#with that damn keffiyeh of his

[theinfinitedivides]

'stopped at a coffee shop?' 'and a pharmacy' *inhales* bitch—

[beardedmrbean]

I bet the last thing Bernie Sanders expected upon his arrival in Ireland and Britain was to be met by angry protesters—to find himself heckled and damned as a sellout by the kind of radicals who would have been shouting his praises just six months ago. And yet that is what happened: Some of Britain's Bernie Bros have morphed into Bernie bashers.

Why? Because he refuses to describe Israel's war on Hamas as a "genocide" and he doesn't approve of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement against Israel.

Quick—cast him out. Unperson him. He has ventured outside the parameters of acceptable Left-wing thought and must be punished.

It all kicked off in Dublin. Senator Sanders, who is on these isles to promote his book, Why It's OK To Be Angry About Capitalism, was speaking at University College Dublin. A group of pro-Palestine protesters assembled at the entrance to the venue, all wearing the uniform of the virtuous: a keffiyeh. "It's OK to be angry about capitalism, what about Zionism?" they chanted.

It got heated inside, too. Sanders was interrupted by audience members. "Resistance is an obligation in the face of occupation!" one shouted. "Occupation is terrorism!" yelled another.

Sanders kept his cool with his reply: "Good slogan, but slogans are not solutions," he said.

It continued at Trinity College the next day. Sanders was in conversation with the Irish journalist Fintan O'Toole. Outside, a small but noisy gaggle of anti-Israel agitators displayed a banner that said: "Boycott Apartheid Israel."

"Free Palestine!" they chanted. (Deliciously, a woman who was queuing for the Sanders event bellowed "from Hamas!" every time they said it.)

Again, Sanders was heckled by hotheads. "Ceasefire now!" they shouted. At one point, in the words of Trinity News, Sanders "threw up his right arm in frustration and looked at O'Toole, as if to ask him what would be done."

It is little wonder he felt frustrated. Sanders was there to talk about capitalism, yet angry youths kept badgering him about Zionism. He is used to a fawning response from Socialist twentysomethings, and yet now some were effectively accusing him of being complicit in a "genocide." It's quite the downfall for one of the West's best-known leftists.

The turn on Bernie is underpinned by a belief that he is too soft on Israel. The radical Left will never forgive him for initially supporting Israel's war on Hamas. Even his more recent position—he now says there should be a ceasefire—is not good enough for these people, who seem to measure an individual's moral worth by how much he hates the Jewish State.

They want Bernie to say the G-word. They want him to damn Israel as uniquely barbarous. They want him to agree with them that it is right and proper to single Israel out for boycotts and sanctions.

In short, they want him to fall into line. They want him to bend the knee to their Israelophobic ideology.

These illiberal demands on Bernie to bow down to correct-think continued when he arrived in the U.K. A group of communists protested against him in Liverpool. Normally, Sanders would have been shown only love in a historically radical city like Liverpool, said the Liverpool Echo, but this time, "the atmosphere was different," for one simple reason: "his refusal to brand Israel's actions in Gaza as 'genocide'."

Sanders' resistance of the G-word haunted him in his media interviews, too. Ash Sarkar of Novara Media, a key outlet of Britain's bourgeois Left, asked him three times if he would call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide." He refused and it went viral. Armies of ersrtwhile Bernie fans damned him as a "genocide denier."

There is something quite nauseating in this spectacle of an elderly Jewish man being pressured to denounce the world's only Jewish State as genocidal. Millennial Gentiles who want to trend online might be happy to throw around the G-word. But Senator Sanders, who lost family in the Holocaust, clearly has a deeper moral and historical understanding of what genocide is. And it seems he is not willing to sacrifice that understanding at the altar of retweets or an easy ride.

Good for him.

Sanders' father was born in Poland, where most of his family were exterminated by the Nazis. Sanders is a son of the Shoah, a descendant of survivors of the greatest crime in history. To subject him to the modern equivalent of a showtrial in which you demand that he scream "Genocide!" at Israel feels unconscionable. As does branding him a "genocide denier."

