heard her.”
  Rafiz sighed. He knew he could not talk Mama out of her
feelings for English-speaking tourists any more than she could
talk him into seeing colors. “Please,” he said. “Try. She’s very
important—”
  “—to the street, yes, you said,” Mama said. “And I agree
with you. I’ve seen her face in the cards, as the Traveler. But I
can’t. You know how I feel. Anyway she hasn’t come back for
weeks now. I heard that you and she didn’t get along, that she
had an argument with you and ran off shouting. The
missionaries used to say, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the
first stone,’ though they cast too many stones themselves for
me to quite believe them.”
   “Who told you that?” Rafiz said. “We didn’t have an
argument. It’s just—she didn’t understand a lot of things.” He
pointed his chin at Sotano, coming toward them from his shop
far down the street. The hand that held the bones waggled a
little as though keeping time to music. “Like Sotano. He came
into the Sun and Stars, and she didn’t want to leave. She
didn’t understand that he’s unlucky.”
  Mama leaned over and spat on the street, disgusted. “Of
course he’s unlucky,” she said. “Look at him. If only we’d set
up that organization when we had the chance. We could have
kept him from opening a shop here again.”
  “If you hadn’t been fighting with Blue Rose we could have
done it,” Rafiz said. “She refused to join if you did.”
  “That’s her problem,” Mama said. “Not mine.”
  “It’s both your problem,” Rafiz said. “You know what they’re
saying about you? They’re saying that you stole her tattoos.”
  “I had nothing to do with that,” Mama said. “Anyway, she
stole my son.”
  “They’re calling her Blue Glove now,” Rafiz said.
  From somewhere inside Mama’s fat body a short deep
chuckle sounded. “Blue Glove,” she said. “That’s good.”
  “Don’t you think it’s time to stop this stupid bickering?”
Rafiz said. “I’ll bet both of you have forgotten what the fight
was about.”
  “What’s the girl’s name, anyway?” Mama said.
  “Casey,” Rafiz said, annoyed that she’d changed the subject.
  “Ca-sey.” Mama lingered over the foreign syllables. “Well, I
can’t promise anything, but I’ll have the children talk to her if
she comes back. How’s that?”
  “She says she’s trying to learn Lurqazi,” Rafiz said.
  “Huh,” Mama said. Sotano shuffled past, the bones in his
hand clacking. Mama nodded to him.
  “How many tourists have you ever heard of that spoke
Lurqazi?” she asked Rafiz.
  “This one’s different,” Rafiz said. “I told you. And the cards
say so too.”
  Mama nodded and closed her eyes against the sun. It was a
dismissal. Rafiz stood up slowly, hoping his legs would hold
him. That was the best he’d ever get from Mama, he knew.
And maybe Casey wouldn’t even come back. He frowned, then
headed back to the shade of Blue Rose’s shop to read the cards.
A new deck had come that morning.



          The Jewel King’s Palace
                                                          «^»
Claire hailed a cab and said, “Super Shop, please.” The driver
nodded emphatically and she got in.
   But when the driver stopped a few minutes later she saw
nothing that she recognized, not the burned-out neighborhood
or the shiny new building rising from the wreckage,
incongruous as a diamond. “No,” she said, leaning forward
from the back seat. “The Super Shop. Groceries.”
  “Yes,” the driver said. “We are here. Bookstore.”
  Startled, Claire looked out the window again. “Joe’s
Bookstore and Car Repair,” the meticulously painted sign over
the small shop said, and in smaller letters, “English Language
Books Sold Here.”
   Claire nodded in understanding. The liquor store would have
to wait. She couldn’t pass up a chance like this. “Thanks,” she
said, paying the driver and getting out of the car.
   From the outside, except for its astonishing sign, the store
looked like nearly every other shop in the city—small, dusty,
neglected. But when she got inside Claire saw a clean store,
trim head-high rows of white bookshelves against the walls
and down the center, the books neatly arranged. The store
was bigger than it looked from the outside, and the lights were
brighter. Behind a counter at the front sat a young
man—Joe?—reading a book. “Hello,” he said as she closed the
door behind her.
  Claire nodded. She was already caught in the enchanted net
of the bookshelves. She walked down rows of books about
history, science, cooking, a large section devoted to car repair.
Her feet on the linoleum floor, and the young man turning
pages, made the only sounds in the store. It’s like drinking,
Claire thought, delighted, running her fingers over the spines.
Worse, because the spell lasts longer. If you read, don’t drive.
She found the fiction section and the new Stephen King and
the new Philip Roth—books that hadn’t even been out when
she’d left the States—and took them to the counter. The young
man set down his book.
  “Do you really repair cars?” she asked.
  “You bet,” he said, ringing up her purchases on the cash
register. “Says so on the sign, doesn’t it?”
  “Where are you from?” she asked. “You’re American, aren’t
you?”
  “Des Moines,” he said.
  “How on earth did you end up here?”
  He put her books in a white plastic bag with the name of
the store printed on it. For a moment she was back in the
United States, in the chain store in the shopping mall where
she bought all her books. “There’s some of us the city likes to
keep,” he said. “I don’t know why. Maybe because all the
tourists come here. It must think it’s only fair to take one or
two of us.”
  She took her books outside, stopped another cab, and went
on to the Super Shop, where she bought much less than the
last time. In the cab home she settled back against the seat,
surrounded by her purchases, feeling pleasantly worn out.
There’s some of us the city likes to keep, Joe had said. She
didn’t feel as though the city wanted to keep her, but she did
wonder if it had singled her out for something. She felt
sheltered, muffled, cushioned in the city’s soft embrace like a
piece of jewelry nestling in cotton inside a cardboard box. She
had noticed Angie had stopped going outside, that she and
Casey looked a little sickly, and she wondered what the city
had done to them, why it had picked her as the sole recipient
of its bounty. But these things, like so many other things in
life, were not to be studied too closely. The cab slowed at the
university, and, feeling like a seasoned traveler, she directed it
the rest of the way home.


Casey went into the kitchen, got out cereal and milk and made
herself breakfast. Mitchell had already left for the day. She
sat at the table across from her mother, who was reading from
what looked like a new hardcover. More books were piled by
her elbow, with a thin brown pamphlet at the top of the stack.
Casey reached over for the pamphlet. A Few Proverbs of Amaz ,
by Percy Swafford-Brown, the cover said. It was badly
smudged.
   She opened the book, looking for something Rafiz had said
to her: “Only a fool argues with the cards.” “Big things walk,
small things roll,” she read. “Time is divided by two.”
  “Hey, Mom,” Casey said. “Where did you get this?”
  Claire looked up slowly from her book, a finger marking her
place. “Bookstore,” she said.
  “An English-language bookstore?” Casey said. “I never saw
one.”
  “Oh well,” Claire said. “You have to know where to look, I
guess.” She smiled, the look of the mischievous child that
Casey had seen more and more since they’d come to Amaz.
   “What do you think this one means?” Casey said, reading
from the book. “ ‘Jagged and curved things can never marry.’ ”
  “I don’t know,” Claire said. She closed the book and seemed
to make an effort to concentrate. “Maybe your father knows.”
  “I don’t think that’s his field,” Casey said.
  “Are you going to go out today?” Claire asked.
  “I don’t know,” Casey said. “I guess not.”
  “What happened?” Claire said. “Didn’t you have a friend out
there, a pen pal or something?”
  “Yeah, well, it’s a long story,” Casey said. Then, in a rush,
she said, “Things have causes that can be seen and
understood, right? I mean, don’t you think so?”
  “I used to, I guess,” Claire said. “Now I’m not so sure. I’ve
seen things happen…” She drifted back to her book and
started to read.
  Casey stood and bqgan to wash her breakfast dishes. I
should have known better than to ask her, she thought. She
put the dishes away and went back to her room,, taking the
pamphlet with her.
  In her room she sat cross-legged on the bed, looking through
her Lurqazi phrase book. She seemed to have forgotten
everything she ever knew about the language. And she would
probably never have occasion to say “Please park my car in the
garage” or “This wine is not suitable. Could you bring us
another bottle?”
  In fact, she would probably never have occasion to speak
Lurqazi again. Her day with Rafiz had shaken her more than
she’d known at the time. How had her picture come to be on a
playing card? How had Rafiz known about the thunderstorm
that had taken the tourists by surprise? As she’d said to her
mother, things had causes that could be seen and understood.
Things did not happen because a playing card said they would.
  She put down the phrase book and looked through the book
of proverbs. Did people really say these things? Even more
important, did they understand them?
  Of course she could go out on her own, without Rafiz. But
there were crazy cabdrivers out there, and women who
wanted to sell babies to her. It was not enough, she was
beginning to think, to understand the language. A few days
ago she had seen a woman stand in front of a storefront and
yell at another woman walking away from her down the block;
the first woman had shaken her forearms after the second
woman’s retreating back. What did that mean? Was she
cursing her, blessing her, saying good-bye, saying she would
never speak to her again? And what about the graffiti that
covered every vacant storefront and burned-out house, the
strange calligraphy of sharp and rounded letters? Even if you
lived here for years you would never really know the place in a
way the natives did.
  And she was starting to feel homesick, too, just like the
tourists she looked down upon. She missed pizza and ice
cream, missed living in a place where everyone spoke English
and it wasn’t a struggle just to make yourself understood.
Everything seemed difficult, a strain. In some ways it would
be easier to stay inside until school started.
   But if she stayed indoors all the time she would become like
poor, pale Angie, she would not have taken full advantage of
her year in another country. Angie. Her mother hadn’t wanted
to talk to her, but maybe Angie would. She could visit Angie’s
bedroom, see how she was getting on. And then tomorrow she
could go out into the city.
  She got up and went into the hallway. Her father had
wanted to put her and Angie in the two bedrooms next to each
other, but she had pointed out how much better it would be if
she and her parents took the two adjoining bedrooms and
Angie took the room across the hall. That way Angie would be
out of the way, and everyone else could get some quiet.
  Angie sat inside her room with her head bent over a black
notebook, her hair coming down over her face like a shining
veil. “Hi,” Casey said, coming in without knocking.
  Angie looked up. “Oh, hi,” she said.
   Casey sat on the bed next to her. “Want to go out into the
city with me tomorrow?” she said.
  “No, why?” Angie said. “I’m busy here.”
  “Oh,” Casey said.
  “You’re losing the war, you know,” Angie said.
  “Yes, I rather thought I would be,” Casey said.
  “It’s not funny,” Angie said. “If you think it’s funny you can
just get the hell out of my room.”
  “I don’t think it’s funny,” Casey said.
  Angie wrote in her notebook for a few seconds. “I need a
word for soldier,” she said.
  “Mafirq ,” Casey said, giving her the Lurqazi word.
  “Thanks,” Angie said, writing some more.
  Casey felt a powerful pull of nostalgia, as if they had
somehow been moved back two or three years to when they
had played the game of the Two Kingdoms nearly every day.
To fight it she said, “You sure you don’t want to go outside
with me? I can show you around, show you Colonial House, it’s
real interesting—”
  “No,” Angie said, not looking up.
  She had to do something to take Angie away from her
notebooks, even if it meant making a sacrifice. “Listen,” she
said. “I’ll take you to Twenty-fifth November Street, introduce
you to my friend Rafiz. You’d like him. And he can show us
both around, he’s lived in the city all his life—”
  “I just don’t have time,” Angie said.
  “Sure you do,” Casey said. “You can still work on the
kingdoms and go out every so often. You used to like to go out
with me. Remember the time I showed you how to use the
gym rings at school?”
   Every recess in grade school Casey had seen Angie hanging
from two of the circle of rings without any idea of how to move
on to the next ring. Finally, unable to stand it any more,
Casey had stayed after school with her and shown her the
secret, shown her that if she moved in toward the center of
the rings the momentum would carry her back outward and
on to the next ring. After that Angie had spent every recess on
the rings, moving gracefully around the circle, and by the end
of the year her palms had thickened with calluses.
   To Casey’s surprise Angie looked up from the notebook and
smiled. “Yeah, I remember,” she said. She rubbed her palms
together as though the calluses were still there. “You know
what I used to think after that? I thought that everything in
the world had a secret, and that all you had to do was to learn
the secret. Algebra had a secret, and so did how to make
friends, and how to be a good cook like Mom. I spent hours
trying to figure these things out. And then I realized that the
world was more complicated than I thought.” She laughed
softly.
  “And that’s when you started your kingdom?” Casey said.
“When you noticed that things weren’t as simple as you
thought they were?”
  “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me, Casey,” Angie said, not
angrily. “The kingdoms aren’t simple—they’re more
complicated than lots of things. I added a lot to them after you
stopped.”
  “Yeah, but you still control everything that happens,” Casey
said. “It’s much easier than real life.”
  “So what?” Angie said. “What’s so great about real life
anyway?”
  “It’s unexpected,” Casey said. “You don’t know everything
that’s going to happen.”
  “So what?” Angie said again.
  “I give up,” Casey said, standing up. “Look, you want to
come with me to Twenty-fifth November Street you let me
know. And if you want to stay here and rot that’s okay with
me too.”
  “I want to stay here and rot,” Angie said. “I just read an
interesting statistic.”
  “Oh?” Casey said. “So you read other things besides your
notebooks?”
  “Sometimes,” Angie said. “Anyway, this statistic said that
most car accidents occur within a one-mile radius of your
house. You know what that means, don’t you?”
  “I’m afraid I don’t,” Casey said. “Enlighten me.”
  “That means it’s much safer to stay inside,” Angie said.
“Never leave your house and you’ll never get into an accident.”
  “Maybe it means you should never go home,” Casey said.
  “Well, I’m not going anywhere,” Angie said. “I’ve got to stay
here and make sure you lose this war.”
  “If you control the whole thing I don’t see how I could
possibly win,” Casey said.
  “Oh, Casey,” Angie said. She bent back to her notebook.
“You used to be able to understand.”


Mitchell squinted at the distant hills, the towers, spires and
domes jumbled together like white and gold chess pieces at the
end of a game. Casey had asked about them, he remembered,
after he’d picked the family up from the airport. He’d never
found out who lived there. Maybe by now Casey had.
   He turned to Jara, feeling, as he always felt next to the
small dapper man, too large, out of scale, Oliver Hardy to the
man’s Stan Laurel. But the whole damn country was the size
of Jara, a country of Laurels. “Well,” he said, “should we get
started?”
  “Yes,” Jara said eagerly. He studied a neatly typed sheet of
paper he held in his hand. The other hand held a briefcase.
“That way.”
   The two men walked in silence for a while. As always when
he was with Jara Mitchell’s thoughts began the familiar
litany: How much can you trust this man? Who did he tell
about the manuscript? Does he know who broke into the house
that night? He stopped himself. Why would Jara have had
anything to do with the break-in? He’d had the manuscript
himself that day.
  And yet Jara was acting, Mitchell thought, a little oddly.
His department had come back with the opinion that the epic
was genuine, and Jara had immediately wanted to follow the
trail of clues in the manuscript to find the ancient Jewel
King’s sword. Nothing wrong with that, Mitchell
thought—he’d wanted to check the manuscript himself, to look
at present-day sites and see how much of the story was real
and how much was myth passed down from generation to
generation. But for Jara the search seemed more immediate,
nothing to do with scholarship, almost an obsession. Mitchell
wondered what Jara would do with the sword if he found it.
  Jara looked at his sheet of paper again. His secretary had
typed it yesterday, he’d told Mitchell, following his and
Mitchell’s notes. So that was one more person who knew about
the manuscript, who could have told her husband, her
next-door neighbor, the man who sold her vegetables. Mitchell
had no illusions that this woman would not have understood
what she was typing. Everyone in Amaz had grown up with
stories about the Jewel King.
  “The manuscript mentions the marketplace,” Jara said.
“Here the Jewel King was reunited with his best knight, who
had been forced into banishment. The knight was in hiding,
selling leather shoes, but he couldn’t resist the glory of the
king’s sword, and so came out from his tent to touch the
sword. And the king, of course, welcomed him back, since he
had need of his services.”
   Mitchell wondered why Jara was going over a story they
both knew so well. Well, it was an oral culture after all. Jara,
like the secretary, had probably grown up hearing hundreds of
variants on the story, though never this one, the only written
version outside of twentieth-century folklore texts.
   “So,” Jara said. “Here is the marketplace, unchanged in
location, our archaeologists tell us, for over a thousand years.
And probably the beginning of our search.”
   Mitchell heard the eagerness in Jara’s voice again, and it
worried him. What did Jara expect from this search? He
looked at the market, the noise, the flies, the cattle crowded in
unsanitary pens at one end, and tried to imagine the Jewel
King coming here with his servants, his knights, maybe even
the queen. He couldn’t see it. Jara was talking, and as
Mitchell turned back to listen he saw a shoemaker’s booth, a
man in a stained and torn leather apron sitting in front, shoes
piled before him like the heads of conquered foes. The best
knight in the realm, Mitchell thought. Amused, he started to
say something to Jara, then stopped as he noticed two men
leaning against the booth, staring at him avidly. One of the
men was huge, bigger even than Mitchell, and the other was
missing an ear. The smaller man nudged his companion, and
they went behind the booth and out of sight.
  Now that was strange, Mitchell thought. What on earth
could they want?
  “Now the manuscript records that next the king and his
knights battled the invaders who attacked the marketplace,”
Jara was saying. Mitchell forced himself to pay attention.
“And that the king’s best knight acquitted himself so well that
the king swore him to allegiance once more after the battle,
swore him on the sword. And that they traveled together to
the king’s house, their friendship newly seamed.”
  Seamed? Mitchell thought. Maybe sealed.
   “But how far did they ride?” Jara said. “And remember that
some of the retinue were on foot, and that there were many of
them. They arrived at the king’s house in time for dinner, for
the epic says that the king served his knight a lavish meal,
and they were going west, because the sun was in their eyes.
So. We must go in that direction—” Jara pointed—“for a few
hours, walking slowly.” He opened the briefcase and took out a
map of the city, so filled with a tracery of lines in
different-colored inks that at first it looked like another copy
of the manuscript. Mitchell looked on in amazement. When
had Jara made that? “My own guess,” Jara said, “is the
unexcavated wall here, in the Old Quarter.” He pointed at a
blue spot on the map, then opened the briefcase again, rooted
around and brought up a compass. “We must walk in that
direction.”
  Mitchell sighed. His clothes were sticking to his underarms
and back, and he was starting to feel hungry. The thought of
walking in the noon heat seemed less and less appealing. How
had Jara talked him into this, anyway? He dealt with theories,
with texts and footnotes and bibliographies, with myths dead
hundreds of years, diving deep into books like a dolphin into
waves. Not with anything real.
   As they were leaving he saw the two men slip around the
side of the booth and take nearly the same path out of the
marketplace. The men stopped every so often to look at the
wares for sale or talk to a merchant sitting in front of his
booth, and yet when Mitchell and Jara walked past the cattle
pens and left the market the two men were right behind them.
Were they following him? Or was he just being paranoid,
uncertain in this strange city?
   The sky looked bleached to a whitish-blue from the intense
heat of the sun. A few cirrus clouds, shaped like ribs, had
formed overhead, but they cast no shadows. Mitchell and Jara
headed toward the distant marble buildings, cool and
impossible as ice. “What are those?” Mitchell asked, pointing
at the buildings. “Are they some kind of monument?”
  Jara looked up from his compass. “Rich people live there,”
he said. “And the very poor, they live on the other side of us,
in the hills there.” He turned to point and the needle in the
compass swung wildly. “Rich and poor, they live in the hills.
And they leave the city for us, for the middle.”
  Mitchell doubted that. He’d certainly seen enough poor
people since he’d come to the city. And what about Dr. Tamir?
Wouldn’t he be considered rich, at least by the standards of
the city?
  They walked in silence for a while. Thoughts of his family
intruded like a persistent odor. He wished he were back at his
desk in the university, pursuing a fine point in eighth-century
Lurqazi linguistics, pinning the meaning of a word like a
butterfly. Angie hadn’t gone out into the city at all last week,
and now Casey was going out less often. And worse, Casey had
started asking if they could all go out to the ruins next
weekend. He wouldn’t mind, but somehow he knew that they
weren’t the kind of family that did things together. Angie
couldn’t be pried from her room, and Claire had started
drinking again… Well, he thought, maybe Casey and I could
go to the ruins together. Though that would just be an
admission that there’s something wrong with the rest of them.
Or, I know—we could go visit the Wileys, and go to the ruins
from there. I think they invited us, didn’t they? Casey would
remember.
  Claire might even like that, a vacation from housework and
the strange, crazy city. Though Claire was looking better—her
cheeks had filled out and her hair looked glossier, not so ratty.
Lately he’d been remembering what she’d looked like sixteen
years ago, when they had gotten married.
   They had both been in college then. He’d dated a series of
stupid pretty women on the weekends. During the week, after
classes, he would go over to a house shared by a friend of his
and five or six other people, and they’d sit and talk philosophy,
literature and politics until one or two in the morning.
   He’d thought those two aspects of his life were separate,
inviolate. The weekends were for physical pleasures, the week
for using his mind. He’d been astonished when his friend told
him that one of the women in the house was interested in him.
In college, away from his small, smug hometown, he’d done a
lot of things that would have shocked his younger, staider self.
Yet somehow going out with an intelligent woman,
introducing her to his weekend life, seemed to him to be
breaking the strongest taboo of all.
  They rarely went to movies or concerts or museums, all the
places he’d taken the other women. (The trips to museums and
concerts, he saw now, were intended to demonstrate to those
women how much he knew, how cultured he was.) They’d go
to restaurants or coffeehouses, begin to talk about something
that had happened during the week, and end up staying for
two or three hours. Afterward, at her house, they’d try to
make it to her bedroom before being stopped by the arguments
raging, like small fires, in different rooms of the house. During
that time he started to think of intellectual discussions as a
kind of foreplay, a prelude to lovemaking.
   Sometimes he wondered what had happened between that
time and this, would try to find the Mitchell and Claire of
those days in his current existence. Where had their torrents
of words gone? Claire had dropped out of school when she’d
become pregnant with Angie and had given up any thought of
returning after she’d had Casey. Had they wanted a family?
Had they even discussed it? He couldn’t remember. Probably
they’d been so busy talking about abstract issues it had never
come up.
   It wasn’t as if he’d never tried to get Claire out of the house.
Every semester, when he got the schedule of classes from the
university, he’d point out courses Claire could take. Now that
Angie and Casey were almost grown, he’d say, she could afford
to go out a little. She would nod and even circle a few of the
classes, but she would always miss the deadline to register. It
was almost as if she’d given up, as if she drank and read
novels that were mostly trash to get back at him. But for
what? What had he done to her? Nothing that he could
remember.
  Jara was saying something. Mitchell turned to him, grateful
at being forced out of his reverie. “Odd,” Jara said. He stopped
and rattled the compass like a watch. Mitchell stopped with
him.
  “What’s odd?” Mitchell said.
   “We missed the Old Quarter,” Jara said. “My grandmother
lives in this part of the city, and the Old Quarter is located in
that direction, at least three miles to the south. And yet we
followed this street here in a straight line, and it should have
brought us—”
  “You sound like Dr. Tamir,” Mitchell said, cheerful now that
he could stop thinking about his family. “He said something
about the streets moving—”
   “Nonsense!” Jara said. He looked truly angry for a moment,
as though Mitchell had just insulted his ancestors. “Dr. Tamir
is a delightful old man, but in some ways he has changed
greatly since he began believing in this Sozrani idiocy.”
  “In what idiocy?” Mitchell said.
   “In this new religion of his,” Jara said. “In the last few
months before he left he angered all of us in the department.
He told us about these delusions of his, his superstitions about
the city, but we gave them no belief, and I suggest you do the
same. And he implied that he knew something, a secret that
we were not worthy to learn.” He shook the map out in front
of him as though trying to rearrange its lines and angles, and
bent to study it.
   Mitchell noticed with amusement that the angrier Jara got
the more British his accent became, until finally he sounded
like an old-fashioned boy’s adventure book. He wondered if
Jara was so impatient to find the sword because he wanted to
establish it as a real thing, lift it out of the category of
superstitious nonsense. He turned to ask him, but at that
moment he saw two men, one much bigger than the other,
hurry around the corner of a building. They were too far away
for him to see if one of them was missing an ear, but his
amusement vanished and he felt almost cold. “Do you think,”
he said slowly, trying to phrase his question so that Jara
wouldn’t think he was an ignorant foreigner, “we’re being
followed?”
 “Followed?” Jara said sharply, looking up from his map. “By
whom? Why should we be followed?”
  “Well, because we’re looking for what would be the most
valuable artifact in Amaz, if it exists,” Mitchell said.
  “Yes, but I see no evidence we are being followed,” Jara
said. “Who else knows about it but us?”
   “That’s what I’d like to know,” Mitchell said. “Look, first my
house was broken into, and then at the marketplace I saw
these two guys watching us, and right here, right over there, I
saw them again, or two men who look a lot like them. Who
else did you tell? The people in your department who checked
the manuscript, your secretary, who else?”
  “What are you implying?” Jara said coldly. “That in my
department is a group of thieves, including my secretary?”
   “No, no, not at all,” Mitchell said, trying to sound placating.
“I’m not implying anything. I’m just saying that my house was
broken into—”
  “Yes, and nothing was stolen,” Jara said.
  “Because the manuscript was at the university, don’t you
see?” Mitchell said. “They didn’t take anything because they
were after the manuscript.”
  “Well but if, as you say, my department was responsible,”
Jara said, “then why would my department break into your
house, if they knew that the manuscript was at the
university?”
  Mitchell tried not to think of an entire anthropology
department breaking into his house. “Yes, but did they know
that you had the manuscript?” he asked. “Did you tell
everyone?”
   Jara threw up his hands, one of them still holding the map.
“How can you possibly expect me to remember?” he asked, his
cold manner replaced by another climate entirely, hot and
volatile. “All right, very well, I will now suspect all my
department, including the chairman, who will retire some
time this year because he is going blind, including Dr. Otaq,
who is so obese he could barely fit through your door, let alone
one of your windows. Would you like that? Would that comfort
you, that my entire department has been set against itself?”
   “All I’m saying,” Mitchell said, “is that my house was broken
into. And that I think I saw two men following us. And that I’d
like to know how many people knew about the manuscript,
that maybe— maybe —someone you know told someone, who
told someone else, who told someone who might, just might, be
interested in the Jewel King’s sword. That’s all.”
  “Where are these two men following us?” Jara said. “Show
them to me.”
  “They went around that building there,” Mitchell said,
pointing to a car-upholstery shop. “They probably heard us
arguing and ran away.”
   “Come,” Jara said. “Let us see if we can find these two men
of yours.”
   Mitchell sighed and followed Jara. He knew what he would
find before they reached the building, and of course once they
got to the back of the shop they saw no sign of the two men,
just an empty field covered with brown weeds. “Maybe these
men are part of your imagination, eh?” Jara said. “Maybe
there never were any men, eh?”
  Mitchell shrugged. “Like I said, they probably heard us,” he
said. “What about the burglary? Was that my imagination
too?”
   “You are a rich American,” Jara said. “There is no mystery
to why you were burglarized.”
   “Look,” Mitchell said. “I don’t want to argue. I don’t want to
follow this wild-goose chase any longer, either. You can keep
going, look for your palace, but be careful. Those men were
real, and they’re probably still around here somewhere. I’m
going back to the university.”
  “Fine,” Jara said. “And when the sword is found there will
be only one man who will get the credit. There will be only one
name on the card when the sword is displayed in the national
museum. You go back to the university. I will continue to
chase wild geese, is that right?”
  Mitchell opened his mouth to say that there was no national
museum in Amaz. Then he saw the low wall halfway across
the field, almost hidden by the weeds. The wall shone like a
mirror in the sun.
  Was it marble? Hardly daring to guess, Mitchell walked
through the weeds, thistles catching on his pants, until he put
his hand on the wall. Graffiti and dirt covered it, but it was
definitely marble. “You are going in the wrong direction!” Jara
said, and now Mitchell realized that Jara had been shouting at
him for quite a while.
  “Forget it!” Mitchell said, shouting back. “Come over here
and look at this!”
  Jara seemed to understand. He hurried across the field and
touched the wall exactly as Mitchell had. “Marble,” he said.
   “Do you think—?” Mitchell said. A man came out of the back
door of the upholstery shop and started toward them,
shouting. “Look,” Mitchell said. “You can almost see a floor
plan. And I think there’s another wall across the field. And
look at this,” he said, excited. A patch of an old mosaic ran
along the base of the wall, faded blue and red and green tiles
that spelled out something in jagged letters. Farther on along
the wall the letters looked as though they had been pried up,
and another mosaic, of newer, more rounded letters, had been
put in their place. Now what did that remind him of?
Something… He couldn’t remember.
   “There will have to be tests made, an excavation,” Jara said.
“It is obviously too early to tell. But if it is, then what a
find—”
  “Why are you here?” the man from the upholstery shop said
angrily, coming up to them. “You should not be here. This
is—”
  “We think we’ve found something,” Mitchell said. “This wall,
we think this wall might be—”
  “It is the house of the Jewel King,” the man said, saying
“Jewel King” in perfect eighth-century Lurqazi. “Everyone
around here knows that.”
  Jara and Mitchell looked at each other and started laughing.
   Later, over sweet sticky bread and cinnamon coffee, Jara
said, “Of course if we investigated every wall that someone
says is the palace of the Jewel King we would be at it for a
hundred years. Even the ruins of the walls of the city are
thought by the ignorant to be the palace, and they are made of
nothing but ordinary stone. But this one is a very good
candidate, just the right distance from the marketplace, in
just the right direction… And of course the fact that there is a
legend around it does not hurt our case at all.”
   “Can the archaeology department at the university handle
it?” Mitchell asked, tearing off a piece of bread. They had
looked for a place to eat lunch but had only been able to find
this crowded coffee-and-pastry shop. It looked as though
everyone in the shop had been sitting there for hours, maybe
days, getting refills on their coffee, gossiping and arguing
politics and making business deals. Mitchell had not had any
breakfast, and the sugar in the bread and coffee hit his
bloodstream hard, making him manic. “I know the chairman
of the department back in the States, he’d be only too happy to
get in at the beginning of this…”
  Jara held up his hand. “Let us see if we can do this
ourselves, without outsiders,” he said. “After all, this is a
matter of national pride. If what we have found is the
palace…”
  “Of course,” Mitchell said, sorry he’d brought it up. He
shouldn’t be talking so much.
   “But think what this will mean to us,” Jara said. “No longer
will they be able to call the stories of the Jewel King ignorant
superstitions. He lived, he existed, he united the kingdom
some time around the ninth century… This could be the
beginning of a new nationalistic movement, a resurgence of
our pride. Everyone will want to come see the site, the actual
site of the Jewel King’s palace.”
  “It’d make a good tourist attraction.” Mitchell said.
   Jara looked at him oddly, and for a moment he feared he’d
said the wrong thing again. Then Jara laughed. “You
Americans,” he said. “That is all you think about, your tourist
attractions. You are the great spectators. The other countries
of the world put on their shows for you, display their ruins,
their pottery, their dances and religions. And you watch. You
watch because your country has no past of its own. Is that
right?”
  Mitchell shrugged. He had never really given it much
thought.
  “But you are right,” Jara said. “It would make a good tourist
attraction. That would be one way we could finance the
excavation.”
   Ah ha, Mitchell thought. You laugh at the Americans, but
when you need money for something we’re the first people you
think of. Still, he was glad to see Jara in such a good mood, his
anger spent. If they hadn’t found that wall he and Jara would
probably not have spoken to each other for the rest of his time
in Amaz.
  “You will be here tomorrow?” Jara asked. “I will tell the
archaeology department about the wall and we will continue
our research.”
  “Sure,” Mitchell said.
  “And maybe tomorrow we will find the sword,” Jara said.


The waitress Casey liked was taking orders behind the counter
at McDonald’s. “Good evening,” Casey said in careful Lurqazi,
and told her what she wanted.
   The waitress giggled. When Casey had first met the
waitress, she had thought the giggles must mean that she,
Casey, was making terrible mistakes in Lurqazi. After a few
tries she realized that the waitress giggled at everything, that
she found the idea of an American learning Lurqazi almost
unbearably funny. She read the order back to Casey in
English.
  “Very good,” Casey said in Lurqazi.
  “Do you think I am ready for the United States?” the
waitress asked.
  “Oh, yes,” Casey said. “Your English is very good. When are
you going?”
  The waitress sighed. Somehow she managed to convey that
she found even the idea of sighing funny. “When I can get
someone to take me,” she said. “I am looking for an American
to marry me and take me back with him. What about your
family? You must need someone to help cook for you.”
  “We can’t—” Casey said. Defeated, she fell back on English.
“We can’t afford a cook. Otherwise we’d love to take you back
with us.”
 “Of course you can afford me,” the waitress said. “All
Americans are rich, aren’t they?”
  Casey laughed. The waitress laughed with her, though
Casey wasn’t sure the waitress had been making a joke.
“Some of them are,” Casey said, and added, “Good luck,” in
Lurqazi.
  They took their trays to a table. Before they could sit down
Mitchell said, “I think we found the Jewel King’s palace
today.”
   Claire took a sip of wine. “Really?” she said, brushing a wisp
of hair from her eyes.
  “Yeah,” Mitchell said. Casey couldn’t remember seeing him
so expansive, so willing to talk. “My colleague, Dr. Jara, he
made up these charts and maps and things. I thought he was
crazy, but we followed the directions in the epic and we ended
up finding an old ruined wall just where we thought it would
be. There’s even a legend around it that says it’s the Jewel
King’s palace.”
 “So you think you’re           working    with   an    authentic
manuscript?” Claire asked.
  Casey saw her father frown. He had told them the epic was
probably genuine weeks ago. She knew he wouldn’t want to
remind Claire of that. “Well, yes,” he said. “Dr. Jara thinks it’s
the Book of Stones, since most of it takes place at the Battle of
Stones, the king’s last defeat. And I’m coming to agree with
him.”
   “I think it’s great, Dad,” Casey said. “Where’s the palace?”
She looked at Angie, hoping her sister would want to say
something too. But Angie was busy taking her hamburger
apart and dividing it into separate sections, pickles in one,
lettuce in another, tomato in a third. Casey watched as Angie
started to eat the pile of lettuce. Angie had a system for
everything.
  “I couldn’t really tell you,” Mitchell said. He laughed. “Jara
gave me a map so I could find my way back. The wall’s
somewhere near the Old Quarter, I think.”
  “What does it look like?” Casey asked.
   “Well, it’s not very impressive,” Mitchell said. “It’s just an
old marble wall covered with graffiti. But there’s a mosaic at
the base of it which we think is rather promising.” His free
hand traced an intricate pattern on the surface of the table.
Was that the mosaic, Casey wondered, or the graffiti?
  “Are you going to start excavating?” she asked.
   “Well, the university is,” Mitchell said. “We’re going to keep
following the directions in the epic. Jara has this—well, I
think it’s an obsession about finding the Jewel King’s sword.
But you know, I wonder if the university can handle all the
work. It’s not the first time I’ve seen these sorts of colleges
take on these projects that are too big for them. Maybe I’ll
write to the States, line up someone to step in when it gets too
tough.”
   Claire sipped at her drink. “But you know what the weird
thing was?” Mitchell said. He was looking at Casey now, as if
he realized she was the only one paying attention and had
given up on the others. “All the time we were out there I got
this definite feeling we were being followed. I saw these two
men at the marketplace, and then I think I saw them again
right before we found the wall. But Jara refuses to discuss it.
He thinks I’m accusing his entire department, when all I’m
saying is that someone there might have told someone who
was interested in the sword. I mean, who else knew about the
manuscript?”
  Casey took a bite of her hamburger to cover her confusion.
Someone else knew, someone her father couldn’t possibly be
aware of. She had told Rafiz in one of her letters to him.
Dammit, that had been stupid. Why hadn’t she seen that the
discovery of the manuscript might be important to more than
just her father and other academics? Now she’d have to go
back to Twenty-fifth November Street and confront Rafiz.
That’d be embarrassing, after the way she’d ignored him for so
long. And depending on what she found out she might have to
tell her father what she’d done, and that would be even worse.
  Her father had stopped talking and was looking at her as if
he expected an answer. No one else said anything, all of them
caught in their old awkward silences. Casey bent her head to
her plate and continued eating. Tomorrow, she thought. She’d
have to go see Rafiz tomorrow.


