Ishtar Read online

  “I warned him,” offers Anna by way of an apology. “Why don’t we go and visit him together?”

  Reluctantly the nuns fall back. Daisy is with them. They’ll do whatever Daisy says. Anna suspects her own safe days are numbered.

  What’s left of Rocco’s corpse has been hammered haphazardly to a cross. The shape is incidental; Anna doubts these girls have heard of Jesus. Jimenez and Skunk stop dead, speechless, even with the nuns too close for comfort.

  The girls have spread his innards on a rattan mat, lungs and liver separate. The liver may be the seat of the soul, but poor Rocco’s speaks of little but misfortune. Perhaps they ripped it too eagerly from its housing? Between life’s fading and the immanence of death sit those precious moments where truths are told. Rocco screamed for hours, but in the end, his passing came as swift as starfall.

  A wall of turbulence obscures the horizon, broiling acid clouds spitting caustic phlegm upon the silicon sea.

  Jimenez steps forward, fists clenching and unclenching. Anna gestures to the lookout tower where Gengis trains a high-powered rifle on him.

  “Tomorrow,” says Daisy, interrupting. “Dawn of the eighth year begins tomorrow.”

  Then, abandoning Rocco’s shredded frame to the vultures, Daisy and her entourage hurry to consult the ossuary’s great skull mothers, arms overflowing with sticky male entrails.

  “You sure about this?” Anna asks the men, eyes squinting in the ochre afternoon glare. “A lion with a pennant. No chance you could be mistaken?”

  “What the fuck is the matter with you? Those bitches tore our buddy limb from limb!”

  “No mistake,” says Skunk, staring straight at her. Anna notes the milky cast of his eyes. Both of them have it. Whatever bullshit they might or might not be sprouting, they’ve definitely done time away from light. She’s amazed they can see at all, what with the glare and the sun-bleached forever. That they saw enough to get as far as Truckstop.

  “More water.” Skunk holds out his cup.

  Anna isn’t listening. She’s thinking about Daisy’s dawning eighth great year, a date of auspice and serendipity. A year when time itself will be tested, debts collected, promises made now answered for.

  Not that Anna gives a damn if an occasional throat gets slit in a show of penance. A splash of red looks pretty on the washed-out rocks. But whatever the fuck year they’d thought it’d been, it’s her year now, goddamn it. Year of the lion and the dove. Reunited like they’d never been apart.

  “Take me to your Major and his lion tattoo.”

  The men pale visibly as the words escape her lips.

  “Not in a month of Sundays,” says Jimenez. “Not if it was the end of the world.”

  “The world died thirty years ago, taking all your Sundays with it,” she says. “Nothing left here but ghosts and undead friends.”

  Jimenez shakes his head. “You don’t know what you’re asking. You don’t know.”

  “I’m asking you to take me as far as the Underworld gates,” says Anna. “After that, I don’t care where you go.”

  “Wouldn’t even if I knew they way,” says Skunk, defiant to the last.

  But she knows she’ll knock it out of him. A day or longer, maybe three. It doesn’t matter. Only the lion matters. “Take me to the Underworld, or I’ll throw you to the nuns.”

  No answer. She isn’t expecting one. Perhaps the men no longer care, for what’s left for them to care about? Walk another hundred miles or get crucified outside the ossuary? If the nuns are what remain of civilisation, barbarism doesn’t bear thinking about. Better to die in the shade by their own hands.

  But their hands are trembling far too hard to hold a blade, even if they had a blade to speak of. So they stand in the sun, feeling their bones bleach and fade beneath their meat.

  An hour later when Anna calls their names, they haven’t moved.

  “Come inside,” she whispers gently. “Eat and rest. Forget about your friend.”

  This time they do as she commands, walking like the condemned men they are, eating a final meal, then sleeping the sleep of the dead.

  ****

  There’s a giant ghost serpent only Anna can see. She feels it shift beneath the sands, tunnelling through the hard-packed silica fines. Other times it coasts above the surface, moody and bucolic, its rainbow sheath refracting shards of sky and sunset. Colours faded before the rise of man. The thing is blind. It flicks its tail in shiftless grace. Soaks up sun. Heat is the one thing it can never get enough of.