Why won't he call Israel's war on Hamas a "genocide"? Maybe, says a writer for the Jewish Chronicle, it's because he lost so much of his family to Hitler's gas chambers and therefore he "knows what a genocide is, what a war crime is." He knows that while the war in Gaza, a war started by Hamas, is "horrible," to use his word, it cannot in any way be compared to the Nazis' conscious efforts to vaporize an entire ethnic group.

There has been a Inquisition vibe to some of the Bernie-bashing in Britain. At times it has felt cruel. The sight of fashionable, privileged Israel-bashers haranguing a man who will have heard stories from his own father about the genocidal mania of the Nazis has come across like Jew-taunting rather than political critique.

More broadly, this unseemly episode gives us a glimpse into the authoritarian impulses behind the Left's obsessive opposition to Israel. Israelophobia, it seems, is less a rational political stance than a borderline religious conviction. There are true believers, who dutifully repeat the G-word like a mantra, and sinful outliers, who refuse to treat Israel as uniquely "problematic."

One's moral fitness for radical society is increasingly judged by one's willingness to treat Israel as the most wicked nation in existence. The dangers of making hostility to the Jewish State a requirement of being a Good Leftist should be clear to everyone.

Sanders is wise to resist this tyrannical zeitgeist, and to say what he believes rather than what he believes will be popular.

Brendan O'Neill is the chief political writer of spiked. His new book, A Heretic's Manifesto: Essays on the Unsayable, is available now.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

[spitbullets]

send 👀 for a dirty thought and/or fantasy my muse has had about yours.

@holysound asked: 👀 .ft piers and chris

Was it a uniform kink if you were also wearing a uniform? Normally, a uniform didn't get Chris going. If anything he was usually on the receiving end of it, back in his Air Force and then later RPD days, women threw themselves at him, not realizing they were barking up the completely wrong tree. To this day, Piers was the only man in uniform to hold his attention. Maybe it was the added keffiyeh, but it was probably just the fact that it was Piers. That alone made it a guilty pleasure. Chris had been in the armed forces longer than he hadn't been and he took it seriously. Ogling a subordinate was a major offense but he couldn't but stare sometimes. Respectfully of course.

It wasn't until he was alone that he let the racier thoughts spiral. Unbuckling all that heavy gear off Piers' slightly smaller frame, knowing how good that felt himself. You felt lighter physically and mentally. How Piers would sigh with relief and their lips would brush as Chris grabbed him by his belt loops. pulling and pushing him into different positions just to kiss him again, rut up against him, and let himself paw at the fabric of that damn uniform. So familiar but so aggravating as well, covering the golden skin he was so keen to kiss and suck and bite. All the grabbing and tearing until seams gave Piers' lean body was exposed to him, spread out beneath him, desperate and willing, wanting Chris as much as Chris wanted him. After that, it was just various positions he could get Piers in while he was naked save for his boots and scarf.

[bllsbailey]

Yale Student Stabbed at Pro-Hamas Demonstration Describes How the Campus Is a Terror Snake Pit

There’s that saying: history repeats itself. And then, some liberals have zero grasp of this topic, which is why we’re seeing a nationwide Charlottesville-like protest but without the tiki torches. It’s not white supremacist agitators either—it’s young people. The alt-right yelled, “Jews will not replace us.” These leftist clowns chant “Long live the Intifada,” and other war cries that directly call for the destruction of Israel. It all means the same: kill all the Jews. The keffiyeh has replaced the swastika.

The Ivy League is reverting to its antisemitic roots. At Yale, these pro-terrorist thugs established an encampment this month, went on a hunger strike, and have now assaulted Jewish students. They’ve been captured trying to stop Jewish students from entering certain buildings. Sahar Tartak was stabbed in the eye, and there is significant doubt that she will get justice for being victimized simply for existing (via The Free Press): 