When she got up the next day Casey noticed that all her dirty
clothes had been washed. She shook her head, a little
bemused. Now where had her mother found a laundromat?
Even more puzzling, how had her mother gotten up the
courage to go out into the hot smoggy city? But she’d been
bringing home groceries and books for a long time, ever since
the dinner with the Wiley’s.
   Casey felt, and was surprised to feel, a little jealous. She
had lost her edge, she was no longer the one the rest of the
family turned to whenever they had a question about the
language or customs of Amaz. All her reading, all her studying
before she came here, and her mother had somehow
effortlessly become the seasoned traveler Casey had dreamed
of being.
   It meant rethinking all her assumptions about her mother,
Casey thought, as she put on her jeans and the embroidered
blouse she had bought in the marketplace. As a kid she had
read everything anyone left lying around the house, anything
from magazines to junk mail from funeral homes, and she’d
gone to her mother, sitting in the kitchen drinking and
reading her own book or magazine, for an explanation
whenever she ran across a word she didn’t understand. She
had been astonished by the number of things her mother
didn’t know. She didn’t know, for instance, the difference
between a bicep and a tricep, or what it meant when
upholstery was described as “chintz,” or what tapioca pudding
was made out of. And this vagueness extended to every part of
her life, so that, for example, whenever she saw a movie, she
never recognized people she’d seen in other movies, thinking,
perhaps, that directors hired an original cast of unknown
actors for each new movie, actors who faded back into the
general population after the movie was over. Once, Casey
remembered, her father had delivered a series of guest
lectures at the university in Berkeley, and they’d driven over
to Berkeley on the Bay Bridge from their motel in San
Francisco every day for a week. And at the end of the week
Casey realized from something her mother said that she
thought there were two bridges crossing the bay, one to
Berkeley and one to San Francisco, that she hadn’t realized
they’d taken the same two-tiered bridge to go and come back.
Casey couldn’t believe it. “Didn’t you see that there wasn’t any
other bridge going from San Francisco to Berkeley?” she
asked, almost angrily. “Oh well,” her mother said, lifting her
hands vaguely, as though she’d forgotten where she was going
to put them. “I never really looked.”
   How on earth had her mother found a laundromat? Casey
thought as she ran her brush once through her hair. How had
she found the liquor store, or the English-language bookstore
where the fat new hardcovers piled on the kitchen table came
from? Had she—Casey paused, staring at the bathroom mirror
but not really seeing herself—had she underestimated her
mother all these years?
  She went outside and hailed a cab. On Twenty-fifth
November Street she nodded to the fat woman in the chair,
and to her surprise the woman nodded back, though a little
grudgingly, Casey thought. Then she went into the shop next
door. “Do you know where Rafiz is, please?” she asked
carefully in Lurqazi.
  The woman with the blue gloves said something Casey
didn’t catch and Rafiz came out from behind the curtain.
“Hello, Casey,” he said, sounding pleased.
  “Hello,” Casey said. Now that it came to it she didn’t know
what to say to him. Maybe he would be offended, would think
she was accusing him, just as Jara had. “I’ve got something I
want to ask you.”
  “Then let us go outside,” he said. They went out and sat at
the curb, their feet stretched out into the street.
   “You remember I wrote to you about my father finding that
manuscript,” she said. Rafiz nodded. “Did you ever tell anyone
else about it?”
 “No,” Rafiz said slowly. “But I think someone is reading my
mail. I think, in fact, that Blue Rose is reading my mail.”
  “Blue Rose?”
  “The woman I am staying with,” Rafiz said. “Once she had
blue roses tattooed on the palms of her hands—”
   “Why would she want to read your mail?” Casey asked,
interrupting him before he could get started on another story.
Storytelling seemed to be the big form of entertainment here,
like football in America.
  Rafiz shrugged. “I do not know,” he said. “But maybe she
read one letter out of curiosity and found out about your
father’s manuscript. Maybe she wants it to sell.”
  “Maybe,” Casey said. “Or maybe she’s looking for the sword,
the Jewel King’s sword, the one my father’s looking for. I bet
that would be worth a lot of money.”
  “Yes, that could be,” Rafiz said. “I know she was
disappointed once, very disappointed, a long time ago when
she had something valuable and then lost it. But why do you
ask me if I told anyone else about the manuscript?”
  “Because my father thinks someone’s following him,” Casey
said, and she told him about the Jewel King’s palace.
  “Ah,” Rafiz said. “These men following your father. Is one of
them missing an ear?”
  “I don’t know,” Casey said. “Why?”
  “Because I have seen Blue Rose talk sometimes to a man
named Zem, a man who would follow someone for a price,”
Rafiz said.“And Zem is missing an ear.”
  “I’ll ask my father,” Casey said. A cab drove down the street
and Casey and Rafiz moved their feet out of the way. The cab
stopped in front of the fat woman’s store and two American
tourists got out. “But what can he do about it? Can he go to
the police?”
   “It is not a good idea to go to the police,” Rafiz said. “Though
if you are a rich American, perhaps—But I do not think the
police will do anything unless there has been a crime.”
   “Well, then, what can we do?” Casey asked. “You mean this
man can follow my father and there’s nothing we can do about
it unless he commits a crime?”
  “Yes, that is what I mean,” Rafiz said. “But I will talk to
Blue Rose about this man and try to find out what she is
playing at. And in the meantime you can tell your father to be
careful. Maybe he can pay a man to help, how would you call
that?”
  “A bodyguard?” Casey asked, feeling worse. With one
unthinking gesture she had put her father in danger, maybe
threatened his life. This was terrible.
 “Perhaps,” Rafiz said. “Perhaps it is not so bad. Perhaps the
men are only following him, nothing more.”
   “Maybe,” Casey said. She sighed. “I don’t know—it seems so
strange. The whole thing. I just can’t believe that something I
did caused all this. That the man following my father comes
from this street.”
  “This street,” Rafiz said, “is at the center. It is the dry river
that runs through the dry city. Everything comes from this
street and soaks through the rest of the city, becoming weaker
and weaker as it gets further from the center. We stand,” he
said, gesturing broadly, “at the very heart.”
  Casey looked at him, trying not to show her amazement.
She had never heard him speak so poetically.
  “Would you—may I show you around today?” he said. “We
could see the marketplace, would you like that?”
  After his outburst of eloquence he sounded almost shy. And
Casey felt sorry that she had ignored him for so long. She felt
ashamed that she had come back only because she had wanted
something from him, and that he had been so eager to help
despite the way she had acted toward him. So what if he
believed in those silly superstitions? That was his problem, not
hers. “Sure,” she said.
  “Wonderful!” he said, standing up quicker than she thought
he’d be able to.



          Twenty-fifth
            November Street: 3
                                                        «^»
Tne tourists brought the paper money of Amaz to Twenty-fifth
November Street but the shopkeepers had a different
currency. In the evenings, after the stores had closed and the
tourists had gone away, they would visit each other and sip
coffee and rum and exchange stories. Something that could be
expanded to epic size happened nearly every week on the
street, and if it didn’t someone always made something up.
   When Zem the One-eared showed up on the street five
versions of how he had lost his ear appeared within the week.
No one knew the true story, but to the inhabitants of
Twenty-fifth November Street that didn’t matter. What
mattered was how the stories grew and were embellished, like
silver filigree, in the hands of the master storytellers. Blue
Rose thought that a jealous girlfriend had cut the ear off.
Someone else was sure that Zem had been marked by one or
another of the criminal groups in the city for failing to do
something for them.
  Zem worked as a handyman. He didn’t live on the street as
Rafiz did, but in the month after he arrived he got more jobs
than he could handle, even taking over some of Rafiz’s. But he
never told anyone how he lost the ear, and he was nowhere
near as meticulous as Rafiz, and after a while the odd jobs
stopped and he drifted away again. He came back three
months later, made some money and left again, and came
back at odd intervals after that, establishing an eccentric
rhythm, a kind of counterpoint to         Rafiz’s stately reliable
pattern. After a while interest in how   he lost the ear dwindled
to the point where if you asked people   on the street to describe
him, the missing ear might be one        of the last things they
would mention.
   The truth was that Zem never told the story to anyone
because he didn’t understand it himself. He was born during
the years of dreamlessness, and while his mother never
suffered from the strange sickness Zem as a child didn’t dream
until he was six or seven. His mother came from the country,
where the sickness was not as severe as in the city, and she
never recognized the symptoms of the disease in Zem—the
glazed eyes, the inattentiveness, the long periods of sleep,
sometimes as much as twenty hours a day. She worked long
hours as a housecleaner, leaving Zem alone in their own
house, and she had no one to tell her that other children didn’t
sleep so much, other children weren’t so quiet. Zem’s father
had left her before Zem was born.
  When Zem began finally to dream he didn’t understand
what the dreams were. He thought that they were another
kind of life, a night life; that everyone had seen the tigers
walk down the center of the street and that the crack that
broke down the side of the house during the night had been
quickly repaired before day.
  Then the terrifying dreams of childhood began. He woke
night after night, hoarse with screaming and covered with
sweat, from dreams where snakes had crawled out from under
his mattress or his mother had changed into an
unrecognizable monster. His mother couldn’t understand why
her child should suddenly have such bad dreams. He tried to
keep himself awake every night, but every night he lost the
battle and fell into what he was starting to think of as the pit.
  One night he had a dream worse than any of the others. He
had been warned not to go in the crawl space underneath the
house, but somehow he was there, and strange night animals
walked or crawled or flew in a circle around him. They
thought he was protected, but he wasn’t, and he knew that
when they found out he would be killed. Already the circle was
spiraling inward. He tried to keep his eyes on one animal, a
giant leathery bird that spit poison, but it kept disappearing
and then appearing again in front of him.
  “We know a secret,” a snake said, starting to move close to
him.
  “What?” he said, stepping backward.
  “Ahhh,” the snake said. “We can’t tell you.”
  “Why—why not?” he said.
  “Why should we tell you?” the snake said. “Have you ever
done anything for us?”
   The leather bird swooped in front of him, and when he
looked back at the snake he saw that a giant spider had come
within inches of his foot. He jerked back again. “I will!” he said
loudly. “What do you want me to do? I’ll do anything. Tell me
the secret.”
  “Ahhh,” the snake said. “You can give us a gift.”
  “Anything,” he said. “Anything you want. What’s the
secret?”
  “The secret is,” the snake said, coming closer, close enough
so that its tongue licked at his ear, “we aren’t real. We’re
inside your head. But now, what can you give us? You have
nothing.”
   He looked around and saw that it was true. Even his clothes
were gone, and he stood naked, cringing, in front of the
animals. “Nothing!” the bird said, and the other animals took
it up as a chant, hissing or barking or cawing. “Nothing!
Nothing! Nothing!”
   “This ear is very nice,” the snake said, coming even closer.
“Yes, very nice. We will take this ear in exchange for our
secret.” All the animals moved nearer, hemming him in. He
felt a terrible pain, and then a sharp throbbing where the ear
had been, and he woke up screaming.
  He lay still for a moment, listening to his mother getting up
in the next room. The snake wasn’t real. All the animals and
everyone in the night life weren’t real. That explained why no
one else ever saw the snakes under the bed or the tigers in the
street. It was all inside his head, he thought, relieved.
  He put his hand to his ear and felt the startling absence just
as his mother came into the room.
   He never had nightmares again. The snakes, the leather
bird and the other night monsters never returned. His mother
blamed herself for the missing ear, thought that he had
injured himself somehow while she was away cleaning houses.
He couldn’t ask her, couldn’t ask anyone, didn’t know the
words to ask. But he thought about that night for the rest of
his life, sometimes believing one thing, sometimes another.
Had the snake been telling the truth or not? And if it had,
what had happened to his ear?


Since then he found it difficult to distinguish between dreams
and reality, and when Blue Rose asked him to break into the
house of the American tourist he agreed immediately. Tourists
definitely belonged to the night life, the dream world. They
spoke a dream language, wore dream clothes, had more money
than anyone Zem knew in the waking world. There could be
nothing wrong with robbing a dream person.
   He didn’t find the manuscript Blue Rose was looking for, but
his work must have been acceptable to her because she hired
him on for another job. This time he was to follow the tourist
and his friend. He hesitated only enough to wonder if he
should ask her how much the job would pay or wait for her to
tell him. The only problem with the dream people, Zem
thought, would be if they disappeared while he was following
them.
  Blue Rose told him how much she would pay. It was
agreeable, enough so that he could leave the street again and
go back to the gambling district. Money was another thing
Zem was pretty sure belonged to the dream world: it came and
went of its own volition, had nothing to do with him. He could
never understand why people told him to stop gambling.
   A few evenings later Zem visited Blue Rose and was invited
upstairs for coffee. Zem told her about following the American
tourist through the marketplace and across the city. He
mentioned that he had gotten a friend to help him in case the
tourist and the smaller man split up, hoping Blue Rose would
suggest a raise in pay. She said nothing. He went on, telling
her about the man’s strange behavior by the wall. “They were
talking that weird tourist language so I couldn’t really
understand them,” Zem said. “But they seemed to be happy
about something, happy about finding the wall, I guess,
though as far as I could tell it was just another ruin. It seemed
silly to me. Why should they care about a bunch of old rocks?”
  He had hoped to phrase the question more subtly, but it
didn’t sound too bad now that it was out. Why was Blue Rose
interested in this man, and why was the man wandering
around the city looking at old ruins, instead of spending his
time like all the other tourists at the far more impressive
ruins to the north, or at the beaches? Even more important,
was there money in it for him? He knew Blue Rose was a real
person who had a real existence in the waking world, so he
couldn’t cheat her. Maybe they could come to some sort of
deal, not bribery exactly, just a sort of arrangement. But Blue
Rose said nothing.
  “And that’s it,” Zem said. “They went to a pastry shop and
sat and talked, and then they went home.”
  “What did they talk about?” Blue Rose asked.
  Zem shrugged. “I told you, I don’t speak their language,” he
said. In fact he had not dared to follow them inside, worried
that the tourist might have spotted him earlier. But he
couldn’t tell Blue Rose that.
  “Did they seem happy in the pastry shop too?” Blue Rose
asked.
  “Oh, yeah,” Zem said. “Very happy.”
  “Good,” Blue Rose said. She thought a moment and then
said, “I want you to keep following this man. He’ll probably go
back to the wall and start out from there, so if you lose him
you can pick him up again at the wall. But don’t lose him.”
  Zem nodded. She dismissed him and he went downstairs
into the shadowed shop, wondering how he could find out more
about this man.



          The Jewel King’s Tomb
                                                        «^»
The spy from Borol saluted the king’s guards and walked
uncontested into the king’s chambers. The king of Marol lay
on the canopied bed, asleep. The spy brushed aside his long
robe and touched the jeweled hilt of his curved dagger. He
unsheathed the dagger and—
  Angie sat back, her pen still poised over her notebook. If the
king of Marol died, then of course the war was over. And then
what? The army of Borol would come marching in, and some
in Marol would be executed and some promoted, and that
would be the end. There were long weeks to go before school
started, and what would she do until then? The war was
supposed to have taken her through September, at least.
  She wished Casey were here. Casey would know what to do
next. Well, suppose the spy couldn’t get to the king. Suppose
he killed someone else, someone like—She gasped.
  Both she and Casey had taken on the roles of some of the
people in the Two Kingdoms. Angie was Andara, the king of
Borol’s daughter. She saw a spy from Marol salute the king’s
daughter’s guards, saw him stand over her as she lay asleep
on the canopied bed, saw him finger the dagger’s hilt. A thrill
went through her like a wave.
  Last week they had been walking home from the
McDonald’s when a car had sped around the corner, overshot
the street and came up on the curb. Her father had reached
over and pulled her out of the way, and her first thought, after
she saw that the car had gone and she was in no danger, had
been, Too bad it didn’t hit me.
   Something had gone wrong with the configurations of her
family, with the way they interacted. Even she, spending most
of her time dreaming over the histories of Borol and Marol,
could see that. They were tied in a terrible four-way knot now,
and none of them could break away without tearing one or
more of the others loose. They could only chafe against each
other, living so close that the wounds they caused never
healed.
  But if she died, that might change. If she were gone the
knot would weaken, might slip apart entirely. Maybe they’d
even miss her. She saw Casey open the black notebooks of
Borol and Marol, take up the history where she left off. The
picture was irresistible; Angie held it in front of her for a long
time, feeling a strange combination of pleasure and pain,
before coming back to the idea of her death as a way to heal
her family.
  She felt death open up within her like a new, undiscovered
country. And yet the impulse had been with her for a long
time. Once, a long time ago, even before she and Casey had
invented the lands of Borol and Marol, she had stood by the
road at midnight and tried to hitch a ride. A neighbor had
found her and brought her home. Her parents had been more
puzzled than angry. “What on earth were you thinking of?”
her mother had asked. I wanted to make you notice me, she’d
thought then. Now she realized that that had been her first
hesitant answer to the question of death.
  She wrote in the notebook, and Andara lay still on the
canopied bed, her red blood painting a new pattern on the
embroidered sheets.


As Mitchell’s cab dropped him off at the ruined marble wall he
saw that Jara had gotten there first and was walking back
and forth in his impatience. “Come,” Jara said to him. “I have
marked where we must go today. Today we will look for the
tomb.”
  Mitchell nodded. He felt tired even before he began.
  “The tomb is described as being of marble and gold,” Jara
said. “From this tomb it is said that the Jewel King will come
again when Amaz has need of him. He was buried in his
gold-and-purple robes of state, and with his sword in his right
hand so that he could go into battle immediately. Of course, all
the gold on the tomb will probably have been stolen.”
  At least Jara, who seemed to become more certain of
extravagant finds every day, did not expect to find the tomb
whole and unplundered.
  “So,” Jara said, taking his map and compass from his
briefcase. “The epic says that the knights bore their dead king
secretly and at night from the palace after his defeat in battle
there, and that they went westward. It was dawn when they
buried him and marked the spot so that they could come back
and build the tomb. So we must go in that direction,” Jara
said, pointing, “and we must walk all day.”
  They walked nearly an hour without speaking, following a
spidery line on Jara’s map. Once Mitchell thought he saw at
least one man, and possibly two, following them. Finally he
said, “You know, this story about the Jewel King returning to
help his people—it’s a lot like the story of King Arthur.”
  “Yes, and the myths of other peoples, too,” Jara said. “I
wrote my thesis about that.”
  “Well, what I mean is,” Mitchell said, “this tomb might not
exist. People have a need to believe that their great heroes will
come again. So they invent—”
  “What do you mean?” Jara asked. “We found the palace,
yes?”
  “Yes, but this tomb—it sounds like something tacked on to
the end of a more-or-less historical account,” Mitchell said.
“After the Jewel King died and the people wanted him to come
back. I mean, look—how could the knights build an elaborate
tomb like the epic says they did if the whole country had been
conquered? Wouldn’t they be running for their lives instead?”
  “They built the tomb later,” Jara said. “Much later.”
  “They’d be a bunch of old men by then,” Mitchell said.
  “Yes,” Jara said. “They would.”
  Mitchell walked silently for a while. Everyone in this
country seems to win arguments by agreeing with you, he
thought. It must be a rhetorical trick the rest of the world
hasn’t discovered yet. “They haven’t found Avalon,” he said,
trying again.
  “They think that Glastonbury—”
  “Avalon was an island.”
  “They think that Glastonbury was an island at one time,”
Jara said.
   “How could Glastonbury have been an island?” Mitchell
asked, feeling a little uncertain now. This wasn’t his field. He
sifted through recorded folk tales and old manuscripts. What
the hell was he doing out in the hot midday sun looking for a
tomb he was pretty sure didn’t exist?
  “Waters shift,” Jara said. “The land changes.”
  A truck painted in camouflage jungle colors took the corner
in front of them too fast and went up on two wheels. Mitchell
watched it push through the congested traffic, saved by its
presence from having to come up with an answer. As it passed
them Mitchell thought he saw a soldier aim a rifle down the
street out of one of the rear windows of the truck.
  Jara saw him staring after it. “Soldiers,” he said.
  “Where are they going?” Mitchell asked. “You’re not at war,
are you?”
  “The communists,” Jara said. “Up in the mountains. People
say they are going to invade again.”
  “Communists?” Mitchell said, feeling slow and stupid. No
one had mentioned communists when the university had
invited him to Amaz. Had he brought his family into danger?
But Jara didn’t seem too concerned. Mitchell took one last look
back at the truck, thinking that the jungle colors were not
going to be much use in this desert country, and then followed
Jara.
   Several hours later they stopped at a pastry shop for sweet
bread and coffee. “What’s curious,” Jara said, “is the way the
epic places emphasis on the sword. It is almost as if the
manuscript’s sole purpose is to give us directions. We are being
led somewhere. We are being told to be on a specific street at a
specific time of day. It is almost as if the story itself is
secondary.”
   Mitchell looked around him, thinking that this pastry shop
could be the same one they ate at the last time. People sat at
small round tables or on cushions on the floor, talking,
gesturing, showing no sign that they would ever move that
day or maybe even the day after. Next to Mitchell sat a man
in wide trousers and an old-fashioned ribbed shirt, adding
numbers on a solar calculator, talking to a man in a turban
across the table from him. That’s the first person in a turban
I’ve seen outside of our street, he thought. I wonder if Jara
knows who they are. But what had Jara been saying? “Well, I
thought it was directions when I found it,” Mitchell said. “I
told you that.”
  “Yes, but more than directions,” Jara said. “There is a
purpose to our being here, on this street at this time, even if
we are going away from the sword. Maybe if we were not here
at this time we would never find it. Do you feel that?”
  “No,” Mitchell said. Now Jara was starting to sound like
Tamir, attributing mysterious qualities to perfectly ordinary
things like maps, streets, directions, though he would be
outraged to hear Mitchell say it. What was it about Amaz that
turned everyone into a mystic, that encouraged nonlinear
thinking? “Not really.”
   “Ah, well,” Jara said. “We are nearing the end of our quest.
I can feel it. Maybe when we hold in our hands the sword you
will understand what I mean.”
  “Maybe,” Mitchell said.
  “I hope so,” Jara said.
   The sun was falling before them when they started out
again, sinking through the hot layer of smog covering the city
and staining the west the color of red wine. Outside of the one
glimpse he’d had at the beginning of their walk Mitchell hadn’t
seen the men who had followed them last time. He thought of
Jara’s odd little speech, thought about maps and signs and
directions. A strong, irrational feeling came over him, a feeling
that the two men he’d seen last time were plotting their own
course through the city, following their own map, writing their
own signature, were even now one street or two streets over,
gliding past twilit stores and houses on some incomprehensible
errand of their own. Why not? It seemed to be the way things
worked here in Amaz. Everything seemed to run somehow
parallel to him, and he ended up only finding out what things
meant much later, if at all. The young student who meets you
at the airport turns out to be your co-worker. The house where
you live turns out to be a church. Perhaps Jara was right.
Perhaps there was a reason for them to be on this street at
this time, and if so perhaps there was a reason for the other
two men to be on other streets at the same time.
   Mitchell shook his head. It was getting late; the same strain
of mysticism he had seen in Dr. Tamir was beginning to infect
him. The streets grew darker and a few of the cars turned on
their lights. He stopped and looked at his watch. “It’s almost
night,” he said. “I’ve got to get home for dinner.”
  “Good,” Jara said. “We will meet here again tomorrow.”
  “Meet where?” Mitchell said. “Where the hell are we?”
  “I think,” Jara said, looking around, “we are near Gaudi
Park. Yes. The park is two blocks in that direction.”
  “I don’t know where that is,” Mitchell said.
  Jara took a pen and a piece of paper out of his briefcase, sat
down with the briefcase in his lap and wrote out long and
elaborate instructions. “Tomorrow, then,” he said.
  Mitchell nodded wearily and hailed a cab.
  He let himself into Dr. Tamir’s house feeling discouraged
and tired and very hungry. No one said anything as they went
out for dinner, not even Casey, who was usually the most
talkative. When they got back Angie went to her room and
Claire to the kitchen, and Mitchell sat on one of the hard
wooden benches in the living room and paged through a Xerox
copy Jara had made of the manuscript. “Dad,” Casey said. “I
have to tell you something.”
  Mitchell looked up. Casey pulled one of the benches over and
sat on it facing him. “Sure,” he said, feeling absurdly pleased.
“What have you been up to? How was your day?” He sounded
inane to himself, and probably to Casey too.
  “Well,” she said, “you know I have this pen pal. Rafiz.
And—”
  “Hey!” Angie said, running into the living room.
  “And I went to see him today, because—”
   “Look outside!” Angie said. Her voice sounded different,
more alert somehow. They went to the heavy wooden door and
pushed it open. Across the street, in front of a bonfire, the men
and women who stared at the house were moving, swaying
slowly first to one side and then the other, their arms raised
as if they were reaching for something. The blue and red
skirts of the women rippled as though moved by a breeze.
  “Well, look at that,” Mitchell said. “I wonder what that is.”
  “Maybe it’s a holiday today,” Casey said.
  “Maybe,” Mitchell said. “Jara didn’t say anything about it.”
  Claire came out of the kitchen and joined them at the door.
The movements of the dancers became slower, the dancers’
arms dropped gracefully, and the dance stopped. “Well, isn’t
that interesting,” Mitchell said. The bonfire guttered low. The
dancers walked into the fire, stomping it out energetically, the
women lifting their skirts above their knees. “I’ll have to ask
Jara about it tomorrow.”
  He closed the door. Behind him he heard Angie and Claire
leave the living room and go back to whatever it was they had
been doing. When he turned around he saw that Casey had
gone too. Hadn’t she wanted to tell him something? He
shrugged and went back to the manuscript.
   A few hours later, stopped by a word he didn’t understand
and that wasn’t in his dictionary, he remembered Casey again.
He walked down the corridor to her room and opened the door.
Light from the corridor fell on his daughter, asleep in bed with
half the blankets off. He felt the same welling of love he’d felt
at seeing her at the airport, even stronger this time. It’s easy
to love your kids when they’re asleep, he thought.
  Casey opened her eyes. “Come on in, Dad,” she said. “I’m
awake.”
  He went inside carefully, picking his way through the room
by the dim light from the corridor. In the dark he couldn’t find
a chair, and he sat on the edge of the bed the way he used to
do when she was much younger. She’s really too old for this,
he thought, but he didn’t get up.
  “Do you think people will ever be immortal?” she asked.
  “I don’t know,” he said. “Someday, I guess. Maybe.”
  “Yeah, but soon?” She rolled over and sat up, leaning
against the wall, blinking sleepily. She wrapped the blanket
around her. “I mean, in my lifetime? See, if there’s a chance I
could live forever I’d be able to arrange my life differently. I
could study everything I want to study, not just one or two
things. I wouldn’t have to go into physics immediately, the
way I’m planning to do now. But if I’m going to live a finite
amount of time I’d better start with physics right away,
because there’s a lot I have to learn. What do you think?”
  “I don’t know,” Mitchell said again. “It’s not my field.”
   “See, I’d like to do some writing, too,” she said. “Maybe
fiction, maybe nonfiction, I’m not sure yet. And I was
considering astrophysics instead of the field I wanted to go
into, which was—”
  Mitchell laughed.
  “What’s funny about that?” Casey said. He thought she
sounded a little hurt.
  “Nothing,” Mitchell said quickly. “I was just thinking—the
word ‘consider’—it means ‘to know the stars’ in Latin.”
  “Really?” Casey said. “Oh, of course. Like sidereal. But what
do you think? There’s lots of new stuff going on in astronomy.
I mean, it’s a good field to get into right now, isn’t it?”
  Mitchell almost said “I don’t know” again. She wanted
something, though, or she wouldn’t have asked nearly the
same question twice. “You really don’t have to decide all of
that now,” Mitchell said. “There’s enough time for that when
you grow up.”
  She didn’t move, and Mitchell knew that that wasn’t the
answer she wanted. It was odd how everyone in the family
used gestures, silences, as a kind of shorthand to express the
things they couldn’t say aloud. Like a Chinese character, he
thought, one symbol standing for a whole complex issue. “I’m
sure you’ll do fine whatever you decide,” he said. “I know I
don’t have to worry about you.”
   She stirred slightly. New patterns of light and shadow
formed on the blanket, a map Mitchell couldn’t read. “You
never worry about me, Dad, do you?”
   “No, why should I?” Mitchell said. “You’ve always been able
to take care of yourself.”
  “What about Angie? Do you think she’s able to take care of
herself?”
   “Well,” Mitchell said. “She’s going through a stage right
now. You went through it too, remember? All that writing in
all those notebooks. You outgrew it.”
  “Yeah, but I’m younger than she is.”
  “I think she’ll be okay,” he said. “We just have to be patient
with her. What are you saying—that there’s something wrong
with her? Do you think we should try another psychologist?”
  “No, not a psychologist,” Casey said. She hesitated, and he
thought, Now. Now she’s coming to it. Everything up to this
point, all her talk about immortality, astronomy, her future
and Angie’s, had been leading up to this, to something she
wanted to say about her sister. But she would never criticize
directly, because that was not the way the family worked. If
they started criticizing they would never have time for
anything else. A can of worms, he thought, and then wondered
where that expression came from. It had to be fairly recent.
How long had cans been around? But Casey was saying
something. “But she’s been acting weird lately, weirder than
usual. She doesn’t go outside, not ever.”
  “Well, this is a foreign country, after all. You have to
remember it’s very different from what she’s used to, the
language, the customs. She might be afraid to go out.”
  “Mom goes outside.”
  “Well, your mother’s more adventurous than Angie.”
  “Is she?” Casey said. “She never was at home.”
   Another can of worms, another issue skirted. Claire had
stayed indoors so much that when Mitchell had run across an
article about agoraphobia in one of her women’s magazines he
had immediately thought of her. Surreptitiously he had filled
out the accompanying test for her and discovered that she had
five out of the ten symptoms listed. One of his reasons for
bringing his family to Amaz had been to get Claire out of the
house. At least that had worked out, he thought. “Well,” he
said. “People change.”
  “And you think Angie will change too?” Casey said. “I saw
that article you were looking at at home, the one on
agoraphobia. Maybe Mom’s not agoraphobic, but do you think
Angie is?”
  Did she read his mind? She was a spooky kid in some ways.
“Angie will be all right,” he said. “Listen—didn’t you have
something you wanted to tell me?”
  “Oh, yeah,” Casey said. “Right.” She hesitated again, but
this time Mitchell thought it was unplanned, that she might
be out of her depth. “The man you thought was following you.
Was he missing an ear?”
  “Yes,” Mitchell said, surprised. Of all the things he’d
thought she’d say he had never imagined this. And how could
she possibly know? Spooky. “Yes, he was. How do you know?”
  “Well,” she said. Another pause. “Well, you know my pen
pal, Rafiz. I wrote him, I stupidly wrote him about the
manuscript you found, and about the Jewel King, and all
that.”
   “You mean Rafiz is following me?” he asked. He had never
given any thought to Casey’s pen pal, and now he wondered
why he hadn’t. Didn’t other fathers worry about their
daughters going off with unsuitable men? How were you
supposed to know all this stuff? There weren’t any books you
could read. Suddenly he remembered the camouflage truck
and the communists he’d seen that afternoon. It seemed there
were dangers besetting his daughter from all sides. He wanted
to tell her to be careful, to stop her adventures in the city, at
least until he found out more, but he knew he couldn’t say
anything. One of the things he had always admired about his
daughter was her independence.
   “Not Rafiz,” she said. “He thinks someone opened his mail, a
woman he works for named Blue Rose. And she’s been talking
to this man with one ear.”
   “But what do they want?” he asked. “Why would they want
to follow me?”
  “We think they might want the manuscript,” she said. “Or
maybe the sword. To sell. Blue Rose—she owns a kind of
antique shop.”
  “Great,” he said. As if he didn’t have enough problems. He
thought of the break-in, of his accusations to Jara, and
realized he would have to make his apologies to him
tomorrow. “Well, what do I do? You don’t have any proof, do
you? I can’t go to the police without proof.”
  “Rafiz is going to talk to Blue Rose,” Casey said. “And he
said you might want to hire a—a bodyguard. I’m sorry.”
  She hates being wrong, Mitchell thought. He had never
realized that before. It must be rough having everyone think
you know all the answers. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s not
your fault. You couldn’t know someone was going to read this
guy’s mail.” He shook his head. A bodyguard. What next?
“Well, tell me what happens,” he said.



