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 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.”
“Why are we here?” I asked. “This is a very long way from home. Does your duty extend this far?”
“This is the victim, or one of them,” Messenger said. “Our business is with the ones responsible.”
“But how did . . .” I let it drop for two reasons. First, Messenger showed what he wanted to show, when he wanted, and in whatever order he thought necessary for me to understand.
Secondly, there was a new person with the mourners, a person who clearly did not belong since her eyes tracked us as she approached.
She was dressed all in black: loose trousers beneath a flowing robe, with her head covered in a black hijab. Black but not dull or even quite monochrome, because as she drew close I saw that the fabric swirled with woven patterns which, unless my eyes deceived me, moved and changed in subtle and fascinating ways.
Her clothing was unadorned, but she wore rings, and I knew instinctively that they were of Isthil and the Shrieking Face.
“She’s a messenger,” I said.
Messenger’s silence was confirmation.
The procession passed by, the young woman in black joined us. She was quite beautiful, with dark skin, unusually large eyes, and a quirk in her mouth that spoke of humor.
“Messenger,” she said.
“Messenger,” he acknowledged with a nod. “This is my apprentice.”
No names. I was disappointed. I was certain that Messenger had a name, at least had had a name once upon a time, but evidently I would not learn it here and now. Even my name was dropped from the introduction.
I stuck out a hand, an instinctive offer of a handshake, a gesture this new Messenger declined with a wry smile.
“You must be new not to know that a messenger is not to be touched,” she said in accented but easily understood English.
“Sorry,” I apologized.
“Thank you for allowing this intrusion,” Messenger—my messenger—said.
“We serve the balance,” the woman said. Then, “It makes no difference, but he was a good boy. Fifteen years old. Brave. Kind. He burned fiercely for justice.”
Without a word being spoken by either my mentor or his counterpart, we three were half a mile down the road, past a village that was really little more than a cluster of a dozen brick and plaster buildings, none even so grand as the humble mosque. We stood in a dusty field marked with twenty or thirty stones, some cut to rectangles, others obviously just hauled here in their natural rough state.
It was the placement of these stones that told the tale, for they were evenly spaced, six feet from left to right, in approximated rows. It lacked the carefully manicured grass, or the cut flowers, or the chiseled limestone markers and grandiose marble obelisks I recalled from my own sad travels to cemeteries, but cemetery it was.
A hole had been dug, long enough and wide enough for a body, deep enough to discourage whatever wild creatures roamed this strange and unfamiliar landscape.
Now the mourners stood praying in three rows. Men stood in front, closest to the grave. Women behind them. Children in the row farthest away.
A woman’s knees buckled and she released a small, despairing cry. She was held standing by women on either side. It was beyond doubt that here was the mother.
The shrouded body was placed on its side in the hole.
“Facing Mecca,” our new companion explained.
“How did he die?” I asked.
The female messenger nodded and the three of us began to walk away. But as we did the world scrolled backward around us. We walked at what seemed a normal speed, but the dead body leaped from the grave and was once again on a stretcher being carried backward down the road.
Faster and faster the scene moved past us, though there was no sense that we were moving at anything but a leisurely pace.
The funeral procession passed backward by the tiny mosque, down the road, to a village somewhat larger than the one we’d passed through earlier. This village was clustered around a trickle of a stream that barely moistened the rocks and seemed at any moment that it might be drunk up entirely by the parched earth.
We watched silently as the body was placed on a wooden table in one simple home with low ceilings and a scattering of thin mattresses. The walls had once been painted a cheerful turquoise, but earlier colors of paint and bare brick showed through.
Now only men were in the room and in reverse motion they untied the ropes, and unwound the shroud, and revealed a body. The boy was heavy and dark-skinned. And he had a bullet hole in his chest, another in his neck, a third in his arm that had very nearly severed it so that just above the elbow was nothing but strings of gristle still attached to the lower part.
A fourth bullet in his face had removed half of his head.
I had never seen anything like that wound. It was . . . what word would suffice? How can I describe the damage? How am I to explain without resorting to horror movie clichés?
His face, from the hairline, down to the bridge of his nose, down to the place on his mouth where the lips dimple a little in the middle, and from there down to the bare white bone of his jaw, was no longer there.
It was all too easy to see what he must have looked like if I simply duplicated and reversed the remainder of his face. But no sane person can see such a thing and calmly reconstitute what is no longer there. The outrage is too great. The anger that wells up inside you is too powerful. There is no looking at such a thing and reasoning, there is only the most profound sense of wrongness, of an unspeakable sin.
Tears filled my eyes. Not because I knew the boy, I didn’t, not even because I could see the pain and sadness on the faces of those who had undertaken the heartrending job of wrapping him for burial, though I could. I cried because it was wrong. I cried because it should not be, should never be.
Messenger did not cry, neither did his female counterpart. They both looked on with the clenched, stony resolve of those who are past crying but not yet past feeling.
“What was his name?”
“Aimal,” the female answered. “His name was Aimal.”
The reality around me had slowed to a stop. Now all the men were as frozen as the boy on the table. His shroud was gone and the men were held motionless in the act of cleaning the body with damp rags.
Motionless tears hung on the cheeks of a man I took to be Aimal’s father. But as if he had read my mind—and he may well have—Messenger said, “That is not the father, that is Aimal’s uncle. The father is in America. As are those we must deal with.”
“The ones who killed Aimal?”
Messenger shook his head. “The men who killed Aimal are not our concern.”
“Then why are we here?” I asked. Was this soul-searing display unnecessary? Had I been burdened with yet another gruesome memory for no good reason?
“The