Only, as she opened her eyes again, it wasn’t her mother standing over her. It was Billy Ray. And it wasn’t a stick he was waving.
The Porsche suddenly swerved and the Angel awoke, startled. She reached out, not sure where she was, and caught in a spasm of sudden terror, grabbed the door handle and ripped it off.
Ray glanced sideways at her.
“Insurance isn’t going to cover that,” he said with a frown as she stared at the door handle in her hand. “Sorry I woke you. I had to swerve to miss a turtle in the road.”
“Tortoise,” the Angel corrected. It was better to babble nonsense rather than think about the meaning of her dream.
“What?”
“They don’t have turtles in the desert. They have tortoises.”
“Oh. Well. That’s good to know.” Ray drove on while the Angel looked at the door handle in her hand.
“Hang on,” Ray warned her. “I’m going to turn again. Don’t get all scared and rip the door off this time.”
“Sorry,” the Angel said in a small voice.
“Jeez,” Ray said, looking stolidly out the windshield. “Lighten up. I’m just kidding. Wreck the whole frigging car if you want. I put it on Barnett’s card.” He took a sudden turn, swinging onto a dirt road that meandered seemingly off to nowhere. “But wait until we get back to Vegas, okay? I don’t feel like legging it back through the desert.”
He glanced at her. She smiled back, briefly, but said nothing. He must think I’m a hysterical fool, the Angel told herself. And he’d be right.
The dirt road curved like a snake through the desert, leading finally to the mouth of a small canyon set into a meandering line of hills that provided the only topological relief in sight. Ray drove carefully, but they still jounced roughly, Ray swearing at every pothole and washout he hit. Though he didn’t blaspheme, so the Angel cut him some slack.
“I hope that was the right turnoff,” Ray muttered. “These hicks don’t mark their roads very clearly—yeah, there it is, ahead.”
It was a ranch, a hacienda of some kind that looked old to the Angel’s eye, but she was no architecture expert. She couldn’t even see the main house at first, because the grounds were surrounded by an adobe wall that had definitely seen better days. The Angel imagined that it had been built to keep marauding Indians out, but now it couldn’t keep out a herd of marauding cows. Though it was still twelve or fourteen feet high in some places, most of it had fallen to nearly ground level. Repairs were in progress, but although tools and ladders and mud bricks were all over the place, no one was actually currently working.
The gate stood wide open, the cross arm barely hanging by a single hinge. The wooden sign over the entrance was mostly in Arabic, with the English words “The Oasis—Welcome” neatly lettered below.
“Do you think we should just drive in?” the Angel asked.
Ray shrugged. “We’ve come all this way,” he said, and carefully pulled onto the looping dirt driveway that was bounded by a border of whitewashed stones. He stopped after the first curve and they stared out the windshield and then looked at each other. “I’ll be damned,” Ray said.
“Don’t blaspheme,” the Angel said automatically.
Suddenly, they were in paradise. It was as green as Ireland inside the walls of the old ranchero, with plants and flowers of every type and description abloom in vivid color. The grass looked like putting greens. Rows of corn, mostly hidden behind the main building, grew as tall as an elephant’s eye. Tomato vines thick enough to swing on climbed groaning trellises, green beans hung on netting draped between the vines, and squash the size of pumpkins and pumpkins like boulders were scattered among them. A pond of rather larger proportions than you’d expect to see in a desert was tucked into one corner of the grounds, surrounded by reeds and cattails. Lilies and lotus of every conceivable color covered its surface, providing shelter for the exotic waterfowl diving for aquatic bugs along its margins.
“These Living Gods are some gardeners,” Ray understated as he edged the car forward. He went slowly, careful not to squash any of the fancy-feathered chickens pecking among the driveway gravel. The birds squawked indignantly at the car’s approach, loud enough to alert those inside the hacienda. By the time Ray and the Angel had parked and gone up to the front door, a tall, bird-beaked joker opened it before Ray could knock. He looked sad, the Angel thought, though it was difficult to read the expression on his odd features.
“Hello, Thoth,” Ray said.
“Mr. Ray. Miss...?”
“This is Angel,” Ray said, and somehow the Angel suppressed the urge to correct him. “She’s my partner. Listen, I know this is a difficult time—”
The bird-beaker joker stepped aside and opened the door wide. “Come in,” he said.
The interior of the old house was cool despite the desert heat. Its floors were tile, the walls adobe brick. There was little furniture in the rooms they went through, but a riot of colorful rugs covered the floors and walls. Thoth led them out the rear entrance, where he stopped and turned to them as they stood on the threshold of the back yard where the other Living Gods were picking flowers from among the riot of blooms that grew there, or just standing talking or sitting silently, comforting each other as best they could.
“We are preparing our brother Sheb for burial,” he explained in a sadly ominous voice punctuated by weird clacking of his long beak. He gestured toward a square, blank-walled shed in the back. Out in the far reaches of the enclosed yard, out beyond that square shed, the Angel could see two of them digging a grave in the soft sand of the desert floor.
“You’re not,” the Angel heard herself blurt out, “mummifying him?”
Ray glanced at her with pursed lips and a frown, but Thoth didn’t seem to mind. “No, Miss Angel,” he said. “I’m afraid that we are a much simpler people than our ancestors were. We have neither the time nor the money to do the job properly, but—”
He fell silent for a moment as one of his comrades came from the shed. Brown and thin and weathered as an old stick, the old man carried four small jars made from white stone. He looked at Thoth, nodded, and took the jars to a woman who had obviously recently been weeping. On a small table before her were a number of small human-like figurines, no more than six inches high, made of clay or stone
“—We do the best we can for our brother. He goes west with his vitals safe in their canopic jars, his ushbati to provide for him in the land of the dead, and our prayers for Anubis to aid him during the time of judgement.”
It didn’t sound all too different to the Angel than a Christian burial. Except that part about the canopic jars. And the ushbati figures. And, actually, Anubis. She felt bad that the poor man would be condemned to Hell because he was a pagan. Anyway, it was all the Allumbrados fault. It was something else that they had to pay for.
“That’s all he could ask,” Ray said.
The Angel stared at him, surprised at his unexpected compassion, as Thoth nodded his bird head. The other Living God—blasphemous as that thought was—gave the jars to the mourning woman and then joined them. He looked normal, if under-nourished and over-tanned by years of exposure to a harsh sun.
“This is my brother, Osiris. He speaks little English, but there is something he would tell you.”
Ray nodded. “His fame is great. I dared to come and interrupt your grief with the hope that he might have news of the boy.”
Osiris spoke rapid Arabic. Ray nodded. The Angel could scarcely believe that he knew what the man was saying.
“Alf shukr,” Ray said. “A thousand thanks for all. Our sorrow for your loss is great.”
“Our strength is spent,” Thoth said. “We are now all old, or weak. We only wish to pass the remainder of our lives peacefully among the oasis we have created in this desert, which reminds us so much of the home we have lost. We can aid you no more.”