Authors: Annmarie Banks
The rifle came down to aim at her. She could hear shouts from Sonnenby and Descartes. She took off running at an angle toward the camel and the black rocks. The tribesman would have to spin his camel to get a bead on her now. Her legs pounded the sand with a speed she had not known she possessed. As she cleared the first outcropping she could see a riderless camel between the rocks.
She tripped on her hem and fell. She hit the ground hard, falling and rolling in the hot sand. She kicked her feet to free them from the hem of the gown and then dug her toes into the sharp grit and gravel and launched herself toward Marshall. He lay on his back, his mouth gaped open and his eyes stared up at the sun, dull and unseeing. Beneath his chin he was all the colors of red.
Elsa ripped off her veil and tossed it aside. She cupped his cheeks with both hands and leaned over him, nose to nose. He was still so warm. Tears came to her eyes and stuffed her nose so she had to breathe through her mouth. She glanced down at his throat, opened from ear to ear above her carefully tied bandage. It had been quick.
She sat up and looked around for the man who did this. Gone.
She could see Sonnenby and Descartes approaching fast, their prods rising and falling on the beasts’ haunches to keep them at a gallop. Dust rose up behind them in spiraling columns.
The camels began to trot when they reached the rocks. Neither man waited for them to stop and kneel, but fell to the sand, clutching their rifles to their bodies as they rolled and then they staggered to their feet. The camels lurched away from them and continued to trot, halter ropes dragging, into the shade of the canyon and toward the well. Sonnenby and Descartes came at her, running full out, raising almost as much dust as their animals had.
“Elsa! Behind you!” Sonnenby yelled. He stopped, dug his boots into the sand, and raised the rifle to his shoulder. Elsa looked behind her and saw one of the Bedouin striding toward her, his own rifle ready to fire at Sonnenby and Descartes. Obviously she was no threat, as he did not even look at her as he strode past.
She kicked at him furiously, catching the side of his knee and causing his shot to go high into the cloudless sky. She heard Sonnenby’s shot at the same moment. Because she had kicked the Bedouin, he was not in the right place when Sonnenby’s bullet fired, and the shot was wasted.
The Bedouin spun around as he put another round into the chamber. The rifle barrel swung toward her stomach and she saw the dark hole of its eye, smoking from the failed shot. It was an old single-shot rifle, from wars long ago won and lost, probably no good at thirty yards, but at this point-blank range it was lethal. She blinked and was amazed at how calm she felt at the moment of death, and how slow time seemed to pass. Where was the fear? The panic?
How was this different from the experience of men facing death in battle? The barrel was moving to aim at her. She was ready for it. Her life had been a good one, full of learning in school and philosophic discussions across the supper table, long walks in the country and honest labor at home. Her parents had been kind and loving, her siblings supportive and caring and loyal. She had a good life. Now it was over.
But the barrel disappeared and moments later she heard a shot and felt the concussion and then heard the echoes on the rocks. She looked down, curious to see how her blood would look on the blue damask, but there was nothing below her breasts but glistening beadwork and the glorious blue of shimmering silk.
Her ears cleared to see her attacker and Sonnenby rolling on the ground, kicking sand and grappling to get a firm hold on one another. The rifle lay some meters away where it must have flown from the impact as Sonnenby threw himself on her attacker. She contemplated retrieving the rifle, or kicking the Bedouin.
The rifle would be empty and she did not know how to load a rifle and she had no ammunition. She kicked the Bedouin as he rolled past her. Sonnenby appeared on top, punching his enemy in the face over and over, his broad shoulders rising and falling like pistons as he threw that massive muscle into powerful jabs one after another. That Bedouin would soon be dead.
She looked for Descartes. The Frenchman was scuffling in the gorge with the other man. She thought about going to his aid. She may not be able to load a rifle. But she could use one as a club. She took a step towards the discarded rifle, but found herself suddenly on her back staring at the sky. Her head hurt.
Towering over her, another man in flowing white robes was thinking the same. This man was a stranger. He must have been the third one riding with Sonnenby. He reached for the barrel of the rifle, lifted it, and with a long arc and plenty of momentum, brought the stock flat up against Sonnenby’s head, knocking him so hard he rolled a full meter from the man he had been pummeling.
