Ishtar Read online

  Then Daisy starts to make a racket, jibbering and jabbering in tongues, pointing to something tall and glinting. So slim and distant, they all might have missed it.

  “Ruins!” exclaims Anna. The men’s downcast eyes confirm she’s right. They know which way, and now she knows it, too.

  Recognition unfolds as they approach. Not much left of the busted-up brick wall: a crumbling tower with a sand-scored plastic sign. The symbol, once familiar. A logo of some kind. She knows she used to know what it was for, but it’s gone now, as with the accompanying words and whatever significance they once held. She doesn’t care; the words aren’t important.

  They make the ruined place their camp, skull sticks staking out a perimeter. A fire is struck, bitter lizards roasted upon twigs. A pockmarked canteen passes from hand to hand, metallic-tasting water shared in meagre gulps.

  The men sense the futility of their futures; stare at their battered, dusty shoes. The moon is nothing but a sliver now, a frown against the angry carbon sky. When the nuns start singing, Anna wanders off alone.

  The stars are bright, but there’s not much light to see by. Doesn’t matter, she’s not going far. She just wants to be alone to talk to her faithful Dog Star friend.

  The air’s still warm and heady from the day. Something cloying about it, too. Something familiar. It takes her a while to recognise the scent: wildflowers, deep and sweet and true. It’s her memory, of course, playing tricks. Nothing has grown out here for years. A handful of scrabbly cactus plants perhaps, desiccated thorns and tumbleweeds.

  But wildflowers? Surely she must be dreaming. “What of it?” she says to Sirius. He’s bright tonight, watching over her as always. When the moon is insubstantial, she needs him most.

  Another scent beneath the heady sweetness. She frowns as she does her best to recall its name. Something...living. Something earthy. A flock of black-faced sheep, of all things!

  Then suddenly she’s on the shaded mountainside. Young with skinny legs and ropy braids. And he’s there, too, staring at her sun-bronzed skin. She can smell the musk of him at fifty paces.

  They fuck under a shady cedar. He smells of sheep but she doesn’t give a damn. Afterwards, she combs stray leaves from her hair with fingers splayed. He lays still, abdomen glistening with sweat.

  “You’re mine,” she tells him. “You must never love another.”

  He laughs. “Twenty girls from town say you’re too late.”

  She cradles his head in her lap and strokes his hair, aware of the power beneath her fingertips. With the slightest pressure she could end his life. But she doesn’t. She loves him as silly village girls are wont to do.

  “I can make you mine forever. I can make you do whatever I want.”

  “If you say so,” he says, drifting into a sated slumber.

  And he did sleep, too, for a thousand years. Or so it seems to Anna, out here beneath the stars tonight. The memory is confusing. It isn’t hers. It can’t be. But it feels so real, as real as anything else.

  Truth is, she’s been waiting here so long she’d almost forgotten him completely. Thomas, her lover, her friend. Her soulmate, if survivors still wore their souls. His absence left a cavern in her heart, but soon it shall be refilled.

  The nuns have stopped their singing and the night is cool and still. The gate she seeks cannot be far away.

  “I want to remember more of him,” she tells Sirius. “I want to see him just the way he was.”

  And then suddenly she’s angry, although she’s not sure why. The years she’s wasted out here in the dust. The broken-down clinic, seeding all those salted wombs. What the Hell did she think she was trying to prove? She was never about healing. The women who walked to her were doomed. So why did she keep planting all those years?

  Sirius winks through the stratosphere. Beneath, a meteoroid burns hollow, trails to nothing.

  “I was waiting. Waiting for him.”

  She turns and hurries back to camp, almost tripping over stones in her haste. She wakes the soldiers and they do not thank her for it.

  “He gave you something to bring to me,” she says. “I want it.”

  Asleep not long, their minds are fogged with exhaustion.

  “Who?” says Jimenez, blinking grit from his eyes.

  “Thomas, you idiot. He must have given you something.”

  “Lady, we escaped,” said Skunk. “Lucky to get this far at all.”

  “Dug our way up. Bribed our way out to the surface.” Jimenez cuts himself off sharply — perhaps he thinks the now-silent nuns are listening.