          A Trip to the Ruins
                                                          «^»
Mitchell shifted noisily into first gear, and Casey, watching
him from the back seat, wondered how long it had been since
he’d driven a stick shift. All the family cars she could
remember had been automatics, but the rental place only had
uneven rows of identical dusty Volkswagen Rabbits.
  The family was silent as Mitchell drove the car out of the lot
and into traffic. A car honked loudly behind them. It was
probably a victory, Casey thought, that they were going on
this trip at all, but she couldn’t help contrasting her family
with the picture of an ideal family she had picked up
somewhere. They were supposed to have packed a picnic
lunch, for one thing, and they should be singing silly songs.
Her mother held the open map on her lap, which was proper
behavior for the mother of the ideal family, but she hadn’t
referred to it once. Though at least she was looking out the
window. Angie hadn’t looked up from the floor since the trip
began.
   They headed through the congested traffic toward the
mountains. The houses grew smaller, shabbier, older. At the
foot of the mountains they barely looked like houses at all but
like some kind of weird mechanical growth made of scraps of
corrugated iron, mangled car bodies and large cardboard
boxes. A green scar, where water had once flowed and might
flow again when the rains came, divided the sad village.
People sat in the little shade of the houses, their faces as solid
and unreadable as a blank piece of paper. A goat stood on a
rock, not moving.
  Casey looked out at the village with amazement and horror,
wondering what it would be like to have grown up here. No
school, no medical care, not enough food, probably no hope for
the future. They passed a ravine filled with garbage—rusted
bedsprings, beer cans and wads of old paper—and then headed
down, away from the village. Now they could see only burnt
scrub and small dirt trails leading away on either side of them.
   Mitchell reached for the dashboard, and for a moment Casey
thought he was going to turn on the radio. Instead the
air-conditioner came on laboriously. They rolled up all the
windows but the car seemed hotter, if anything. “The hell with
it,” Mitchell said, opening his window.
  The road leveled out. Finally they rounded a bend and saw
the ocean, turquoise near the shore and darker blue farther
out. They passed one hotel, then a small group of them, then a
solid row of taller hotels standing like teeth near the water’s
edge. “What hotel are we staying at?” Mitchell asked.
  Claire said nothing. “The Americana,” Casey said.
  “Did we pass it?” Mitchell asked.
 “I don’t think so,” Casey said. “No, there it is, up ahead.”
Mitchell pulled into the hotel’s parking lot.
  It seemed strange to step into the hotel’s clean,
air-conditioned lobby, as though they had somehow been
transported back to the United States. The lobby was
completely deserted, with the unreal quiet of a library. They
got their room key and took the elevator to their floor. Casey
almost laughed out loud when she heard the Muzak in the
elevator, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head.”
   In the room they changed into swimsuits and went down to
the beach. Casey saw the Wileys first, stretched out side by
side on a large fluffy white towel. As they came closer Mrs.
Wiley rolled over and sat up. She was wearing a gold one-piece
bathing suit cut high on her thighs.
  “I’m so glad you could make it,” she said. “Especially since
we’re going home in three days.”
  Casey and her family spread their motley assortment of
towels. Claire hung back, making sure that at least one other
person stood between her and the Wileys. Of course, Casey
thought. She hasn’t had her drink yet. She’s nervous. Mitchell
looked back at Claire as if waiting for her to answer, and
Casey realized how much he depended on his wife to carry on
conversations, to smooth over any social awkwardness. How
much he depended on her to become the person she was after
a few drinks. Funny how families worked, she thought.
   “I hadn’t realized you were leaving so soon,” Mitchell said
finally.
  “Not soon enough for me,” Mrs. Wiley said. “What with the
communists just waiting up in the mountains.”
  “The communists?” Mitchell said. “Do you really think
they’re a threat?”
  “Oh, yes, very much so,” she said. “Don’t you listen to the
radio?”
  Mitchell laughed a little. “Not enough, apparently,” he said.
“But in the city no one takes them seriously.”
  “Well, they sure as hell take them seriously here,” she said.
“Our hotel is almost deserted. And one or two of them down
the beach have had to close, I hear.”
  “Really, Mitchell.” Mr. Wiley sat up next to his wife. He had
a long scar an inch wide running down his breastbone—a
heart operation, Casey thought. “If I were you I’d take your
family and go home. This man, Commander Cumaq, he’s
serious. He’s ready to invade any day, they say.”
  “I’ll think about it,” Mitchell said. “I’d hate to have to leave
now, just when my work is going so well. But I’ll listen to the
radio more, I promise you.”
  “Do more than think about it,” Mr. Wiley said. “Remember,
you’re in a country that has no formal ties to the United
States to begin with.”
  Mrs. Wiley stood up. “Want to go into the water?” she said.
  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Claire said. She got up and
went back toward the hotel. Mitchell and Casey watched the
Wileys, tanned and athletic, walk out to the ocean, careful not
to look back at Claire, careful not to acknowledge that they
knew what she really wanted at the hotel. They had both seen
the bar just off the lobby.
   The Wileys walked without hesitation into the water. What
a strange juxtaposition, Casey thought. The communists up in
the mountains and the luxurious white hotels down here along
the ocean. But then it was all strange, and nothing was
stranger than the sight of her family, pale and unexercised,
lying on a beach among the carefully maintained bodies of the
American tourists. The only one among them with a good body
was Angie, and she had hidden it away in a bulky black
swimsuit. All in all they looked like a illustration out of one of
those kid’s books: What Is Wrong with This Picture?
  Claire came back from the hotel at the same time the
Wileys returned from their swim and began to talk to them
animatedly. Disgusted, Casey went down the beach to the
water.


In the late afternoon Casey and her family went back to their
room to change and then downstairs to meet the Wileys in the
lobby. The Wileys had promised to show them the best
restaurant on the beach.
   The family waited silently in the lobby. Casey had tried to
get Angie to put on suntan lotion but she hadn’t listened, and
as a result her nose and arms had turned the color of bubble
gum. Claire walked a little loosely; she had made a number of
trips back to the hotel during the day. She greeted the Wileys
enthusiastically when they stepped out of the elevator, and the
two families went outside.
   The restaurant turned out to be in another hotel farther up
the street. Inside the restaurant, on a small stage to one side,
a woman backed by a six-piece band sang songs in Lurqazi and
English. She wore the bright colors of the women of Amaz, but
she had raised the hemline of the skirt and added a slit down
the side and lowered the neckline of the blouse. A spotlight
followed her as she walked back and forth.
  Claire ordered a glass of wine as soon as she sat down.
“What are you going to do when you get back to the United
States?” she asked Mrs. Wiley.
  “Oh, I don’t know,” Mrs. Wiley said. “Probably nothing for a
while, just lie back and listen to people speak English. We
have some relatives in New Orleans, we might go visit them.”
   The waiter came with Claire’s wine and she drank half of it
in one swallow. “It must be nice,” she said. “Having a husband
who’s retired. So you can do anything you want.” She looked
at Mitchell almost slyly out of the corner of her eyes, but
Mitchell, busy studying the menu, didn’t see her. Casey saw
her, though, and suddenly she wished she could be anywhere
else but in the restaurant with her family. She had seen that
look before and knew what it meant: that her mother had
reached a point where she might say anything.
  “Oh, it is,” Mrs. Wiley said.
   “Not that I’d want Mitchell to retire, of course,” Claire said.
“God knows what I’d do with him hanging around the house
all day. It’s bad enough when he’s there on the weekends.”
  “Are we going to see the ruins tomorrow?” Casey said.
  “Sure,” Mitchell said, looking up from his menu, puzzled. He
never sees these things coming until they’re right on top of
him, Casey thought. “I said we would this morning.”
  “He works a lot of evenings,” Claire said. “Did your husband
work in the evenings before he retired, Betty?”
  Mrs. Wiley shrugged. “No, not that much,” she said.
  “Or at least that’s what he says he’s doing,” Claire said. “I
don’t know, it’s all a mystery to me.”
  “Do you know what you want to order, Claire?” Mitchell
said. He’s got it, Casey thought. Finally.
  “Did you know I used to be a physicist?” Claire asked Mrs.
Wiley. “Well, I was studying physics, anyway. I couldn’t do
any work because I got married and started having babies.”
She looked vaguely at Casey and Angie, as if unable to connect
them with the babies she remembered.
  Angie was doodling on a napkin in front of her. “Help me,”
Casey said to Angie in Bordoril. “Stop her.” Angie looked up
briefly and then went back to her doodles.
   “So I wouldn’t exactly say that it was Mitchell who put a
stop to my career,” Claire said. “He was the one who wanted
to get married, though. And then we had the kids. I told him
once, I said, you know, Mitchell, I feel my whole life just went
nowhere. If I hadn’t gotten married during college I could have
done something with my life, worked on something important.
And you know what he said to me?” Her voice had gotten
louder. People at the neighboring tables were turning to stare.
“He said maybe I should see some kind of counselor. As though
the whole thing wasn’t his fault. As though he could make a
mess and then go away and have someone else clean it up for
him. But that’s the story of his life. I mean, he did the same
thing with his kids. Look at Angie over there. Angie’s never
going to say one word to us her entire life. Are you, Angie?”
She went on without waiting for an answer. “And whose fault
is that? I mean, who’s responsible for that?”
  “Hush, Claire,” Mitchell said. “Claire, please be quiet.”
  Claire finished her drink and stared at the empty glass.
When she started speaking again, it was in a voice so quiet
Casey could barely hear her. “Did your husband make you give
up your career when you got married, Betty?” she asked. “Did
he make you start having kids?”
  “We decided not to have any kids,” Mrs. Wiley said. “It’s Al’s
second marriage. He’s already got a family.”
  “Second marriage,” Claire said. Her eyes closed. “Must be
nice.” She put her head down on the table, barely missing the
empty wineglass. “God, I’m sleepy.”
  “Why don’t I take you back to the hotel, Claire?” Mitchell
said. “You can go to sleep there.”
  “I can sleep here,” Claire said. “Oh, this is nice.”
  “Come on,” Mitchell said. He pulled her to her feet and put
his arm around her. “Let’s go,” he said as he led her out of the
room. Someone laughed loudly after they had gone.
   Casey looked at the menu for a long time, pretending she
was not at the restaurant with her sister and two people she
barely knew but out with Rafiz. Finally Mrs. Wiley broke the
silence. “So,” she said, “what grade are you in?”
  “I’ll be going to the university next year when we get back,”
Casey said.
  From the look Mrs. Wiley gave her it was clear that she
didn’t believe her and was insulted at having been lied to.
Casey returned to her menu and no one said another word in
the long minutes it took Mitchell to get back.


Claire had a headache the next morning and declined to go to
the ruins, and Angie said loudly that if Claire wasn’t going she
didn’t see why she had to. So it was only Casey and Mitchell
who signed up for the hotel’s tour and waited in the lobby with
four other guests until the bus pulled up.
  The man who had signed them up escorted them out to the
air-conditioned bus. “Only six?” Casey heard the driver say to
him in Lurqazi.
  The other man answered him, shrugged and went back into
the hotel. Obviously they had expected more people. Were
tourists really staying away because of the communists? Casey
had discounted everything Mrs. Wiley had said just because it
had been Mrs. Wiley who had said it, but now, looking around,
she wondered if the shallow woman could have been right. She
went down the aisle and took a seat next to Mitchell.
   The bus drove past the row of hotels, turned away from the
water and headed out into the desert. After a few minutes she
felt as if the air-conditioning had shut down, but the windows
looked permanently sealed. The desert stretched away on all
sides and drummed with heat.
  She scowled and tried to get comfortable in the hot vinyl
seat. It was all ridiculous anyway, trying to pretend that she
had a normal family like everyone else. If the family were
normal then her mother and Angie would be here, and
everyone would be looking out the windows and pointing and
laughing. Even the emptiness of the bus seemed somehow her
family’s fault, a reproach. They could never manage to get
anything right.
  “There it is,” Mitchell said, pointing out the window.
  A wall of marble, white as sea-foam, rose before them out of
the desert. The driver pulled into the parking lot and opened
the door. “The temple of Marmaz,” he said. “I leave in one
hour. One hour.”
  Casey and Mitchell got off the bus. A small group of natives
who had been smoking cigarettes in the meager shade of the
wall got up and headed toward them across the parking lot.
“Silver?” one of them said, dangling a chain. “Cards?” said
another. Casey thought they sounded as if their hearts weren’t
really in it. What would happen to these people when the
tourists stopped coming?
  “See that part, the portico?” Mitchell said, pointing to the
ruins. “That was added three hundred years later. If you get
up close you can see that the marble’s a different color. By the
time they added it they’d forgotten where the original builders
had gotten the marble.”
  Casey walked on ahead, impatiently. In her ideal family
Mitchell would have explained all about the temple to her and
her mother and Angie, and the other tourists would have
gathered around, amazed and delighted that they had an
expert in their midst. Now that it was just her, though, she
found she didn’t want to listen to anything her father had to
say. Damn her mother, anyway.
  She went inside the cool marble building without looking to
see if her father had followed. She wandered from room to
room, looking at fragments of tapestries and mosaics, at the
fountains and towers and red-and-green-tiled patterned floors,
at the cracked domed ceiling open to the sky like an
observatory. In one large white room she heard a guide’s
explanation of the dining hall echo off the far walls.
  The guide looked at her, stumbled for a second and
continued on with his speech. Then he herded his small group
of tourists expertly through a crumbling doorway: “Careful,
please, as you go through here. In the next room…” and Casey
thought she must have imagined his hesitation. But as he
followed the group through the doorway he motioned almost
infinitesimally with his head, beckoning her to follow him.
Annoyed—with him, with everything—she went in the
opposite direction, back the way she had come.
  She went through a room filled with statues, another room
where every square inch of the marble walls had been carved,
and then found herself back in the parking lot. She couldn’t
see her father anywhere. So that was the famous temple of
Marmaz, the one she had begged her father to take them to
every day for a week. Of course she might have enjoyed it
more if her mother hadn’t made that disgusting scene at the
restaurant last night. That’s the last time she gets away with
something like that, Casey thought. She stood for a moment,
enjoying her foul mood and the oppression of the heavy sun,
until she became aware that someone was making his way
toward her across the parking lot, shimmering with heat haze.
The guide from the temple.
  He reached her before she could make up her mind whether
or not to walk away. “Hello,” he said. “I saw you at the
temple, do you remember? I have wondered if you have seen
the last printing of the cards?”
  “Yeah,” Casey said, looking across the parking lot for her
father.
  “I do not wish to sell you anything,” the guide said quickly.
“But I wish to show you—to tell you that your picture is in
this deck. And to ask you if you knew that. That the cards
have mentioned you, that they say you are about to do
something important.”
   “I’ve seen it,” she said. “There’s a picture of someone who
looks like me.”
  “Look,” the guide said, as if he hadn’t heard her. He reached
into his pants pocket and pulled out a deck held together by a
rubber band. “See, here is the Traveler—” He shuffled through
the cards. “And there is another strange thing, and that is
that the Sun and Stars is missing. The card of good luck. It
has not been missing for ten years. No, for longer than that.
The last time we did not find it in the deck we had the big
earthquake and then the fires.”
  “So what are you saying?” Casey said. “That we’re going to
have an earthquake because you can’t find a card in the deck?”
  “Maybe it is not an earthquake,” he said. “But something
big, some kind of change. And you are part of it. I have seen
your picture in almost every deck for the past two months. Do
you feel it? The change that is coming?”
  “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I don’t believe in stuff like cards.”
   “Ah,” the guide said. “But the cards believe in you.” He held
up the Traveler as though it were the successful conclusion to
a magic trick. Abruptly Casey realized that the card had
changed since the last time she’d seen it, the last printing,
that the girl in the picture was now wearing a blouse similar
to one she had bought in the market a week ago. And someone
stood behind her in the card, someone blonde—but it couldn’t
be Angie. Even if you believed in the cards it would take a leap
of the imagination to think that Angie would ever do anything
important. The guide turned the card over and slipped it into
the deck. The strange pattern of lines on the back seemed to
writhe like snakes.
  “There’s my father,” Casey said. “I’ve got to go now.”
  “Be careful,” the guide said, calling after her as she walked
across the parking lot.
   Casey and her father got on the bus. The other four tourists
followed them, one of them putting his camera away in an
expensive-looking leather box after he sat down. The bus
backed up noisily and headed toward the hotel.
  Without discussing it the family ordered dinner from room
service that evening. The next morning they left the hotel
without eating breakfast and without saying good-bye to the
Wileys. As the car started up the mountains Mitchell turned
the radio on and fiddled with the tuning knob. They heard
flutes and bells playing in a minor key, a burst of static, a play
in what sounded like Chinese and finally a news broadcast in
English. “Some observers report as many as ten thousand
troops camped in the mountains above the city,” the
announcer said in a British accent. “Among them is said to be
the Russian-backed communist army, led by Commander
Cumaq.”
   Mitchell snapped the radio off. “That’s it,” he said, taking
his eyes off the road to look in the rearview mirror at Casey
and Angie. “I don’t want either one of you going outside when
I’m not at home. We’ll just have to wait until this thing blows
over. And if it doesn’t blow over we’re going back to the United
States. Do you hear me?”
   Casey nodded. Angie said nothing, and Mitchell seemed to
take her silence for assent. “Parenting,” Casey whispered to
Angie after he had turned his attention back to the road, their
old word for those moments when Mitchell seemed to feel it
was necessary to assert his authority. Angie didn’t smile. And
after a few minutes Casey began to feel depressed. Cooped up
in the house all day with Claire and Angie, unable to go
outside—what kind of a vacation would that be, anyway? Who
knew how long something like this would last? And what if
they had to go home?



          A Trip into the
            Mountains
                                                          «^»
Claire was sitting at the kitchen table as though nothing had
happened when Casey came in for breakfast the next day. A
fat new hardcover book lay open to the first page in front of
her. The radio played what sounded to Casey like an old
English folk song. Claire looked up, nodded and went back to
her book.
  Casey got out milk and some of the sweet bread Claire had
bought and sat at the table. A dysfunctional family, she
thought, a term she had picked up from a psychology book.
Claire took a sip of her drink. “Good morning,” Casey said
loudly to her mother.
  Claire looked up briefly from her book again. “Too bad you
couldn’t have come with us to the ruins,” Casey said, feeling
maliciousness rise within her like a black cloud.
  Finally Claire put the book down. “Were they interesting?”
she said.
  “Oh, yeah,” Casey said. “Very interesting. Lots of families
there, taking the tours,” she said, knowing she was lying,
knowing her mother would never find out.
  Claire smiled softly.
  “Normal families,” Casey said. Her blood beat against her
skin as if it wanted to break through. She wanted to stop but
something pushed her on. If only she could go outside, visit
Rafiz, wander aimlessly through the city.
  Claire went back to her book.
  “Families where the mother doesn’t embarrass her children
every chance she gets,” Casey said. All around her barriers
were breaking down, the rules she’d lived with ever since she
was a small child. A part of her stood aside and watched with
amazement, wondering how far she was going to go. “Where
the mother wants her kids. Happy families.”
  Claire felt for her drink without looking up. Casey moved
the glass out of her reach. “Families where the mother doesn’t
drink so much,” Casey said. “Or any of this other shit you do.”
  Claire looked up, her eyes and mouth vague. “What are you
talking about, Casey?” she said evenly.
   “You know what I’m talking about,” Casey said. “The way
you embarrassed all of us at the dinner with the Wileys. All
those things you said, about how me and Angie ruined your
life.”
  “Oh, come on,” Claire said. Only her fingers, tapping on the
tabletop, betrayed her nervousness. Casey moved her mother’s
drink farther away. “You’re exaggerating. I didn’t say
anything about you and Angie.”
 “Oh, come on,” Casey said, a vicious imitation of her
mother. “How the hell do you know what you said?”
   “Casey,” Claire said, trying to sound stern. “I want you to
stop talking like this. I won’t have it, do you understand? I’ll
tell your father when he gets home. Whatever you have
against me we can settle it then, reasonably, without you
spreading all these lies about me.”
  “They’re not lies and you know it,” Casey said. “You don’t
remember the dinner at all, do you? All you remember is
waking up the next day with a hangover.”
  “The subject is closed,” Claire said. She reached for her
drink again, unaware that Casey had moved it to her side of
the table. Her fingers jumped like grasshoppers. She looked
down at her book. Casey would have bet anything she wasn’t
reading.
  “The subject is not closed!” Casey said, almost yelling. She
heard Angie scream something from her bedroom, what
sounded like the Bordoril word for “stop.”
   “You drink too much and you know it! If you want to wait
till Dad gets home, fine, we’ll wait. He’ll just say the same
thing. What do you think, that he hasn’t noticed?”
  Claire did not look up from her book. The hand not holding
the book open clenched and unclenched.
  “It would be fine if it was just you, if you were only ruining
your own life,” Casey said. “But it’s everyone, all of us. You
said Dad ruined Angie’s life, but I think it was you. You were
the one who didn’t pay attention to her. To any of us. You’re
the selfish one.”
   Claire turned a page. Casey stood, shaking. She ran into the
living room and out the front door, slamming the heavy
wooden door hard on her way out.


Claire took a sip from her glass thoughtfully. That had been
strange, she thought. She had never seen Casey so angry. Of
course it hurt when your own daughter made accusations
about you. But it wasn’t true that she drank too much. If she
drank too much she wouldn’t be able to keep the house as
clean as she did, or to buy groceries for four people, or to
navigate her way to the English-language bookstore every so
often. Mitchell would say the same thing. Just a few days ago,
before they’d gone to the beach, she’d bought a delicate silver
bracelet inlaid with stones for her sister. The bracelet had cost
her about four dollars in American money. She’d like to see
Casey find something that good. Would Casey have known
precisely where to go among all the beggars and street
merchants and marketplaces in the city?
  The difference between me and Casey, she thought, feeling
peace settle over her again, is the difference between the
native and the tourist. Casey wants to see all the sights, the
beaches, the ruins, but it’s as if I live here. She’s interested in
the surface, but I go beneath that. So I didn’t have to see the
ruins with her and Mitchell, because that’s for the tourists.
That’s just a show they put on. Even as a child, I wanted to
know how the insides of watches worked, to see the backs of
things. I was always running off into the Employees Only
section of stores, or taking vacuum cleaners apart to see how
they worked. And when I got interested in physics—but no, it’s
probably better not to think of that.
   She smiled, thinking of all the places she had gotten into
that she was not supposed to have seen: the back room at the
post office, the employees’ lunchroom at the amusement park.
The surprised looks on the faces of salespeople and security
guards. I haven’t done that in a long time, she thought. What
does the stockroom of the Super Shop look like? Where does
Joe repair his cars? Well, but you get tired, you don’t have as
much energy as you used to. And raising two
daughters—they’ve settled down now, but I had to watch them
all the time when they were younger, especially Casey. It just
gets easier to sit down, to conserve your strength. And after a
few drinks you forget this need you have, this urgency to see
the reality behind everything.
  Casey. Claire closed the book and rubbed between her eyes.
There had really been no reason for her to get mad like that.
You never knew what might set people off. All of a sudden you
found yourself blundering off into an area you never even
realized was there. I know my way around this city better
than I know my own daughter’s mind, Claire thought, getting
up to pour herself another drink. We’re all tourists in each
others’ lives. We all have monuments and ruins, places of
strange beauty and forbidden sites chained off and locked
securely so that no visitor can get in. And none of us has the
guidebook to anyone else, or even the list of most commonly
used phrases. We just have to get along the best we can.
  She went back to her book. When the announcer broke into
the music for a news bulletin she was already on page sixty.
“In a broadcast in London this morning the BBC announced
that the army camped up in the mountains has started to
move. Some observers report as many as ten thousand troops
converging on the capital, among them the Russian-backed
army led by Commander Cumaq. The government has denied
the BBC story, calling it an unfounded rumor.”
  Oh my God, Claire thought, alarm breaking briefly through
the haze surrounding her. Casey’s out there. And shit, didn’t
Mitchell say something about her staying inside? What’s he
going to say when he gets back?
  The haze returned, a soft golden web wrapping her close.
She’ll be okay, Claire thought. She’s always been able to take
care of herself. Claire took another sip of her drink and went
back to her book.