Elsa gasped, her own pain forgotten. That blow had been hard enough to cause a fracture. Her mind was back at the field hospital. Flashes of metal surgical tables and scalpels and bone saws clouded her vision. She saw a vision of medics with laden stretchers between them hurrying across rough ground toward the medical tents. She got to her feet and tried to reach the patient.
A rough hand grabbed her dress and long hanks of her hair between her shoulder blades and lifted her completely off her feet. She kicked air and screamed her frustration at being interrupted in her need to get to the stretchers. The sand rose up to meet her and knocked the scream right out of her throat. She rolled to her belly and panted, getting her breath back. The desert formed around her again. She was not at the front. She was in Mesopotamia. A Bedouin had picked her up and thrown her away like she was nothing. But Elsa Schluss was not
nothing
.
She could barely see, she was so angry. There was just a small circle of light immediately before her eyes, all else was deep black. In that circle a white-robed man straddled her patient and was drawing his knife from his belt. She had a vision of Marshall’s slack face and gaping neck. She saw the severed throat, the muscles, veins and arteries opened like a cadaver on the dissecting table.
Medical school flashed before her eyes. The lecturer pointed to anatomical points of interest with a beautifully polished pointer. The cadaver’s jugulars were dyed a lovely blue like her gown, and the carotids a bright poppy red. Elsa gathered her feet beneath her and launched herself at the Bedouin’s back, digging her fingers into his shoulders and pounding her knee into his kidney just as she had the Turk on the train. He rolled from the impact and lay face up, his mouth and eyes wide with surprise. Elsa was on him. One knee crushed his unprotected privates, causing him to curl toward her and gasp.
That gasp was his last, for she ran her right thumb up his throat until she felt the thick pulse of his left carotid. She used her left hand to grasp his trachea below his beard, and with her elbows locked she squeezed and pressed and twisted with all her strength, which was considerable. Her victim’s eyes rolled up in his head out almost immediately, but she was not finished.
She rose up, pushing with her legs for more leverage to bring as much of her weight through her shoulders and arms as possible. Her jaw began to hurt with the force of clenching her teeth. She squeezed with both hands, locking her elbows harder and putting extra weight on her thumb, completely cutting off any blood to the brain. She felt the trachea collapse, her hands sank into the man’s now flaccid neck; she could feel his spine through the flesh. The head rolled to the side, the tongue flopped out from between his blue lips and his eyes bugged sightlessly.
She adjusted her grip and tilted her head, narrowing her eyes as she focused on his face. She would not permit this man to kill her patient. She would rip his head off. He became every man who had harmed another. He was every aeroplane, every tank, every bursting shell, every incendiary bomb and every gas canister. Elsa was wild. She felt as though she no longer could think in words, only in images.
She saw ruined faces, bayoneted bellies, broken limbs, amputated legs, crushed skulls, slack jaws, and worst of all, the vacant stares of men whose bodies survived the battles, but had lost their minds. Her hands squeezed as if she could squeeze the violence out of this man and every single man on the planet.
Big hands had her by the shoulders again. She flew up and twisted in the air, ready to savage the next man who tried to kill her or someone she loved. She reached her claws out with a deafening scream and took this man down too. She would kill them all. Every single man in the world.
Without men there would be no more wars. She held her face over his so he could see her ferocity. She wanted him to see what a mistake he made in touching her without permission. She drew her lips back in a snarl and ran her thumb up his throat and along the side of his neck, searching for the carotid. There. She had it.
His eyes blinked huge and round at her. He was not kicking or rolling or striking her. He lay very still. Now the eyes seemed familiar. Her thumb stopped a centimeter from the wildly pulsing artery. The man’s lips were moving, he must be speaking to her, for she could feel the humming vibration beneath her hands, but all she could hear was a roaring in her ears like pounding surf or the screams of wild cats.
Then she heard German. “
Leibling, liebling, schatze…”
She recognized Sonnenby. She blinked and drew in her breath and another and another. She relaxed her grip on his throat. He took a deep breath, too. “
Gott im Himmel
, Elsa,” he said and put a hand to his neck.
Elsa felt as if all the air leaked from her, and all her strength. She opened all her stiffening fingers and rolled off his body and lay on her back in the hot sand. Sonnenby turned to his side and pulled her closer to him. Her body felt like a rag doll in his arms.