  “But you found me so easily!” Anna says. “He must have told you where I was. Offered guidance.”

  Her tone suggests she’s past the halfway point of reason.

  “Maybe it’s not him?” Skunk offers. “Maybe he’s not your guy?”

  She can’t even hear him, that’s how far she’s flipped.

  “Can’t be a coincidence,” she mumbles over and over. “Hardly a chance thing — what would be the odds?”

  She finds herself a private space, lies back to study constellations. They changed their names the day the Earth caught fire. Banished are the old guard: the bull of Heaven, the goat-fish, the great one. Tonight she sees shapes close to her heart: the lion, the lovers, the dove. The Dog Star, winking conspiratorially, approves of all her visions. In the background, the periodic bleating of goats and soldiers bickering in low whispers is punctuated by the howling of distant wild dogs. She tracks lonely satellites through the early hours, deaf and dumb, doomed to circle silently forever. She drifts to sleep, a smile upon her face. Imagines Thomas’s arms around her own.

  ****

  The morning light is weak and chill. Tracks bleeding off to the east reveal a tale. Skunk has run off in the early hours. Took a canteen, blanket and a knife.

  A nun crouches near his scuffed sand tracks, leans on her skull pole for support. Her name is Wattle and yes, she saw the soldier leave.

  “Why didn’t you try and stop him?” Anna screams.

  Wattle shrugs. “The boy is marked for death.”

  “Says who?”

  “Says Madame de Bethune!” She shakes her stick and the skull swings round to face them.

  Anna stares into the skull’s cavernous depths.

  “Madame says he shall be feeding crows by noontide.”

  “Not a lot of tide ’round here in case you haven’t noticed.” But Anna leaves it there. Wattle will not be moved. She lives for that skull on its whittled branch. She’d die for it if she thought it was what the skull wanted.

  Meanwhile, Jimenez stews in disbelief. “You ain’t even gonna hunt him?” he whines.

  “What for when I have you?” She points north. “Is this the way?”

  The soldier’s sullen shrug indicates she’s guessed it right. She’s seen a subtle twist of macadam through her spyglass. Up closer, they notice how cracked and warped it has become, boiled and blistered from excessive heat. Further beyond, a stiff shale ridge, gnarled like a crocodile’s back.

  “Over there,” whines Jimenez. “Sure as fuck, you don’t need me.”

  “We need each other,” Anna insists.

  The walk takes longer than expected. Hours longer under ruthless sun. Too hot for singing. Even the nuns drag their feet, skull sticks trailing swishes in the sand.

  Anna’s excitement increases incrementally. She half expects a five-point flange of sleek jet fighters to burst out over the ridge in salutation. Fact is, she can see them if she really wants to. Clear as she can see the sand and sky.

  As they get closer, Jimenez begins to crack. “I’m not going back down there. You said to the gate. That’s the gate ahead. He’ll kill me for running out on him. Plenty of men get hooked up for less.”

  “But you’re the messenger!” Anna offers brightly. “I barely remembered anything before you came. Thomas will reward you. Promote you. Shower you with gifts. He’ll love you, soldier boy, for bringing home his girl.”

 
But Jimenez is crying as the rock ridge looms ahead. Anna frowns, expecting something grander. An archway, perhaps? Something akin to the ossuary’s antique splendour. At the very least, an orifice leading down into the earth’s cool recesses.

  She’s been hoping he’ll be there to greet her. Waiting with his handsome, rugged smile. Older, of course. A little gray around the temples. Wiser, too. More worldly than before.

  Jimenez keeps blubbering.

  “Shut up,” Anna snaps.

  “Not going back,” he whimpers.

  “You’re going where I say you’re going.”

  She’s not really listening. All she’s thinking about is that missing doorway as he mewls and blubbers like a baby.

  It happens swiftly, no time for contemplation. In a second, Jimenez is leaping. Wattle collapses in a heap upon the ground, her precious Madame de Bethune rolling free of its shaft.

  Jimenez manages to liberate her knife. He slits his own throat before anyone can stop him. Does a decent job of it too. Wattle sprawls beneath his bulk, open-mouthed, recipient of warm baptismal blood. His eyes have whited over. He’s dead, but he’s still kneeling.