The streets were less crowded than Casey had ever seen them.
Even the group of men and women standing across the street
seemed smaller. Casey remembered the Wileys’ warning at
the beach and thought about going back to Dr. Tamir’s house.
But she couldn’t face her mother after the things she’d said.
Everything would be different when she got back.
  Now she noticed radios on all around her, in cars and taxis
driving by, near groups of men and women squatting on the
sidewalk, held close to their ears by people hurrying past. A
family sat around a cooking fire, oblivious of the heat, a radio
next to a pile of freshly caught fish. Even the turbanned
people had a radio. She couldn’t remember ever hearing a
news broadcast in Lurqazi before; Rafiz had said that people in
Amaz got their news from the cards. The entire street seemed
to be holding its breath. Slowly, fighting the inertia she felt on
every side of her, she went to the bus stop and waited for a
bus.
   A bus that she knew went to Twenty-fifth November Street
came around the corner, and it was only then that she realized
she was going to visit Rafiz. She motioned for it to stop and
got on. Someone ran toward the bus, panting, and as Casey
turned to look at him she realized that one of his ears was
missing. The bus pulled away from the curb before the man
reached it. Casey looked out the window and saw him run a
little after the bus and then stop, looking disgusted.
   The bus driver said something to her in Lurqazi. “What?”
Casey said, first in English and then in Lurqazi. “One,” the
driver said, and she realized that he was asking her for her
fare. She took a one with its disturbing picture of a fat coiled
snake out of her purse and handed it to him. A boom box next
to his seat was on but the announcer spoke too fast for her to
understand him.
   She walked down the aisle of the nearly empty bus and sat
in front of a man wearing a startlingly white turban. Was Zem
now following her instead of her father? What did he want? Or
maybe that was someone else, just a poor guy running for the
bus. There had to be more than one man missing an ear in
Amaz. Still, Casey thought she would feel better if she could
talk to Rafiz.
  The radio crackled with static. Casey heard the word
“Cumaq,” the name of the commander of the communists up in
the mountains.
  The bus seemed to snake through every part of the city.
They passed streets of burned-out rickety wooden houses and
streets of houses fronted with marble and brass and screened
from the road by fantastic cactus gardens. A long time later
they came to Twenty-fifth November Street and Casey banged
on the roof to be let off.
   Twenty-fifth November Street was as empty as the rest of
the city. All the junk that had grown like mechanical lawns in
front of every shop had been taken inside. The tourists whose
cameras and loud conversations in English and German and
Japanese Casey had encountered everywhere in the city had
disappeared from the street. She opened the door to Blue
Rose’s dim shop and stepped inside.
  Blue Rose had a radio on too. “Excuse me,” Casey said,
speaking over the announcer and trying to see through the
gloom.
  Blue Rose looked up quickly. “Hello,” she said. Casey
thought she looked a little surprised to see her, but any visitor
on a day like this would probably be unusual.
  “Is Rafiz here?” Casey asked.
  Blue Rose looked quickly at the curtain that led to the back
of the store. “No, he’s not here right now,” she said. “Why
don’t you sit down and wait for him? He’ll be back in a few
minutes.”
  “Uh, no, thanks,” Casey said. Zem and this woman worked
together, she remembered, and Blue Rose seemed a little too
eager to keep her there. Was Blue Rose waiting for Zem to
return? Or was she just being paranoid? “I’ll come back later.
Tell him I stopped by, okay?”
  “I wouldn’t go home by myself if I were you,” Blue Rose said
as Casey backed toward the door. “Haven’t you heard the
news? We’re about to be invaded from the mountains at any
moment. I’m surprised your parents let you go out today.”
  They didn’t, Casey thought. “I’ll be okay,” she said. “I got
here all right.”
  “I’d feel much better if you’d wait for Rafiz to take you
home,” Blue Rose said. Her pale-blue gloves rubbed and
twisted together, and, unbidden, a picture of her hands inside
the gloves came to Casey, dry and white as chalk. “Or my
assistant—he had to run a few errands, but he’ll be back in a
minute—I’m sure Zem wouldn’t mind taking you home.”
   At the mention of Zem’s name Casey knew she didn’t want
to wait in Blue Rose’s shop. How long would it take Zem to get
another bus? What if he decided to take a cab? “No, thanks,”
Casey said. “I’ll be fine. Really.” She opened the door and
nearly ran to the bus stop. A few minutes later a cab drove by
and she waved at it. The driver, she saw with surprise, was a
short fat woman with gold coin earrings. Casey gave her the
directions to Dr. Tamir’s house and got inside.
  Fifteen minutes later the cab stopped opposite the house.
The heat felt oppressive, as if a thunderstorm were about to
break at any minute. Casey stepped out of the cab. A man on
the porch of Dr. Tamir’s house stood up and she saw with
horror that it was the same man who had run for the bus that
morning. So he hadn’t gone back to Blue Rose after all. She
got back inside the cab. “Drive,” she said in Lurqazi.
  “Where?” the driver said, and then more words in Lurqazi
she couldn’t understand.
   “I don’t know,” Casey said. The phrase book didn’t cover this
situation. She saw Zem hail a cab and get in it, pointing at
her. “Please. Fast.”
   Zem’s cab made a U-turn in the nearly empty street and
ended up three cars behind her own. Her driver seemed to
understand. She pulled away from the curb without looking,
made a left and then two rights in quick succession. Zem’s cab
followed, a block behind them and then dropping back little by
little. Her driver turned left and drove up onto the curb and
through a part of the block burned out by fire. Casey looked
back. Zem’s cab followed them up the curb, a little closer now.
Her cabdriver said something that sounded like a long string
of curse words and sped up.
  They took a corner on two wheels and Casey grabbed for the
dashboard. The driver turned to her and said something in
Lurqazi, grinning. “I don’t understand,” she said. She wished
the driver would look back at the road. Zem’s cab came around
the corner. It had dropped back again.
  They came up on Colonial House. A small group of people
stood outside near the front porch. Tourists? Casey thought.
Today? The cab swerved to avoid them and narrowly missed a
horse-drawn cart coming toward them in the opposite lane.
Someone outside Colonial House yelled after the cab and a few
people raised banners. Protesters, Casey thought. The banners
were in the old style of writing, like her father’s manuscript.
   Zem’s cab headed straight for the protesters and they
scattered. The cab came close enough for her to see Zem turn
to the driver, to see the emptiness where his ear should have
been. Then her driver stepped hard on the gas and they pulled
ahead again.
   They made a right turn between two houses and Casey saw
that what had looked like a driveway widened out to become a
dirt road. All the houses on this street had burned down in the
fire, and Casey saw tents made of blankets and coats on either
side of them. The street became smaller again, looped like
string back and forth and finally seemed to turn in on itself.
The driver held the wheel tightly, a look of hard determination
on her face as they lurched over the rough streets. For the
first time Casey couldn’t see Zem’s cab anywhere behind them.
  They turned a corner and Casey saw Colonial House again.
“He’s gone, yes?” the driver said, grinning again.
  Casey looked back again to make sure. “He’s gone,” she said.
   Still speeding, as though the emergency had given her the
right to drive as fast as she wanted, the driver took Casey
back to Dr. Tamir’s house and pulled up next to the group of
people across the street. “A thousand thanks,” Casey said
politely. She gave the driver all the money she had in her
purse and got out of the cab.
  The cab turned the corner, driving fast. Casey watched it go
and then looked around her. Zem’s cab came toward her from
the opposite direction. Oh shit, she thought. Now what? And
at the same time a logical voice inside of her said, Well, of
course. He knows where you live.
  She pushed blindly through the group of men and women on
the street. To her surprise they parted to make a path for her
and then closed up behind her. She heard them murmur
something over the voice of the announcer on the radio, one
word passed from one to the other like a coin. A man
unwrapped his turban and quickly wrapped it again around
her head. Two or three people pressed against her, not
unpleasantly, shielding her from the street.
  She could see a little through the crowd, and she watched
Zem get out of the cab and stand in the street, looking around
him. After a while he walked over to Dr. Tamir’s house and
sat on the steps.
  The group swayed a little, moving Casey with them. They
smelled of cinnamon and some kind of incense she couldn’t
identify. He couldn’t wait there all day, could he? He would
have to give up some time and go home. And in the meantime
she was probably as safe here as anywhere in the city,
surrounded by people on all sides.
  She turned to the man who had given her the turban.
“Excuse me, please,” she said. The man motioned her to be
quiet. Did they observe some kind of rule of silence? She
couldn’t remember hearing any of them talk, even when they
had performed that strange dance. She wondered what time it
was. Had any of them brought some food, or did they fast all
day?
  A cab pulled up in front of Dr. Tamir’s house and a very
large man got out. The man walked up to Zem and talked with
him for a moment. Then Zem got into the cab and the man sat
down on the porch, motionless, as if waiting for something.
   Damn, Casey thought. He’s got reinforcements. Now what?
If she could get to a phone she could call the police, or call her
parents. She pushed against the wall of flesh surrounding her
but everyone moved closer, hemming her in. Were they trying
to tell her it would be dangerous to leave the group? She sank
back. There was nothing to do but wait until her father came
home and discovered a strange man sitting on the porch in
front of his house. The crowd around her swayed again.
   Time passed. Casey heard the announcer on the radio and
the rustle of clothing as the crowd rocked back and forth
together, but otherwise the street was silent, deserted. The
man waited on the stoop, alert and unmoving, his feet
stretched out in front of him. It was only fifty feet to their
front door but the door was as unreachable to her as the moon.
She wondered if her mother had missed her yet. Probably not.
She felt hungry and thirsty, and her hair under the turban
itched.
  A bus stopped in the street in front of them. At first Casey
thought everyone had started to sway again, but then she
realized that the group was moving together toward the bus.
She started to giggle. Well, they had to travel somehow.
   Women in colorful skirts and men in turbans got off the bus.
The two groups made muffled conversation as they passed,
and then Casey’s group started to board the bus. One person
walked on either side of her, one in the back and one in the
front, as if by accident. She tried to break away and join the
new group but the press of people around her did not let up.
Against her will she was moved up the steps of the bus and
down the aisle. When she tried to take a seat someone held
her back, not unkindly, and sat in the window seat. They were
still shielding her from the man on the porch.
  By looking past the man who had gotten in the window seat
she was able to see the man on the porch. He was watching
the two groups intently, almost as if he knew where she was.
No, Casey thought. If he suspected something he’d be over
here this minute. He’s just watching us because we’re the only
interesting thing on the street right now.
  Casey followed his gaze to the new group arranging itself on
the sidewalk. In all the time she’d lived in Dr. Tamir’s house
she had never seen this changing of the guard. Makes sense,
she thought. After all, they can’t stand there forever.
    The bus started up. I guess when we get where we’re going
I’ll call my father, or the police, she thought. Unless I’m a
prisoner. They weren’t too gentle hustling me into the bus.
But why would they want me? Probably they were just trying
to protect me from Zem’s friend. But why?
  “Excuse me, please,” she said to the man next to her.
“Where are we going?”
  She didn’t understand his answer and shook her head.
“Mountains,” the man said slowly. She liked the way he looked
immediately, with his medium-length white hair and neat
bushy white beard, his small silver-framed glasses. “We are
Sozranis.”
  She looked in her purse for her dictionary and discovered
with relief that she had brought it along, though she didn’t
have the phrase book or the guide book. The word he had
used—Sozrani—wasn’t in the dictionary. “Why am I here?”
she asked.
  “You are motmot ,” the man said, using the word she had
heard muttered back and forth when she’d joined the group.
  She didn’t expect to find motmot in the dictionary either,
but it was there, with the longest entry on the page. “A
person, place or thing not holy in itself that becomes holy
through association with a holy or sacred person, place or
thing.”
  She looked up the Lurqazi word for “holy” in the dictionary
and then turned to the man again. “Is the house holy?” she
asked.
  The man swayed back and forth in his seat. “Of course the
house is holy,” he said.
  “Why?”
  The man looked at her carefully over his glasses and she
wished she could take back the question. Maybe she couldn’t
be motmot if she didn’t know why the house was holy.
“Because of the holy Sozran,” the man said.
  “The holy Sozran lived in the house?” she said.
  “Of course,” the man said.
  Of course, she thought. Well, no one ever told me .
   The bus started climbing into the mountains. She watched
the houses closely, looking for landmarks she could use to get
back. The man swayed against her again and she noticed that
everyone on the bus had started to move back and forth like a
field of brightly colored wheat. Outside the window she saw
another group of people standing and swaying in front of a
nondescript house. Had Sozran lived there too? Maybe he
moved around a lot. Or maybe someone else just as holy had
lived in that house.
  “When did the holy Sozran live?” she asked the man next to
her.
  “The year One,” the man said.
  That was no help. “How—how long—” she asked.
  “Twelve hundred years ago,” he said.
   She nodded. “Before the Jewel King,” she said, wanting to
let him know she was not totally ignorant of his history.
  To her surprise he turned away from her and spat out the
window. “The Jewel King,” he said, sounding disgusted. He
spat again.
  Okay, I won’t say that again, she thought. She wondered
what the Sozranis had against the Jewel King, and if her
father knew. Maybe I can tell him when I get back. Maybe the
information’ll give him a whole new perspective on his
manuscript. I might even get an acknowledgment.
  If I get back, she thought, as the bus took the winding roads
farther up the mountain. They passed houses of white and
green and red marble, some of them set so far from the road
she could barely see them. One house trimmed with copper
and brass sat at the other side of a dark-green lawn that must
have cost a small fortune to keep up in the harsh climate of
Amaz. What do these people want with me?
  The bus stopped and everyone stood up. Outside Casey saw
what looked like the largest house of all, made of white marble
and topped with golden spires and thin poles flying flags she
didn’t recognize. These Sozranis aren’t as poor as they look,
she thought. As she walked down the aisle, hands reached out
to pull her turban off. “Not holy,” the man with the silver
glasses said. She guessed he meant that it would be
sacrilegious for a woman to wear a turban.
  She followed the Sozranis out of the bus and down a wide
path lined on either side with rosebushes. Beyond the path
stretched the lushest lawn she had seen so far. On one side a
box hedge separated the lawn from a neighboring house. To
the other side she could see the street and then another
imposing house past that. Apparently only two houses shared
this one block. A fountain scattered drops like pearls over the
lawn, a flagrant waste of water.
   They went up a wide marble stairway, waited until someone
unlocked the front door, and were ushered into a large,
echoing room. On either side of the room stood rust-red
marble columns which reached to the ceiling. The floor was
tiled in the same color, and to Casey it looked at first sight as
though a lot of blood had been spilled a long time ago. Men
and women walked back and forth, coming and going from
unguessable errands, their sandals hushed on the marble floor.
Echoing over and around their soft noises she heard the
booming voice of the radio announcer. Now she remembered
that the radio had been on in the bus on the way over too.
  “Please, do you have a telephone?” she asked the man who
had sat next to her.
   The man turned to her, about to say something. The sound
of gunshots came into the room, loud, insistent, terrifying.
Most of the people stopped what they were doing and some
threw themselves face down on the floor. Someone screamed.
The man next to her looked startled for a moment and then
started to smile. What’s so funny? Casey thought, looking
around desperately for a place to hide. Maybe one of the
pillars. “The radio,” the man said, and then said it again,
loudly, so that the whole room could hear. Someone said
something else in Lurqazi that Casey couldn’t follow.
  Oh, she thought, feeling stupid. The shots are from the
radio.
  A new announcer came on, speaking harsher and faster
than the last one. Casey heard the word “Cumaq” but could
not understand anything else. “Please, what is happening?”
she asked the man next to her. The man motioned her to be
quiet. All around her people were standing still and listening
intently.
   After about ten minutes the voice on the radio stopped. “Soz
Mike!” the man next to her called out. It seemed to Casey that
even before he spoke a young man detached himself from the
others and came over to them. He was tall and thin, with very
pink skin and hair so blond it was almost white. His eyes were
a watery blue. The other Sozranis had gone back to whatever
it was they were doing. “Could you please explain to this
woman what is happening? She is motmot ,” the man next to
her said, and something else Casey couldn’t follow.
  “A thousand thanks,” Casey said to the young man.
  The young man held up his hand. “Don’t worry about it,” he
said in English. “We don’t have to speak Lurqazi if you’re more
comfortable with English.”
  “Thank God,” Casey said. “Could you tell me what the hell is
going on around here?”
   “Cumaq’s taken over the radio station,” the young
man—Soz Mike—said. “And other things too—in fact he
claims to have taken over the whole city, but I don’t know how
much of that you can believe. He’s declared a curfew, no one
outside on the streets tonight, and no foreigners on the streets
at all, except on their way to leave the country. I guess that
means you,” he said.
  “Oh, shit,” Casey said. “I’ve got to get home. My
parents—they’ll be going nuts if I don’t get back. Can I—?”
  “Sure, you can use the phone,” Soz Mike said. “And if you
can’t get back tonight you can stay here with us. Everyone is
welcome. Come—the phone’s over this way.”
   He led her through the room. The radio came on again with
an unpleasant squawk of static. Soz Mike stood and listened
for a while and then continued on. “He’s just saying the same
thing over again,” he said.
   Some of the men and women they passed on their way out
of the room carried trays of food, and Casey thought hopefully
of dinner. Did “Everyone is welcome” mean she could eat here
too? They all seemed so efficient, moving with an unhurried
grace and stately precision, almost anticipating everything she
wanted before she could ask for it. But something felt wrong,
off. Was it that they were too efficient, robotlike? No, because
they moved like dancers, and each one seemed to be enjoying
the dance. She was just paranoid after what had happened
earlier. It had been a long day.
  They went down an arched hallway and into a small alcove
containing nothing but a carved wooden table with a phone
and recessed bookshelves covered with glass doors. The titles
on the books were in the old script. As she lifted the receiver
she noticed that what looked like diamonds were inlaid next to
each of the numbers on the touch-tone buttons.
  There was no dial tone. She jiggled the receiver button a
few times and tried again. “Damn,” she said, handing the
receiver to Soz Mike.
  “Do I have to dial something to get out? I don’t hear a dial
tone.”
  Soz Mike held the receiver to his ear and shook his head. “I
bet he’s cut the lines,” he said. “Cumaq. He said something
about taking over the phone company.”
  “Now what?” Casey said. “Can we—go to the police?”
  “I wouldn’t advise you going out,” he said. “And he might
have taken over the police stations too. Maybe by tomorrow
we can see what’s happening, maybe we can disguise you
somehow—” He sounded doubtful.
  “What about you?” Casey said. “Aren’t you American? Don’t
you have to go back to the United States?”
  “I’ve renounced my citizenship to become a Sozrani,” he
said. “My name is still Mike, but when I take the initiation I’ll
be free to change it to a name of Amaz.”
  “Mike?” she said. “But he called you—”
  “Soz Mike,” the man said. “The title means that I’m not
initiated yet.”
  “But do you have citizenship here?” she said. “I mean,
couldn’t it be dangerous?”
  “Oh no,” Mike said. “I never go outdoors anyway.”
  At first she thought he meant because of his skin. “You
never—”
  “Because I’m not initiated,” he said. “I don’t have a turban. I
have to stay inside and work.”
  “Oh,” she said. “Well, when will you be initiated?”
  Bells playing a sweet harmony cut off his answer. “Time for
dinner,” he said when they stopped. “This way.”
   They went farther down the corridor, turned a corner and
stepped through an arched doorway into a courtyard
surrounded on all four sides by walls of marble. Tables had
been set up under trees with pale purple flowers. A monkey
climbed hand over hand up a tree as she passed and was gone,
hidden in the foliage.
  Casey looked around her. “A lot of people in Amaz eat in a
courtyard like this,” Mike said. “All the restaurants look like
this, and some of the bigger houses even have their own
courtyards. Because it hardly ever rains, so they can eat
outdoors almost every day.”
  “Not the restaurants I’ve been in,” Casey said, thinking of
the Sun and Stars.
  “Really?” Mike said. “You should try a restaurant that
serves authentic Amaz cuisine some day. It’s really very good.”
  “I have,” she said, starting to get annoyed. Did he think she
never went out? What about him, sitting and vegetating here
behind the walls of his marble fortress? Still, he was being
very nice to her. She didn’t know what she would have done
without him and the rest of the Sozranis. And maybe he did
know more about Amaz than she did, unlikely as it seemed.
   He led her to a table sparkling with linen and silver and
crystal, and they sat down. The bells started up again, ringing
a single note twelve times. A man in a long white robe stepped
to the center of the courtyard, raised a sword and said
something long and sonorous in Lurqazi. She couldn’t
understand a word of it. It was probably the old speech, before
the language had changed in the fifteenth century.
  Everyone murmured a response when he had finished, and
he sat down. “That sword?” Mike said, pointing to the sword
now on the table next to the man in the robe. “When I am
initiated I will be able to hold it in my hands. It belonged to
the holy Sozran before it was stolen from him by the Jewel
King.”
  “The Jewel King?” Casey said, startled. A man set a silver
tray with bread and a bowl of what looked like stew in the
center of their table, but she had forgotten her hunger. “That’s
the Jewel King’s sword?”
  “You’ve heard of it?” Mike said, dipping his bread into the
bowl.
  “My father’s writing a book on it,” she said. “That’s why we
came here, because he wanted to find the Jewel King’s sword.
Wait’ll I tell him about this!” She remembered her earlier
thought—that she might get an acknowledgment in his
book—and she laughed. If he heard about this he’d probably
give her part authorship. “How on earth did you guys get it?”
  “Through a disciplined use of magic,” Mike said. “When I get
initiated I’ll learn all about it.”
   She looked at the sword again. It was smaller and
straighter than she’d imagined the Jewel King’s sword would
be. Had her father told her the sword was curved like a
scimitar or had she just pictured it that way? And it looked
awfully new and shiny for a sword supposedly hundreds of
years old. “How do you know it’s authentic?” she asked.
   “Well, of course it’s authentic,” Mike said. “It’s been passed
down for generations. I even heard about it in the United
States,” he said, as though that proved something. “And when
I heard about it I knew I had to find it. Because it confers
magic too. Look at us,” he said, waving his hand around the
courtyard. “That’s why we’re so prosperous, so successful.
Because we have the sword. I dropped out of school in the
middle of getting my engineering degree—I’d actually thought
that was important, getting that piece of paper—and came all
the way down here, just because someone I’d met in a bar one
night told me this crazy story about a sword. And I had
adventures—wild adventures, some of them, someday I’ll
write a book—and finally I found it. They didn’t want to make
it too easy, see, because then I wouldn’t value it as much.
Someday I’ll tell you all about it. You probably haven’t heard
anything like it, down here with your parents and all, living
the easy life. What are you, staying up at the tourist hotels?”
  “No, we’re in the city,” she said. He was trying to one-up
her. Well, all that meant was that he probably hadn’t done
much, just run to the Sozranis and shut himself up the minute
he’d gotten here. “At a house the holy Sozran lived in,
actually.”
   That was a cheap shot, but at least it got him to look at her
with something like respect. “That’s right, you’re motmot ,” he
said. A man poured wine into his crystal goblet and he took a
sip.
  “Would you people let my father look at the sword?” she
said. “It’d really help him with the book he’s writing.”
   Mike frowned and took some more bread. “Probably not,” he
said. “We don’t want to make it too easy for people trying to
find the sword, like I said. Of course he could join us, become
initiated, and then he’d get to see the sword.”
  Sure, Casey thought. Lock himself up in this crazy place.
They’d love that back at the university. She tore off a piece of
bread and dipped it in the stew. It tasted very good and she
took another piece.
  A bell rang after everyone had finished eating. People came
into the courtyard to clear away trays and dishes. All around
her Sozranis were standing up and heading toward the
doorway.
   Casey stood as well and, trying to look casual, began to walk
over to the sword. The hilt was carved and seemed to be made
of gold. As she strained to see more a group of people moved
toward her, enveloped her and gently pushed her back the
other way. Mike led her away from them, looking worried.
  “We’re going to meditation now,” he said. “It’ll probably be
boring for you, since it’s all in Lurqazi, but it can’t be helped.
We can’t let you go outside.”
  She wanted to tell him angrily that she’d been studying
Lurqazi, but that would only drag her down to his level. And it
turned out that she could barely understand the meditation,
which seemed to be one Sozrani after the other mumbling as
fast as he or she could. She sat uncomfortably on a rattan mat
in the room of red marble, trying to sit cross-legged, the way
everyone around her did so effortlessly, and worrying about
her parents. They would probably be frantic.
  That night, as she slept on a rattan mat surrounded by
softly breathing Sozrani women, she had a dream. She
dreamed that she walked through the strange, luxurious
house of the Sozranis, and that it was at the same time a
house and an exercise in Lurqazi grammar. The first room,
the main room, was the noun, and the next room the verb, and
various rooms leading out from the first two rooms were
adjectives and adverbs, conjunctions and prepositions. And all
the while she walked through the maze of the house, through
the long and complicated Lurqazi sentence, she knew that she
would understand everything when she came to the end, that
the end of it would have to be the Jewel King’s sword. But
when she got to the last room it was bare, with only a tile
mosaic of two overlapping calligraphies on the floor.
          Twenty-fifth
            November Street: 4
                                                          «^»
Five years ago Harhano, on a trip to the country with some
friends, met the woman who was to become his wife. He and
his friends had started out with plans to visit the Silver Caves,
supposedly the place where the Jewel King’s son had hidden
while in exile, and to do some hiking in the mountains. But by
the third day of the trip they were still in the small village ten
miles from the caves, sitting in the combined restaurant, bar
and hotel and drinking the local beer.
  A small woman, wearing an embroidered red shawl despite
the heat, her straight shiny black hair pulled back into a bun,
walked into the village square opposite them. “See that
woman?” Harhano said, gesturing with his beer glass. “I’m
going to marry her.”
   His friends laughed. Harhano was nearly twice the woman’s
size, big-boned and portly. He needed to have his clothes
specially made by a woman on Twenty-fifth November Street,
and had to send away for his shoes, which looked like small
suitcases. Furthermore, no woman had ever thought that he
was handsome; his eyes protruded slightly, like a frog’s, and
when he smiled, which he did often, his mouth seemed too
large.
  “Her?” one of his friends said. “You’d crush her the first time
you got in bed together!”
   Embarrassed, Harhano took another sip of his beer. He
didn’t really know why he’d said what he had, especially in
front of such coarse men as his friends. But now that he
thought about it, it didn’t seem like such a bad idea. He had
never seen anyone as beautiful as the woman standing across
from him in the village square, framed by the window of the
bar. So what if she was small-boned, like a bird. They would
work something out.
  When his friends went off to the caves the next day
Harhano stayed behind and made inquiries. He learned that
her father was unemployed, one of those who had worked in
the silver mines until they closed. She, her mother and her
two sisters did embroidery work to keep the family going. The
second day that he was left alone he worked up the courage to
speak to her. By the time his friends came back from the caves
he was able to introduce them proudly to his new bride,
Arqana.
  They had the wedding at Harhano’s house on Twenty-fifth
November Street and invited everyone on the street. Everyone
came, even Mama and Blue Rose, each of whom had sworn
never to be in the same room with the other. There was
dancing and wine, and in the evening everyone went outside to
build a huge bonfire in the middle of the street. Hours later
Harhano and Arqana said good night and went back to their
house. Everyone called out after them, suggestions that got
more ribald and obscene the farther away the newlyweds got.
Years later, people who had been there still dated things by
whether they had happened before or after the wedding.
  Harhano was never quite able to believe his luck. A few
months later he moved up to a storefront that had opened up
on the afternoon side of the street, and he felt that Arqana
was somehow responsible for this change in his fortunes. Then
a traveling dream interpreter told him one of his dreams
meant Arqana would soon bear twins. His life seemed to be
perfect. Once the twins came, he thought, things could not
possibly get better.
   His new store, unlike most of the stores on Twenty-fifth
November Street, had a basement, and one day he went down
the stairs to see if the baby carriage he remembered was still
there. But after he turned on the light he stopped, hand still
on the light switch, so overwhelmed with surprise that he was
unable to move. The basement had utterly changed since the
last time he’d visited. The accumulation of junk he
remembered had been covered with what looked like hundreds
of bags and cardboard boxes—bags and boxes that had held
the mountains of junk people had brought to the store. He
couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to save all of them.
   Bemused, he went upstairs and called out his wife’s name.
She came out of the store. “Arqana—” he said again. He found
he was unable to stay mad at her once he saw her. “What are
all those bags doing in the basement?”
 “Oh,” she said. “I thought we might need them someday.
Maybe if we move?”
  “If we move we’ll just move farther up the street,” he said
gently. “We really don’t need all that stuff, Arqana. I’ll just
throw it out, all right?”
  “Sure,” she said.
   When she wasn’t working in the store Arqana stayed in the
bedroom upstairs and did embroidery, cleverly worked
depictions of birds. Harhano, once he saw that she rarely
embroidered anything else, wondered if her mother and sisters
had had their specialties too, plants maybe, or other animals.
Then he noticed that she seemed to have an affinity with
birds, that birds would seem to fly near her when she went out
walking up and down the street, singing almost in harmony. It
was ridiculous, but once or twice he even thought he saw a
bird land on her shoulder when she called to it. At first he
attributed this delusion to love, to the thought that nothing
was impossible for his beloved. But after a while rumors began
to fly up and down the street, rumors about his wife, and he
realized that other people had wondered about Arqana and her
birds too.
  On their first anniversary—the twins still hadn’t come, but
his happiness was undiminished—he bought a dozen rare
birds, hoping to surprise her. But when she came into their
bedroom and looked around her at the bright neon colors, she
began to cry. He hurried over to comfort her. “The—the
cages,” she said, gasping through her tears. “The cages.”
   Of course, he thought. What a stupid oaf he was. His friends
had been right—he would crush her if he wasn’t careful. He
opened the cages, opened the bedroom window and let all the
birds fly away. He watched them go, feeling little but wonder
at their colors like the flags of all the countries he would never
visit.
   He took the twelve empty cages into the store. They sold
slowly at first, but after he’d sold two or three he found that
others on the street recommended him whenever anyone
asked for a birdcage. Almost against his will he’d acquired a
specialty, the way others on the street specialized in rugs or
jewelry. He bought more cages, larger, some with elaborate
wrought-iron decorations like the tracery of a fantastic spider.
Arqana never said anything about it.
  Soon after he let the birds go free, he went down to the
basement to see if he had an electrical switch a customer
wanted. Once again he found the room filled with bags and
boxes, filled this time nearly to the ceiling. Once again he
talked to Arqana, gently because he didn’t want to hurt her,
and once again she agreed to let him throw them out.
   Six months later he heard noises in the basement and,
thinking it was rats, or that one of Mama’s kids had broken in,
he went down to investigate. He found Arqana trying to lift a
load of flattened bags almost as big as she was onto a shelf.
  This time he wasn’t so gentle, and she cried at the end of his
speech. Her tears moved him very much but he knew that he
had to be stern, that he couldn’t let her get away with her
strange behavior again. The bags were a fire hazard, an
invitation to termites, who knew what. “Do you understand?”
he asked.
  She nodded, not meeting his eyes.
   Three months later he was in the store, selling an American
some baskets made in Taiwan, when another customer asked
for a birdcage. “Arqana!” he called. “Arqana, could you come
and help me here?”
   She didn’t come. He got rid of the American by pretending
to speak nothing but Lurqazi once the sale was made, sold the
other man the birdcage and went upstairs, shouting her name
in every room. In the bedroom he noticed that her painted
combs were gone, and so was the woven blanket her
grandmother had made, and          her red shawl covered with
embroidered birds. “Arqana!”       he called again, refusing to
believe the evidence, concocting   wild and ridiculous reasons for
each of the disappearances.        Finally he remembered the
basement.
   He went downstairs, hoping that he would see her there,
struggling with a load of bags and boxes too big for her. She
could keep her damn boxes, he didn’t care—all he wanted was
to take her in his arms and hold her. He turned on the light.
  Two birds flew past him, holding a filled bag between them
in their beaks. Other than that, there were no bags at all in
the basement.


He spent three years wondering what he had done wrong.
True, he had given her the caged birds; true, he had sold the
cages; but she had started collecting the bags before their
anniversary. He kept coming back to that. She had been
planning to leave before he’d done anything to hurt her. She
had been planning to leave all along.
   He paid less and less attention to his store. The flair for
business that had gotten him to the afternoon side of the
street, that had people predicting he would someday even
move next door to Mama and Blue Rose, had deserted him.
Now, over sweet bread and coffee, people up and down the
street said that he would not last out the year at his new
location.
   One day Zem came into the store. “I don’t need anything
fixed,” Harhano said immediately.
  “I’m not here for that,” Zem said. He looked around him.
There were large gaps in the shelves where Harhano had
neglected to fill in more merchandise. Everyone’s store was
dusty—the people on Twenty-fifth November Street believed
that dust added to the ambience of an antique store—but
Harhano’s piles were thicker than most. “I want to know if
you’ll help me.”
  “Help you do what?” Harhano asked suspiciously.
  “There’s money in it for you,” Zem said quickly,
misunderstanding. “Blue Rose is paying me—paying me
well—to track two people, a tourist and a guy at the
university. But I can’t do all the work alone. What if they split
up, for instance?”
   Harhano shrugged. He couldn’t say why, but he had never
liked Blue Rose. Every six months or so, taking advantage of a
time when Mama and Blue Rose weren’t around, someone at
the Sun and Stars would bring up the feud. It would be passed
around from person to person like an old photograph, faded
from age and creased with folds, whose details were known to
everyone. And he would always side with Mama. When
pressed for his reasons he could never give them. He just felt
better about Mama, that was all.
   “But that isn’t the best part,” Zem said. “See, Blue Rose
wants these guys followed for a reason. Because they have
money, or know where they can get money, that’s what I
think. And so one of these days I’ll just follow them on my
own. Or maybe get one of the tourist’s kids and ask her what’s
going on. Take her away for a few days, see what kind of
ransom I can get. There’s a lot of money involved in this, for
both of us, if we work this right. I’ve never known Blue Rose
to be so generous.”
  Harhano remained silent. He had never heard anyone talk
so easily of betrayal. Why shouldn’t Zem take it into his mind
to betray him as well, once they started working together?
And if he agreed to work for Zem he would be involved with a
sort of betrayal of his own, a switching of allegiances from
Mama to Blue Rose. A triple betrayal: of Mama, of the tourists
he would be following, ultimately of Blue Rose herself.
  He had never thought of himself as a bad person, as a
person likely to go along with the kind of scheme Zem was
proposing. But Arqana had seen something bad in him, must
have, or why had she planned to leave him from the
beginning? He might as well start to live up to her
expectations of him, then—after all, he had nothing left of her
but her expectations. Zem was starting to say something, a
guess as to how much money might be involved. Harhano cut
him off. “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”



          The Book of Stones
                                                        «^»
Mitchell followed Jara through the maze of streets, stopping
every so often so Jara could jot down a note or mark a new
route on one of his many maps. He barely noticed the
emptiness of the city, the few people hurrying by with radios
near their ears, the police cars speeding past. Today, he
thought. Today when we stop for coffee I’m going to tell him.
   Jara stopped, looked at the sun and consulted his compass.
“I think we are on the right track,” he said. “At last. The
streets we were walking last time had not even been built in
the time of the Jewel King—that was our error. The streets
we want seem to have shifted over the years, and now we are
walking approximately where they once were. We are getting
closer to the sword. I feel it.”
  That’s what you said last week, Mitchell thought. But how
could you argue with someone who thought that streets
shifted like rivers?
  He followed Jara slowly, feeling sweat drip down his sides
and back. And he was not even wearing a coat and tie, hadn’t
worn them since his second week with Jara. Ahead of him
Jara walked as if he barely felt the heat, looking dapper in his
brown suit. They’re used to the heat, though, Mitchell
thought. They’ve lived with it all their lives. He hurried to
catch up.
  At last, after Jara had made his last note and folded up his
maps, they stopped at a coffeehouse. The place was deserted,
without even a waiter to take their orders. From somewhere
Mitchell heard the loud voice of a radio announcer. “Jara,”
Mitchell said.
  Jara, in the act of taking out yet another of his maps from
his briefcase, stopped and looked up. “Yes?” he said.
  “I’m not—I can’t go out looking for the sword any more,”
Mitchell said. “I’m only here for a year, I have to do my
research while I can, and write articles, and I don’t have the
time—and anyway I think finding the palace was enough of an
achievement, don’t you? That’s the kind of thing we can make
our reputation on. We don’t really have to find the sword.”
   He had expected Jara to be angry, but Jara just sat there,
turning the map over and over in his hands. “Ah,” he said
finally.
   “My article on the palace is almost finished,” Mitchell said.
“And of course I’ll put you down as co-author, let you look it
over before I send it out for publication…” He was stating his
arguments very badly, he knew. He hadn’t felt this awkward
since he’d broken up with his girlfriend in high school. If only
Jara would say something. “I don’t really belong in the field,”
he said. “My place is more in research. I haven’t been in the
field since graduate school, really, and I—”
  “I wonder when we are going to get service here,” Jara said.
“Excuse me while I look in the kitchen.”
  As Jara stood up a man came out of the kitchen and shook
his head. “We are not open for business today,” the man said.
“Go home.”
  “Your door was open,” Jara said.
  “Well then, we will close it when you leave,” the man said.
“You have been listening to the news, yes? You should go
home.”
  “My friend and I would just like—”
  “What news?” Mitchell said. “What’s going on?”
  The man turned to him. “You do not know?” he said.
“Commander Cumaq, he is ready to march down from the
mountains. Everyone is home, waiting—You truly did not
know?”
  “No,” Mitchell said, standing. The streets had been deserted,
hadn’t they? Why hadn’t he realized something was wrong?
“Come on, Jara. We’ve got to go.”
  “Why do you let this Cumaq frighten you?” Jara said. “He
has been in the mountains for as long as anyone can
remember. Come, we will find a place that is open, we will
have some coffee, and then we will continue to look for the
sword.”
  “No,” Mitchell said again. “You look for the sword if you
want to. I’m going home.” Before Jara could say anything he
went out into the street and looked around for a taxi. A cab
came fifteen minutes later and he directed it to Dr. Tamir’s
house.
   As he got out and paid the driver he noticed a large man
sitting on the porch of his house. Now what? Had something
happened to one of his family? He walked faster, but as he got
up to the house the man left the porch and hurried away.
Mitchell let himself in.
  “Claire?” he said. His voice echoed in Tamir’s large living
room. “Casey?”
   Now he could hear the radio playing in the kitchen, and he
went toward it. Claire sat at the kitchen table, a drink and a
book in front of her. “Claire?” Mitchell said. “Is everything all
right?”
   Claire looked up sleepily. “Oh sure,” she said. “Everything’s
fine.”
  “Where are the kids?”
   “Angie’s in her room,” Claire said. “And Casey—I don’t
know. I think she went out for a bit. She was angry with me
for some reason.”
  “She went out?” Mitchell said. “We’re about to be invaded,
did you know that? And you let her go out?”
  “Well, I didn’t let her,” Claire said. “She just did it.” She
laughed a little.
  Mitchell stood in the middle of the kitchen, irresolute. He
couldn’t get mad at Claire, he knew that. It really wasn’t her
fault. Finally he went down the hallway to check on Angie. He
felt a pang of fear when he looked into Casey’s empty room,
but he forced it away. Then he went back to the kitchen to
listen to the radio, and to wait.
   At around five in the afternoon they heard the gunfire on
the radio, startlingly loud in the small room. The station went
dead in mid-shot. Mitchell turned the knob up and down the
dial until he heard a man speaking harshly in Lurqazi. Four or
five stations carried the same voice, the same speech. He
heard the word “Cumaq.” Was this Cumaq speaking, or had
Cumaq been overcome in the fighting? And where the hell was
Casey?
  At six Casey still hadn’t returned. Angie came into the
kitchen. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Aren’t we going out to eat?”
  “Is that all you can think about?” Mitchell said. For a
minute he had thought she was Casey. “We’re not going
anywhere. You can just forget about going outside until this
thing blows over.”
  “What thing?” Angie said.
  “What thing?” Mitchell said. “We’re being invaded, that’s
what. And your sister isn’t back yet. Dammit, I’m calling the
police.”
  Angie sat down. If what her father said had scared her she
gave no sign of it. Claire poured herself another drink.
Mitchell came back from the living room. “The phone’s dead,”
he said. “Where did—Did she say where she was going?”
  “No,” Claire said.
 “Damn,” he said. He sat down heavily at the table. “Now
what?”
  “She can take care of herself,” Claire said. “She always has.”
   “Claire,” he said. “We’re in a foreign country. We’re being
invaded. She could be—could be—” He stopped. She was past
understanding. And he didn’t want to think what might be
happening to his daughter. He stood up and walked to the
living room, opened the door and came back into the kitchen.
“There’s no one out there but the turban people,” he said.
“Maybe nothing’s happened after all. We might as well go out
to dinner, and if we see a policeman we can ask him what’s
going on. How does that sound?”
  No one said anything. He looked from his wife to his
daughter, wondering when they had changed, become
unrecognizable to him. Had it happened gradually or all at
once? Or did they just act differently when Casey wasn’t
around, when one loose strand unraveled the entire pattern of
the family? They stood up and followed him outside.
   They saw nobody on the streets on the way to the
McDonald’s, no cars, no tourists, none of the frantically
hurrying pedestrians. Once inside Mitchell saw that the nice
waitress, the one that Casey talked to, was on duty. At last,
he thought, letting himself feel a little relief. Someone I can
talk to. He went toward her, then stopped when he noticed
what she was wearing, slung behind her so he hadn’t seen it at
first. A machine gun.
  “Excuse me,” he said. “Do you know—?”
  The waitress said something in Lurqazi.
  “I’m sorry,” he said, trying to smile. Surely she remembered
that they only spoke English? “We don’t speak Lurqazi.”
  “Why not?” the waitress said.
  “What?”
   “Why not? You are in my country now, yes? I am not in
yours. Why do you speak your language instead of mine?” She
fingered the strap of the machine gun.
  “I don’t—I didn’t learn—”
  “But I learned yours, yes?” she said. “You could learn mine
just as easy. If you start now, soon it will be second hand to
you.” Even through his fear and frustration Mitchell realized
that she must have meant “second nature.”
  “I am sick of you Americans, thinking that you own the
world. But this is one part of the world you will never own
again. We have nationalized the restaurant.”
  Mitchell would have bet she hadn’t known the word
“nationalized” yesterday. “So then Commander Cumaq—”
   “Long live Commander Cumaq,” the waitress said. “Long
live the revolution. All foreigners must leave the country.”
  “We—we can’t leave the country,” Mitchell said. “I don’t
know where my daughter—you remember Casey? She was
trying to learn Lurqazi.”
  “All foreigners must leave the country,” the waitress said.
“All foreigners must be off the streets.”
  “But my daughter,” Mitchell said. “Is there anyone who can
help, one of Cumaq’s men maybe? As soon as we find her we’ll
go, but we can’t just leave her here.”
  The waitress shrugged. The machine gun followed her
motion. “I do not know,” she said. “May I take your order
please?”
  Mitchell blinked. Had he heard her correctly? But she was
standing at the counter attentively, fingers poised over the
keys of the cash register. “My order?” he said.
  “Yes,” she said. “We are still a restaurant.”
  “But I thought you said we had to be off the streets,” he
said.
  “As long as you are here I may as well serve you,” she said.
“After all—” her shoulders lifted with pride—“I own this
restaurant now.”
  They ate in silence and walked back to Dr. Tamir’s house.
The streets had grown darker; the road ahead of them ran
black as ink. It was a darkness that seemed suddenly more
menacing, that could be hiding anything—snipers, jungle
animals, a convoy of tanks. From somewhere Mitchell heard
the stutter of a European-style siren, the kind that always
made him think of World War Two movies.
  Even the turbanned people had gone, and the statue holding
the egg stood alone, looking taller and somehow out of place.
The family went inside the house and Mitchell tried the phone
again, but it was still dead. He paced back and forth, let
himself outside and stood staring out over the mad city. A fire
was burning out of control in the mountains, and he heard
machine-gun fire from somewhere to his left, though whether
it was fifty yards or fifty miles away he couldn’t tell. Casey
was out there somewhere. He looked hard at the darkened
street, hoping for a taxi that could take him to the police,
where he could—could what? The police would probably just
order him out of the country, and he’d never see Casey again.
He went back into the house, feeling a weight he was not
prepared to handle.


Angie lay awake on her bed, her eyes wide open. I know where
she is, she thought. A dozen times during dinner she had
started to tell them, but something had always held her back.
She hadn’t said anything of importance to her parents in so
long that she wasn’t sure she could start now.
  But I know where she is, Angie thought. She’s out there,
and I know where. Twenty-fifth November Street, the same
place she wanted to take me to that one time. Should I tell
them? Or—why don’t I just go there myself?
   She shivered in the darkness. No foreigners were allowed on
the streets—she had heard the waitress say so at dinner. It
was dangerous out there. If she left now she would almost
certainly be killed. Even if she waited until morning—All
right, she thought. I’ll get up early, get out of the house and go
to Twenty-fifth November Street. Either I die or I bring her
back. Either way it would end. She closed her eyes. A siren in
the distance was the last thing she heard before she drifted off
to sleep.
  She woke the next morning in darkness, dressed quickly
and went outside. The sun was coming up and she could feel
the promise of heat.
  The streets were still deserted. Well, that didn’t matter. She
could walk aimlessly until she found a taxi, and the driver
would know how to get there. She walked along the main
street, past the statue, thinking that something looked
strange, different. Right. The turbanned people weren’t there
any more.
  Once she noticed that she began to notice other things. She
had never heard anything like the song of the birds that
seemed to come from all around her, two long notes and then a
shorter one, like an afterthought. A horse and rider came
toward her, the man wearing a yellow shirt and green pants.
Strange, she thought. Those were the colors of the mounted
guard of Borol. And the fountain in the park up ahead—Casey
had invented a fountain just like it for a park in Marol, the
water going in toward the center and then shooting up in a
straight line. In fact—
   It seemed as if a door had opened, somewhere in her mind.
In fact, she was in the Two Kingdoms right now. The daughter
of the king of Marol had disappeared, and she was sent for to
find her. Only she understood the mind of the king’s daughter,
only she knew where to look for her. Around her people were
starting to come out of their houses and gardens, speaking in
Bordoril, which she understood perfectly: comments about the
weather, the king’s health, the costumes in the tournament
last week.
  A cab pulled up alongside her. For a moment everything was
superimposed, Borol and Marol on one hand and this strange
country—she had forgotten its name—on the other. Then she
got into the cab. “Twenty-fifth November Street,” she said,
and sat back.
  A few minutes later the cab stopped at a shabby-looking
street. “Here it is, miss,” the driver said. “Twenty-fifth
November Street.” She paid him and got out.
  Was this the place Casey had wanted to show her? There
was nothing here but badly painted houses and a bunch of
junk. The only person up was a fat old woman sitting in a
cracking leather chair, surrounded by things no one would
want to buy in a million years. What on earth had Casey
found to interest her here?
  Then the Two Kingdoms took over, and she stood not in the
middle of a crumbling street but in the bazaar of Borol,
looking for the king’s daughter who had run away and hidden
here. Protected from all harm because she was on the king’s
business she walked up to the woman in the chair and said,
“Excuse me. Do you know someone named Rafiz?”
   The woman stirred. For a minute she looked as if she were
about to pull herself up out of the chair and walk away. Then
she waved her hand, the hanging flesh under her arm
quivering. She could have been dismissing Angie or shooing off
a fly. Or she could have been pointing to the store next door.
  What a rude woman, Angie thought. Maybe a spy for
someone. She went to the store the fat woman had indicated
and knocked on the door. A woman called out something in
Lurqazi. Angie pushed open the door and went inside.
  It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dim light.
Junk was piled all around her, on the floor, on rickety tables,
on shelves lining the walls, and dust covered everything. The
only light seemed to come from the electronic numbers on the
cash register, which glowed an eerie blue in the darkness.
  “Excuse me,” Angie said. “Is Rafiz here?”
  “Rafiz?” the woman said. “Yeah, just a second.” She started
toward the back and then stopped and turned back toward
Angie. Now Angie could see that the woman’s hands were
covered with pale-blue gloves. “What do you want him for?”
  “I think he knows where my sister Casey is,” Angie said.
“She didn’t come home last night, and we’re worried.”
  The woman pushed aside a curtain at the back of the store
and called out a long sentence in Lurqazi. A man came
through the curtain. “Hi,” Angie said uncertainly. “Are you
Rafiz?” The man was missing an ear.
  “No, not Rafiz,” the man said. He pulled a knife out of a
leather sheath at his belt and came closer to her. Angie tried
to back away but the man grabbed her wrist and pulled her
roughly toward him. She cried out a little in panic.
  “I’m afraid you’re going to stay with us for a while,” the
woman with the gloves said. “At least until your father agrees
to pay your ransom.”