  Despite its flimsy corporality, she stays indoors on the days the serpent moves. The would-be mothers have no sense of it. They cross its shadow, pass oblivious through its discontented flesh.

  The nuns can’t see it either, but they know it’s there. They merely wait, charting plans for its massive, elongated skull. A figurehead for their beloved ossuary. It has to die eventually. Everything does.

  But today the great ghost serpent sleeps. The men and Anna await the rise of Sirius, the only sigil Anna ever trusts, before setting off on their journey. The others don’t yet know of her intimacy with the Dog Star, the dialogue continually running in the substrata of her mind.

  The men freeze when they see the bed sheet retinue waiting patiently beyond barbed wire barricades. Seven scrawny nuns, Daisy chief amongst them, flanked by two hardy red-eyed Nubian goats.

  Jimenez throws a backward glance at the clinic’s cold white walls. “You never said nothing about them nuns coming too.”

  Anna shrugged. “You reckon I’d know how to stop them?”

  Daisy has the raptures upon her, eyes fluttering upwards in her tiny shaven head. Her sisters pay no more attention to the men than to the goats. Each clasps a skull and, apparently, the skulls are speaking.

  “They’ve forgotten Rocco,” Anna whispers. “Short attention spans. You don’t have anything more to fear. For now.”

  A gleam of metal catches their attention. Gengis stands guard atop the watchtower’s skeletal frame. Utterly motionless against the skyline, as if carved from the very dirt itself.

  “What’s his story?” mumbles Skunk.

  Anna stares beyond the tower, far out across the insipid, pallid blue. She sees old Gengis as the envoy of Sirius, star stuff moulded human, but she’d never tell him that. Soldier of fortune, Armageddon escapee. Last man standing when the dust finally settled. All those things and several more besides. Or is he something else entirely? So deeply tanned, his race long rendered indeterminable.

  But he doesn’t quit and he doesn’t whine and he can hold that rifle steady in a howling tempest. His needs are simple, his problems very few.

  “He keeps us safe,” is her eventual answer.

  Skunk doesn’t bother asking safe from what. Perhaps coming to comprehend the pointlessness of questions, he turns his back on Gengis and starts walking.

  The slender line of hopeful mothers raise shrouded faces as Anna’s expedition strides past. They’ve learned better than to stand and make a fuss. The ones who’ve made it this far understand the need for waiting. They sit passively as all their future hopes march north into the desert.

  Anna knows they’ll be sitting there when she returns. And if she doesn’t? Will they die there in their straggly encampments, sunburned faces wrapped against the wind? What will happen when storms inevitably set in?

  Not her problem. Very little is, these days. Her own destiny has taken a turn for the better. Finally, there seems a point to all she’s seen and done. The clinic has been a holding pattern, sanctuary from the ravages of time. Perhaps she’s finally ready to rejoin the world?

  Will Thomas remember her? Of course he will. True love is all the Earth has left. Their separation has been a test. An endurance, or perhaps some harsh initiation rite?

  Thomas will be a man now, not the smiling youth embedded in her memory. Half-forgotten, yet never quite let go. They were meant to be together beyond fire and flame.

  They walk for hours, sunlight dazzling their eyes. Thr
ee nuns up front, four bringing up the rear. Anna’s doctor’s bag weighs heavy, but she’s brought it for good reason. She pats its scuffed black leather for reassurance.

  “I don’t trust ’em sneaking along behind us,” grumbles Skunk.

  “Their singing shits me,” adds Jimenez.

  Anna hasn’t heard the singing, she’s so wrapped up in her private thoughts. But she hears it now, so gentle, bittersweet. Mournful, hopeful, all mixed into one.

  The air before her shimmers with the faintest trace of ghosts. Battle scenes. Cars and tanks. People running, screaming through the flames. Rubble raining as buildings crumble. The usual sort of thing. She’s long stopped wondering where the pictures come from. Resonance or residue, aftershock...afterbirth. All roads led to death, no matter how you look at it.