I was stabbed in the eye last night on Yale University’s campus because I am a Jew.  I wish I could say I was surprised, but since October 7, Yale has refused to take action against students glorifying violence, chanting “resistance is justified,” “celebrat[ing] the resistance’s success,” and fundraising for “Palestinian anarchist fighters” on the frontlines of the “resistance.” In more recent days, the school has allowed students to run roughshod over their most basic policies against postering, time and place restrictions, disorderly conduct, respect for university property, and the rights of others, not to mention stalking and harassment.  Yesterday, I paid the price for their inaction.  […]  By April 20, the students’ encampment had grown to roughly forty tents, sleeping bags, umbrellas, and a stereo. On Saturday night, a student in a Class of 2026 group chat encouraged Yalies to come and show their support for Yalies4Palestine. As a student journalist for the Yale Free Press, I went to check it out. Other reporters from the Yale Daily News were already on the scene.  I should say here that I am a visibly observant Jew who wears a large Star of David around my neck and dresses modestly. I went over with my friend Netanel Crispe, who is also identifiably Jewish because of his beard, black hat, and tzitzit.  When we approached the anti-Israel protest accompanying the tent encampment to document the demonstration, we were quickly walled off by demonstration organizers and attendees who stood in a line in front of us. No one else documenting the event was blockaded this way.  […]  They pointed their middle fingers at me and yelled “Free Palestine,” and the taunting continued until a six-foot-something male protester holding a Palestinian flag waved the flag in my face and then stabbed me with it in my left eye.  My assailant was masked and wearing a keffiyeh, concealing his identity. He also wore glasses and a black jacket. I started to yell and chase after him, but the wall of students continued to block me as I screamed. Next, I went to the Yale police, but they offered little in the way of assistance. They told me that their orders came from administrators who weren’t present at the demonstration, and that there were only seven officers to handle a crowd of about 500. So I was checked out by an ambulance EMT, who recommended I go to the hospital.  The midnight demonstration, the encampment, the violence, all of it violates Yale policy. Some of it, like my assault, also violates state and federal law. Yet nothing meaningful seems to happen in response. Given Yale’s permissiveness, I had the sinking feeling that someone would get hurt. I just didn’t expect it to be me.

It’s a damning and unnerving account of how it’s open season on Jewish students at Yale. And if that wasn’t eerie enough, Tartak said this assault reminded her of how her mother was persecuted for being Jewish in Iran, being subjected to rocks that left her with a scar on one eyelid that remains visible to this day.

Why are college presidents and administrators endorsing these attacks? Why are they allowing the inmates to run the asylum? Is it fear, or do they agree with the vicious antisemitism and anti-Israel advocacy that’s veered into calls for genocide against Jewish people?

The signs that things could go off the rails at Yale were seen last year, too.

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[defiant-firefly]

Oh yeah fun fact about those escape room games me and my mum have been playing: they make no fucking sense. Not in a 'we can't solve them' way, they're actually fairly easy (for me anyway but I think that's cause mum gets bored) but because the protagonist is a detective with stupid reasoning sometimes.

Mostly saying this because she got shot at and kidnapped (by the guy wearing the keffiyeh so like... yeah that's not helping her case here), ended up in a cabin in the woods, found this guy's camera in his backpack, and said one of the photos on it was suspicious. Two of the three photos were pretty sus. First one is of the protagonist and her friend (I think) investigating the disappearance of a woman at the petrol station from the previous chapter. It's from an angle that makes you think he was just camping out in the fucking trees to take this photo, so yeah that's a bit weird. The second is of the missing woman sitting on a bench reading a paper, taken from within the bushes. Pretty sus, right?

But it's the third one that gets logged as vital evidence. That's the one that makes the protag think there's more than one kidnapped woman here. Clearly, super important! So what was it?

A wedding photo. The culprit's wedding photo with a blond woman hugging him. She's wearing a flower crown that's part of a puzzle, but otherwise, that's it.

The protag thinks a wedding photo is more suspicious than a photo of a woman taken from within the bushes. The Arabic man can't have married a conventionally attractive woman! No villain like this has ever been married before! No no no that's just not right! She must have been kidnapped too and coerced into this! How cruel! /s obviously

Like. Come on. They could at least have made the woman look even remotely like she didn't want to be there if they were going for this. They're not even trying to be subtle about this.

The REAL fucked up thing about this man should be that to get into the attic, he has to pull down the mounted animal heads on the wall in the right order. And he had a fucking lightbulb in a draw that only opens when the guns in the rack are in the right places. And he didn't notice the distinct lack of boards over tha attic window when he pulled up outside. And his number plate combined with a fishing bait catalogue is the security pin for the basement door that unlocks from the inside where the victims are.