Mitchell woke early the next morning. A night’s sleep had
done nothing to diminish his feeling of dread. He dressed and
shaved, avoiding the kitchen for no clear reason he could give
himself. When he opened the front door he saw that the sun
was already shining, and he started to feel a little hope.
Maybe today was the day he would find someone to help him.
   A man wearing a turban came toward him. Mitchell nodded
at him and brushed past. He was eager to get started. Maybe
he could get directions to the police station and walk there, if
it wasn’t too far…
  “Excuse me, please,” the man said.
  “Yes?” Mitchell said, stopping.
  “Excuse me,” the man said again. “But we have your
daughter.”
  “You do?” Mitchell said. “Oh thank God. Where is she? Is
she safe?”
  “We have your daughter,” the man said. “And we will give
her to you—”
  “Yes?” Mitchell said.
  “—if you give us the sword.”
  “What?”
  “If you give us the sword,” the man said. Now Mitchell
noticed that there was something wrong with the way the
man spoke, as if he didn’t speak English and had memorized
the phrases he had to say.
  “What sword?” Mitchell said. “Look, I—”
  “The Jewel King’s sword,” the man said.
  “I don’t have the sword,” Mitchell said. “What is this, some
kind of ransom demand? Look, I don’t even have—If you don’t
take me to my daughter right now I’m calling the police.”
   The word “police” seemed to set the man off again, to call
forth more memorized phrases. “You cannot go to the police,”
he said. “You are a foreigner. We will give her to you if you
give us the sword.”
  “But I don’t have the sword,” Mitchell said. “No sword,” he
said, speaking slowly and shaking his head. In desperation he
repeated it in eighth-century Lurqazi. “I’d give it to you if I
had it—you’ve got to understand that. I’d do anything to get
my daughter back. But I just don’t have it.”
   The man seemed to hesitate. Then he said, “We will give her
to you if you give us the sword.” He turned and walked away
toward an empty bus waiting at the corner of the street.
   “Wait!” Mitchell said. He looked around for a taxi, but the
streets were still deserted. “I have the manuscript—it has
directions to the sword—” The bus pulled away from the curb.
It had no license plate that Mitchell could see.
  He stood on the porch for a while, trying to decide what he
should do next. The only person he knew in Amaz was Dr.
Jara. Very well, Jara would have to help him. He lived in this
damn country, after all. Mitchell locked the door behind him
and set out for the university.


Claire finished her breakfast and went outside. At first,
looking at the empty streets in front of her, she thought she
wouldn’t be able to get a taxi. But then she remembered her
previous successes, the liquor store and the bookstore, and
soon enough a cab came around the corner. She waved at it
and got in when it stopped.
  “Where to?” the cabdriver asked.
  “My daughter Casey,” Claire said.
  “Excuse?” the driver said.
  “My daughter Casey, please,” Claire said again.
   “I do not understand,” the driver said. “I go to Colonial
House, to Gaudi Park, to the marketplace, anywhere in the
city you want to go. I do not go up to the ruins near the tourist
city—too far. Where to?”
  “I don’t—” Claire said. She had been so sure this would
work, so sure she could get behind the facade of the city to
wherever it was Casey had gone. “I’m looking for my daughter
Casey. She didn’t come home last night. I thought that you
might—”
  “I do not know this Casey,” the driver said.
  “Oh,” Claire said, slumping. The city had deserted her, had
barred her from going inside. She had lost the key somehow.
She couldn’t think of what to do next. “Well, the Super Shop
then, I guess.”
  “Okay,” the driver said, and started the car.
  She still half hoped that he would take her to Casey, but
when he stopped in front of the glass-fronted building, she
knew she had to give up. She got out, told him to wait, and
went into the liquor store. Once inside she piled her cart to the
top, filling it not just with liquor but with meat and bread,
eggs and fruit and cheese. It might be dangerous to go back to
the McDonald’s, especially if the waitress had told someone
they were still in the country.
  The taxi was still parked at the curb when she finished her
shopping. She had thought the driver might have deserted
her, along with so much else in Amaz. He got out and helped
put her bags in the cab. “Home now, yes?” he asked, looking at
her in the rearview mirror.
  “Okay,” Claire said. The wine waited patiently for her inside
the bag. At least the wine wouldn’t desert her.


“You are early,” Jara said when Mitchell got to his office at
the university. “We had arranged to meet at the location on
my map, yes?”
  “My daughter’s been kidnapped,” Mitchell said. “They want
the sword.”
  For once it seemed as if Jara had nothing to say. “I am
terribly sorry,” he said finally. “When did this happen?”
  “I don’t know,” Mitchell said. He stood over Jara’s desk,
unmoving, unable to move, just as he had that first day when
he had brought the manuscript. “She didn’t come home last
night.”
  “And they want the sword?” Jara asked. “How do they know
that we are looking for it?”
  “I don’t know,” Mitchell said.
  “Well then,” Jara said. “We will have to find the sword for
them. Shall we start now?”
   Mitchell stirred. This maniac Jara would probably want to
go find his sword in the middle of nuclear war. “I don’t want to
look for the sword,” he said. “I want to go to the police.”
   “Cumaq has taken over the police,” Jara said. “As he has,
apparently, taken over everything else. We have received
notice that some of his men will meet with us next week to
decide the future of the university. And you, of course, should
be on your way back to the United States. All foreigners must
leave the country. They emptied out the hotels in the tourist
city, have you heard? At best you have a week before you are
deported, a week to find the sword.”
  “And if we find the sword, what then?” Mitchell said. “Do we
just hand it over to these people? What about your plans for a
national museum?”
   “Of course we will not hand it to them,” Jara said. “We will
find the sword and then we will decide what to do with it.
Perhaps we can pretend to deal with the kidnappers and then
somehow rescue your daughter.”
  “Without the police?” Mitchell said. “Just us against them?
She’s been taken by the people who wear those turbans—do
you know how many of them there are in the city? There must
be hundreds. Thousands.”
   “Please, do not raise your voice,” Jara said. “We will go look
for the sword today. And if we must, we will give it to your
daughter’s kidnappers to get her back.” He stood, picked up
his briefcase and coat and went to the door. Mitchell followed.
Jara was obsessed with the sword, but maybe he was right.
Maybe the only way to get Casey back was to give the
kidnappers what they wanted. And if they didn’t find the
sword that day he would think of something else.
  The day went by in a blur. Jara, working carefully and
precisely, drew lines on his map, aligned his compass, checked
his copy of the manuscript, but still it seemed to Mitchell that
they were walking in circles. There had to be something else
they could be doing. Every so often they passed soldiers
dressed in torn and dirty mismatched uniforms, carrying guns,
and Mitchell would pray they wouldn’t stop him. Jara’s words
kept coming back to him: “At best you have a week.” And
what would happen to them after that?
   It seemed to Mitchell that they wandered all over the city
without finding the sword or any likely place to begin digging
for the tomb. He almost wished that they hadn’t had such a
spectacular early success, that they hadn’t found the walls of
the palace. Maybe then Jara would have been willing to give
up this whole crazy chase, to call it off and go home.
  “It’s getting late,” Mitchell said finally. His voice seemed
strange to him in the empty air. “What do you think?”
  “Think about what?” Jara said.
  “About finding the sword,” Mitchell said. “Do you think
we’re any closer? Or should we just go home and think of some
other way to get Casey back?”
  “Of course we are closer,” Jara said. “We move closer every
day. We are now on streets that have existed since the Jewel
King’s time. Probably we are walking over streets that the
Jewel King himself has walked.”
  “Too bad these streets can’t talk,” Mitchell said.
  Jara stopped and looked at him, amazed. “Yes,” he said.
“That is very good. Too bad these streets cannot talk. Very
good.”
  Mitchell sighed, too tired to tell Jara he hadn’t invented the
saying. “I’m ready to go home now,” he said.
  No traffic moved in the streets except ancient trucks filled
with soldiers. They had to walk back to the university and Dr.
Tamir’s house, Mitchell following Jara and the map,
completely lost in the strange, lowering city.
  A woman moved out of the shadows of the porch as Mitchell
went up the steps, and he backed away a little, startled. “We
have your daughter,” the woman said.
  “Yes, I know,” Mitchell said. “I told you this morning, I don’t
have the damn sword. I’ll—”
  “This morning?” the woman said.
  “Yeah,” Mitchell said. What were they playing at? “When
your friend with the turban came to tell me you had Casey. I
already told him—”
  “Casey?” the woman said. Now he noticed that she was
wearing pale-blue gloves. Before she could speak again
Mitchell knew, if not the exact words, the tenor of what she
would say, that something else had gone badly wrong. “Not
Casey, the other one,” she said. “The blond one. We’ll give her
back if you give us the sword.”
   Mitchell said nothing, sagging a little where he stood. He
was a researcher, a man who sifted through dictionaries and
old manuscripts. Not an adventurer, not someone who was
equipped to deal with a strange woman who had kidnapped his
daughter in a foreign country. Finally he said, “Angie?”
  “Yeah,” the woman said. “Angie.”
  “My other daughter’s been kidnapped too,” he said wearily.
Could he appeal to her sympathy? “We heard about it this
morning. They want the sword too. So if I had the sword,
which I don’t, I don’t even know if it exists—”
   “It exists,” the woman said. “So if you had it you’d have to
make a choice, wouldn’t you? Which of your daughters would
you want back?” She didn’t give him a chance to answer. He
didn’t know what he would have said anyway. “If I were you
I’d get to work finding that sword.” She went down the porch,
to an old rickety car waiting for her at the curb. The car, of
course, had no license plates.
  Mitchell let himself into the house. He felt infinitely tired.
Claire sat in the kitchen, a book and a glass of wine in front of
her. “Where’s Angie?” he said.
   “Angie?” Claire said, looking up from her book. “She’s in her
room. Isn’t she?” Her words slurred together so badly Mitchell
knew he would not have understood her if he hadn’t had years
of practice.
  “No, she’s not,” he said. “She’s been kidnapped. So has
Casey.” Suddenly it seemed absurd, two daughters kidnapped
on the same day. He forced himself not to laugh. If he started
laughing he might never stop.
   “Kidnapped?” Claire said. Alarm showed part way through
her vague expression, like the sun trying to come out through
clouds. He’d gotten through to her. Finally.
  “Yeah,” he said. “They want the sword.”
  “But you don’t have the sword,” she said.
  “No,” Mitchell said. “I don’t.” And that’s not the worst of it,
he thought, but he didn’t think he could burden her with
anything more. “Jara took me on another of his wild-goose
chases today. Do you know if the phones are working?”
  “I didn’t check,” Claire said.
  Of course not, Mitchell thought. He went into the living
room and lifted the receiver, but the phones were still dead.
Then he walked heavily down the corridor to his daughters’
rooms.
   “You’d have to make a choice, wouldn’t you?” the woman
had said. The problem was that it wouldn’t be much of a
choice. He’d pick Casey over Angie any day, always had. But
of course he couldn’t think that way. Of course he’d have to do
everything in his power to get both of them back. Still, he
couldn’t rid himself of the guilt the woman’s words had stirred
up.
  Casey’s room looked the same as it had the day before. The
bed was unmade—they had given up trying to get her to make
her bed years before—and piles of clothes and books were
scattered around the room. He went closer to read the titles. A
physics textbook, A Few Proverbs of Amaz, The
English-Lurqazi Phrase Book, The Old Curiosity Shop . Any
sane father would secretly prefer Casey to Angie, he told
himself. It’s nothing to feel ashamed about. But the guilt he
felt would not go away, had, if anything, gotten worse.
   He went across the corridor to Angie’s room. Angie had
made her bed, and had placed at least a dozen black notebooks
at the foot, arranged in three neatly squared-off stacks. Maybe
she had written down wherever it was she had been planning
to go. He went over to the bed, sat down and picked up the top
notebook on the first stack.
   It seemed to be a dictionary of some kind, about ten words
to a page, alphabetically arranged. She’d left spaces between
the words so more could be added later. He flipped through it
quickly. Two or three of the words seemed to be in old
Lurqazi, and a few others were in the later demotic form. He
closed the book and picked up the next one in the stack.
   This one contained nothing but maps. She’d divided the book
into two sections, one headed “Borol” and the other “Marol.”
Imaginary countries? Mitchell thought. Was this what she did
in her room all day?
  The next book had descriptions of holidays, arranged
according to a calendar that, as far as Mitchell knew, had no
counterpart in the real world. Suddenly angry—at Angie for
wasting her time like this? at himself for prying?—he put the
book down and picked up the top one in the last stack.
   “And so the best knight in all the realm was ordered from
the country, and given from sunrise to sunset to arrange his
affairs, as if he were a common criminal who had trespassed
against the king…” Astonished, Mitchell turned to another
page and read, “They bore the dead king at night from his
resting place to the tomb of marble and gold they had built for
him…” And later, “The trumpets sounded loudly. The king’s
son was come to redeem the land, and to clear his father’s
name.”
   Mitchell sat on the edge of Angie’s bed, the open notebook
still in his hand. Everything ran parallel to him, he had
thought while out walking with Jara, the day after they had
found the wall. Things he didn’t understand happened all
around him, and he only managed to catch up with them much
later, if at all.
   As far as he knew the only written version of the Book of
Stones was the one he had found at the university, in a box
labeled “Arabic Studies.” The manuscript had never been
translated into English. And yet somehow his daughter,
working in ways incomprehensible to him, had managed to
translate or reinvent the Book of Stones. Somehow she had
done the same work he’d been engaged upon for the past year.
Her inner world, the made-up countries of Borol and Marol,
had overlapped with the real thing. Was your daughter crazy
if her imaginary kingdoms turned out to have an actual
counterpart?
   And how had it happened? Some slow seepage of magic
radiating out along the lines Jara had drawn on his map, out
of the colored wheels and arrows of ancient Lurqazi
calligraphy? He shook his head slowly. Now he was thinking
like Jara, like Tamir. Angie had probably read the notes he
was beginning to make on the epic and had fashioned her own
story out of them. If he were to read the two versions he’d
probably discover that they weren’t all that similar. He closed
the book and put it back on the stack, relieved to have solved
one problem at least. Slowly he returned to the other world,
the one where his daughters were missing and the city swirled
around him in chaos. He stood heavily, wondering what he
could do next.



          One way to Twenty-fifth
           November Street
                                                       «^»
Casey woke early, stood up and went to the door, stepping
around the sleeping women on their rattan mats. Three
woman got up immediately and went to the door to stop her,
softly whispering words in Lurqazi. “You can’t…” they said.
“You must…” Casey understood enough of it to know that she
was not supposed to leave the room.
  After about ten minutes a bell rang and all the other women
sat up. They went out of the room and down the hall, laughing
softly, carrying her along in their midst. They stopped at the
large communal bathroom Casey had seen the night before
and then, when they had all used the toilets and showers, took
her with them to the courtyard.
  Breakfast was strong coffee and a sweet pastry, served on
bone-white china with a circle of gold inlaid around the rim.
  “Where is Soz Mike?” she asked the women sitting at her
table. All of them shook their heads and shrugged. She
couldn’t see him anywhere in the room.
  When breakfast ended the women stood and left the room,
bowing slightly to the man in the long white robe who had
held up the sword the night before. Now what? Casey thought.
She tried to follow the women who were at her table but one
went to the kitchen, one to the red-pillared room to sweep, one
back to the bedroom to pile the rattan mats in a corner. “Can I
help?” she asked the woman lifting the mats.
  “No, please,” the woman said. “You are our—” and then a
word that Casey didn’t understand, that left her feeling
anxious until she looked it up and found, to her relief, that it
meant “guest.”
  She left the room and started to wander through the house.
No one came out to stop her, but she didn’t believe for a
moment that they’d forgotten about her. She passed through a
room with a ceiling made of what looked like beaten gold. She
walked by an open door, looked inside and saw a room filled
with men seated on plain wooden benches, answering
questions put to them by an old man in a long dirty white
robe. She ended up crossing the courtyard three times, each
time coming to it by a different doorway, one tiled, one
wooden, and one shaped like a star. Finally she walked down
an echoing corridor with walls and floors of checkered white
and black marble. The corridor ended in a plain wooden door.
  She stood before the door for a while, wondering where she
had seen it before. She’d had a strange dream last night… But
no, that was ridiculous. The door opened to her touch.
  The room beyond the door was empty. Of course, she
thought. They wouldn’t keep the room the sword was in
unguarded, unlocked, open to just anyone. They’re making
poor Mike go through an initiation ceremony, after all.
   The walls were painted an unremarkable off-white, but the
floor was covered with a tile mosaic. She went farther into the
room to see it better, leaving the door open to catch the light
from the hall. The pattern looked like some kind of
calligraphy, like the words in her father’s manuscript. Some of
the words were written in large, rounded letters, and the
others, nearly covering the first group, in letters jagged as
barbed wire. That definitely reminded her of something, not
her stupid dream, but—Of course. Graffiti just like this
covered most of the city. But the graffiti she’d seen—she
closed her eyes, trying to remember—had been exactly the
opposite, the rounded letters nearly covering the jagged ones.
  She opened her eyes and went down on her knees to
examine the mosaic closer. It looked as if part of it, most of
the rounded letters, had been pried up and the jagged letters
added later. She ran her fingers over the tiles, feeling the
places where the second group of letters did not line up exactly
with the original mosaic. There were lots of these places,
almost as if—as if whoever had done the second mosaic had
wanted people to know they had desecrated the original. She
stood up slowly. But why would they have done that, and why
hadn’t they just taken out all the rounded letters?
  “You are not allowed in here,” someone said from the open
door.
  She turned around quickly. The man with the silver-framed
glasses, the one who’d sat next to her on the bus, stood there.
He didn’t look nearly as friendly as he had on the bus, and her
first feeling was impatience. Why had he interrupted her
before she’d seen everything? “What?” she said slowly, to gain
time.
  “You are not allowed in here,” he said again.
 “It’s very beautiful,” she said. “Very interesting. What is it?
How old is it?”
 “If you like you may join us here and become initiated,” the
man said. “Then we will tell you its meaning. Not before.”
   She had never heard the Lurqazi word for “initiated” but
she understood its meaning as soon as the old man said it. “It’s
different,” she said. “The—the letters. In all the others the
letters are different, there are more of these letters—”
  The man turned away. At first she thought he hadn’t
understood her, and she cursed herself for not having studied
Lurqazi more diligently. Probably she hadn’t made any sense
at all. Then she heard him spit, very deliberately. “You must
not say that again,” he said slowly. “It is only because you are
motmot …” She did not understand the rest of the sentence.
“You must leave this room now.”
   She followed him out the door reluctantly and watched as he
closed it to make sure he didn’t lock it. Maybe she could get
back sometime while everyone was at dinner or at meditation.
“Where is Soz Mike?” she asked the man.
  “He is busy.”
  “Well, what do I do?” she said. “Is there something to do?”
  “No,” the man said. “You must wait until you can go outside
again. And you must not go back to that room again.”
  “When can I go outside?”
  “When it is safe,” the man said. “When we say you can.”
  She sighed and walked with him down the checkered
hallway. He left her at one of the many turnings of the house
and she continued her explorations.
   At last she found herself back in the red-floored room. The
door to the outside stood across the room, unguarded. Was it
still locked? All around her Sozranis went back and forth over
the red tiles, carrying brooms, mats, candles, books, their
sandaled feet making sounds like whispers. She walked
purposefully toward the door.
  Five feet from the door two turbanned men moved quickly
in front of her and began to push her back. “You cannot go
outside,” one of them said.
  “Well, what the hell can I do?” she said, enraged into
speaking English.
  The two men looked at each other. One of them left the
room and came back a few minutes later with the man with
the silver glasses and another, younger, man. “This is Tarq,”
the man with the glasses said. “He will be your companion.”
  She looked up “companion” in her dictionary and nodded.
“All right,” she said.
  The young man—he was not much older than she was,
really—motioned her to follow him. They went out of the red
room and he opened a door she hadn’t seen in her explorations.
Beyond the door lay a flight of stairs. She hadn’t even known
the house had a second floor. He indicated that she should go
up ahead of him.
   At the top of the stairs they turned left and walked down a
long narrow corridor with identical doors running along one
side. He opened one door—how does he know which one?—and
they went inside. The room was empty except for shelves
standing in one corner. She looked at the floor, half hoping to
see looping or jagged calligraphy, but it was covered in
ordinary black and white tiles. While she stood in the middle
of the room, confused, Tarq went to the shelves and brought
back a carved mahogany box.
  Tarq sat cross-legged on the floor, opened the box and
dumped its contents on the floor. Chess pieces. Now she
noticed that the tiles were arranged like chessboards, with
larger white tiles separating one board from the next. “You
play?” he asked.
  “Sure,” she said.
   After a half-dozen moves she realized that the rules were
slightly different from the ones she knew. One knight could
only turn clockwise and the other counterclockwise, there was
a time limit between moves, and the king could be resurrected
under certain conditions. It was this last that made her lose
the first game. She protested loudly, in Lurqazi and English,
but Tarq kept a look of innocence and at the end said
something in rapid Lurqazi that she thought meant, “You said
you knew how to play.”
  She won the next two games, resurrecting her king once,
and then realized that if she wanted Tarq as an ally she had
better start losing. She lost two games and then, growing
bored, ended the third in a draw.
  Tarq looked satisfied as he set up the pieces for another
game. “Are you initiated?” she asked him.
  He looked up, a little surprised, and said, “Of course. I have
the turban.” He touched the turban with his hand so she
would know what he meant.
 “The holy Sozran is very interesting,” she said. “Can you tell
me about him?”
  He shook his head. “You must first become initiated,” he
said.
 “I would like to be initiated,” she said. “But I am not sure.
Maybe if you tell me more…”
   “Well, then, I will tell you a little,” he said. In fact, he did
not finish his story until the bell rang for dinner. She didn’t
understand a lot of the words, and some of them were not in
her dictionary, so she had to stop him and make him explain
what they meant. As he talked, the scattered chess pieces in
front of him forgotten, his words became lyrical, his gestures
broader, his eyes brighter. She had seen the same enthusiasm
before—in Rafiz when he talked about Twenty-fifth November
Street, in a man who had stopped her to sell her cards. That’s
what’s missing, she thought. Everyone in the city is so
passionate about things. Here they’re only passionate about
their religion. They’ve lost everything else.
   The holy Sozran, she found out, had been king and religious
leader of Amaz twelve centuries ago. His rule rested on the
sword—“The same sword that shines for us every day, like the
sun,” Tarq said—and his people were prosperous and content.
The man who later became the Jewel King was one of
Sozran’s men, not a knight, but lower, much lower, a turnkey
in the prisons. “His name before he became the Jewel King is
not even remembered,” Tarq said. “That is because he was not
of noble birth.”
  But the man who became the Jewel King coveted the sword,
and finally he put together an army of outcasts and misfits.
Because there had not been a war in all of Sozran’s reign the
king was unprepared, and the Jewel King and his men were
able to treacherously overcome him and steal the sword. But
the Jewel King’s reign, because of his misdeeds, was filled
with sorrow, and his enemies were many. At the last battle
Sozran made an alliance with the Jewel King’s half brother,
and both Sozran and the Jewel King were slain. The Jewel
King’s son—“not even his son but a bastard, fathered on his
wife by the best knight in the realm,” Tarq said gleefully, as
though he personally had been the go-between for the two
adulterers—ruled the country for a while, but the kingdom
declined and finally crumbled into fragments.
   “And the sword was lost,” Tarq said. “That is mostly why
the kingdom fell apart, because instead of governing, the new
king spent his time trying to find the sword. But what he did
not know is that Sozran’s followers gained the sword and have
it to this day. And no one knows it but us.”
  And me, Casey thought, but she knew she probably
shouldn’t say so. Instead she said slowly, “The house I live in,
the house that is motmot , they said that house is three
hundred years old. But if the holy Sozran lived twelve hundred
years ago, how could he have lived there? How could the house
be motmot ?”
  Tarq looked confused for a moment and then, the doubt
gone from his face so quickly she wasn’t even sure she had
seen it, said, “Ah. That is something you will learn when you
are initiated.”
  “The Jewel King,” she said, finally understanding
something, “did he write like this?” She made large looping
motions on the floor with one of the chess pieces. “And did the
holy Sozran write like this?” she asked, moving the piece
jaggedly back and forth.
  This time Tarq did not even bother to hide his astonishment.
“How—how did you possibly learn that?” he said.
   “It is all over the city,” she said. “The writing of Sozran and
the Jewel King. But in the city the Jewel King’s letters—there
are more of them. And here in the room I saw there are more
of the holy Sozran’s letters.”
 “You must not tell anyone you know this,” Tarq said, almost
whispering. “I told you too much. If you tell I will be—”
  “I will not tell anyone,” she said. Too late she realized that
she had nearly done a very stupid thing. If Tarq told his
superiors what she knew they would probably keep her here
forever. But Tarq had his own reasons for keeping silent.
“Okay?”
  Tarq grinned, as she knew he would, at the only English
word he knew. “Okay,” he said. Distantly, on the first floor,
the bells rang for dinner.
  They put away the chess pieces and went downstairs. After
dinner, when Tarq went to meditation, Casey tried the phone
again. There was still no dial tone. She wondered if she should
try for the front door but she thought she had made enough
trouble for one day. Instead she stood as quietly as possible in
the red room and listened for noises out in the street. There
was nothing—no cars, no sirens, no gunfire. If everything’s
gone back to normal why are they keeping me here? Don’t
they know it’ll be harder for me to leave the country the
longer I stay here? I’ll have to escape, she thought, and then
stopped, a little startled by the word. It hadn’t occurred to her
before that she was being kept against her will. All right then,
she thought, I’ll escape tomorrow. She left the red room and
went back to the meditation room to find Tarq.
  After meditation the women led her back to their bedroom.
A young man sat cross-legged on a mat outside the room, and
the women nodded to him and giggled as they went inside. My
guard, Casey thought. She started to think of a plan.
  She stayed awake for hours after all the other women had
dropped off to sleep. She did physics problems in her head. She
remembered all the poems she knew and tried to translate
them into Lurqazi or Bordoril. She imagined letters she might
write to Rafiz, to her parents and Angie, to the kids back at
the city college. Finally, when she thought enough time had
passed, she got up slowly and went to the door.
  The guard lay asleep on his mat. A guttering oil lamp
burned beside him. As she had hoped, he had taken off his
turban before he’d gone to sleep. She took it and went back
into the women’s bedroom. The guard stirred slightly as she
started to close the door, but he did not wake up.
   In the dark of the women’s bedroom she stuffed the turban
into her purse. Then she lay down on her mat and went to
sleep.
  Tarq was waiting for her after breakfast. “Would you like to
play chess again?” he asked.
  “Okay,” Casey said.
  “Okay,” Tarq said, laughing as though the word were a
private joke between them. They went back to the room with
the chessboards on the floor, and Tarq set up the pieces.
  Casey lost three games before she spoke. “Is it warm
outside?” she said.
  “It is hot,” Tarq said, setting up for another game. “Very
hot.”
   Casey sighed. “I would love to go outside,” she said. “I am
tired of being always inside.”
  “It is too dangerous,” Tarq said. “I am sorry.”
  “For a minute only,” Casey said. “I am sure you will—” She
made him wait while she looked up the word in the dictionary
and then said, “Protect me.”
  It was almost too easy. Tarq sat up straighter, hesitated
before putting down a piece, and said, “Well—”
  “I would be so happy,” Casey said. “Just for a minute. Not
very far. Okay?”
  “Okay,” Tarq said. “I will protect you.”
  They went down the stairs and into the red room. No one
stopped them as Tarq took out a key and opened the door. The
dark-green lawn stretched out in front of them, smooth as a
rug.
  Casey went down the marble stairway and stopped at the
bottom. Tarq followed closely behind her. “It is so beautiful,”
she said.
  Tarq shrugged. “We should go back inside now,” he said.
  “Just to the—” Casey said, pointing, not knowing the word.
  “Fountain,” Tarq said.
  “Fountain,” Casey said. “It is very beautiful. And then we
will go back. Okay?”
  “Okay,” Tarq said.
  The thick lawn felt good beneath her feet. She almost felt
sorry for him. She waited until she got the fountain between
them and started to run.
   “Hey!” Tarq said. “Heyyy!” He came after her. They were
too far from the big house for anyone to hear him. His sandals
slipped once on the lawn and Casey was gone, through the box
hedge and around the back of the neighboring house. She kept
running, always picking the streets that led down, but she
didn’t think he had followed her. He was afraid to leave the
safety of the house. They all were.
  What they’ll probably do, she thought at the foot of the hill,
taking out the turban and tying it around her head to cover
her hair, is get in their bus and try to follow me. But by that
time I’ll have found a taxi and gone home. Taxi—I have no
money. I gave it all to that woman cabdriver.
  She set off down one of the streets, wondering what to do
next. Boy, that was stupid, she thought. I’ll just have to keep
walking until I find something I recognize. Maybe I should
have stolen some of the silverware.
   The streets were as deserted as they had been two days ago.
Is Cumaq still in charge? she thought. What’s been happening?
She felt sharply visible. She was a walking paradox, a woman
in a turban, an American in a city where all the Americans
had gone home. And my parents? Did they go home too? They
had to have waited for me.
   The graffiti on the streets had grown like weeds. They
covered everything, every house, every few feet of sidewalk,
even some cars—a jagged phrase almost entirely covered by a
rounded one. It’s a feud that’s gone on for twelve hundred
years, she thought, wondering. Between the Sozranis and the
followers of the Jewel King. And everywhere but in the marble
house and a few other parts of the city the Jewel King is
winning. I wonder if my father knows.
  But she was too worried to concentrate. She passed houses,
then an empty burned-out section with a glass-and-chrome
supermarket rising incongruously out of the wreckage. “Super
Shop,” the sign over the glass door said. It looked eerie,
standing alone in the deserted city, golden reflections of the
sun shining from the glass. She went past it quickly.
  At the next corner three streets met and she chose one at
random. The day grew hotter. It was probably noon. And what
would she do if she was caught out after dark without having
found a familiar landmark? What would Cumaq’s men do to
her if they found her? She wished she knew more about him.
She had wanted to listen to the news at home but her mother
hadn’t liked having the radio on. And anyway she’d been home
so seldom.
  She passed a park with wavy benches made of orange and
red tile, structures of gold and green that looked as if they had
melted in the heat. Gaudi Park, she thought. She had been
meaning to ask Rafiz to take her here. Someone had defaced
one of the benches with graffiti.
  Should she rest in the park for a while? No, better to go on.
She came to a commercial district, passing stores selling fruit,
lamps, brass, wood, furniture. All the stores were closed, and a
few of them had signs she couldn’t read posted on the doors.
She hurried on.
  The store ahead of her had sharp gables over the windows
and a door shaped like a triangle. The store next to that one
was rounder, a scallop design on the roof, circular windows
and a large arch over the front door. Did the feud extend even
to their architecture? It wasn’t that ridiculous an idea. In
twelve hundred years the entire city could have been made
over into angles and curves. You’d want to know whom you
were dealing with when you went into a store, whether the
proprietor was a follower of Sozran or of the Jewel King.
  Now that she was looking for them, she saw sharp and
rounded edges everywhere. Spires and domes in the
mountains. Bricks sticking their corners out of a wall, a
chimney leaning at a grotesque angle, curving steps, a circular
driveway. She’d thought their cars were so old-fashioned
because they couldn’t afford newer ones, but now she realized
that most of the people preferred the rounded lines of the older
cars. Newer models like Rabbits were for tourists.
   And even the streets, with their sudden jagged turns or long
rounded corners, even the streets were part of the feud. No
wonder everything in the city was so hard to find. The entire
city had probably been knocked down and built up hundreds of
times since the war, like a larger version of the mosaic in the
house of the Sozranis. And if that was true then she should be
taking the rounded corners, because the Sozranis, out of long
habit, would be taking the jagged ones.
   She turned a long corner, then another one, then another. If
you thought the whole thing through it was all pretty
amazing. The cab-drivers and the bus drivers who were on the
side of the Jewel King would take the rounded corners
through the city, and the ones on the side of the Sozranis
would take the jagged corners. The feud would control where
you lived, who you talked to, what kind of furniture you had,
what you wore. And yet there was no hint of any of this in any
of the guidebooks. No visitor had ever guessed, starting with
the Spanish conquerors hundreds of years ago.
  The rounded street corners made her feel as if she was going
in circles. But the commercial district gave way to a row of
neat little houses, all of them declaring solidly for the Jewel
King, and the houses were succeeded by a burned-out area
covered with hundreds of tents made of different-colored coats,
blankets and cardboard. The street looked familiar. Or did she
just imagine that it did, out of desperation?
  She turned another corner. Ahead of her on the other side of
the street she saw the Sun and Stars. She ran down the
street, squeezed between the two houses at the end and looked
out at Twenty-fifth November Street.



