No, look.
He gathered Haj Harun up in his arms and wiped the blood and rust out of his eyes. The old man’s head rolled back. He gasped.
Jerusalem.
Yes.
Right there.
Yes.
Haj Harun struggled out of his arms. He crawled to his knees and planted one foot. He grasped the boulder and pulled himself up never taking his eyes off the mirage above him. Wildly he lurched away from the boulder, slipped and nearly fell but somehow kept going, staggering and coughing and spitting, cackling and stumbling, half naked on his spindly crooked legs tottering up the hillside, laughing and trailing blood and no longer caring whether he was on the path or not, waving his arms frantically as he yelled.
I’m coming, wait I’m coming.
11 Maud
Once more a dream and a place to dream.
THE BLEAK FIRST MEMORIES better to be forgotten as they had been for forty years.
A farm in Pennsylvania where she was born toward the end of the century, her poker-playing father gone before she knew him, abandoning his wife and child to go west. Her mother managing a few years before she swallowed a dose of Paris green in despair and when that didn’t work went out to the barn and hanged herself.
Maud hungry and thinking it was time for supper, calling her mother and going to look, stepping through the open barn doorway with a little skip.
A taut stiff rope. A straight stiff body hanging in the shadows.
Screaming and running, too young to understand everything could be taken away by a footstep through a doorway. Running and screaming, Why have they left me?
The desolate mining town where her silent grandmother lived alone, an old Cheyenne woman whose husband had been a murderer, sent away. The old Indian woman not saying a word for days at a time, her face flat and dead behind the counter of the small saloon she ran, a dark filthy place where little Maud poured beer at ten o’clock in the morning and stared at the tense blackened faces of the miners as they whispered about another broken lift cable and mangled bodies three hundred feet below the ground, learning arithmetic by adding up what the exhausted miners drank.
An ugly world and she was frightened. People left you, why? What had you done? Everyone always went away and there was no one to trust, so she dreamed. At home alone she took off her clothes and danced in front of a mirror, dreaming, because dreams alone were safe and beautiful.
All else was grime and coal dust and dangling ropes, old women who never spoke and murderers who never came back and haggard worn-out faces, hopeless whispers and the terror of doors and footsteps.
She worked hard to escape, to become the best skater in the world, it was her whole life as a child. The clean white ice sparkled as she flew across it on the glittering hard surface of her dream, a still silent surface so white and yet so thin above the swirling currents of life that could spin ever deeper into blackness and a blind world of twisting creatures unknown in a young girl’s dreams.
She won competitions and more competitions and when she was only sixteen she was chosen to join the future American Olympic team that was going on an exhibition tour in Europe. The year was 1906 and the first exhibition was in the resort town of Bled, which was where she met a man with the curious name of Catherine and where it all began.
A strange name for a strange man, a rich Albanian who was the head of one of the leading Albanian clans, whose native tongues were Tosk and Gheg, who lived in a seventeenth-century castle.
Tosk and Gheg, a castle in a mysterious land. Within a week she left for Albania with Catherine Wallenstein to become his wife.
Almost at once she discovered she was pregnant and at the same time Catherine ceased to take any notice of her. Increasingly he was away on what were called his hunting trips. Toward the end of her pregnancy Maud learned the horrible truth about these forays from an elderly woman named Sophia who had a peculiar hold over the castle, a woman referred to by everyone for some reason as Sophia the Unspoken.
Her mysterious position in the castle was beyond explanation. Sometimes Maud had the impression she might once have had some intimate connection with Catherine’s dead father, yet she also hinted her mother had been no more than a lowly servant in the place, a cleaning woman attached to the stables. In any case she had been born in the castle and passed her whole life there, and now she seemed to be its real master while Catherine was little more than a stranger who came and went. The old woman completely ignored him and he did the same to her, even to the point where they never addressed one another. To both of them it was as if the other didn’t exist.
Yet she was kind to Maud and often talked to her, especially about Catherine’s father, who had died insane. The old woman was obsessed by his memory and whenever she mentioned him she became a little mad herself. Her voice was hushed and childlike with a peasant’s awe for superstition and she told preposterous tales about the last of the Skanderbeg Wallensteins almost as if he were still alive, although from what the other servants said he must have died at least three decades ago, long before any of them had come to the castle. Of Catherine’s mother, who apparently had died in childbirth, Sophia the Unspoken never said a word.
And then having mentioned Catherine’s birth, the old woman suddenly went into a rage. She clenched her fists and muttered wildly, spewing out the monstrous visions of a demented mind.
A vicious child, she hissed. At first he killed only wild animals. He trapped the females in the mountains and ripped them open to roast the embryo. But later he began going into the mountains disguised as a holy man, just as he does today, hunting for stray boys. When he finds one he carries him off and ties him up and uses him, uses him and cuts him until the boy’s nearly dead, then hacks off the head and eats the mouth. Do you understand? The peasants suspect it’s him but they can’t do anything about it because he’s a Wallenstein. All they can do is never let their little boys out of their sight for an instant, but that makes no difference to him because there are always gypsies wandering through the mountains to provide new victims for his ecstasies, more sacrifices for his rites.
Thus Sophia raved in her boundless hatred for Catherine until finally Maud had to lock her door and refuse to see her.
A few weeks before Maud was to give birth, Sophia broke into her room one night. Maud had never seen the old woman so crazed. She screamed at her to leave but Sophia seized her by the arm and pulled her to the door with an unnatural strength.
Tonight you must see it all, she hissed, dragging her down the hall to Catherine’s room where she worked a concealed lever in a desk. Inside the secret compartment was a thick book in a pale covering.
His life, she said, bound in human skin. Touch it.
Maud pulled away in terror but Sophia still held her tightly. She dragged her down a corridor to the back of the castle and lifted a tiny shutter in the darkness. They were looking down on a small windowless courtyard Maud had never seen before and there in the moonlight crouched Catherine, naked and thrusting, the hindquarters of a ram between his legs, his strong hands wrapped around the animal’s neck.
To break it at exactly the moment, hissed Sophia. Now do you believe me?
Sophia had a carriage waiting and Maud left at once. By noon the following day she had gone into labor. Catherine, in pursuit with forty horsemen, found the farmhouse where she lay and slaughtered all the inhabitants before ordering some of his party to carry his newborn son back to the castle. His left eyelid was drooping in the familiar Wallenstein manner of past generations and to Maud he said nothing. His only interest now was to return to the castle and murder Sophia before she escaped.