He was so solid. Like a tree. She used to climb trees when she was a child and hang from their branches on warm summer afternoons. She would climb them and nestle on a notch, her back against the sturdy trunk and read her books until her sisters would call her in the late afternoon to help with supper. She looked at his face. Blood soaked his hair and his ear on his left side where he had been struck with the rifle. He was pale, but his eyes were bright. “Valkyrie,” he whispered.
She closed her eyes. She had killed a man. With her bare hands. It was hard to breathe.
“Brunhilde, you have saved the world.” He kissed her on the mouth without asking first. She decided she would permit it.
“
Mon Dieu
.”
Sonnenby released her and they both looked up at the Frenchman. Now her head ached and her mouth was dry. Sand was ground into every part of her body and scraped her between the gown and her skin. She sat up and put her head in her hands, willing the ache to go away. Sonnenby’s head must hurt even more. She turned to see him pushing himself up to sit in a similar posture. He touched the blood over his ear with two fingers and then looked at them.
“
Mon Dieu
,” Descartes said again, slapping his fedora against his thigh.
Sonnenby squinted up at him. “I take it you dispatched your man as well.”
Descartes nodded. “He is dead. They are all dead. But poor Marshall. Look at him.” He put his hat to his chest and went down into a crouch on his heels beside the field agent.
Elsa did not want to look at Marshall. Tears burned her.
Sonnenby put a hand over his eyes. “We will bury him,” he said. “Leave the others. Let the
jinn
take them.”
Elsa stood over Marshall’s grave, holding her briefcase in one hand and his pocket-watch in her other. She had found all their passports in his trouser pockets along with a small case that contained two fine gold cuff links and a tie tack. She put them in her briefcase. The watch she held in her palm, feeling Archibald Marshall in its solid weight and steady ticking.
Behind her Descartes and Sonnenby were stripping the three dead Bedouin of their clothing and possessions. Sonnenby had told her it was necessary. She looked over her shoulder at them.
Necessary
. The camels were couched a meter away, waiting as she was, but uninterested in the macabre activities.
Descartes tugged at a dead man’s boot, making the corpse shake with a disgusting quiver.
“Must you do that?” she asked.
“We have to,
fraulein
. We want anyone who finds the bodies to think raiders killed them. Only Europeans leave the bodies untouched.”
She nodded reluctantly and adjusted her veil. “If it must be done.”
“It must be done. Get on your camel,” Sonnenby said.
She put Marshall’s silver watch inside her briefcase and then tied the handle to the wooden saddle frame across from her water skin. She finished packing and climbed onto the kneeling camel, adjusted her dress and veil to cover her as much as possible from the sun, and used the prod to encourage the animal to stand. Descartes and Sonnenby were gathering the other camels into a line head to tail. She waited impatiently, swatting at the flies, always looking to the west.
“Come,” Descartes said. Her camel responded to his voice. Sonnenby brought up the rear with the dead guards’ camels. No one spoke. After an hour the dark outcropping of stone was a small blot on the yellow sands behind them.
They were heading east. To Elsa it all looked the same. Yellow sands, hardpan, and distant shimmering mountains obscured not by mist, but by mirage. Descartes had his compass out and was looking at it as he swayed side to side on his camel. Sonnenby followed behind, his head cloth obscured his face from view. Her camel bellowed and began to trot without being prodded. Elsa held on to the saddle frame until the animal caught up with Sonnenby’s and greeted the other animal with a snort and a grumble.
“Where are we going?” she asked him.
“Baghdad.”
“How far?”
“One day. We will be there at midnight.”
“And Descartes knows how to get there?”
Descartes tucked his compass into his chest pocket and turned his head. “
Oui, cherie
.” He gave her a smile of confidence. “I lived there many years ago.”
She relaxed. Baghdad was a large city. As large as Damascus. There would be real beds in a real hotel. Hot food and plenty of water. Tea and coffee. Electricity. Telephones. A bath. Perhaps a train. She started to feel better. The horror of the battle at the rocks started to feel more like a dream than an event that happened just that morning, but her ache for Marshall did not fade. Thinking of him made her hurt all over. If she had been with him she could have stopped his attacker. She knew it.