          Casey and Mama
                                                        «^»
When Angie woke in the dim cluttered room the first thing she
saw was an old bamboo tray, and on the tray a loaf of bread
and a cup of coffee. She assumed the food was for her. They
wouldn’t try to starve her, would they?
   She sat up and put the tray on her lap. Well, but what if her
father couldn’t pay the ransom? Was her family rich enough to
afford it? She didn’t even know. Maybe they wouldn’t even
bother, maybe once Casey came back they would just go home.
She knew they liked Casey better anyway.
  But it didn’t pay to think of that, and she slipped back into
the Two Kingdoms. As was happening more and more she
thought of the history of the kingdoms first, the history she
hadn’t known until she had come to Amaz. The Jewel King,
the best knight in all the realm, the Queen and the son she
had conceived with the knight the day her husband fought the
War of Stones and began to lose the kingdom… they paraded
before her in all their finery, the gold bits and stirrups of the
horses, the rich tapestries, the shields and swords, and over all
the one sword, curved, with a fiery hilt. Where had they come
from, these people who had appeared full-grown in her mind
when the rest of the kingdom had come to her slowly,
piecemeal, with hundreds of revisions and additions? This
sudden vision must mean something, but what? That she
would come to join the kingdoms of Borol and Marol, that she
would fade gradually to the world and finally live only in that
other, brighter, realm? That was what she hoped, but she was
afraid the vision meant something else, something sinister.
  There was a knock at the door. Angie waited, but no one
entered. The knock came again. “Come in,” Angie said.
   The door opened. The light from the corridor hurt her eyes,
and now she noticed that light was struggling to pierce the
dingy curtain on the far wall. Hours must have passed since
she had eaten the bread, but she was used to time passing
differently for her while she was in the kingdoms. A man stood
in the doorway, his knotted white hair the only thing she could
see against the light. Surprisingly, she was no longer afraid. If
something terrible happened to her it would be that much
worse for her parents if they hadn’t come forth with the
ransom money. “Are you going to kill me?” she asked.
  The man closed the door and sat on a covered stool near the
foot of the bed. “No,” he said. “Do not be frightened. Blue Rose
does not know that I am here.”
  “Blue Rose?”
  “The woman who wears the—the gloves,” the old man said.
“She is waiting for word from your father. My name is Rafiz. I
am a friend of Casey’s.”
  “Oh,” Angie said. She couldn’t get her mind to focus. Why
didn’t he go away and leave her with the bright horses, the
shining swords?
   “We must get you away,” Rafiz said. “Blue Rose is waiting
for your father to give her the sword, and I fear that if she has
it—”
  “The—the sword?” Angie said.
  “Yes,” Rafiz said. “The Jewel King’s sword. Your father—”
  “Then it’s real?” Angie said, disappointed. “The Jewel King’s
sword really exists?”
  “Yes, of course,” Rafiz said. “Your father is looking for it.
You did not know?”
  “No,” Angie said. “I thought I made it up. The Jewel King,
and the Queen, and the knight, and their son—It’s all real?”
   “It is all real,” Rafiz said. “What do you mean that you made
it up? Surely you had learned the legend from your father.”
   “No,” Angie said slowly. “I never talk to my father. I wrote
it all down in my notebooks. I never heard any of it before in
my life.”
  “Tell me the story,” Rafiz said.
   She told him all of it, how the Jewel King had overthrown
the corrupt king before him and come to power, how he had
gained the sword and used it to unite the realm, but how
treachery in his palace and outside the country combined to
bring him down. Rafiz listened quietly, his hands resting
loosely on his lap. His eyes in the dim light looked impossibly
black, like the black coins issued after the death of a king in
Borol.
  After she had finished he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “That is
our national epic.”
  “All of it?” she said.
  “Yes,” he said. “All of it.”
  She sat silent a moment. The real world always lay out
there waiting, ready to ambush you with something you could
not control. The history you’d made up for your own private
kingdom turns out to be the national epic of some obscure
country. Her disappointment returned. “But how—how could
that happen?”
  Rafiz shrugged. “There are forces at work that we do not
understand,” he said. “Forces that brought you here, to
Twenty-fifth November Street. Time is divided by two, what
we know has happened and what is hidden from us in the
future. And I cannot even go to the cards, because for the first
time that I can remember the cards have not been printed.
But I know that we must get you away from here. Blue Rose
must not get the sword.”
   She didn’t want to move. She wanted either to be killed
right away or to have her parents ransom her. How much was
she worth to them? Thousands? Millions? If Casey had been
kidnapped too would they ransom her first? She said nothing.
   “I can do nothing now,” Rafiz said. “I am only here because
Zem thinks I am also working for Blue Rose. He had the
sickness of dreamlessness when he was a child, and is
slow-witted. But I will come back. You must be ready to leave
at once.” Angie still said nothing. “Do you understand?” Rafiz
said.
  “All right,” Angie said.
  “You are very different from Casey,” Rafiz said. “But Blue
Rose says you are sisters.” He opened the door and went
outside.
   Angie sat stiffly on the bed after he had gone. She had only
talked to him for a few minutes and he was already comparing
her with Casey. Her whole life had been like that. Probably
Casey, wherever she was, had met up with a better class of
kidnapper, probably Angie had somehow failed in that too. She
wouldn’t mind staying here for a long time, for the rest of her
life maybe, as long as they gave her a place to sleep and kept
feeding her. She could work on the kingdoms just as easily
here as anywhere else. Though it was too bad she couldn’t
have brought her notebooks.
  But the old man—Rafiz—would be back to take her away.
Because, he said, Blue Rose must not get the sword. The
sword… She saw the Jewel King raise the golden sword high
above him, the Queen, dressed all in white and gold, standing
at his side. The crowd before him roared as if with one voice.
Claire looked up from her book and saw Mitchell come into the
kitchen. She nodded at him and went back to reading.
  “It’s frustrating,” Mitchell said. “I know they’re out there
somewhere, but there’s no one I can talk to. No way to get
help.” He spread his hands helplessly over the table. “There’s
just nothing I can do.”
  Claire put down the book, a little surprised. It had been a
long time since he had wanted to talk to her, a long time since
the two of them had been alone. They had to have talked when
they decided that Angie needed to see a psychologist, but she
couldn’t remember it. She didn’t know how to have a
conversation with him that wasn’t some kind of furious
intellectual argument.
   Sometime in the future, she knew, Angie and Casey would
move out, go away to college or something, and then it would
be just the two of them living alone in the house. But that was
in the future, and things were sure to change before then. She
wasn’t ready for this intimacy yet.
  “I don’t even know where the damn police station is,”
Mitchell said. “The phones are dead, so I can’t call. And even if
I got to the station, who knows what the hell I might find.
Cumaq’s taken them over too, Jara says. They’d probably just
order us to go home.”
  “Take a cab,” Claire said.
  Mitchell looked at her and laughed. Now she saw that he
hadn’t really been talking to her, just using her as a sounding
board.
  “A cab,” he said. “There are no cabs. The streets are
deserted.”
  “I took one,” Claire said.
  “When?”
  “Yesterday,” she said. Mitchell looked up at her quickly, and
suddenly she felt uncertain. No, it had to be yesterday, she
thought, checking back. “Yeah, that’s right. Yesterday.”
  “Where did you go?” Mitchell asked.
  “I looked for Casey,” she said.
  “You looked—where?” he asked.
  She brushed her hair away from her face. “In the city,” she
said.
  “Where in the city?” Mitchell said, sounding urgent. “Where
did you think she was?”
  “Oh, I don’t know,” Claire said. “Around.”
  “You got a cab and all you did was drive around?” Mitchell
said. “Why didn’t you go to a police station? Or a—an embassy
or something?”
   “Well,” she said. “It’s hard to explain. See, the first time I
got in a cab I asked to be taken to a grocery store. That was
when we had the Wileys for dinner, remember?” Mitchell
nodded, his eyebrows slightly raised. She went on. “Well, the
driver took me to this place called Super Shop. It was a
grocery store, but mostly it sold, well, it was a liquor store. As
if the driver knew that I hadn’t had anything to drink since I
got to Amaz.”
   Mitchell’s eyebrows were higher now, the expression on his
face one of astonishment. She could see that he wasn’t going
to believe her. That was the trouble when other people
thought you drank too much, they tended not to believe most
of what you said.
  “So then one time I asked to be taken to the Super Shop,”
Claire said. “And the driver took me to this bookstore. As if he
knew I liked to read. So yesterday when I got in the cab I
asked to be taken to Casey. That’s all, just Casey. Because
they usually know what I want, see, and yesterday all I
wanted was to get Casey back.”
  “And what happened?” Mitchell asked.
   “He didn’t know what I was talking about,” Claire said. She
felt a tear leave her eye and move slowly down her cheek.
“The city’s abandoned me. Something’s happened. Something’s
changed.”
  “Where did you go?”
  “Around the city, like I told you,” Claire said.
   For a minute she thought he was going to get angry. But he
never got angry with her, she knew that. “You weren’t
abandoned,” he said finally. “No one knows where Casey is.
It’s not your fault.”
  “Maybe I can get another cab,” she said.
  Mitchell sighed. “It’s all right, Claire,” he said.
  “No, really,” she said. “Do you want to come outside with
me? I can try to get a cab, and then you can go to the police
station, or wherever.”
  “The streets are deserted,” he said. “There’s nothing out
there.”
   “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go. It’s worth a try.” She stood
up and went into the living room. She could hear Mitchell
following behind her. “Maybe I can get on the other side this
time,” she said, but she said it mostly to herself.


Mitchell looked out at the empty streets in front of him. It was
stupid to humor her, he thought. Now she’ll just sink further
into her depression. There’s never any point in showing people
the truth behind their fantasies. Probably she hadn’t gone
anywhere yesterday, probably she’d just stayed at the kitchen
table all day.
  Something came around the corner. “Look!” Claire said,
pointing, and then dropped her arm as the truck came closer.
Soldiers called to them from the back as it passed.
  “Listen, Claire—” Mitchell said.
  “A little more,” Claire said. “Just a little more time. Maybe
the city will help me out just once more.”
  Mitchell said nothing. They stood on the porch looking at
the streets, a mirror image of the turbanned people who had
once stood looking across the street at them.
  Now he saw a small figure walk around the corner and head
toward them. The police, he thought, come to take us to the
airport, or to jail. We really shouldn’t be out here. It’s much
too exposed.
  “Claire,” he said. “Let’s go inside.”
  “In a little bit,” she said. “Just a little longer.”
  “Now,” he said, trying to sound stern. “There’s a man
coming this way. Who knows who he is? Could be the police,
could be anyone. Let’s go.” He took one last look at the man
and saw that he was wearing a brown suit. Probably not the
police, then. Probably worse. The man came closer, a small
man, walking rapidly in the heat. Jara.
   Mitchell turned back to the house but Jara had already seen
him. “Good morning, Dr. Parmenter,” Jara called. “I waited
for you at the place we agreed to meet, but you did not come.”
  “I’m not looking for your damn sword any more,” Mitchell
said as he got closer. “It won’t do any good.”
  “But your daughter—”Jara said, standing at the foot of the
porch and looking up.
  “My daughters,” Mitchell said heavily. “The other one’s gone
too now. And they want the sword in exchange for her
too—some woman came to tell us last night. So unless you can
guarantee we’ll find two swords, so I can give one to each…”
  “What will you do?” Jara said.
  Mitchell shrugged. “Go to the police, I guess,” he said.
  “That would do no good,” Jara said. “Cumaq controls the
police now. They would just arrest you.”
  “It’s my only hope, though,” Mitchell said. “I can’t think of
anything else. The only thing is—I don’t know how to get
there. Could you give me directions?”
  “I will tell you what I will do,” Jara said, coming up the
porch steps. “I will take you there. And when we are there I
will go inside and ask about your daughter—daughters—and
see if it is safe for you to come inside too. I will do this if you
will come with me to look for the sword.”
  Mitchell looked at him, surprised. He would never have
expected Jara to make an offer like that, to help him so
selflessly. Of course it wasn’t entirely unselfish, the maniac
was still doggedly on the trail of the sword. “Why don’t you
just go look for the sword yourself?” Mitchell said. “What do
you need me for?”
  “I do not know,” Jara said. “I feel that—I will need you for
something before the end. It is not over yet.”
  “Well, thanks,” Mitchell said, sorry for all the times he had
belittled the man. “Thanks a lot.” He turned to say good-bye to
Claire. “Don’t go anywhere,” he said. “Don’t leave the house.
Don’t even answer the door.” She nodded vaguely, closing the
door behind her.
   Then they set off. Jara led him through the twisting streets,
turning corners, doubling back, until Mitchell was completely
lost. I never could have done this by myself, he thought.
Finally Jara stopped in front of a shabby storefront divided
down the middle into two shops, one selling old office machines
and the other a shoe-repair store. “Here we are,” he said. “The
police station.”
  “This?” Mitchell said. He was very much afraid he had been
the victim of an elaborate practical joke. “How can you tell?”
  “Upstairs,” Jara said, and now Mitchell saw a flight of stairs
at the side of the shoe-repair shop. “They do not look like this
where you are from?”
  “They—no,” Mitchell said.
  “Wait here,” Jara said.“I will go see if it is safe.”
   Mitchell watched as Jara went up the stairs to the station.
As soon as Jara was gone Mitchell felt alone, exposed to
anyone who might come along. How do I know I can trust
him? he thought. What if he’s turning me in right now? What
if he doesn’t come back? But almost immediately he felt
ashamed. Of course I can trust him—hell, if I can’t there’s no
one left in this crazy country who can help me. I’m just being
paranoid. Anyone would be, under the circumstances.
  Jara came to the head of the stairs and waved to him.
Mitchell started up, relieved and apprehensive at the same
time. They went into the station together.
  Inside it looked a little more like what Mitchell imagined a
police station to look like: steel desks and filing cabinets, green
walls and gray linoleum floors, a glass door that led to
someone’s office, another that led down a corridor. A clock on
the wall said 4:36.
  But if the room lived up to Mitchell’s expectations the men
in it most definitely did not. They lounged on desks and
chairs—there was even one of them up on a filing
cabinet—laughing, drinking from paper cups, talking loudly.
Almost all of them had the same kind of machine gun as the
waitress at the McDonald’s, and one man was sighting a pistol
carefully at the clock. Another man gleefully tore up the
papers on his desk, and when he was finished he looked
through the drawers for more. They were dressed in every
kind of clothing, jeans, suits, combat fatigues, all torn and
stained, all mismatched.
  A few of the men stopped talking when Mitchell entered,
and one of them came toward him. He wore the charcoal-gray
pants of a good tweed suit, a black T-shirt, a
green-and-yellow-checked scarf and a beret. “How may I help
you?” he said.
  “My daughters are missing,” Mitchell said. “Kidnapped.”
  “Ah,” the man said. “What is your nationality?”
  “I’m an American,” Mitchell said.
  “North or South American?”
  “North—I’m from the United States,” Mitchell said.
  “Ah,” the man said.“The United States. But surely you know
that all foreigners must leave the country?”
 “Yes,” Mitchell said, speaking fast. “Yes, I know that, but
my daughter—my daughters—I can’t leave without them—”
  “I am afraid,” the man said, “that we will have to arrest
you. Breaking curfew, being in the country when you have
been ordered to leave—what else?” He looked around at the
other men for inspiration, but none of them was paying
attention. He reached into his pants pocket and drew out a
pair of handcuffs. “Give me your hands, please.”
  Mitchell looked wildly at Jara, at the other men in the
room, at the door leading down the steps. What would Claire
do, alone at the house, if—? Jara was shaking his head
emphatically, as if to deny any connection to the man with the
handcuffs. Suddenly the man started to laugh. “Funny, yes?”
he said, putting the handcuffs back in his pocket. “You truly
thought I was about to arrest you, no? That was a good joke,
was it not, American?”
  Mitchell nodded weakly. Everyone except Jara was
laughing. He heard a loud bang and the shattering of glass as
one of the other men shot the clock.
  “Now,” the man with the handcuffs said after the laughter
had died down, “you say your daughter is missing.”
  “Daughters,” Mitchell said. “Both of them. They’ve been
kidnapped.”
 “Ah,” the policeman said. “You must be a very rich
American indeed. Two daughters missing. How much do they
want?”
  “They don’t want money,” Mitchell said. “They want—”
  “An old manuscript,” Jara said, stepping forward. “Dr.
Parmenter is a colleague of mine at the university. He
discovered an ancient manuscript which various groups are
anxious to have for themselves.”
  “What kind of groups?” the policeman said.
   “The people that wear the turbans,” Mitchell said. “They’ve
got one of the daughters. And the other one—a woman came
to tell us she had her. I never saw the woman before in my
life.”
  “So two different groups want this manuscript,” the
policeman said. “This strange woman and the Sozranis.”
  “Who?” Mitchell said.
  “The Sozranis,” the policeman said. “That is what the people
with turbans are called.”
  “The Sozranis, then,” Mitchell said. Where had he heard
that word before?
  “This manuscript—it must be very important,”                    the
policeman said. He looked shrewdly at Jara.
  “Yes, it is,” Jara said. “It is the story of the Jewel King.”
  “Ah, the Jewel King,” the policeman said. The suspicion
which had started to gather in his eyes vanished. “Of course.
Of course that would be important.”
  “So you think you can help us?” Mitchell said.
   “Unfortunately I think not,” the policeman said. “We have a
lot of work to do here, as no doubt you can see for yourself.”
He gestured at the men talking and drinking and laughing
behind him. “What I would suggest is that you go into the
mountains to the place where these Sozranis live. Perhaps
your daughter is there.”
   Mitchell started to protest but then realized that he would
get nowhere by arguing, that he might even be arrested after
all. Defeated, he turned to go. “Oh, and American—” the
policeman called after him. He looked back. “You should really
be out of the country now.” The man laughed, but this time no
one joined him.
  Mitchell left the station and went down the stairs. He could
hear Jara following behind him. Once they got out in the
street Jara said, “I am very sorry. I truly thought that they
would help.”
  “So did I,” Mitchell said. “It isn’t your fault. I guess the only
place left now is the embassy.”
   “What embassy?” Jara said. “You know your country has no
ties with Amaz.”
  Mitchell shrugged. “Well, what embassies are there?”
  “I really do not know,” Jara said. “We are a small
country—no one takes much notice of us. I think there may be
a French embassy somewhere.”
  “Good enough,” Mitchell said. “Where is it?”
  “I do not know,” Jara said again. “I have never needed to go
there.”
  “Well, do you have a phone book?” Mitchell said.
  “That would do us no good at all,” Jara said. “None of the
phones is working.”
  “I meant for the addresses,” Mitchell said, trying not to get
impatient. “You have addresses listed with the phone
numbers, don’t you?” Jara was shaking his head. “No? Well,
hell.” He sighed heavily. “Well, hell, I just don’t know what to
do. I can’t think. Unless you think we should go into the
mountains, to these Sozranis.”
  “How will we get there?” Jara said. “There is no public
transportation. Besides, I am not sure where they live. And
once we get there, what will we do? Ask that they give her
back to you? I heard that there are many of these Sozranis,
thousands of them, all living in luxury up in the mountains.”
  “That’s where I heard that name before!” Mitchell said.
  “What?”
  “The Sozranis,” Mitchell said. “You said something about
them once. Remember?”
   “Yes,” Jara said, for the moment as excited as Mitchell.
“Yes, I said that Dr. Tamir was one of them. Or had talked of
joining them. I would guess that he never became initiated,
since he never wore the turban.”
   “And he knew that I was looking for the sword,” Mitchell
said. “Because I stupidly wrote to him and told him, when I
was making the arrangements to trade houses. And he must
have told one of the Sozranis. So that’s why they stood in front
of our house like that. They were waiting for the chance to get
one of us alone, with no traffic or pedestrians who might
notice what they were doing.”
  “They stand in front of houses all over the city,” Jara said.
“They stand in front of a house on the same street as my
grandmother. They told her it was because the holy Sozran
lived in that house.”
  “Who was the holy Sozran?” Mitchell asked.
  “I do not know,” Jara said. “All I know is what they told her.
She watches them while they watch the house. She is an old
woman with very little to do.”
  “That manuscript I found—” Mitchell said slowly—“it
mentions someone named Sozran, very briefly, at the
beginning. Remember? He was the corrupt king the Jewel
King overthrew.”
  “Yes, now I remember,” Jara said. “But it could not have
been the same person. The oral tradition does not give the
name of the corrupt king at all. And surely the Sozranis have
not been around for twelve centuries.”
  “Why not?” Mitchell said. “You said they live in luxury.
Maybe they’ve been amassing wealth for twelve hundred
years. And another thing—if it is the same person, then he
couldn’t have possibly lived in Dr. Tamir’s house. The house is
only about three hundred years old, you told me that yourself.
So those Sozranis had to be standing there waiting for us.”
  “Maybe,”Jara said. “But—”
  “Well, is there anyone else in history named Sozran?”
Mitchell said, sure he was on the right track now. “Is it a
common name?”
   “No,” Jara said. “No one I can think of has that name. I
wonder if that was Tamir’s secret, that the people in turbans
follow the man who was king before the Jewel King.”
  “It doesn’t seem like much of a secret,” Mitchell said. “I
think it was that he was planning to tell the Sozranis about
me—I think that was his secret.”
  “Maybe,” Jara said. “But he is in the United States, and we
are here. And we are still no closer to finding out where the
Sozranis are or what they have done with your daughter. We
know a little more about them, that is all.”
   “Oh,” Mitchell said. He felt his unhappiness return and hem
him in, almost a physical thing, like an uncomfortable suit of
clothes. “Right. Well, what are we going to do now?”
   “There is only one thing we can do,” Jara said. “We must
find the sword.”
  “No,” Mitchell said. “No, I can’t—no, I have to find my
daughters.”
  “You made me a promise,” Jara said. “You said that you
would help me look for the sword if I took you to the police
station. And I have kept my side of the bargain, have I not?”
   Mitchell nodded unhappily. “Tomorrow, then, Jara,” he said.
“I’m not really up to it today. I’m too worried—let’s do it
tomorrow. All right?”
  Jara nodded and reminded him of where they had agreed to
meet. “We are very close to finding the sword this time,” Jara
said. “I can feel it.”
  Mitchell said nothing. He followed Jara back to Dr. Tamir’s
house and let himself in. “Did you have any luck?” Claire said
when he came into the kitchen.
   “No,” Mitchell said, sitting heavily at the kitchen table.
They said nothing else for the rest of the evening. Claire fixed
a light meal and they ate it. It seemed to Mitchell that the
slight noises they made echoed all around them in the kitchen
and beyond, through Dr. Tamir’s cavernous living room and
the two empty bedrooms at the back.


Casey went back to the Sun and Stars and looked inside,
hoping to see someone she knew. She could barely see through
the murk. And who had she expected, anyway? She didn’t
know anyone on the street except Rafiz. Disappointed, she
turned away. Sotano was coming down the street toward her,
shaking his clenched hand angrily in front of him. She was
never so glad to see anyone in her life.
  “Sotano!” Casey said. He looked up, surprised. “Sotano,
please, can you help me?”
  He said nothing. Probably he’s not used to having people
talk to him, she thought. I wonder what the poor bastard did
that everyone treats him so badly. “Please, I need your help,”
she said. “Could you tell Rafiz to come to the Sun and Stars?
Only Rafiz. Please?”
  Sotano nodded slowly. He said something Casey didn’t catch
to whatever it was he held in his hand, and then went back
the other way.
  Casey stood and waited in front of the restaurant. What if
he couldn’t find Rafiz? What if he said something to Blue Rose
or Zem? She was tired of running, of constantly looking behind
her, of fear.
  Rafiz turned the corner and came toward her slowly. Her
relief came and went in the span of a breath. Why isn’t he
saying anything? Has Blue Rose got him working for her too?
  “Casey!” he said finally. “I did not recognize you with the
turban. I thought that one of the Sozranis had come for me.”
  She pulled off the turban and ran the rest of the distance
toward him. He put his arms around her when she reached
him; she smelled the familiar burnt cinnamon and held onto
him gratefully. “The Sozranis wouldn’t let me go,” she said.
“They took me up to their place in the mountains, and I
thought they wanted to save me from Zem, who was following
me, but they kept me there and wouldn’t let me go—”
  Rafiz stepped back and held up his hand. “From the
beginning,” he said. “Please.”
   She told him about being followed by Zem, about the
Sozranis taking her up into the mountains with them, about
her escape. It was good to be able to speak English again. “I
have to get back to my parents,” she said. “They said all
foreigners have to leave the country—is that true?” she said,
stopped suddenly by the thought that the Sozranis might have
been lying to her.
  Rafiz nodded.
  “So I’ve got to get back,” she said. “They must be frantic.
But I don’t have any money—I gave it all to the cabdriver—”
  “There is another problem as well,” Rafiz said. “Blue Rose
has Angie.”
  “Angie?” Casey said. “How on earth did she get here?”
   “She wanted to find you,” Rafiz said. He shrugged. “She was
looking for me, I think.”
   “Why didn’t you tell me?” Casey said. “Why did you let me
tell you that stupid story first?”
  “We in Amaz love to hear stories,” Rafiz said. He shrugged
again, palms up.
  “What does Blue Rose want with Angie?” Casey said. “Oh.
She wants the sword, right?”
  Rafiz nodded.
  “Oh,” Casey said again. “Well shit. We can’t leave her here,
can we? What do we do?”
  “I do not know,” Rafiz said.
  “Do you know where she’s keeping her?”
  “At a room on the second floor,” Rafiz said. “Zem and
Harhano take turns guarding her. I was able to see her once,
when it was Zem’s turn—he is slow-witted and I told him I
was working for Blue Rose. But I was not able to get her out.
And both men are very strong, Harhano especially.”
  “Well,” Casey said. “What about a ladder?”
   “An excellent idea!” Rafiz said. “We can climb up at the back
of the house and take her. But we will have to wait for night.
A wonderful idea. I wonder why I did not think of it.”
  Casey grinned.
  “But we must do something about you before night comes,”
Rafiz said. “You cannot stay out in the street so close to Blue
Rose—she is desperate to have the sword. I know—we will
take you to Mama.”
  “To Mama?” Casey said. “Why can’t I just go home? Mama
doesn’t like me.”
   “Why do you say that?” Rafiz said. “It is true she does not
like to speak English, but you will speak Lurqazi to her and
she will love you like one of her own children. She is much
nicer than you think.”
  “Are you sure?” Casey said doubtfully. “I’d rather go home.”
  “Blue Rose might have someone watching your house,” Rafiz
said. “Or the Sozranis might. Or you might not be able to
come back tonight—there are very few taxis running. It is
best that we bring you to Mama’s. Put the turban back on and
we will go.”
  “What about my parents?” Casey said. “I have to tell
them—”
  “I will tell them,” Rafiz said. “No one will suspect me.
Come.”
   Reluctantly she wrapped the turban around her head. Rafiz
looked at her and laughed. “You have not been a Sozrani very
long,” he said. He took the turban off and wrapped it around
again. “This is the way they tie it. It was lucky for you that
none of the turbanned people saw you.”
   Rafiz made sure that no one except Mama was out on
Twenty-fifth November Street. Then he led Casey to where
Mama sat in her old leather chair and spoke to her briefly.
Mama called for one of her children and led Casey and Rafiz
into her store. A small girl appeared from nowhere and
climbed into Mama’s chair.
   Inside the store—which was even dimmer and dustier than
Blue Rose’s—Rafiz explained what had happened to Casey,
speaking slowly so that Casey could understand him.
Somewhere in the middle of his narrative Mama turned away
from him and toward Casey, looking at her shrewdly with eyes
as small and dark as raisins. Casey felt as though she were
being tested.
  “Why didn’t the Sozranis want to let you go?” Mama asked
her.
  “I don’t know,” Casey said.
  Surprisingly, Mama began to laugh, a chuckle that started
deep within her body and worked its way outward, like an
earthquake. “They want the sword, I bet,” she said.
  “They had a sword,” Casey said.
  Mama laughed harder. “A fake,” she said. “A fraud. They
haven’t had the sword for eleven hundred years.”
  Casey hadn’t followed everything Mama said, but she
understood the gist of it. “The sword looked new,” she said.
  “New, yes,” Mama said. “And it was straight, yes?
Straight?” She pantomimed the word “straight” with her
hands. “Not curved?” The movements of her hands changed.
  “Straight, yes,” Casey said.
  “Yes, of course,” Mama said. “Jagged and curved things can
never marry.”
   “I have to go,” Rafiz said. “I have to tell Casey’s parents that
she is all right, and that we will try to get the other daughter
to them too. I’ll leave Casey here with you.”
  Casey gave him directions to Dr. Tamir’s house. When she
heard her speak English Mama looked at her sharply, almost
as if she hadn’t passed her test after all. But after Casey said
good-bye to Rafiz Mama put her arm, warm and comfortable
as dough, around Casey’s shoulders. “We will have a lot to talk
about,” Mama said. “Would you like some coffee? Some
bread?”
  “Sure,”   Casey   said,   then   remembered      her   manners.
“Please.”
  Mama led her upstairs, into a small kitchen. Through an
open door Casey could see a large bedroom with one bed and
about a dozen mattresses nearly covering the floor. Mama
quickly made sweet coffee and sliced a loaf of sticky bread and
put bread and coffee on a lacquered Chinese tray. She led
Casey to the tiny kitchen table, sat her down and started
talking immediately.
  Casey didn’t understand a lot of what Mama said, but she
thought that if Rafiz had been right and Mama’s earlier
objection to her had been because she spoke English it would
be rude to take out the dictionary. Anyway Mama didn’t seem
to need any response from her. She was talking about her
children, all twelve of whom, according to Mama, had had
different fathers. Or had Casey misunderstood something?
Mama told her about Jarek, who had stolen something from
Blue Rose, and when she told this story she started shaking
again, as though she thought Jarek had done something
inexpressibly funny. She told her about Satl, the fourth child
and second girl, the quiet one. She told the story of the sixth
child and fourth boy, who had had two different fathers. But
no, Casey had to have misunderstood something there. Even
this ignorant woman would know that that was impossible.
  In the middle of the story about the twins Mama started
calling her taggi , which Casey knew from her reading was an
endearment used mainly by parents to their children. “When
they were born they looked the same,” Mama said. “So alike
that even I could not tell them apart. I may have even
switched them when they were young, started calling one by
the other’s name. But as they grew older they changed, and
are now so different they look like they come from different
families. One of them is even older than the other. I asked
Rafiz and he says that that can happen, that people can grow
older faster or slower. What do you think, taggi ?”
   Casey said nothing, surprised by Mama’s easy assumption
that Casey was part of the family. And maybe it wouldn’t be
so bad to be a part of this family after all, living near the
warmth of this woman; going to bed surrounded by all your
brothers and sisters, like puppies; taking part in the anarchic
life of the street. She caught herself, a little surprised. Her
own life wasn’t that bad that she should envy a poor Third
World family growing up in a junk shop.
  Mama went on talking as if she hadn’t expected an answer.
Her bread and coffee still lay untouched on the tray before
her, and Casey wondered how she had managed to get so fat.
When she finally paused for breath Casey said, “Why does
Blue Rose not like you?”
  “Would you like some more bread, taggi ?” Mama said, and
started on the story of the twelfth child, who had been born
small enough to fit into a coffee pot.


Rafiz walked through the deserted streets, almost not noticing
where he was going, taking the curved corners by habit. A few
blocks back he had seen a flash of something, something that
had to be a color. But which one? It had looked crisp, a bit
unfriendly, very self-assured. It had been on a leaf, so he
assumed that it was green. But that wasn’t how he had
expected green to look at all. In spring people always became
so excited by green, about the return of color to the trees. So
then what was this smug interloper? Maybe it was blue,
though he had never heard of blue appearing on a leaf.
   Another flash of color, this one startling, almost terrifying.
He guessed it was red, though he was by no means sure. He
would have to ask someone, but he would have to ask in such
a way that people would not suspect what was happening to
him. If he could see color, then one day, probably soon, he
would be able to see death, and he didn’t want anyone to feel
sorry for him. For himself he felt he had had a long life, filled
like all lives with happiness and sorrow, and he would not be
too sad to leave it.
  But first he had to find Casey’s parents. He reached the
university and followed her directions to Dr. Tamir’s house.
Once there he stopped, amazed. He had not known that
Casey’s family was so rich, that they could afford such a
palace, with what looked like six or seven rooms. It was
probably a good thing Casey hadn’t told him, he thought, or he
would not have been able to treat her with such familiarity.
He went slowly up the steps to the porch.
  He knocked on the door, knocked again when no one came.
Inside he thought he could hear someone moving around,
coming hesitantly to the door and then walking away. He
waited a long time before going downstairs and back to
Twenty-fifth November Street. On the way home he saw a
cool, shimmering color, but whether it was blue or yellow he
didn’t know.



