“Did you rest well?” Messenger asked.
“I did,” I said, smiling at the memory of trading flip-flops for corn chips.
“I took the liberty of making coffee.”
I could smell it. I poured myself a cup and took a sip. I’d always taken coffee sweetened and with milk before. I took it black now. The bitterness no longer seemed significant to me. Indeed there was something reassuring about it.
“Are we traveling?” I asked him.
“Yes. We have a complex situation.”
I don’t think he’d ever referred to one of our missions in quite that way before. I might have asked him what he meant but the Messenger of Fear is not easily questioned. He speaks or does not, as he chooses.
He is a boy, not yet a man, though as with everything now I’m never sure if what I’m seeing is really him. He is tall, thin, and has long very dark hair and eyes the blue of a sunlit tropical ocean.
He is beautiful, Messenger is. I am perhaps pretty, or maybe just cute, but Messenger is beautiful.
He wears the same thing each time I see him: a long black coat that goes down to midcalf, a steel-gray shirt, black pants, and tall black boots. Yes, that almost completes the outfit. I say almost, because there are details, like the buttons of his coat, which are small silver skulls. And the two rings he wears.
The ring on his right hand is Isthil, goddess of wickedness and justice. She is stern, magisterial, and shown on the ring carrying a sword.
The other ring is a face. It’s a young face, contorted by unendurable terror.
“Let me get dressed,” I said. I popped a strudel in the toaster and went to shower and dress. There’s a closet with several rather dull outfits, all perfectly size
d, none really mine.
When I got back Messenger was sitting on a stool and doing nothing at all. He’s good at that. In a world where no one who owns a phone can ever be without some diversion, he is diversion free. He is patient, and that patience is slowly beginning to be mine as well, simply because there is no point in impatience.
By the time I was ready, the toaster strudel was cooked and cooling in the toaster. I wrapped it in a paper towel and began to take careful bites even as we were out of the house and—without a flash, a sound, or even a sense of movement—instantly somewhere else.
We stood on gravel and loose stone beside a road that had once been paved but had since fallen into disrepair, so that the gray of pavement was like a series of scabs over the richer soil beneath. Grass poked up here and there but seemed to lack sufficient moisture to thrive.
Across the road were cultivated, irrigated fields, and there the crop grew. It was a rich green, neat rows of what looked like tall grass that bent over at the top. Beyond that, in the distance, a vast field of pink flowers. This field was being worked by men bent low with bags slung from their shoulders. Other men with automatic rifles patrolled the edges of the field and appeared to be supervising or protecting or controlling, or some combination of the three.
Beyond the lovely but sinister flowers the land rose into terraced hills and, still farther, far off in the distance, the gray and white suggestion of snowcapped mountains.
Between the road and the fields was a small, off-white building. It was not an impressive sight. It was roughly square, a single ill-proportioned story in height, whitewashed brick on the sides, stuccoed brick in the front. There were three doors, all in a line, too many obviously for such a small structure, with the two flanking doors smaller than the central one, which was itself only tall enough to allow a six-footer to scrape beneath the top of the casing. The doors were painted green, a darker green than the Dr. Seuss–like tree that provided a comically small patch of shade.
The only feature of note was a small tower, just twice the height of the building itself and narrow, like a blunt, brick rocket. It leaned just a little to one side.
But my eye was drawn away from the building by the sight of a group of people walking slowly up the road toward us. A dozen people, perhaps, it was hard to be sure, but certainly no more than that number. The men were dressed in what looked like long shirts over loose-fitting pants, all of unadorned cotton. The women wore voluminous black with only their faces and hands showing.
Four of the men carried something, and I could already guess, from the muted crying, from the downcast eyes, from the slumped shoulders, from the way some supported others, that this was a funeral procession.
The body came into view as the mourners neared. It was wrapped in white cotton. A red rope tied the top of the shroud just above the head, a second rope gathered the shroud just beneath the soles of the feet. Two more such ropes were wrapped around the body’s midsection, keeping the shroud in place. It had the unmistakable gravity of sacred ritual.
The body was large and at first I thought it was too large to be that of a child, but then I noticed that some of the men were of large size as well, so perhaps it was a family trait.
As the procession reached us more men came from the small brick building and joined silently in.
“Their mosque,” Messenger said, nodding slightly toward the building.
“It isn’t very impressive,” I said. I suppose I had images from news stories of the huge mosque that protects the Kaaba Stone in Mecca, or even of the overwhelming Hagia Sophia.
We were, of course, invisible and inaudible to the mourners. Had we wished to we could have walked right through them. But death and grief impose limits, even on those with great power. We kept our distance. I finished my pastry, feeling foolish and disrespectful but needing food and having no better plan.
“This is a poor, rural area,” Messenger said. “Farmers and shepherds. Their mosque is humble.”