  Sister Daisy is slung with reliquary beads carved from a polished human femur, threaded on string plucked from ancient carpets. Scrimshandering has become the holiest vocation. Many fine clinic scalpels have been liberated for the cause, high art being far worthier than surgery. Anna never argues. She leaves Daisy to her business. Daisy might be crazy, but she’s smarter than the rest. All Anna has to do is wait. Time will deliver. All will return to the dust from which it came. She throws a parting glance to the ossuary, a gleaming monument to the end of days. The end of time itself, for past the end of days, who’s counting? Does time still flow when all the clocks are broken?

  Once some swanky kind of bar, all sandstone, chrome and glass bricks, that ossuary became as good a place as any to store the dead. A sturdy tower of gleaming skulls and bones, if somewhat scoured by relentless desert dust. That dust clings to everything: skin, stone and soul. On a bad day the air swirls thick with it. On a good day...but ah, thinks Anna, there are no good days anymore.

  Venus sits sullen in the powdery dawn sky, offering little commentary, as is her way. All today’s ghosts are from the cities. Sleepwalking, listless in the tide. They chatter to the void, hooked up to the electronic whisper, muttering mantras under faded breath.

  Anna recalls metropoli, those vast and shining jewels. Sheer towers, wind blasted corridors, massive fingers of chromium and glass. Once she walked amongst them, invisible in the slipstream, relishing her anonymity. Banked-up cars from here to doomsday. Gridlocked regularity, spores on crusted macadam. She can smell the gasoline stench, the acrid belching choke of it. The image fades, soaked up by the sand. Patina on retina, industrial residue.

  It had been the end of days, although they hadn’t known it then. Always autumn, whenever she thinks back on it. Cool breezes, gusts of wind stirring up the leaves. She suspects the seasons past of trickery. There are no changes anymore, only baking heat by daylight. Freezing chill at night when the sun fades.

  But some things she is certain of, the startling turquoise of Thomas’s eyes, the gleaming smile, the cocksure tilting of his head. Young love so strong you know you’re both immortal. Powerful enough to transcend death itself. Only it doesn’t. Transcend anything. Thomas shipped out the night the fire rained, all their pointless promises forgotten. I’ll find you, he told her, although he never did. But he looked for her. She knows for sure he tried.

  She’s brooding on this issue as she puts one foot before the next, lulled by repetitive patterns of her fellow travellers’ footfall. She stares at the dust-baked earth, trusting the nuns to watch the skies and the horizon and all the nothing lying in between. They like to watch with their sharp little eyes, minds alive for signs and portents. Now and then they pause to evaluate the significance of details all but invisible to Anna and the men: the twist of a skeletal sparrow’s spinal column, burnished shards cracked off a rogue bull’s metal casing.

  The men stick close to Anna, as if understanding they’ll never feel safe in this life again. Understanding the world as they knew it is long gone.

  All portents aside, Anna continues to see ghosts, knows that they’re imprints more than signs. Moments imprisoned by the heat and glare, doomed to eternal repetition and playback. Right now, she sees an army march across argent sands, foreign colours streaming from spear tips. Their breastplates, once golden, are hammered and stained. Lost in time as well as destination. Above their helmets, a plane plummets, earthbound. When it crashes, the sand trembles from impact, yet there is no plane, just as there are no marching soldiers.

  Other times, through tears, she sees naked children frolicking with dogs. Their dusky skin repels the glare, teeth as white as reliquary ivory. They’re not real. They’ve never been real. These are island babies, scrabbling for coconuts and shells. They smile at her through a thousand summers. No one told them the world has ceased to be.

  The visions become more corporeal, more intense. She feigns indifference, but the mantle’s getting thinner.

  “Tell me about the Major,” she asks the men who trudge beside her. Did they see the plane? She’s too afraid to ask.

  “Fucking crazy,” Jimenez offers after a time.

  “Who isn’t after what we’ve all lived through?” She hates the way her voice sounds, the way she speaks like one of them.

  “There’s crazy and there’s crazy,” Jimenez says.

  Anna can see he won’t elaborate unless she forces him. He doesn’t want to be the one who calls it. There’s no way to dress up words like psychopath, but he surely will, if it will keep him alive.

  The singing stops, sudden silence jarring. The men freeze in their tracks like startled rabbits.

  Anna brings a finger to her lips, mouthing a soundless shhhh. Unnecessary. All know something’s wrong.