           Another Way to
             Twenty-fifth
               November Street
                                                            «^»
By the time Rafiz returned, Casey’s eyelids hurt from the
strain of keeping them open. Who would have thought the old
woman could talk so much? “What did they say?” she asked
Rafiz in English.
  “Who?”
  “Who? My parents, who do you think?” Mama looked from
Casey to Rafiz, suspicious, and abruptly left the room.
  “No one came to answer the door,” Rafiz said.
  “No one—” Casey said. “Are they gone? Did they leave the
country, do you think? What do I do now?”
  “Forgive me,” Rafiz said. “I did not mean to give the wrong
idea. Someone was in the house, but that person would not
answer the door. I could hear him or her moving around
inside.”
  “Well, did you leave a note?” Casey said.
  “No,” Rafiz said. “I had nothing to leave a note with.”
  “So they still don’t know I’m all right,” Casey said. She was
angry, and a little frightened too. Maybe someone had taken
over Dr. Tamir’s house after her parents had gone. Maybe Dr.
Tamir had come back. “That’s just great. As soon as we get
Angie I’m leaving. We’ve got to get out of the country.”
  “It might not be safe for you to go back,” Rafiz said.
  “Well, it sure isn’t safe to stay here!” Casey said. “Was
anyone watching the house?”
  “No,” Rafiz said. “Not that I could see.”
  “What about Zem or Harhano?” she said. “Did you see
them?”
  “No.”
  “How about the Sozranis?”
  “No,” Rafiz said.
  He looked so dejected she almost felt ashamed. He didn’t
deserve this interrogation. Still, if only he’d left a note…
“Okay,” she said. “It’s okay. We’ll be leaving soon anyway.”
  Mama came back into the kitchen to fix dinner. She set a
huge pot on the stove and added what looked like all the
ingredients she had in the small refrigerator. One by one the
children came into the kitchen and ladled out some of the
stew. They ate sitting on the floor or one of the mattresses in
the other room, on the stairs or in the shop. They talked and
laughed all the way through the meal. Casey couldn’t
understand a word.
  After all the children had taken their share Mama motioned
to Rafiz and Casey to help themselves. They took their food
over to an empty corner of the kitchen and ate standing up.
Casey wished she could think of something to say to Rafiz, but
she was afraid if she started to talk she’d just end up shouting
at him again. She turned away from him and looked at
Mama’s sink, the tiniest sink she’d ever seen. Of course, she
thought. They’d need it small to conserve water. Rafiz broke
the silence only once, pointing to her dish and asking, “How do
you say the name of this color in English?”
  She looked at him, surprised. She’d thought he knew
enough English to understand that much, at least. “Blue,” she
said.
   When they’d finished the children took their plates to the
sink and one of them, the oldest, ran water over them. Mama
went downstairs to close the store. The kids washed and put
away the dishes and then moved into the bedroom and closed
the door. Casey heard muffled screams and laughter from
behind the door, and then, after a long time, nothing but
silence. Rafiz and Mama sat at the kitchen table and talked in
rapid Lurqazi. Casey joined them but she could barely
understand what they were saying. Gossip about the street,
about who didn’t speak to whom and why, about a woman who
had run off with birds… Casey started to feel sleepy. Had they
forgotten all about the plan to free Angie?
  Finally Rafiz stood. “They should all be asleep by now,” he
said, still speaking Lurqazi. “It is time to get the ladder.”
  Casey followed him downstairs. Mama called out something
after them, probably wishing them luck. They went out a back
door and walked away from Blue Rose’s, through the
backyards of three or four stores, until they came to the
toolshed. She could barely see Rafiz ahead of her in the gloom.
He went inside and brought out a ladder.
   She followed him back the way they had come, feeling
superfluous. He didn’t even need help carrying the ladder; for
an old man he was surprisingly strong. He set up the ladder so
silently that if Casey hadn’t known he was there she would
not have suspected a thing.
 “Are you sure that’s the right window?” she asked him,
whispering.
   “I fixed that window for Blue Rose just last week,” he said,
turning to her. His eyes were so black they looked as if pieces
of the night had been caught in them. “You had better go up.
She is your sister, after all.”
  Casey climbed up the ladder. The window opened easily;
Rafiz was probably a good craftsman. The room smelled of
wicker and stale food. “Angie?” she said, calling softly through
the curtain into the darkened room. “Angie, are you there?”
  No answer. “Angie?” she said again. This time she heard a
small rustle, as if someone were sitting up. “Angie, it’s me.
Casey.”
  “Casey?” Angie said, much too loudly.
  “Sssh,” Casey said. “We’ve come to rescue you. There’s a
ladder here at the window. Can you see me?”
  “What if I don’t want to be rescued?” Angie said. She was
still speaking conversationally, as if she and Casey were
sitting in her bedroom in Dr. Tamir’s house.
  “Quiet,” Casey said. “What do you mean, you don’t want to
be rescued?”
  “I like it here,” Angie said. “They feed me, they take care of
me, and I get left alone to work on the kingdoms. No one ever
nags me to do anything else.”
   “You’re nuts,” Casey said. She wished she could see her
sister’s face. “You think they’re going to treat you this way
forever? If Dad can’t pay the ransom they’ll probably kill you.”
  “So?” Angie said.
  “What do you mean?” Casey said. The door to the corridor
opened.
  “Who is here?” someone—Zem?—said in Lurqazi.
  Casey said nothing, trying not to move. Her heart
hammered against her ears.
  “Who is here?” the man said again. “Are you real or a
dream?”
  “A dream,” Casey said, amazed at how calm she sounded.
“You are asleep.”
   “Good,” the man said. He went back out into the corridor,
closing the door behind him.
  “Angie,” Casey said, urgently. “Come on. That guy will be
back.”
  “What—what did you say to him?” Angie said.
  “I’ll tell you later,” Casey said. “Get out here or I’ll come in
after you.”
  Angie said nothing. After a while Casey thought she heard
her stand up and come over to the window. Hardly daring to
hope, Casey held her breath until she saw her sister fumble
with the curtain. She guided Angie to the window and out to
the ladder.
Casey had intended to wake up early and go back to Dr.
Tamir’s house, but she had been up late the last two nights
and when she woke it was near noon. Angie lay on the floor of
the kitchen next to her. Someone, probably Mama, had
covered them with blankets while they slept. Casey sat up as
Rafiz came into the room.
  “Blue Rose is very angry,” Rafiz said. “She is sure we have
Angie. She is threatening to bring Zem and Harhano over and
break down the door.”
  “Do you think she’ll do it?” Casey said.
  “I do not know,” Rafiz said. “Mama’s friends have said they
will protect her. The street is divided between those who
support Mama and those who support Blue Rose.”
  “How come Blue Rose dislikes Mama so much?” Casey said.
  Rafiz shrugged. “No one knows,” he said. “She has been that
way since before I came to the street. Some say they have
hated each other for twenty years.”
  “Mama said one of her kids stole something from Blue Rose,
but I didn’t catch what it was,” Casey said. “Do you—?”
  “Her tattoos,” Rafiz said.
  “What?” Casey said. Was he making fun of her? He had
acted strangely ever since he’d come back from Dr. Tamir’s
house.
  “He stole Blue Rose’s tattoos,” he said. “They were on the
palms of her hands. That is why she wears the gloves.”
  She turned away from him, angry and frustrated. It didn’t
pay to talk to any of these people—they were all crazy. And
the scary thing was that if she stayed another few days she’d
probably be just like them, believing all the ridiculous things
they believed. “We’re going to go home,” she said. “As soon as
Angie wakes up.”
   “I would not if I were you,” Rafiz said. “Blue Rose is
watching the house. And there are soldiers still in the streets.
It would not be safe to return to your house.”
  “And it’s safe to stay here?” Casey said, her old impatience
with him returning. “Just stay here and let Blue Rose and the
rest of them come get us?”
  “Mama will not let Blue Rose get you,” Rafiz said. “And it is
safer here than in the streets. In a few days you can—”
   “And what about my parents?” Casey said, loud enough to
wake Angie. Maybe she had been right, maybe Rafiz worked
for Blue Rose after all. But no—why would he have helped her
rescue her sister? “In a few days my parents will probably be
gone, and then what’ll we do? Stay here for the rest of our
lives?”
   Rafiz said nothing. She noticed that he was looking intently
at what seemed to be empty air, and she began to worry about
him. He had been like this ever since yesterday, turning
suddenly to stare at something quite ordinary, a chair or a
flower or a skirt. But even as she thought to ask him what
was wrong, she noticed that the air in front of him had started
to sparkle. All of the small kitchen was sparkling gold and
silver. She tried to stand, struggling upward against air that
seemed to have congealed, to have turned hard as earth.
“What—?” she said, frightened.
  “Something is happening,” Rafiz said.
  “What?” she repeated, standing up and leaning against the
wall.
  “Something…” Rafiz said, standing still as if listening.


As Mitchell followed Jara through the streets he noticed that
they were about to pass the place where he had rented the car.
The lights in the rental office were off, the gate of the fence
around the lot locked, and a sign already faded on the gate
said “Closed” in five different languages. He looked into the
office, hoping for a sign of life, but he could see no one. The
rental place had figured in one of his half-baked plans: he
would get a car, drive up into the mountains and storm the
fortress of the Sozranis. And if he couldn’t get Casey back he
and Claire would drive to the airport. In a few days the food
Claire had bought would run out, and the banks had been
closed for several days. They would have to find some way out
of the country. It disturbed him that he was already thinking
about leaving, as if he had given up.
   Maybe he could climb the fence, find the keys to one of the
cars. He studied the barbed wire at the top of the fence a little
dubiously. How did he come to this, he who had only asked to
sit in his study and follow the trail of words as far as it would
go? What he’d been thinking of was breaking and
entering—and who knew what the punishment for that was
here?
  And why was he still following Jara on his futile quest?
Sure, he’d made a promise, but would he have kept that
promise if the police had somehow miraculously managed to
get his daughters back? Wouldn’t he rather have run to the
airport as fast as he could go and booked his family on the
next flight out? What did he owe Jara anyway? Wasn’t all of
Jara’s talk of needing him before the end more of the man’s
strange mysticism?
   A truck turned the corner in front of him and his heart
seemed to start beating again only when the truck moved out
of sight. Every day he and his family stayed here increased the
danger. He would have to leave soon, probably tomorrow. He
would go back to the United States and contact someone in
authority there, someone who could work through the proper
channels to get his daughters out of Amaz. He would be like
one of those sad men whose pictures he saw sometimes in the
newspapers, men who had tried for twenty years to get their
children out of Vietnam. You never think of these things
happening to you, he thought.
  “Look!” Jara said.
   Mitchell lifted his head. He had been staring at the
sidewalk, which seemed to have been paved with bottle caps.
He couldn’t see anything. “What?” he said. It was an effort to
speak.
  “An open pastry shop,” Jara said. “Over there. Is it too early
in the day to eat, do you think?”
  “Not for me,” Mitchell said, welcoming the idea of sitting
down.
   They went into the pastry shop. At the table Jara took out a
map and several different-colored pens. What do the different
colors mean? Mitchell thought, aware of how little the search
for the sword had come to mean to him.
   A waiter came to take their orders. Now Mitchell noticed
that they were the only people in the dim shop. Jara said
something to the waiter in Lurqazi. Mitchell turned the map
to face him and began drawing on it idly with one of the pens.
  “What are you doing?” Jara said.
  “I don’t know,” Mitchell said. “Look, if we follow these
streets here we’ll be writing the word ‘sword’ in old Lurqazi.”
   Jara turned the map toward himself eagerly. “Yes, I see!” he
said, excited. “Look, we are here, and if we continue this way,
following this route that you drew—But we must draw it like
this.” He made Mitchell’s letters more curved, rounding out
the jagged edges.
  “Why?” Mitchell said.
   “Because this is the way the followers of the Jewel King
write,” Jara said. “You must have seen the writing on the
street, the jagged letters covered by more rounded ones. The
letters say ‘The King lives,’ though probably the people who
write them, kids mostly, do not know what they are writing.
They only know that they are coming out in support of the
Jewel King. And they are covering the same letters written
the way they had been written by the corrupt king, the one
who reigned before the Jewel King.”
  “Sozran,” Mitchell said. He was starting to get a little
excited too. Why hadn’t Jara told him the significance of the
graffiti before? Surely Jara knew of his interest in the Jewel
King. But Jara probably thought nothing of the writing he had
seen all his life, writing that had survived eleven centuries.
  “What?” Jara said.
  “Sozran,” Mitchell said. “The corrupt king before the Jewel
King. Remember, I found his name in the manuscript—”
   “Yes, and the people who write the letters the other way,
the way of Sozran, they are probably Sozranis,” Jara said. “I
have always thought that the jagged letters were written by
kids—how do you say it, you have them in the United
States—by kids who are delinquents. But if they are written
by Sozranis, then that is the secret which Dr. Tamir claimed
to have understood—that the King is Sozran, that Sozran
lives. And if that is true, then it is possible that the Sozranis
have the sword, that they gained it at the last battle and have
kept it all these centuries—”
  “No, because why would they want the sword to ransom
Casey?” Mitchell said. Both men had raised their voices,
spurred on by their discoveries.
   “No, you are right,” Jara said. “They want the sword to win
back the country for Sozran, to take back what they consider
rightfully theirs. Come—we must go now. If they have
discovered the same things we have—”
  “Go?” Mitchell said. “Where?”
   “We must follow the route you have laid out,” Jara said. “It
is obvious that this will lead us to the sword.”
  “I didn’t mean—” Mitchell said. “I wasn’t saying—”
  “Come,” Jara said, standing.
   The waiter came out of the back of the shop, carrying a
silver tray. “What about our food?” Mitchell said.
  “No time!” Jara said, calling over his shoulder as he left.
  Mitchell hurried to catch up with him, Jara’s contagious
interest propelling him forward. Now he saw, on almost every
house and vacant storefront, the two overlapping
calligraphies, rounded and jagged. How could he not have
noticed them before, the stylized letters shouting from every
corner that “The King lives”? He could feel his own excitement
welling up within him. Words drew him on, the words that
were his specialty.
   But at the same time he knew that they were probably on
another wild-goose chase, the last wild-goose chase. How could
following a route that said “sword” lead them to the sword
itself? Even Mitchell, who loved words, who collected ancient
words the way some people collect coins, knew that there was
a difference between the word and the thing itself. Still,
following Jara gave him something to do, something to think
about besides his missing daughters, the empty bedrooms.
Tomorrow he would have to admit he’d failed and find some
way to the airport. Today he could follow the mad wind raised
by Jara and pretend that he was doing something
constructive.
  Though he wished that Jara would slow down. He wished
they’d gotten something to eat at the pastry shop; he was
starting to feel almost faint from hunger. Ahead of him he
could see tiny sparkles of silver and gold dancing in the air.
The heat must be getting to him, the heat and the lack of food.
  The sparkles grew brighter. And the air seemed thicker,
almost tangible, every step more of an effort. “Hey, Jara!”
Mitchell said, wondering if his words would make it through
the dense mass separating him from the other man. “Could we
rest for a bit? I’m tired.”
  “No time!” Jara said. Jara had slowed too. He seemed to be
struggling against something that blocked his way.
  “What’s going on?” Mitchell said. “Do you see it too?
The—the sparkles?”
  “We are—” Jara said. He had to stop, take a deep breath
and try again. “We are rearranging the streets of Amaz. The
streets we walk now have come into being only because we
walk through them. Before we came here they were sharp,
jagged, they declared for Sozran. Now we are forging new
streets, rounder streets, streets that declare for the Jewel
King.”
  That’s ridiculous, Mitchell wanted to say. But he had to save
his breath for the struggle against whatever was holding them
back. And maybe it wasn’t so ridiculous after all. Something
was happening, that was certain. But how did you, as Jara
said, forge new streets? What happened to the old streets, to
the people living in them? Did they just wake up one day and
find that their houses had moved over a few feet to
accommodate a new street, a street that now declared for the
Jewel King?
  He tried to see what was happening around them, straining
through the gold and silver. He thought he saw houses
jumbled together in front of them, a chimney here, a front
door there, a car sticking out of a second-story window. And as
they passed the houses re-formed themselves, moved over
politely to create new streets.
   He turned and looked back. The sparkles stopped a few feet
behind him, and he had a clear unobstructed view of the
streets they had passed through. Houses sat against the
sidewalk, unperturbed, not looking at all as if they’d been
picked up and moved like game pieces in the last few minutes.
There were even people out on the sidewalk, one person
anyway, a man who was—
  With a strong feeling of déjà vu , Mitchell said, “There’s
someone following us.”
  Jara said nothing.
  “Did you hear me, Jara?” Mitchell said. He felt as if he were
shouting into a strong wind.
  “Yes,” Jara said. “There’s someone following us.”
  “Shouldn’t we—stop? Do something?”
  “No time,” Jara said.
  Mitchell turned back again. The man following them held
one hand against the opposite shoulder, holding it as if it
pained him. As Mitchell watched, the man stumbled and
nearly fell.
  “He’s hurt,” Mitchell said. “Can’t we stop and help him out?”
  “No time,” Jara said again.
  “What’s so important?” Mitchell said. Every word was an
effort now. “Why are we in such a hurry? So what if we find
the sword a few minutes later? The man’s hurt, Jara.”
   Jara looked behind him briefly and then continued. Gold and
silver sparkles hovered around him. For a minute Mitchell
thought Jara carried a sword instead of a map, cutting
through the air ahead of them. He blinked to clear his head of
the vision. Finally Jara said, “He is a Sozrani.”
   “What?” Mitchell said. It was difficult to concentrate. The
air seemed to make a noise like static.
  “He is a Sozrani,” Jara said. “The man who is following us.”
  “How do you know?” Mitchell said. He turned to look at the
man again. Oh, he thought. The turban. Jara said nothing,
intent on following the directions on his map. As Mitchell
watched the Sozrani fell to the pavement and laboriously
picked himself up again. “But he’s hurt, Jara. The next time
he falls down he probably won’t make it up again. We can’t
just leave him there.”
   “You are talking—” Jara sliced at the thickened air with his
sword, no, with his map. “You are talking, as you yourself
pointed out, about—” he paused for breath—“about a follower
of the corrupt king who lived before the Jewel King. He is
following us to gain the sword. We must not let him find the
sword before we do. I would fear for my country if that should
happen.”
  “He’s not in shape to find anything before we do,” Mitchell
said.
   “We are nearly there,” Jara said. “We are almost at the end
of the word.”
   They walked in silence, pushing through the strong, stiff
air. Peering through the gold and silver sparkles, Mitchell
thought he saw a house straight ahead of them, a house that
seemed to move out of their way as they came toward it. The
sound of static became louder, until he could no longer tell if it
came from inside or outside his head. The man in the turban
still came on after them, stumbling every so often and looking,
it seemed to Mitchell, beseechingly after them. Despite Jara’s
last words he felt as if they had walked a long time, as if they
would walk through Amaz forever, condemned not to stop
until they had written their own long strange story on its
streets.
  Mitchell looked behind him again. The Sozrani stumbled
and fell, one hand still pressed against his shoulder. “Jara,”
Mitchell said. “He’s just lying there. He’s hurt.”
  “He is a Sozrani,” Jara said. “Your enemy and mine.”
  No, Mitchell thought. Not mine. He turned and headed
toward the man. The way back was much easier, the haze of
the sparkles growing less and finally disappearing altogether.
“Hello,” Mitchell said, bending over the man, feeling awkward.
Blood trickled from the man’s fingers holding the shoulder.
“Are you okay?”
  “Okay,” the man said, barely able to get the word out. He
grinned, as if at a private joke, but a spasm turned the grin
into a grimace of pain. He said something in Lurqazi.
  “Dr. Parmenter!” Jara called, an insubstantial figure on the
other side of a gold-and-silver mist. “Mitchell! Come! We must
hurry!”
  “He’s hurt!” Mitchell called back to Jara. The wounded man
had started to talk again, a torrent of words. “Could you come
back here? I can’t understand what he’s saying.”
   Mitchell watched with relief as Jara’s form came slowly out
of the mist, seeming to solidify. For a moment he had thought
Jara would leave him there, standing on a street that existed
on no map, alone with a wounded man whose only English
word was “okay.”
  “You are an idiot,” Jara said. “We are so close, we are nearly
there—”
  “What’s he saying?” Mitchell said.
  “What’s he saying?” Jara said. “He is saying that he is a
Sozrani. Can we continue following the map now?”
  “No,” Mitchell said. “He’s saying more than that. Maybe he
knows something about Casey.”
   Jara knelt and listened to the man on the pavement. “He is
delirious,” Jara said finally. “He is not making very much
sense. His name is Tarq. He has been beaten, someone has
beaten him, and then they have pierced him with—” Jara’s
breath caught for a fraction of a second—“with a sword, here,
in the shoulder.”
   Mitchell took Tarq’s hand and gently moved it away from
the wound. The Sozrani cried out. Mitchell opened Tarq’s shirt
and wiped the blood away. It was a clean wound, small, one
that could very well have been made by a sword. Despite the
size of the hole, Tarq had lost a lot of blood.
  Mitchell unwrapped the Sozranis’ turban and started
winding it around the wound. “Okay?” he asked. The Sozrani
hissed in pain. “Okay,” he said finally.
  Jara stood and began to pace back and forth. “Ask him who
beat him,” Mitchell said. “Was it the Sozranis?”
 “We are wasting valuable time,” Jara said, coming back to
Mitchell and Tarq. “We should be following the map.”
  “Ask him,” Mitchell said.
   Jara spoke to the Sozrani and listened to his answer. After a
while he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “It was the Sozranis. They
beat him and pierced him with a sword, and then sent him out
to look for us.”
  “For us?” Mitchell said.
   “For whoever it was that was creating the disturbances in
the streets of the city,” Jara said. “Apparently it was felt
throughout the city.” Tarq said something else. “The Sozranis
think the disturbances occurred because someone, an outsider,
had learned too much about their secrets. This person had
been staying with them in the mountains and had gone into a
forbidden room, a room of—of something, I can’t make it
out—” Mitchell listened eagerly. “And had escaped—”
  “Was it a girl?” Mitchell asked.
  Jara translated. Tarq nodded slowly. “Yes, a girl,” Jara said.
“She escaped while Tarq was guarding her. That is why they
punished him, and then gave him the task of finding her.”
Tarq said something else. “They told him that the girl might
lead him to the Jewel King’s sword. Tarq says that he is
puzzled by this, because he thought that the Sozranis already
had the sword, the one that wounded him. He has held it in
his initiation.”
  “So Casey escaped,” Mitchell said. “I might have known.”
   Jara was talking to Tarq now, rapidly, asking him
something and pointing to his wound. “He says that the sword
of the Sozranis is straight,” Jara said. “As it would have to be,
to create a wound like this one. But I am certain that the Book
of Stones mentions that the sword is curved, as the writing of
the Jewel King is curved. Do you remember?”
   “What?” Mitchell said. It seemed miraculous that Casey had
escaped, that she was alive. Perhaps she had even come home,
would be waiting for him when he got back. And they could
leave this crazy country, maybe ask the police to give them a
ride to the airport—Then he remembered Angie. Well, Angie
might turn up too. He refused to let dark thoughts intrude on
the first good news he had had in days.
   “Is it straight or curved?” Jara said impatiently. “The sword
in the Book of Stones. Do you remember?”
  “I think it was curved,” Mitchell said. “Well, everything
having to do with the Jewel King was curved, wasn’t it?”
  “Yes, but the sword originally belonged to the king before
him, and everything having to do with him was jagged,” Jara
said. “Perhaps it changed shape when it passed from one to
the other.”
  “Maybe,” Mitchell said. After what he had seen he certainly
couldn’t rule out anything as impossible.
  “So the sword the Sozranis say they have is a fake, a fraud,”
Jara said. “That must have been Dr. Tamir’s secret, that the
Sozranis still had the Jewel King’s sword. But if he thought
that then he was sadly deluded, like our friend here. And
when he passed along to the Sozranis the information that we
were looking for the sword, information he must have
considered a joke, the Sozranis must have become very
interested. Someone in power there knows the true story
behind the sword they own.” Jara started to pace again. “We
must be going,” he said. “Now more than ever I am sure we
are on the right track.”
  “Ask Tarq if he’ll be okay here until we can come back for
him,” Mitchell said.
  Jara spoke briefly to Tarq. “He said he must go where we
go,” Jara said. “That is the punishment that was given to him
by the Sozranis.” Jara laughed. “But I do not think that he
will be able to follow us far, in his condition. I do not think he
will even be able to stand.”
  Mitchell put his arm around the Sozrani and helped him up.
Tarq leaned heavily against him. “What are you doing?” Jara
said.
  “I’m helping him come with us,” Mitchell said. “I just
realized that we can’t leave him here.”
  “Of course we can leave him here,” Jara said. “What         are
you, crazy? You want to take him along with us to find        the
sword, and when we get there, you want to hand him            the
sword and say, ‘To the Sozranis, with my compliments’?         Do
you have any idea what would happen to the country if         the
Sozranis had the sword?”
  “We can’t leave him here,” Mitchell said again. “The way the
streets are shifting we might never be able to find him again.
He could die of loss of blood before we get back. And he’s in no
shape to get the sword away from us, once we find it.”
  “I have a map,” Jara said. “Of course we will able to find
him again—”
  “Either he comes with us or I stay here with him,” Mitchell
said. “Remember when you said you’d need me for something?”
  “Perhaps your usefulness ended when you marked out our
route on the map,” Jara said darkly.
  “Perhaps,” Mitchell said. He was grinning, one arm around
Tarq. “Do you really want to take that chance?”
  Jara shrugged. “Very well,” he said.
  They turned and went back the way they came. Jara led, his
map carried out in front of him, and Mitchell followed a few
paces behind him, held back by Tarq’s weight. Almost
immediately they ran into the gold and silver sparkles, the
heavy pressure of the air. Tarq whispered something to
Mitchell in Lurqazi, all harsh guttural consonants and breathy
vowels. “Quiet,” Mitchell said. “It’s okay.”
   They walked for what seemed like hours but was probably
only a few short minutes. Tarq’s weight was growing
intolerable. Finally the sparkles seemed to become fewer, the
air to press a little less heavily. Mitchell could almost make
out what was in front of them, burned-out houses and then a
building with a section of the roof poised to crash through the
intact first floor. But no, he must be seeing only what the mist
showed him again. No one could possibly live in a house like
that, it was far too dangerous.
   The road seemed to end in front of them. Jara walked
onward and Mitchell followed, feeling the air lighten, feeling
Tarq become almost easy to carry. He wondered if this was
what runners felt like when they got their second wind. The
road squeezed between two houses and Jara stopped. Mitchell
stopped too, and looked over Jara’s head at the street in front
of them.
  “This street is exactly like the street marked on the map,”
Jara said, his voice hoarse with excitement. “It is the end of
the word ‘sword.’ The sword is here somewhere. I can feel it.”
  “It’s nothing but a bunch of junk shops,” Mitchell said
without thinking. He shrugged, trying to move Tarq to a more
comfortable position along his shoulder.
  “Yes,” Jara said. “What better place to find an ancient
sword?” Mitchell looked out at the rows of grimy storefronts,
the sidewalks littered with what looked like trash. “Where do
we start?” he said.
          The Jewel King’s Sword
                                                        «^»
I’m going downstairs,” Casey said.
  “No,” Rafiz said. “Blue Rose—”
  “I’ll be careful,” Casey said. “Besides, I’m sure no one’s out
there in this—whatever it is.” It was an effort to talk.
   She pushed herself off the wall and through the gathering
thickness in the air. It seemed to take forever just to go down
the stairs. Mama stood behind the counter in the shop below,
with what looked like most of the kids arranged around her.
“Not a good day to go outside,” Mama said, breathing heavily.
“I knew it when I woke up this morning.” Casey could barely
see her through the gold and silver sparkles.
   “I have to,” Casey said, and at that moment the air
lightened and she nearly stumbled. “Now what?” she said,
almost forgetting and saying it in English.
  “Something’s happening,” Mama said. She stood straighter
and seemed to sniff the air.
  Casey pushed past her impatiently. Was that all anyone on
the street could say? Of course something was happening, that
much was obvious. The air had turned nearly transparent
again. She opened the door to the street.


Mitchell bent down and carefully settled Tarq on the
pavement. “We’ll have to come back for you,” he said. “Jara,
tell him we’ll come back for him.”
  Jara ignored him and stepped into the street. “It is here
somewhere,” he said. “I know it is.”
  “It’s okay,” Mitchell said to Tarq. Tarq looked pale, the
palest native of Amaz Mitchell had ever seen, and he was
breathing shallowly. Maybe he’s unconscious, Mitchell
thought. “Jara’s an idiot,” he said, though who he said it to he
didn’t know. He hurried after the smaller man.
   There was no one at all on the street. Were they all inside
because of the coup, or because of what had happened to the
air earlier that day? Or maybe no one at all lived on the
street, maybe no one had lived there for years. Looking around
him at the accumulation of junk piled in front of each of the
storefronts Mitchell thought that was possible, even likely.
  “Now what?” he said to Jara. “Do we go into every store and
ask if they happen to have the Jewel King’s sword?”
  “Yes,” Jara said. The idea seemed to delight him. “Only of
course we do not say it like that. We simply ask if they have a
sword for sale.”
  “I think they’re all closed,” Mitchell said. But even as he
said it he saw a door open near the middle of the street, and a
small figure step out and look cautiously around.
   “There, you see?” Jara said. “There is at least one store that
is open today. We will start with that one.”
   They walked down the street, past the silent storefronts on
either side. The slight figure turned toward them and began to
walk and then to run in their direction. Casey? Mitchell
thought. No, it couldn’t be—The young girl ran down the
street and embraced him tightly before he could finish the
thought.
  “Casey?” he said stupidly, moving back a little to see her
better. He was not even that surprised to see her, his miracle
daughter standing tall and slim as a blade before him. “How
did you get here?”
  “How did you?” Casey said, laughing. “This is Twenty-fifth
November Street—I told you about it, remember? Angie’s here
too.”
  “Angie?” Mitchell said. Perhaps Casey had also done her
own translation of the Book of Stones and found the Jewel
King’s tomb while she was gone—he wouldn’t put anything
past her. “Where? How—?”
  “Come on,” Casey said, leading them back to the door she
had come out of. “We’ve got to hurry. Blue Rose kidnapped
Angie—remember I told you about her, and about Zem? And
then we got her back—me and Rafiz—but Blue Rose knows
where we took her and will probably try to get her away from
us now that whatever’s happened to the air has stopped.”
  “Hold on,” Mitchell said. “How did you find out about Angie?
And how did you get away from the Sozranis? We heard—”
  “There’s no time,” Casey said. “We’ve got to get going, get
Angie and leave the country.” She stopped in front of a
storefront that looked no different from any of the others they
had passed, maybe a little larger and with a little more junk
out in the front. She held the door open for Mitchell and Jara
and motioned them inside.
  “Just a minute,” a woman’s voice said behind them. To
Mitchell it seemed as if the pile of junk had gained a voice and
started to speak. He turned. A thin woman with blue gloves
stood among the junk in front of the store, the woman who
had come to Dr. Tamir’s house with the ransom demand for
Angie. On one side of her stood the man with no ear, and on
the other a man so huge he made the two others look like
dwarves. How had they gotten there so fast? “You have
something that belongs to me. I want it back.”
  “We don’t have anything of yours,” Mitchell said.
  “Oh yes you do,” the woman—she must be Blue Rose—said.
   “The Jewel King’s sword. I had it once, a long time ago, and
I sold it, because I didn’t know its worth. And the man I sold it
to returned it to Mama, instead of to me, and Mama sold it for
more money than I’d ever seen. And I want it back.”
  She’s from the United States, Mitchell thought, listening to
her talk. It seemed a strange thing to notice in the middle of
everything else. “We don’t have it,” he said.
 “But you were looking for it,” Blue Rose said. “I know that
much about you.”
   “Sure, we were looking for it,” Mitchell said. “But we
couldn’t find it. I was just about to give up and go home, back
to the United States.”
  “You’re lying,” Blue Rose said. “You have it, or you know
where it is. I haven’t set foot in Mama’s house or yard for
seventeen years, ever since she sold my sword, and I’m not
doing it now just to listen to your lies. There are three of you
and three of us, but I think you’ll find that Zem and Harhano
could overpower you easily. And if you don’t tell me what I
want to know we’ll turn you over to the police. All foreigners
have to leave the country, you know. You’re in violation of
curfew.”
  Claire, Mitchell thought. “We don’t have it, but we know—”
   “We do not have it,” Jara said. “And we do not know where
it is. My colleague Dr. Parmenter was telling you the truth.”
  “All right,” Blue Rose said. “Zem, Harhano—” She motioned
them forward.


A second-story window opened and Casey looked up. Mama
leaned over the sill, nearly filling the entire window. Behind
her Casey could make out the faces of a few of the children,
their eyes wide.
  “Get off my property, Blue Rose,” Mama said. “And take
those men with you. Zem, Harhano, you should be ashamed of
yourselves.”
  Zem looked confused for a moment. Then he blinked and
stared up at Mama, eyes wide and innocent. But Casey
thought Harhano looked a little embarrassed.
  “What’s she saying?” Mitchell said to Jara, whispering.
  “Quiet,”Jara said.
  “I’m not leaving until I get what belongs to me,” Blue Rose
said. “When that man returned the sword you should have told
him to bring it to me. You had no right to take the sword, and
no right to sell it again. It was mine.”
  “Get off my property,” Mama said. “I mean it, Blue Rose.”
   “Or what?” Blue Rose said. “Or you’ll call the cops? Just try
it and see what happens. And even if the cops came, which is
unlikely, you know they’d side with me. It was my property,
after all.”
  Mama ducked back into the room. More children crowded at
the window, pointing and talking quietly. “Good,” Blue Rose
said. “Zem, Harhano—”
  Mama reappeared at the window, holding something in her
hand. “Casey,” she said. “Here. Get rid of her.” She threw
what looked like a piece of metal toward the group in front of
the store. It fell end over end, lazily, so pitted with rust that
the sun didn’t even glance off it.
  Harhano was the first to move, reaching out over Casey’s
head for the piece of metal. “Hey!” Casey said, running toward
him to throw him off balance. His arm brushed the thing,
which skittered out of reach of the six of them and came to
land on the sidewalk twenty feet away.
   As the group stood for a second, watching the rusted metal
fall, a small man ran up from the shadows and picked it up.
He held it carefully, looking at it with a combination of
wonder and distrust. Now they could see that it was curved,
and so shot through with rust it looked like lace. But as they
watched, it seemed to knit itself together and grow brighter,
until they could hardly bear to look at it. The hilt seemed to
writhe under the man’s grip, the carvings becoming deeper,
the gems shining forth. “Tarq!” Casey and Mitchell called out
at the same time.
   Tarq paid them no attention. “This is—is this it?” he said,
holding the thing a little away from him, as though it would
blind him if it came too close. “Is this the Jewel King’s sword?”
   “You thief!” Blue Rose said, shouting up at Mama. “You had
it all this time? You had it for seventeen years?”
   “Of course,” Mama said. “Just because you would have sold
it doesn’t mean that everyone would.”
  “Give it back!” Blue Rose said, motioning Zem and Harhano
toward Tarq. “It’s mine. It belongs to me.”
  “No,” Tarq said. “It belongs to the Sozranis. It was the holy
Sozran’s before it became the Jewel King’s.” He looked up at
the golden sword as if he weren’t holding it, as if it were a
thing apart from him. “It was straight then, straight as a
bone. I have to give it back to the Sozranis.”
  “Why would you give it to the Sozranis, Tarq?” Jara said,
taking a step toward him. Zem and Harhano didn’t seem to
notice, and he took another step forward. “What have the
Sozranis ever done for you? They beat you and then they stuck
a sword into you… Look at you. You’ve lost a lot of blood. You
might die if you don’t get medical attention. And these are the
people you want to give the sword to? Give it to us instead.
Don’t give it to those torturers.” He held out his hand.
  “Did the Sozranis do that to you, Tarq?” Casey said, nodding
at his wound. Jara looked at her in amazement, as if he had
never heard a tourist speak Lurqazi before. “He’s right. You
shouldn’t give the sword to people like that. They are not good
people.”
   Tarq looked from Casey to Jara. “Give it to us,” Jara said
again. “We’ll put it in a museum. We’ll let everyone come see
it, not like those Sozranis, who will lock it away and maybe let
you see it once a year. We’re with the university. We know
what should be done with it.”
  “They lied to you, didn’t they, Tarq?” Casey said. “They told
you that they had the sword. But the sword they had was
straight, and it was too new. I know, I saw it. They’ve lied for
hundreds of years. Do you really want to give them the
sword?”
  Tarq sagged a little, still holding the sword high so that it
seemed as if it was the only thing keeping him erect. “But
what will I do?” he said, so softly they could barely hear him.
“Where will I go? The Sozranis were my life. My parents gave
me to them when I was twelve years old. I don’t know any
other way to live.”
  “You can’t live a lie, Tarq,” Casey said.
  “Give us the sword,” Jara said. He took another step
forward.
  Tarq moved toward Jara, holding the sword out in front of
him like a burning brand. Casey heard Zem mutter something,
but she didn’t want to take her eyes off Tarq, as if by watching
him she could help him come closer. “What did you say to
him?” Mitchell whispered to her.
  They heard a loud crack, and, at what seemed like the same
time, saw blood spurt from Tarq’s shoulder. Zem hurried
toward Tarq, holding the gun in front of him. “The hell with
this museum shit,” he said. “Give me the sword.”
  “No,” Tarq said, his face twisting with pain. Casey saw that
he’d been shot in the other shoulder, so that it looked as if he’d
been the victim of some bizarre rite, a ritual that required
matching wounds. “No!” Tarq said louder, and reached out
with the sword. The hand holding the gun separated from
Zem’s arm easily, almost as if the two had come apart
hundreds of times before. Zem looked at his arm with
incomprehension. Then he turned and ran. “Casey!” Tarq said,
throwing the sword to her. His eyes rolled up and he fainted.
   His aim was off, and once again Casey missed the sword.
She heard it clatter behind her and turned and watched it
disappear into Mama’s store. Someone picked it up, but in the
dim light she couldn’t tell who it was. One of Mama’s kids,
probably, she thought with relief. She was completely
unprepared for the figure that came out of the darkness of the
store, walking into the light as if onto a stage, her blond hair
lit by the glow of the sword.


