第11章 The Guide's Debt

They stayed two nights at Huriye's inn, and on the second night Tufan knocked on Zeyla's door and came in and stood with his back to the window and told her the truth, which she had been waiting for since the chimney at Nekhab. He had known Bekir Sundur for eleven years, he said. He had guided for Sundur's people before the militia had a name, when it was just a family that controlled a crossing and took a cut of everything that crossed it, and he had borrowed money from them for his sister's operation, and the sister had died anyway, and the debt had not. Two years ago Sundur had come to him with a proposition. Tufan would keep guiding the archaeologists and the tourists, and once in a while, when a person came through who was looking for something valuable, Tufan would tell Sundur where that person was going. In exchange, the debt would be forgiven in installments. He had done it four times. He had never told any of them where the thing actually was. He had only told Sundur where the seeker was, and the rest had been Sundur's business. "And me?" Zeyla said. "With you I told him nothing." He said it flatly, without asking for credit. "For the first three weeks, I told him nothing. Then the parcel came, and the consortium arrived, and Sundur sent word asking why there was a woman in the guest room with a green notebook, and I understood that he already knew. He knew because the consortium pays him, and the consortium has been watching you since before you arrived." He looked at his hands. "When we left Sarnem, I sent word that we were going east to the ridge. That was true. At the pass, when the roadblock was already there, I understood that someone else had told him where we were. Not me. Which means there is a fourth person in this." "Or it means Sundur is not the only one paying you." "Nobody else has ever paid me," Tufan said. "That is the only thing I can tell you that is worth anything." Zeyla sat on the bed and looked at him for a long time. She had spent fifteen years learning to identify a lie by its shape, and she had never once been able to do it with a person she trusted, which was, she suspected, the entire problem with her career. She did not know whether what she felt was anger. What she felt was the particular clarity that comes when a suspicion finally turns into knowledge and the knowledge turns out to be survivable. "You are going to keep sending him messages," she said. "I will not send another." "You will send another tonight." She stood and went to the window and looked down at the truck park, at the white vehicle parked at the end of the row with its lights off. "You will tell him that we are going south to the coast, that we have given up the road, and that the consortium can have the plateau. You will make it sound like I am frightened. You will make it sound like the woman in the green notebook is running." Tufan was quiet. "And where do we go?" "To Kavil," Zeyla said. "There is a ford there, and a bridge above it, and a village that has repaired the bridge twice in its history because the stones went missing and had to be replaced. One of those repairs was made in the year the fourth stone is supposed to have been reset." She turned from the window. "You asked me once who the fourth person is. I think there is no fourth person. I think the fourth person is the person who has been selling counterfeits to the consortium for years, and I think they have been trying to protect the road, and I think they are the same person who sent me my grandmother's notebook." "Who?" "I do not know yet," Zeyla said. "But Kavil is where the forgery came from, and Kavil is where we will find out." She did not tell him the other thing, which was that she had decided to trust him exactly as far as the next lie and no further, and that she was almost certain he knew it, and that the knowing was, in its own way, the beginning of an honesty between them that the first three weeks had never contained. In the morning Tufan wrote his message to Sundur in the code of a guide sending a route, and gave it to a boy at the bus stop, and the boy ran off toward the crossing, and Zeyla watched him go and felt the whole plateau tilt under her, the way the ground tilts when a plan has finally committed you to it. They left Merlak at noon heading east, and by evening they had reached the first of the hills that fall toward the Kavil river, and behind them the white truck pulled out of the park and turned south, toward the coast, toward a road that Zeyla had invented for it, and she allowed herself, for the length of one breath, to believe that the trick had worked. It had not. But she would not know that for another day. Huriye was closing the kitchen when they came down, banking the coals and stacking the pans she had already stacked, and she listened to their plan the way she listened to everything, without interrupting, and at the end she made a face that Zeyla had learned to read on her grandmother's face forty years earlier and had not seen since. "You are going to the bridge," Huriye said. "The ford is watched. They shot at you and let you live, which means they want you to keep walking. If you walk to the bridge, you walk into the place they have left open." "I know." "Then why go?" "Because the thing they have left open is the thing they want," Zeyla said. "And if they want it, it is worth having." She put the cup down and stood. "Also because my grandmother came through here for twenty years and never found it, and I would rather be the second Arkut to fail at the bridge than the first Arkut to run from it." Huriye looked at her for a long moment and then took a cloth from her waist and wiped the table that was already clean, which was how she said things she did not intend to say out loud. "Your grandmother asked me once why I never sold the stone that a shepherd brought me. I told her it was because he had asked me not to. She asked who he was. I said I did not know his name, only that he came once a year with a bag of paper and a chisel and sat in the corner and drank his tea standing up." She folded the cloth. "She never asked me again. I think she understood before I did. Somewhere on this road, there is a person who has been keeping it, and they are not on either side. They are the road's side." Tufan watched her go, and then looked at Zeyla. "If that is true, then the forger is not an enemy." "The forger is a rival," Zeyla said. "There is a difference, and it is the difference between a person who wants the same thing you want and a person who wants you to fail. Whoever cut that counterfeit stone knows the real text. Whoever cut it also warned us, in the margin, with a correction. That is a person leaving markers for the person who comes after, the way a surveyor leaves markers for whoever will use the road." She picked up the notebook. "We do not know their name. But we are using their road. And I intend to find out whose road it is." ---