第5章 The Tanur Pass

The road that no longer existed was not, as it turned out, entirely gone. It had been a military track, cut through the hills for the movement of men and grain, and when the border moved and the garrison was paid off the track had simply stopped being repaired. Two centuries of weather had folded it into the land. But the land remembered. Tufan found it the way he found everything, by reading the ground instead of the map, pointing out the flat shelf that ran along a hillside when every natural slope fell away, and the line of stones at the foot of a cut where a road-builder had thrown rubble to hold an embankment. They walked it for two days without meeting anyone. The track climbed steadily toward the Tanur Pass, and the country changed from bare hills to a high, stony plateau where the wind never stopped and the only sound was the grit moving across the ground in long, thin whispers. Zeyla kept the notebook in an oilcloth wrap against her ribs, and she counted the days in her head, and she did not let herself think about how far Belenor and its archive had fallen behind. On the second afternoon, Tufan stopped at the head of a slope and stood looking down at the pass for a long time. Below them the track ran between two rock walls and then out onto an open shoulder of scree. A single vehicle had parked on that shoulder, angled across the road, its tail toward them. "That is not a breakdown," he said. "No." "There is a man on the roof of that rock on the left. He is lying flat. He has not moved in ten minutes, which is how I know he is watching us and not resting." He slid the rifle off his shoulder and did not raise it. "They have put the truck where we must pass. They have put a man where he can see us come. That is a roadblock, not an ambush. An ambush would be quieter." "Can we go around?" "Over the pass, yes, but it is four hours and no water. Or back down the valley and around the far ridge, which is two days." He looked at her. "Or we can make them think they have already won." Zeyla understood. She took the notebook from its wrap and opened it, and while Tufan watched the man on the rock she tore out the final leaf, the one with the torn dot, and folded it into her sock. She wrapped the notebook in the oilcloth again and put it, very deliberately, inside her camera case, which she laid on top of the pack where it could be seen. Then they walked down into the pass with their hands in view. There were three men at the truck. They were not militia in uniform, but they had the look Zeyla had come to recognize: boots too good for farmers, coats too new, and the particular stillness of men who are being paid to wait. The oldest of them stepped forward and raised a hand, polite as a traffic officer. "Bag," he said. "You could ask," Zeyla said. "I am asking." He held out his hand, and she gave him the pack, and he opened it and found the camera case exactly where she had left it, and opened that, and lifted out the notebook with a small sound of satisfaction. He turned through the pages while the other two watched the road. The green cloth, the nine dots, the abbreviations. He did not notice that the final leaf was gone, because the final leaf had never been a page he would know to count. "Where is the rubbing case?" he asked. "Stolen in Belenor." He looked at her for a moment, weighing it. Then he handed the pack back without the camera case and waved them through, and they walked past the truck and up the far slope and did not look back until the pass had closed behind them like a door. They were a kilometer beyond the roadblock when the shot came. It was a single flat crack, high and distant, and it hit the rock a meter from Tufan's head and sent a spray of chips across his face. They dropped together behind a boulder and lay still while the echoes ran out over the plateau, and then there was nothing, only the wind and the whispering grit. "He was told to frighten us, not to kill us," Tufan said, wiping his face. He was bleeding from a cut on his cheek. "That was a warning shot from a bad rifle." "Or a good rifle and a bad intention, corrected at the last second." "Either way, they know we came through. They will follow." He looked east, down the long fall of the plateau, where the ground broke into a maze of gullies. "The ruins at Tavras are below us. If we reach them by dark we can lose ourselves inside. They will not follow a woman into a place with one way in." "They did not follow her to the ridge at Kirmil." "No," Tufan said. "They got there first." They went down through the gullies as the light failed, and the country changed again, from stone to dust to the pale, crumbling walls of a place that had been a town. Tavras appeared out of the dusk all at once, like a photograph developing. A caravanserai the size of a small fortress, its roof gone, its courtyard open to the sky, surrounded by the shells of a hundred houses and the stumps of a broken aqueduct that walked out into the desert and stopped, as if it had forgotten where it was going. Zeyla stood at the edge of it and felt the old, unmistakable pull of a site that has not been touched. There were no tire tracks. There were no footprints. Whatever the consortium had found, they had not found this, and the realization went through her like clean water. "This is where the second stone was set," she said. "Mehve circled it. And nobody has come." "Not yet," Tufan said, and looked back at the pass. They went down into the last of the light, and the plateau gave way by degrees to a softer, dustier country where the rock was buried under its own crumbled self and every slope ended in a fan of pale gravel that slid underfoot. Tufan walked ahead with the mule and stopped every hundred meters to listen, and Zeyla walked behind him and learned the shape of his listening, the way he would tilt his head and hold one shoulder lower than the other, as if the sound he wanted lived slightly to his left. She had known men who could read a city and men who could read an archive. She had never known a man who could read a silence. "You are worried about more than the truck," she said at last. "I am worried that they did not chase us." He did not turn around. "A militia that shoots to frighten and then lets you walk away is not finished. It is waiting. Bekir Sundur does not spend a rifle shell and a day of wages to teach a lesson. He spends them to measure how fast you run." He shifted the rope. "We ran fast. Now he knows how many hours behind us he is." The sky went the color of tinned peaches and then the color of ash, and the first stars came out hard and close, the way they only do where there is no city to argue with them. Far behind, on the lip of the pass, a single light appeared and hung there, and then a second, and then the lights began to move down the road at the pace of a walking man. ---