Angie had lain on the floor of Mama’s kitchen while the air
around her had thickened, pretending to be asleep. She had
heard Casey’s argument with Rafiz, seen Casey leave to go
downstairs, felt the air lighten and return to normal. And still
she lay, eyes half-closed, wondering if she should get up or
stay on the floor until everything had ended. Whatever was
going on, it had nothing to do with her.
  She heard Mama come into the room and she opened her
eyes and sat up. Rafiz was still there, sitting at the kitchen
table. He said something to Mama in Lurqazi as she passed.
Mama ignored him, went to an elephant’s-foot umbrella stand
at the top of the stairs and rummaged through it, discarding
canes and umbrellas and parasols and finally coming up with
an old rusty piece of metal. Interested, Angie got up and
watched as Mama went to the bedroom window and yelled
something to Casey in guttural Lurqazi. Then Mama threw
the piece of metal down to the street.
   Now Angie could hear the clatter of metal against the
pavement, hear Mama and Blue Rose raise their voices in
argument. Was that strange piece of metal the Jewel King’s
sword, the thing that Blue Rose had kidnapped her to obtain?
Blue Rose’s voice pierced the still air. Angie went downstairs,
coming into Mama’s store just as the sword, a dull blur of gold
in the dim light, skittered past her. She bent and put her hand
around the hilt. Then, moved only by an impulse to see the
sword in daylight, she stepped outside. The sword blazed
upward, casting her face in light. She heard someone gasp.
 “Angie!” her father said. How had he found her? “Angie, give
me the sword.”
  She felt the hilt, hard and cold under her hand. The sword
was heavy, pulling her down. She felt she could sink with it,
past this world and into another filled with pageantry and
magic. She would see the kingdoms of Borol and Marol with
her own eyes, be welcomed into the palace of the king of Borol
as his daughter, use the sword to overcome the armies of
Marol, take her rightful place on the throne.
  “Angie,” she heard her father say. “Angie, you have to give
us the sword. Quick. It’s what Jara and I have been looking
for, the Jewel King’s sword.”
  Out of the corner of her eye she saw a large man start to
move toward her. She didn’t even look at him. The sword, the
Jewel King’s sword, was real. Her father had said so. It was
real as death, and it was in her hand now, this minute.
“Angie,” Casey said. “Come on, give Dad the sword. Hurry up.
Then we can go home.”
   For the first time Angie looked closely at the sword. The hilt
was carved and inlaid with jewels. She could feel one of the
jewels press into her palm. The sword was real, but not in the
way she had thought. The sword had its own history. She saw
its forging twelve hundred years ago. Sozran led his followers
to victory only to see, too late, the treachery within his own
ranks. The Jewel King won battle after battle, and as the
sword passed to him in his final triumph she saw it change
shape in some way she did not understand, arcing from
straight to curved. It was buried with the Jewel King in his
tomb after the Battle of Stones, stolen fifty years later, and
passed from hand to hand until its significance was forgotten.
She saw a man centuries later look at it closely, trying to
decide if the wavy lines in the hilt were carvings or the result
of some accident, saw him shake his head and return the
sword to his attic. It lay in the attic for hundreds of years,
dust settling on the hilt and dulling what was left of the
jewels, until a young man found it and took it to Twenty-fifth
November Street, hoping to earn enough money to buy food
for his family. It passed to a wealthy tourist, and then to
Mama, who served as its guardian for seventeen years.
   The world shifted around her and she was back in the
present. After all its twists, the story of the Jewel King led
finally to this small group of people standing in front of
Mama’s store. Borol and Marol had nothing to do with it.
Somehow she had picked up the history of this strange
country and had worked it into her own legends. But the
history was real, not made up. A real thing.
   She would always remember this moment, the sword heavy
in her hand, the people—some she knew and some she did
not—standing around her in silence, watching her intently.
The sun cast light on the sword, hit the things on the lawn,
each object with its own shadow, each shadow with its own
location predetermined by the sun and physics. She
understood clearly the meaning of this tableau, the
significance of all the figures, but she would never be able to
put it into words. The closest she would ever come to it later
on was the sentence “Real is real.”
  The sword in her hand was real. The sun was real. Casey
and Mitchell, the things on the lawn, were real. But Borol and
Marol were not real. She was the lost princess, the secret heir,
but not in some imaginary kingdom. She was powerful here,
now, this moment. She was powerful because in her hand she
held the sword.
   Everyone watched her, frozen. Blue Rose’s mouth was
slightly open, as if she wanted to say something but couldn’t
break the silence. The large man leaned toward her, about to
take another step in her direction. Casey had raised her hand,
almost in supplication. Her father’s eyes, and the eyes of the
small man next to him, were wide, nearly terrified.
  She had the sword, and so she could do anything. This was
what she had played at with the kingdoms, this feeling of
power over other lives, but here the feeling was enormous,
multiplied a hundred times. She could give the sword to Blue
Rose and dash her father’s hopes forever. She could turn the
sword on herself, dying while they watched with horror. She
could even kill Casey, be rid of her forever, and her father
couldn’t say anything, not if she gave him the sword
afterward.
  The figures before her hadn’t moved. The air had congealed
again, thickened by the power of the sword. Everyone looked
foolish, caught in the act, even her father, even Casey. The
sword felt heavy in her hand.
  Real is real, she thought. This was real, the family grouped
around her waiting for a decision. She held the knot that
bound them all together, and she could cut or loosen it as she
desired.
   And suddenly she knew what she had to do, the one act
around which the rest of her life would turn. She could change
the configurations of her family, but the lost princess would
have to abdicate. And afterward she could start learning how
to live in the world again. Any place that held such marvels as
the jewel-encrusted sword couldn’t be all bad. She stepped
toward the group on the lawn—the sword cut through the air
easily—and handed the sword to her father.
  He grasped it tightly. The power drained out of the air and
everyone sagged forward a little. “Come on,” he said. “We’ve
got to get going.”
  Blue Rose took a step toward Zem’s hand, still lying on the
pavement and holding the gun. Mitchell turned in her
direction and brandished the sword and she stopped,
paralyzed. Mama yelled something in Lurqazi from the
window, and then called out the only English words she would
ever say, “Good-bye! Go! Good-bye!”
  “Good-bye, Mama!” Casey said. “Thank you! Good-bye,
Rafiz!” Then they were running down Twenty-fifth November
Street, following Jara, who was opening his briefcase as he
ran and taking out one of his maps. Paper spilled out behind
him like a trail, but Angie, looking back, saw that no one came
after them.


Mitchell followed Jara as he ran through the empty streets of
Amaz, trying hopelessly to understand what had just
happened. Who was that woman, so large that she seemed to
fill an entire window, and how did Casey know her? Had the
woman kept the sword all this time? Had Casey known? If so,
why hadn’t she told him? And his other daughter, Angie—he
could never forget the way she looked as she stepped toward
him and handed him the sword, the way she had seemed to
shine with a light to rival that of the sword’s. She had been
smiling a little, too, the first time he could remember her
smiling in years. Had he misjudged her, written her off too
soon?
  Jara ran ahead of him, his open briefcase flapping against
his leg, always turning the rounded corners. Up ahead
Mitchell could see the university. “We will have to put the
sword in the administrative office,” Jara said, breathing hard.
“There is a safe there.”
  They stopped in front of the office. Mitchell looked at the
sword in his hand as if realizing for the first time that it was
there. It had been strangely light during their wild run
through the streets. He held it out to Jara reluctantly. “Here,”
he said.
  Jara took the sword from him and the four of them went
into the building. The sword caught all the light in the dim
corridor and seemed to shape it, twining it into new patterns.
The woman behind the desk in a small receptionist’s office
gasped as Jara came in, holding the sword above him like a
conqueror. “We found it,” Jara said to her. “As I told you we
would.” He walked past her into a larger office and headed for
the safe set into the wall.
   He worked the combination, put the sword inside reverently
and turned toward Mitchell. “I suppose we will not be seeing
each other again,” he said. “You must go home to your country
and I must stay here to await whatever Cumaq’s forces have
in store for me. I would like to thank you for all your help, for
your dedication—”
   “What do you mean, whatever Cumaq’s forces have in store
for you?” Mitchell said. “What do you think he’ll do?”
   Jara shrugged. “I do not know,” he said. “There has been
talk of closing the university. I do not know what will happen
to us.”
  “But can’t you—can’t you leave?” Mitchell said. “Can’t you
come with us?”
  “How?” Jara said. “I am a citizen of this country. They will
not let me leave. But I will write to you as long as I am able,
and perhaps we can collaborate on an article or two about the
sword and the epic of the Jewel King. Perhaps there will even
be enough for a book—”
  “Sure,” Mitchell said. “We could write a book, and then if
the book does well enough, if people start hearing about you,
we could start some kind of campaign to bring you to the
United States—”
 Jara smiled sadly. “Good-bye, my friend,” he said. “You
must hurry now, you must leave the country quickly. Cumaq’s
position has grown stronger the past few days. I’m afraid I
may have put you into danger in my urgency to find the
sword. You must go to the airport now, quickly. I am sorry.”
  “I’ll write you,” Mitchell said. “I’ll make notes for the book
and send them to you as soon as I can.”
  “Yes,” Jara said. “It is a nice dream, this book.” He ushered
Mitchell, Casey and Angie out of the room and stood looking at
them as they walked past the receptionist. She called out
something to them in Lurqazi, some sort of farewell, and
Casey answered her.
  The three of them walked back in silence to Dr. Tamir’s
house. “How much was the ransom?” Angie asked as they
passed the place where Mitchell had seen the animal market.
  “They wanted the sword,” Mitchell said, surprised. He
couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard her ask him
anything.
  “Is that all?” Angie said.
 “What do you mean, is that all?” he said. “Isn’t that enough?
What did you expect?”
  “I thought—” Angie said.
   “And who told you to leave the house when we’d specifically
told you to stay inside?” he said, remembering, belatedly as
always, his responsibilities as a parent. “You’re lucky I came
after you at all.”
  “I thought I knew where Casey was,” she said. “I thought
she’d go to Twenty-fifth November Street.”
  “Yeah, well, you should have told us what you thought
instead of running out the way you did,” he said. What was he
doing? He should be working to keep her talking, not pointing
out her shortcomings. But she had done a stupid, reckless
thing, and he wanted to make sure she knew about it. He
balanced perfectly on the point between two responses, certain
that whichever one he chose would be wrong. “What did you
think?” he said finally.
  “I thought the ransom would be a million dollars, at least,”
she said.
  “Did you?” Mitchell said. “Do you really think you’re worth
that much to us?”
  “Sure,” Angie said, laughing.
  He’d made the right decision, Mitchell thought, amazed. He
would do anything to keep her talking this way. They turned a
corner and a large American car slowed beside them. The
driver called out to them in Lurqazi.
  Mitchell motioned to Casey to be quiet. “We don’t speak
Lurqazi,” he said to the driver of the car. “I’m sorry. Just
English.”
  “All foreigners must be out of the country,” the driver said.
Now Mitchell saw that he was wearing a kind of uniform, and
that a rifle stuck up between the two men in the front seat.
More of Cumaq’s forces, he guessed, though judging from the
uniforms they could be with almost anyone. He wondered
where they had gotten the car. “You must come with us to the
police.”
   “We’re trying to leave the country,” Mitchell said. “We can’t
find a cab to take us to the airport. We’ve been looking for one
for hours.”
  The driver said something to the man in the passenger seat
in Lurqazi. Casey nodded to Mitchell, and he knew it was
going to be all right. “We will take you to the airport,” the
driver said. “Come, we must hurry.”
  “My wife’s still at home,” Mitchell said. “Could you take us
there first so we can pick her up and get our plane tickets? We
don’t live far from here.”
  The driver sighed theatrically. “Do we look like drivers of
taxis?” he said. “No wife. We must go now.”
  “We have some money at home too, some Amaz currency,”
Mitchell said. “We can’t take it out of the country and all the
banks are still closed. I’ll give it to you, all of it, if you take us
home.”
  This time the driver didn’t need to confer with the other
man. “Okay,” he said. “Get in. But we will only stop long
enough to get your wife and the tickets.”
   The three of them got into the back of the car. Mitchell
leaned over the front seat and directed the driver to Dr.
Tamir’s house. This is the last time I’ll pass this corner, he
thought. I’ll never see this street, this house, again. He was
surprised at how forlorn he felt.
  The driver pulled up at Dr. Tamir’s house. Mitchell had half
expected the Sozranis to be back, but the streets were still
deserted. He ran up the porch, opened the door and called out,
“Claire!”
   In another of his nightmares Claire would be gone, and all
the strange masks and swords would wink at him maliciously
from the wall. But Claire was still at the kitchen table where
he had left her, a fat book opened in front of her. “We’ve got to
go,” he said. “We don’t have much time. Pack only what you
absolutely need—we’re going to the airport. Oh, and give me
all the money you have.”
  Claire stared at him without comprehension. She looked
only slightly more alert when Casey and Angie came into the
room after him. “How did you—?” she said.
  “There’s no time,” Mitchell said. “Get everything you think
you might need. You too,” he said, turning to his children.
  “Everything—” Claire said vaguely, but Mitchell was
already heading down the corridor to their bedroom.
  In ten minutes he and Casey and Angie were packed and
heading out the front door. Claire trailed after them, holding
only her purse and her book, fingers carefully keeping her
place. The car had waited for them, though the driver swore in
Lurqazi when he saw the three suitcases the family had
brought outside. Mitchell took out a bundle of notes, feeling
horribly conscious that the stack was not as thick as it might
have been. The banks had been closed since Cumaq’s takeover.
Claire fumbled in her purse and brought out a few more bills.
The driver counted them and then, satisfied, ordered his
passenger from the car. The passenger began to argue in
Lurqazi.
   This is it, Mitchell thought. One of us will have to stay
behind. There’s not enough room for all of us. And we were so
close—But luck was with them even in this, and at last the
driver gave the other man about a fourth of the notes and the
man left the car.
  Mitchell got in front, balancing his large half-empty suitcase
on his knees, careful to avoid the rifle. Claire, Casey and Angie
sat in back. The driver pulled away from the curb. The last
thing Mitchell saw as they turned the corner was the bronze
statue of the man holding the egg. He realized he had never
found out who the man was.



           Twenty-fifth
             November Street: 5
                                                         «^»
Mama sat in her bedroom in a chair she had taken from the
kitchen, carefully watching the man who slept on her bed. His
breathing was regular now, and his complexion, though still
pale, seemed healthier. The wounds on both shoulders, under
the sterile white bandages Rafiz had wrapped around them,
had finally stopped bleeding.
   Her work was ended. She sat back in her chair and closed
her eyes, hardly hearing the excited voices of her neighbors
outside in the street. Seventeen years ago a tourist had come
into her store carrying an old rusted piece of metal with one
end strangely carved. Seventeen years ago she had recognized
the pitted metal for the Jewel King’s sword and bought it from
the man immediately. And seventeen years ago Blue Rose had
come running into her store, demanding the sword back,
claiming that it was she who had sold it to the tourist in the
first place. The two had not spoken to each other once in the
intervening years, not until the day last week when Mama
had thrown the sword to Casey.
   The man on the bed stirred and she leaned over and felt his
forehead. With the recognition of the sword had come further
understanding, the knowledge that she had somehow been
appointed the sword’s guardian, that her task was to see the
sword handed over to the people who would care for it. She
didn’t know who those people would be, but she knew she
would recognize them when they finally came to the street.
And so she had guarded her prize for seventeen long years,
watching as nearly everyone on the street moved on, as she
and Blue Rose advanced toward the middle of the street from
opposite sides until their stores stood next door to each other.
   She had had her first child shortly after the man had sold
her the sword. As the sword’s guardian she was afraid that
something might happen to her, that she would not always be
around to protect it from Blue Rose. Two children didn’t seem
to be enough protection, nor did six, nor did ten. By the third
or fourth the people on the street had started calling her
Mama, and by the fifth or sixth no one could remember her
real name. Sometimes she had trouble remembering it herself.
The twelfth child had been born some time ago; she had not
felt the need for more children after that one.
  Outside the sun was going down. As they had done all
during the past week, the shopkeepers had closed their stores
and gone outside to talk about the latest events on
Twenty-fifth November Street. Mama stood slowly and turned
on the light. Now she could hear her neighbors as they
gathered wood and junk that no one had been able to sell for a
bonfire, their excited voices drifting up to her.


“She was from the United States, you know. Mama told me.”
  “Amazing. She lived here all these years and we never even
suspected.”
  “I think she heard about the sword while she was living in
the United States. And she knew she had to have it, and
moved here.”
  “Yes, when she opened her store she claimed to be an expert
on swords. I remember someone told me that. Whenever
someone wanted a sword or had one to sell people sent them to
her.”
   “And then someone must have sold her the Jewel King’s
sword. But it looked like an old piece of scrap metal, so she got
rid of it.”
  Someone laughed. “I wonder how she felt when she found
out she’d sold the Jewel King’s sword.”
  “The sword she’d come to Amaz for.”
  “And what about when she learned that Mama bought it?”
  “And just last week, when she found out that Mama hadn’t
sold it after all?”
  Everyone laughed. This was the kind of story they all
enjoyed, evil and evil’s punishment, the wheel of justice
coming around slowly to work retribution. And if a few of
them looked uneasy because Blue Rose hadn’t been all that
evil, had, after all, been neighbor to all of them for longer than
they could remember, they didn’t see fit, in the glory of the
bonfire, to say anything in her defense. Everyone knew that
by the time the street was finished with Blue Rose she would
have become one of their legends, that everything that went
wrong on the street would be blamed on her, that parents
would use her name to frighten their children into behaving.
Already two or three people were looking over their shoulders,
trying not to imagine they saw her approaching the fire out of
the darkness.
  “And Mama. Just think of her keeping that secret to herself.
Keeping it for seventeen years.”
  “I have to admit I misjudged her. I always thought she was
far too cold to Blue Rose. I never understood what she had
against her.”
  “We could start the antique dealers’ association again.”
  “That’s true, we could.”
  “And we could elect Mama to be president.”
  “Hey, that’s a great idea!”
  Mama, sitting upstairs by the bed, heard them call out her
name and shook her head. She would have to stop this idea
before too many people took it up. She had better things to do
than be president of some organization.
  Outside a young woman, not more than twenty, stood and
stretched. “Sorry I can’t stay any longer,” she said. “I still
have some cleaning to do.”
  “Hey, sit down, Calano.”
  “Sorry,” Calano said, walking away from the circle.
Everyone watched as she left the protective light of the bonfire
and blended into the darkness around them. After a while they
saw light flare out from the door of Blue Rose’s shop as she
opened it and stepped inside.
   “I still think she’s too young to take over Blue Rose’s store
all by herself,” someone said, almost whispering.
  “Oh, you’re just jealous. Everyone knows you wanted that
store for yourself.”
  The circle of people around the fire grew quiet. Then
someone said, “I wonder where she is now.”
  “Blue Rose? She went back to the United States, I bet.”
 “Maybe she got carried off by the same birds that took
Harhano’s wife.”
   “And where’s Harhano? I haven’t seen him since last week
either.”
   No one suggested that the birds could have been responsible
for Harhano’s disappearance too. Although the speculations of
the people on the street were frequently unlikely, they stopped
short of the ridiculous.


The man in the bed opened his eyes, cried out once and then
was silent. Mama hushed him and tucked him back in bed,
careful not to touch his bandages. He has beautiful eyes, she
thought, watching as he sank back into sleep, brown like a
doe’s and surrounded by long black lashes. What would a child
fathered by him look like?
  The thought surprised her. Hadn’t she just finished telling
herself that her guardianship was over, that there would be no
more children? And yet she knew she was still fertile. Perhaps
she had been lying to herself. Perhaps the children were the
most important thing, after all. And where would the young
man go after he healed? She had heard him tell Casey that he
had been with the Sozranis since he was twelve. Wouldn’t it
be better to keep him here with her?
   She bent over the man in the bed. Her long black hair
brushed his face and he woke, this time completely. He lay
still, marveling at the woman’s abundance, her beauty.


Rafiz sat downstairs in Mama’s store, hardly listening to the
cries and laughter of his neighbors in the street. He knew all
the colors now, could name each of them correctly and without
making embarrassing mistakes. The world was crowded with
color. He had not turned off the lights and each one pressed
against him insistently, red, blue, green.
   With the ability to see colors, he knew, would come the
ability to see Death. He had seen Death a few times already,
only briefly because he couldn’t bear to look directly at it.
Death was a skeleton each of whose bones was painted a
different color, like the xylophone Mama had sold the other
day. He had once told himself that he had had a long life and
would not be unhappy when it ended, but now that the time of
his death was at hand he could not help but think that he was
unready.
  The colored skeleton grinned at him from behind a jumble of
open cartons. He tried to stand but his legs would not hold
him. If he could only get to Mama perhaps the skeleton would
disappear, daunted by having to face someone it had not come
to claim. But the climb up the stairs to Mama’s bedroom
seemed impossible. The skeleton beckoned to him.
  “No,” Rafiz said weakly. “I’m not—”
  The skeleton came out from behind the cartons. With a long
wave of one bony hand it gestured to Rafiz. Come to me, the
hand seemed to say. Its fingers were blue, red, green, yellow.
  Rafiz pushed his chair back. Its legs scraped loudly against
the floor. The skeleton came closer. “I’m not ready!” Rafiz said,
summoning up the last of his energy.
  The skeleton shook its head. You are ready, it seemed to be
saying. I have been waiting a long time for you.
  Rafiz slumped in his chair. It was true, he had been given a
longer life than anyone he knew, perhaps longer than anyone
in the world. And there was nowhere to hide. At least he had
been granted the knowledge of colors before his death.
  The skeleton beckoned to him again. Haven’t you had time
to do everything you’ve ever wanted? it said to him without
words. Casey, he thought. I just wish I could have said
good-bye to Casey. He rose to follow it, leaving his old, old
body behind.


The look in the wounded man’s eyes was the same one Mama
had seen in the eyes of the twelve men before him. He tried to
rise, but he was too weak and fell back onto the pillows. Later,
Mama thought. She rearranged the blankets around him and
listened to his breathing become regular again.
  Outside the night had deepened. The only light came from
the dying bonfire and the high stars. One by one the
shopkeepers left the circle of the fire and went to their stores,
leaving only three or four people who would talk through the
night and leave the “Closed” signs on their doors the next day.
The voices quieted, made a soothing murmur that became the
background for Mama’s thoughts.
  In a way she was sorry the sword had been found. The
sword had been the source of all magic on Twenty-fifth
November Street, and the slow seepage of that magic had
gradually spread to the rest of the city. She had once heard
Rafiz call the street the center, the heart, the dry river that
runs through the dry city, and she thought he had spoken her
feelings exactly, though she didn’t know how he had come to
understand them so clearly.
  But now all that would change. She didn’t think the people
on the street would even notice: all of them except Blue Rose
had come to the street after she had received the sword, and
the magic had become as familiar to them as breathing. They
had come to think of people like Zem and Rafiz—people who
had arrived on the street, drawn unknowingly by the
sword—not as odd or eccentric, but as people like themselves.
They had come to think of the strange events not as magic but
as part of the regular patterns of their lives. And those
patterns would go on, but with one strand missing.
   Only Mama would know what was gone, and only she would
regret it. She stood heavily and went to get ready for bed. Her
children, who had been running up and down the street
finding wood for the bonfire, would be home soon. Ah well, she
thought. Maybe a new baby would make up for part of the loss
she felt.
   Someone in the street called her name. Mama wrapped her
embroidered shawl around her and went ponderously down the
stairs. Rafiz was still in the store, slumped in a chair, his eyes
closed. She wondered if something was wrong with him.
“Mama!” a woman’s voice called out in panic, and Mama
hurried past him and went outside.
  “Mama!” the woman said for the third time, and now Mama
recognized Calano, the new occupant of Blue Rose’s store.
What could have happened to her? “Mama, come quick!
There’s a blue rose growing through the floor in my store!”
  Mama breathed a prayer of thanks to all the gods she
believed in and went next door as quickly as she could. The
magic hadn’t left her yet.



          Home
                                                             «^
The soldier dropped them off at the airport. Mitchell went to
talk to an airline clerk and found that the next flight to the
United States left in five hours. The clerk cheerfully—and, it
seemed to Mitchell, eagerly—took his tickets in exchange for
seats on the departing flight. An armed guard stood next to
her and watched Mitchell carefully through the whole
transaction.
   It was not a large airport, but the absence of people made it
seem that way to the family. They remembered the taxis
parked in front of the glass doors, the people lined up to sell
necklaces and newspapers and decks of cards, the noise and
smell and swirl of colors as tourists came in from all over the
world. Because Mitchell had given all their Amaz currency to
the soldier they could not buy anything to eat, but no one
complained. Only the snack bar selling chocolate bars and
newspapers from around the world had remained open,
watched over by a bored young clerk listening to rock music
from a radio on the counter. Claire read and Angie stared at
an opened notebook. Mitchell and Casey wandered up and
down the corridors, looking at closed stores and terminals,
until it was time to leave.
   Their flight was delayed for another two hours. An hour
before boarding a security guard asked them to open their
suitcases and examined every item carefully. Claire did not
look up from her book as the guard paged through each of
Angie’s notebooks and then held them upside-down and shook
them to see if anything would fall out. When they finally
boarded they saw that the only other passenger was a young
man wearing a clean new suit and several day’s growth of
beard. The stewardess looked a little embarrassed as she
explained the seat belts and oxygen masks to only five people,
none of whom paid her much attention.
  When the plane was in the air and they could walk around
Casey found a newspaper in Lurqazi on one of the empty
seats. She tried to read it, using her dictionary, but after a
while realized that it contained not news but poetry. She could
barely understand the stiff, formal syntax, and she put it
down and watched the young man a few seats up. He had
opened his briefcase and was checking over a long list of
numbers with a pocket calculator. Once he took off his glasses
and started to cry. Casey wondered how much money he had
lost when Cumaq’s forces took over the country.
   Feeling restless, she stood and walked aimlessly up and
down the aisles. In the tiny galley she found her mother trying
to convince the stewardess in sign language to sell her a drink
for American traveler’s checks. Finally the stewardess nodded
and handed her a cup filled with ice and a tiny bottle.
   Casey went back to her seat. Her father had taken a yellow
legal pad out of his carrying case and was jotting down notes.
“Am I going to get a mention in the book?” she asked.
  “Are you kidding?” Mitchell said. “Of course you are. You
and Angie. How on earth did you both end up at Twenty-fifth
November Street at the same time?”
   They talked quietly for the rest of the flight. Claire returned
to her seat and stared straight in front of her. Angie moved to
a window seat and looked at the sky until the stewardess
came over the address system to tell them to put their
seatbelts on.
  Just before they landed the stewardess passed out customs
declaration forms to Mitchell and the young man. Under
nationality Mitchell wrote “American,” studied the word for a
minute and then crossed it out and wrote “United States.”


The family went through customs and took a taxi home from
the airport. Everything looked strange, elongated, as if seen in
a funhouse mirror. The people were too pale, the cars too new,
the houses too angular. The road home seemed too straight,
too obvious, seemed to declare for the Sozranis instead of for
the Jewel King. As they neared their house they thought it
impossible that they had ever lived on such a street, in such a
home.
  When they got inside they stood for a while, stupefied. For a
minute they felt they had returned to Amaz. The smells of Dr.
Tamir’s cooking shimmered in the air: cinnamon, coffee, fish.
Even the furniture had been placed to remind them of Dr.
Tamir’s house, the two couches facing each other instead of at
right angles as they had left them, all the chairs taken to the
kitchen and grouped around the table.
  Tamir had left a note on the table. “Sorry I could not be
here to greet you,” the note said. “Pressing business called me
back to my country.” Mitchell, who had expected to deliver the
bad news to Tamir that he would not be able to stay for the
entire year, read the note and laughed aloud. He wondered
how much of Tamir’s “pressing business” had to do with the
Sozranis, irate because the sword had slipped away from
them. He hoped that Cumaq’s forces would give Tamir and the
rest of the Sozranis as much trouble as Tamir had given him.
    Claire opened the refrigerator and took out fish and
vegetables. “There’s enough here for dinner,” she said. “But
it’ll be pretty small.”
  “That’s fine,” Mitchell said.
   In a kitchen cabinet Claire found half a dozen spice boxes
and took them out one by one. The word araraq was stamped
in red on one of them. A strange word, Mitchell thought, as
out of place in the sharp fluorescent-lit kitchen as a herd of
lowing cattle. He brought the tin box to his nose and then put
it down, briefly disoriented.
  “I can have dinner ready in half an hour,” Claire said. “Why
don’t you go upstairs and unpack?”
  Half an hour later the family came down to dinner. They sat
at the kitchen table with its strange multitude of chairs and
started to eat. “I’m starving,” Angie said. “They didn’t give us
anything to eat on the plane.”
  Mitchell looked up in surprise. He couldn’t remember the
last time Angie had said anything during dinner. “No, they
didn’t,” he said. “This is delicious, Claire.”
  “I’m missing half my dictionary,” Angie said to Casey. “Did
you pack it? I’ve got N through Z, but I must have left A to M
in Amaz.”
  “No,” Casey said. “What would I be doing with your
dictionary?”
  “What kind of dictionary?” Mitchell said. Careful, he
thought. Don’t scare her off.
 “Oh, you know,” Angie said. “That language me and Casey
made up. Bordoril.”
   “No, I don’t know,” Mitchell said. “Neither one of you ever
told me.”
  “It was pretty childish,” Casey said. “I don’t do it any more.”
  “No, now you study languages like Lurqazi,” Angie said.
Mitchell had expected her to blow up after Casey’s taunt, but
she was almost smiling. “That’ll come in useful in the outside
world.”
  “Sure it will,” Casey said. “How many Lurqazi speakers do
you think there are in the United States? If I can’t make it in
physics I’ll always have that to fall back on.”
  “Oh, come on,” Angie said. “You don’t speak it all that well.”
  “Sure I do,” Casey said. She said something sharp and filled
with consonants.
  “What does that mean?” Angie said.
  “You don’t want to know,” Casey said. “It’s very rude.”
  “I think I heard someone say that in the marketplace one
day,” Mitchell said, laughing a little. “Just before he got
beaten up.”
  Casey grinned, the smile of the mischievous child Mitchell
had always associated with Claire. Claire. Mitchell looked
toward his wife. She lifted a small bite of fish to her mouth
and took a sip of wine.
  Hadn’t she and Casey quarreled about something the day
Casey ran off? The family had made an art of avoiding
arguments so it must have been serious, bad enough to make
Casey leave the house after all the warnings he had given her.
Had they ever made up?
  He and Casey and Angie had followed the maze to the
center, to Twenty-fifth November Street. They had traced
their own story on the streets of Amaz, had turned the
crooked writing of the Sozranis into the fluid letters of the
Jewel King. The three of them had drawn together in a new
configuration. But Claire hadn’t been there. Claire had been
home reading and drinking. The city had somehow deserted
her, had refused to open for her as it had before, and the new
configuration didn’t include her. Dammit, he thought. Was he
always going to have to worry about one member of his
family?
  “How are you doing, Claire?” he asked.
  Claire stopped eating and stared frankly at him. Was that
the first time he had ever asked her that question? “Okay,”
she said.
  “Something wrong?” he asked.
  “What could be wrong?” she said.
  She wants to argue with someone again, Mitchell thought.
At least she’s not doing it in public this time. From his fresh
new perspective it was easy to see the tangle of emotions he
had left behind. But it would be easy, too, to fall back into
them if he wasn’t careful.
  “I know something happened just before we left,” Claire
said. “I heard you and Casey talking on the plane, something
about swords and mazes and roses. But you’re not going to tell
me what it was, are you? You think things have changed, but
they haven’t really. No one tells me anything.”
  “I’m sorry,” Mitchell said. He felt his heart contract and
harden, turn to a small stone. He couldn’t eat. How could he
have been so unaware? “We found the sword. The Jewel King’s
sword.” He held the information out to her like an offering.
  “I know that,” Claire said. “I heard you talk about it on the
plane. I’m not stupid.”
  “Mama had it,” Mitchell said, trying to talk over her.
“Someone Casey knew on that street she was always going to,
Twenty-fifth November Street. Mama had it for seventeen
years, and her neighbor, Blue Rose—”
  “I suppose I’ll see even less of you now,” Claire said. “You’ll
be in big demand, the man who found the Jewel King’s sword.”
  “I’m going to try to spend more time at home,” Mitchell said.
“Something happened on the streets just before we found
it—some kind of shift—” He stopped. He was not making very
much sense.
   “I know,” Claire said. It was one of those sudden changes of
mood that used to surprise him the first few years they had
been married. She’s had a lot to drink, he thought. When did
she find the time? “I felt it too. The air went all shimmery. I
looked up from my book—I thought I was hallucinating, but it
didn’t go away. It was hard to move. And then suddenly it
stopped.”
  “That was us,” Mitchell said. “We were—we were forging
new streets. Coming closer to the sword.” How much of the
story was she going to believe? It seemed absurd to state it as
baldly as that. Casey looked at him skeptically; he could see
that at least one person, his pragmatic daughter, didn’t buy
his explanation at all.
  “You were forging new streets,” Claire said flatly.
   “Yeah,” Mitchell said. “I was following this map Jara had,
following the word ‘sword’ written on the map. And Casey and
Angie were already there, at Twenty-fifth November Street,
because Casey—”
  “I’d been kidnapped by the Sozranis,” Casey said. “The
people with turbans? They took me up to the hills but I
escaped and got to Twenty-fifth November Street, and
meanwhile Angie—”
  “I went to Twenty-fifth November Street to try to find
Casey,” Angie said. “And I got kidnapped by Blue Rose,
because she wanted the sword—”
  “So me and Rafiz rescued her—”
  He couldn’t remember when he’d heard his daughters speak
at the same time. They sounded like chimes, Angie slightly
lower than Casey. But Claire was shaking her head slowly,
wisps of hair falling in her eyes. “Maybe you can tell me all
this later,” she said. “I’m tired, and I have a headache from
the plane.”
  Claire stood up and left the table. They heard her go
upstairs and close the door to her bedroom, and then the
noises stopped. No one said anything.
   Mitchell looked at his two daughters, so lively just a
moment before. In Amaz, he had rescued them from forces he
didn’t altogether understand, and he had rescued them too
from their cold cities of silence with his words. Anyone who
could do that could find a way to bring Claire back from
wherever she had gone to. Maybe it would be more difficult,
but he knew he would have to try.
                         —«»—«»—«»—
        [scanned anonymously in a galaxy far far away]
        [A 3S Release— v1, html]
        [October 13, 2007]