The more fucked up guy is the fisherman who locked his car jack behind a number code box. And the protagonist for spending like an hour solving puzzles to put out an engine fire rather than get the fisherman out the fucking car before it explodes.

The culprit is actually cool btw. He has a fucking secret cave behind a waterfall as a secret spot to hang out in after he kills someone. A secret cave!!! Behind a waterfall!!! With a comfy hammock in it!!! And he's trying to kill this dumb fuck protag!!! Sure he might be a murderer but I'd forgive him if he kills this racist, judgemental idiot that has to spend forever organising the box of donuts before she can take one, and locks her office phone inside a locked draw you can only open with the key from a safe, where the code is the amount of squares on the files in the cabinets she also has to organise before she can use them.

Like damn bitch, you live like this?

I get it's an escape room puzzle game, but like. There are some things that maybe just make your characters look insane if you make them puzzles ngl

[nerdypipsqueak]

Lawrence After Arabia (SPOILER ALERT)

Today thanks to the generosity and hospitality of @aivelin @steblynkaagain and @willdudedoo​ I watched the new “Lawrence After Arabia” movie and boy oh boy do I have thoughts, vibes and general WTFery (in no particular order) for you. Buckle up, lords, ladies and supreme rulers of the universe!

1. The soundtrack is... questionable. But we knew that already because it got released, complete with music video, so much earlier.

2. The CGI was... not good. We also knew that because we saw a snippet of it in the music video. But I was not expecting to see the entire screen turn green (like solid green) halfway through the movie. I really understand that the movie was crowdfunded but dammit, if I were a benefactor and saw this I would be severely disappointed. Why I personally refused to donate to this movie is a separate matter; please feel free to DM me if you want details.

3. The acting wasn’t the best. It sometimes felt a bit like a school play.

4. The movie tried too hard to be educational, especially in the beginning when the church custodian tells the little boy about Lawrence, during the public inquiry, during the scene when the secret agents read Lawrence’s file out loud and in the end after the funeral.

5. The movie was actually filmed on location in Clouds Hill, on the grounds and inside the cottage itself. The National Trust (the organisation currently looking after the property) initially denied Mark Griffin (the producer) permission to film on location. He then took to the media (both traditional and social) and ranted about how the National Trust denied his biopic but allowed a “Jane Austen and zombies” movie to be filmed on one of their locations until the Trust gave in.

6. There was a shitload of really random details from Lawrence’s life. Some felt like they were shoehorned in to make the film more educational.

7. I was astounded by the sheer amount of very “in your face” references to “Lawrence of Arabia” (1962), from “nothing is written” to numerous visual references (goggles hanging on the bush, shadow in robes) to literally naming a character William Potter to literally using the quote “the trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts”.

8. So many conspiracy theories! From the black car theory to Feisal possibly being poisoned. In fact the entire film is built around the premise that Lawrence was taken out by two secret service agents in a black car.

9. I really wanted to like Tom Barber Duffy as Lawrence but his performance was just... IDK, bland? There wasn’t much feeling there. 

10. My notes here literally say: “did he just kiss Florence Hardy on the cheek?!” and that’s exactly what happened. We will revisit the Florence Hardy situation later.

11. I want the keffiyeh and the leather motorcycle gauntlets.

12. There’s a flashback to Ned’s childhood where he is seen receiving punishment from his mother. Sarah Lawrence displays a tactic I’ve seen among numerous Christian fundamentalists: she tells Ned she loves him and gives him a hug, then quickly pushes him away and proceeds to administer punishment, complete with the “I do this because I love you” messages.

13. Tom Barber Duffy’s visible piercings sparked joy in me. Thank you @aivelin​ for the screenshot.

14. I was quite excited to see Laurent C. Lucas as Feisal simply because of the resemblance but, damn, he was disappointing and his attempt at a Hejazi accent wasn’t great.

15. Lawrence gets called a “bloody sadomasochistic little bastard” by the head of the secret service. So many opportunities for an intelligent short joke were missed in this movie.

16. “Feisal gives him status of son”. I thought that was Hussein? Am I confusing them? Can someone please help?

17. “If someone isn’t going to annihilate this little shit then I will”. Again, so many short joke opportunities...