She looked at her hands then looked away.
Now I am a murderer…or a soldier
, she told herself. Neither was satisfactory. She took no pride in taking a life. Even an enemy’s. She had lost complete control of herself. It was frightening. What else might she do if she lost control again? She thought about this while the sun moved steadily upward.
Her experience was not a failure of control. Possibly it was a defense mechanism the brain used to preserve the body in times of crisis. If she had thought too long about the situation, she would not have attacked the Bedouin. Her mind would have told her it was impossible for an untrained woman to kill an experienced warrior in hand-to-hand combat. Yet it had happened. It had happened because the experienced warrior had no experience with a furious Austrian woman, and because she had not waited to listen to what her brain had to say. She had listened to her heart, which was telling her that she had two seconds to keep that knife out of Sonnenby’s neck.
Sonnenby was riding beside her, but now her camel decided it wanted to follow Descartes’ animal and kept making an attempt to pass. Sonnenby gave her a sideways look as the two camels had a vocal exchange about the proper alignment. He told her, “We are on the wrong camels.”
“Apparently,” she answered. “I don’t know how people get used to spending days on them.”
Her attempt at light conversation fell flat. All words seemed inappropriate. But silence was painful to her. She craved the sound of a voice, any voice. Talking kept her from thinking too deeply about what she had done, what she had seen. And from the memory of Marshall’s gaping neck. She knew if she started talking about it she would babble like a child.
This is shock
, she told herself.
You are experiencing the aftermath of trauma.
Sonnenby did not appear to want to talk. It occurred to her that he probably had never had anyone to talk to. Ever. He was not used to the idea of comforting conversation. In his world one remained silent in the face of pain. This was the world of the boarding school, the military man, the aristocrat. Man’s world.
Women wanted to talk about events. There was something soothing in the sharing of a common experience. In the nurses’ lodging house there was never silence. They would sit knee to knee in their hard wooden chairs with a cup of coffee cradled in their hands or on their laps and talk about the day, the men who had been saved and the ones who had died. The men they had put on trains to go home, and the men they had put in the earth. Elsa wanted to tell him how she felt. She wanted to hear his words in response.
But he looked terrible under the bloody head cloth. He did not look like he wanted to talk. His face was scuffed and scabbed and his beard was rough. His
thobe
was torn, the hem dark with mud and blood. The brown and black spatters on the white cloth suggested that the various spatters occurred some time apart. Beneath the
thobe
he was wearing the same clothing she had seen him in when they were in the tent in El Zor. At least the trousers were the same. He had lost the shirt somewhere. Fresh blood soaked one side of his head cloth from the blow he had taken from the Bedouin. His boots were scuffed.
She looked quickly at Descartes for similar damage, but the Frenchman’s back was straight, his pocketed khakis had no stains and he swayed on his camel without obvious discomfort.
She had to try. “Tell me what happened in El Zor.” The silence was becoming a force of its own, bearing down on her.
He made a sound in his throat, and then said, “I tried to talk to Mehmet. He would not listen to me.”
He said nothing else. Elsa gave him time to continue but after a long while it appeared he wasn’t going to elaborate. She prodded gently, “I will assume, then, that we cannot go back.”
He turned his head to look at her and that was her answer.
She changed the subject. “Mr. Marshall,” she murmured. She had meant to say more, but her throat tightened. She needed to say more. She wanted to talk about him to ease the twisted feeling inside her.
But Sonnenby winced. He turned away from her. The edges of his head cloth flapped in the wind and hid his face. His camel prod waved and his animal lengthened her stride and took him out of range for conversation. Elsa would have to grieve alone and in silence.
Midnight brought the lights of the city. It could be seen from miles away. Elsa’s camel seemed as eager to get there as she did. The three of them travelled down empty streets between two and three story buildings built right up against the road. Telegraph wires welcomed them with the promise of civilization and Elsa felt hungry for the first time in days.
Descartes knew where he was going. He led them down first one side street and then another until he stopped in front of a low mud-brick building. The camels knelt and they dismounted. A light was on inside. Descartes didn’t have a chance to knock before a man opened the door. The light behind him made a long stripe on the road.