  Anna’s furious she didn’t see this coming.

  Wattle crawls away on bleeding knees, leaving the soldier’s frame to slump all the way to the ground.

  The others merely stare in silence. A pause before the prayers. Such deep commitment guarantees no going back. How dull their gaze is. How estranged from living women they have become. Standing there as silent as their skulls, as useless as the mountain ridge before them.

  Jimenez’s corpse twitches as the last of his fluid drains.

  “Thomas would have blessed you.” Anna whispers into his ear. She sits with him to catch her breath while the nuns set up a campsite, milking goats and baking damper as they brew a billy full of bitter thornbrush tea.

  Anna sees the soldier’s suicide for what it is — a sign. Thomas isn’t waiting by the gate to let her in. Things might be tougher than they seem, but that’s okay. Decades in the sun have taught her patience.

  The soldiers regarded him as some kind of warrior king, a pharaoh of the lands beneath the dirt. Even the kindest pharaohs could have cold-stone hearts. To go down there love-blind might be foolish.

  She walks off on her own to think. The skyline streaks burnt umber, and for a while it seems there’ll be no moon at all. But the moon is there eventually, not far from faithful Sirius.

  “What must I take with me?” she asks.

  But she knows the answer already. Knew it days before they set out on foot. She brought it with her in her doctor’s bag.

  Insurance.

  It’s not that she doesn’t trust beloved Thomas, but his minions — who can say? Best be on the safe side. Best make sure she’s covered.

  The nuns are boiling porridge. Smells like seeds and grass and clay. Tastes like it, too, but it quells the bellyache. After eating will come time for prayer. A few solid hours of pantomime, interpretive dance and religious mumbo jumbo. That’s when she needs to act. They think she’s holy; she takes great pains not to disappoint them.

  The skulls look wise and ancient in the flickering firelight, watching sagely from atop their sharpened sticks. Daisy and her nuns insist the skulls aren’t silent. They whisper secrets from the future and the past. Give names to keep track of potential prophecy. Some are helpful, others downright liars. It matters little in any case — the stupid bitches do whatever their hollow-headed bony masters tell them. Drink the stormwater, it’s perfectly safe. Dance naked in it while you’re at it, don’t worry that the acid strips your flesh.

  Anna ducks behind a rock, applies the Essential Oils Sheep Placenta Collagen Mask, with grape juice and green tea extract. Something scrounged from the back of the clinic’s storeroom. She hums a little tune, rocking back and forth as she waits for the stuff to harden.

  Apparently such things were commonplace in the world before. Who today would waste a rich sheep’s placenta on anything so frivolous as skin? The clammy cling of it reminds her of better days.

  Taking care to ensure her tattoo is exposed — both of them, the eight-point star and the dove — she joins the nuns at their fire. They all gasp and make the sign. Beneath the mask, every word Anna speaks is prophecy.

  She’s known for some time that words themselves don’t matter. It’s all about the ceremony. The ritual. Gestures and incantations. Flourishes and exaggerations. Nuns gape, open-mouthed as she pulls the pneumatic hypodermic from her coat folds.

  “What’s your name, little sister?” she asks each one in turn. Firelight has rendered them identical. Mindless creatures of the swarm, like fish or bees — not that she’s seen either of those in years. Daisy and Wattle. Hibiscus, Dandelion, Flax, Eithne and Anemone.

  “Sting of scorpion, fang of snake.” She hisses and spits, making claws of her hands.

  Then she’s on her feet, dancing between them, kissing cheeks and tugging arms. She jabs each one and they barely notice, hollering witchy nonsense as she reloads.

  When the deed is done, Anna slinks into the shadows, peels the sheep’s placenta from her face. She’ll cast the mask into the fire when the others sleep. She won’t sleep — tomorrow is too near. She’ll spend the night with Sirius in darkness.

  ****

  With the tepid dawn comes something new. The pressure of unseen eyes. One pair or a hundred — Anna can’t be sure. She can smell it, too, the scent of unwashed flesh. The nuns are busy ministering to their skulls. Their needs come first even when there might be danger — and when is there ever no danger in this world?