  They drop to a crouch, no need for instruction, all but the nuns. They sniff the air like dogs.

  If it’s a storm come early, they’re done for. Nowhere to run and hide. The sand a few feet ahead erupts. The scent of burning ozone, the air alive with sparks.

  “Rogue bull,” says Anna, climbing to her feet.

  The nuns are already onto it, swinging rifles from their shoulders, fanning out in three precise directions.

  “It’s just a bull,” says Anna to the soldiers. “Good target practice — those things can’t aim for shit.”

  But the men don’t get up immediately. Jimenez’s got the shakes. Skunk crouches, eyes flitting side to side.

  “Suit yourselves.” Anna moves forward for a better view. She’s seen this show a hundred times, but it’s not like there’s much else to look at.

  It’s just an old SUGV, 30mm Mk 44 chain gun quadruped. Waterproof and shockproof, but miles away from nunproof. The bull calibrates its sights on Daisy but it isn’t quick enough. By the time it’s done, the girl has ducked away. The thing is on its last legs, all pretence at stealth corroded. That it can still shoot is miraculous.

  The nuns duck and weave their way around it, freezing whenever it gains one in its sights. Then all of a sudden they let fly with rocks. They squeal with glee when they score a strike. It doesn’t take long for the bull to fall. The tired old thing collapses on its side, twitches in the sand, battered and undignified.

  Though it has never truly lived, it dies a creature’s death.

  “Fucked up little witches,” Skunk mumbles.

  Anna’s mind drifts as each rock strikes home. The shimmering heat reflects off the sand. Through the gloaming wash, she flashes back to younger days and Thomas, who’s vaulting over spike-capped palace walls.

  She’d been bathing with her slaves in a marble pool strewn with rose and lilac petals. First the gasps, then the stifled giggles of the waterbearers. Olive branches trembled as Thomas thudded heels first into soft grass.

  The three slaves stared aghast at this forbidden male intrusion. But it soon became clear that Anna did not mind. She stepped from her bath, rivulets trailing down her soft brown skin. When she ran to him, the slave girls closed their eyes, turned their faces from the couple’s wild abandonment. What they couldn’t see they couldn’t be forced to tell.

  Stray dust particles in her eye make Anna blink. What the Hell memory was that su
pposed to be? Women’s quarters? Slaves balancing amphorae? But it had been Thomas, clear as day. Not her usual flavour of fantasy — she’d never been the slave girl type — but new environments brought new feelings, she supposes. Something in the northern dust or the way the sky has changed.

  She can see so much further than she used to.

  ****

  Seven days pass before they see more clouds, a boiling bank of thunder smothering the horizon, end to end. The goats bleat, nervous. They can smell the air’s deceitful chemistry. That night the moon is at its thinnest, bled out by the tainted pallor of dusk.

  The nuns drive their skull sticks deep into the ground.

  “Which way?” asks Anna.

  The men remain tight-lipped. They know, of course. She knows they know. Their steps have been slowing, more hesitant, more wary.

  “Why do you want to go below?” asks Jimenez in an uncharacteristic surge of bravado. Perhaps he knows his time is near, his days are marked and numbered.

  “You wouldn’t understand,” says Anna.

  “The fuck I wouldn’t. I’ve been there. Twenty stinking years beneath the earth. Darkness like you couldn’t even dream.”

  They’ve been through this routine so many times by now.

  “But that’s where he lives, so that’s where I must go.”

  So simple, when she says what’s on her mind.

  “Major Thomas?”

  “My Lionheart.”

  Jimenez scratches at the sand lice in his hair. “That Major never had a heart to speak of.”

  “Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong,” she coos. “You don’t know him. Nobody knows him like I do.”

  “Like you did,” chimes in Skunk. “Like you did. Maybe. And maybe he was sane before the fall. Maybe I could picture that if I had a gun to my head. But twenty years in darkness sucks the kindness from a man. The man you loved is barely human now.”

  “You don’t know anything about the man I love!”

  She’s angry now, and the men shift their weights uneasily from foot to foot, eyes on those twitchy, deadly little nuns with their sharpened skull sticks and human femur shivs. The goats keep whimpering and whining in the heat. They can smell the wrongness. They know something bad is about to happen.