The conversation was muted and short. Another man joined the first and Elsa could see that this one knew Descartes as a friend. The two men embraced and their greetings were fast and loud. A third and fourth man pushed the door wide and the strip of light became a rectangle. Elsa unfastened her briefcase and clutched it to her chest before the men could take her camel away. Sonnenby was limping again. He had nothing in his hands when he relinquished his animal. Descartes introduced them with a wave and French-accented Arabic. Elsa nodded, and Sonnenby ran a hand over his head and slid the filthy head cloth off with a polite nod to their host.
Descartes’ friend looked them both over carefully. He said something to Descartes before came out of the house and led them to the building next door. Inside, the single room was dark until a kerosene lantern was lit and hung on a chain that dangled from the ceiling. Elsa was ushered in and the men followed.
She looked around while the pleasantries were concluded. This was a simple room with a hard packed dirt floor, level and cleanly swept. High openings in the walls near the ceiling were designed to let in light and air, but not much else. Now she saw the glimmer of the stars through them, and a cool cross draft blew in from the open door. A minute later another man carried in some small carpets under his arms and unrolled them on the floor. Water jugs and bowls were set on the low brick bench that was part of one wall from corner to corner. Descartes was still talking, but Sonnenby had already paced the space, examined the ventilation and poured water into one of the bowls. He brought it to her and she drank gratefully. He took it from her and finished it.
The door closed and Descartes said, “This is the room he rents to travelers. I have stayed here many times.” To Sonnenby he said, “She is your wife, my friend.”
Sonnenby nodded and handed Descartes the bowl. “Understood.”
Elsa shrugged. She had been playing this charade for days now.
Descartes took a long drink and refilled the bowl. “You could have been my wife, if you prefer.” He smiled at her. “But my friend here,” he nodded toward Sonnenby, “might punch me in the mouth if I try to kiss you.” He drank again. “I like my teeth.”
Sonnenby smiled briefly. “There will be no kissing. There will be no more punching.” He looked at his swollen knuckles and shook out his right hand. “Not for a while.”
Descartes continued, “The lie is for your protection,
cherie
. I do not want them to think you are a prostitute. They would drop by later, expecting to claim you for their pleasure in turn.”
Sonnenby gave a short laugh and touched his neck. “She would rip their throats out.”
Descartes nodded. “Like I said, we don’t want more trouble. She is your wife.”
But the morning brought bigger problems. Elsa was jolted awake from her sleeping spot on the brick bench as the door banged open and the doorway darkened with men. Three men in uniforms. Sonnenby and Descartes leaped up from the floor where they had been lying. She quickly covered herself with her veil.
The men looked from Descartes to Sonnenby. They decided Sonnenby was the one they wanted. A pistol was drawn and pointed. One of the men said, “Lord Sonnenby, I presume. Sir, you will come with us.”
“The hell I will,” he answered. He threw an uppercut with his left fist. The pistol flew up and hit the low ceiling then bounced to the floor in the corner. Sonnenby kicked and the man holding the pistol had his legs knocked out from beneath him. He hit the ground on his back.
Descartes was frantically speaking in mixed French and English, waving his hands for emphasis. The other soldier now had his weapon drawn and pressed against Sonnenby’s temple. He took Sonnenby’s pistol from his holster and tucked it in his belt. No one moved. Descartes stopped explaining. No one noticed Elsa at all. The man on the floor got to his knees, then his feet. He straightened his jacket and retrieved his weapon, glaring at Sonnenby who knelt, fuming, before the other man’s pistol.
It had all happened very fast. Elsa had been holding her breath, for now she let it out in a loud sigh. The third soldier was on her in one stride and had her by the arm. He dragged her up and when he saw that she stood taller than he was, used his other hand to whip off her veil.
“Good God,” he said. “Who is this?”
Sonnenby mumbled, “Valkyrie.”
“What?”
Elsa jerked her arm, trying to get loose, but the soldier’s grip tightened. “You are all coming to headquarters.”
Headquarters was another nondescript two-story brick building a short walk from their lodging. Elsa was separated from the men and marched down a tiled hallway between whitewashed walls and placed alone in a room with metal chairs and a single table. There were no windows in this room, but a wooden shutter over the door was open to provide ventilation. She waited for her interrogator.