  The ridge juts defiantly in the sharpening morning light. Less of a crocodile’s back this morning, more an impassable wall.

  Out in the open they’re vulnerable. Exposed. But it’s too late — the eyes have already seen them. Is the doorway hidden, embedded in the living rock? Is it somewhere else entirely? Was Jimenez lying all along?

  No, his blood is the truest certification. Not that there’s much left of it; the sand is scuffed, the red stain but a memory. Something must have crept up in the night. Sucked the iron from the silicon granules. Took the body, too.

  Her reverie is broken by the sounding of a gong. Dull reverberations of wood upon metal shattering the air’s sullen quiet. She’s been expecting this — an invitation, or something like it. A grand pronouncement signalling connection between two worlds.

  She takes her time in getting up, brushes sand and grit from her garment’s folds. Allows each beat to guide her to its source.

  Her shoulders slump when she sees it’s only Daisy, hammering on steel with a gnarled tree stump. Throwing her whole weight behind each blow, the resultant sound much deeper and louder than it ought to have been.

  Could this steel slab be a door? It has no handle, window slit, nor hinge. When Daisy glimpses Anna, she stops to catch her breath. Starts again as Anna checks its welds. Knobs and rivets infest its farthest edges like hardy boils.

  Not a door. A seal. To keep us out or something else inside?

  Daisy eventually tires of her exertions. Anna stands lost in private reverie as the last reverberation melts away to silence.

  No army of demons burst forth from the ground. The sky does not darken, the wind does not howl. The desert behind her is as still as it has ever been. The ridge remains an oppressive, threatening weight.

  She turns to see nuns scurrying like ants, each bearing items essential to their acceptance of the new situation. In moments they have transformed the giant metal plate into a shrine. Somehow they’ve found flowers in this dead and dreary wasteland. Tiny mean-looking things reminiscent of the nuns themselves. A shrine is always their first response, followed closely by requisite prayers, chants, dances and incantations. They’ll strut their stuff until exhaustion claims them, but the door will stay firmly shut. It has been fused to the living rock for a reason. They don’t care. Reason has long been the least of their concerns.

  Anna’s heart sits like a stone
. Has she come so far to let mere steel obstruct her? It seems there’d been a time when anything was possible. When the mere sound of her voice could bring a mountain crashing down.

  Was she ever a goddess or a princess or a high priestess? It hardly seems to matter now the world is drowned in dust. The water poisoned, clouds so thin and still. The men all limp, the women crazy. Anna doesn’t know why she’s come here. If she ever had a plan, it’s lost to time.

  “Let me in or so help me, I’ll raise the dead!” She pummels the steel with balled fists, shrieks insults into the tepid wind. Her words evaporate unheeded. Languid whispers tossed from breath to breath.

  She leaves the sisters to their silly games, returns to the embers to sketch circles in the sand. The skulls stare down at her in a non-committal fashion. Past death, small details become so irrelevant.

  Sudden movement catches her attention. Dandelion scampering along the rock face like a nimble goat. Perhaps the girl has heard a noise. Not far beyond where Anna sits, the hobbled Nubians bleat in nervous bursts. Whatever it is, they’ve heard it too; or perhaps they can sense or smell a foreign presence.

  Moments later, Dandelion’s stealthy investigation is backed up by both Wattle and Hibiscus brandishing bone shivs. Anna settles back comfortably to watch. She likes it when the nuns turns into huntresses; the gleam in their eyes at the promise of fresh meat. How much better they are this way; an army swarming like crabs across the rocks to take a city.

  Anna’s picked her favourite. Wattle would be hitting puberty right about now if she could bleed. Why these children were burdened with such hopeful post-apocalypse monikers, she can’t imagine. Anna vaguely recalls a Dawn, a Melody and a Sunshine going back a couple of years. There was even a Rainbow, a buck-toothed horror who’d had the good grace to die of dysentery.

  Wattle somehow manages svelte rather than bone-grating skank. She’s got a spring in her step and a swivel in her hips. Yes, there are hips, somehow, occasionally visible beneath those dust-encrusted hotel sheets the nuns appropriate as robes.