18. SO MUCH talk about Ned and Oswald Mosley. I felt that at one point it was suggested that Ned may have sympathised with Mosley but I may be mistaken.

19. I have a weird feeling that Mark Griffin (the producer) was inspired by Matthew Eden’s infamous “The Murder of Lawrence of Arabia”.

20. Cally the dog is a very good boy and so far my favorite character. Cally’s performance was the best and is the only thing about this movie that deserves an award.

21. OMFG NED JUST FULL ON HUGGED FLORENCE HARDY

22. Is Mark trying to make Ned straight?!

23. What the fuck is going on with Ned and Florence Hardy and why does it look like Mark is shipping them?! During the 2 hour feature Ned kisses Florence on the cheek, Florence cups Ned’s face in her hands and kisses his cheek while he turns his head like he’s trying to get a kiss on the lips and then stops himself, Ned and Florence hug, Ned helps Florence down a fence/wall type thing and they have one of those moments where they stand a little too close, still holding onto each other and looking into each other’s eyes, then they hold hands while they walk to the village.

24. Ned pulls a gun on a journalist and almost shoots him. I’m sure this is a reference to that one time Lawrence punched a journalist for asking invasive questions.

25. Is Laurent C. Lucas in brownface make up?!

26. Why TF is Ned bathing in a basin if he has a whole-ass bathtub on the property?! Filming restrictions probably.

27. The secret service agents called Ned “a queer”. No context was provided as to why they would say that.

28. It would appear that the two secret service agents “were roommates” and “there was only one bed”. That is the actual setup of their room and they are filmed sitting on the one bed.

29. At this point my notes say that the soundtrack composer may have been inspired by the BBC News theme tune.

30. The accident is just a major WTF moment.

31. The blood pouring down Ned’s face is just... a lot.

32. Why was there a beep like when someone flatlines on a medical show?!

33. OMFG THAT DICK JUST WENT IN THERE AND INJECTED NED WITH SOMETHING

34. I liked Ned racing the train and the plane on his motorcycle. It was a fun touch.

35. Y’ALL LEAVE POOR MR BROUGH OUT OF YOUR SCHEMES, YOU SECRET SERVICE DIPSHITS

36. The dipshit blackmailed Mr Brough with a picture and I really want to know what was in that picture. Did I miss something?

37. Mark is really going to ride the whole black car thing to the death.

38. The inappropriately happy and upbeat version of “Jesu, Lover of My Soul” was used as the background for Ned’s funeral procession. It was supposed to be a march.

39. Mark Griffin has inserted himself into the movie as a secret agent and a voice-over guy.

40. Deraa was mentioned exactly twice, once as “an allegation” and referred to only as torture. No further context was provided.

41. Dahoum is referenced numerous times but without any context. I feel that Mark struggled to choose between the LGBT theory and his own heteronormative projections on Lawrence and decided to roll with both.

So there you have it. Two hours of my life that I will never get back.

[dherzogblog]

GARDEN PARTY 9/22/79

In late summer 1979 Jackson Browne and a group of like minded LA musicians announced a series of “No Nukes” concerts at Madison Square Garden for September. Like any self respecting young person at the time I was well aware of the dangers posed by nuclear energy after the incident at Three Mile Island. It became a big issue, particularly on college campuses, I was concerned about it but wasn’t ready to hit the streets in protest. The initial concert line up had a distinctly ‘El Lay’ feel. Headliners and performers included The Doobies, CSN, James Taylor, Carly Simon, Poco, Orleans, and of course Jackson Browne. The post Woodstock Hollywood hippy vibe surrounding the event left me a bit cold. Back then my eclectic college radio tastes were leaning hard into punk, new wave, and reggae. But then the organizers announced Bruce Springsteen would perform, and that quickly got my attention. Up till then Bruce had avoided affiliation with any and all political or social movements. His participation was seen as a big deal. I had seen him live for the first time on a year earlier The Darkness Tour and became an immediate convert. I was couldn’t wait to see him again.

Bruce had agreed to headline two nights, including a Saturday night show on the eve of his 30th birthday, on a bill that included Peter Tosh, Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers, Gil Scott Heron, and Bonnie Raitt. It was amazing line up that seemed to spring directly from my record collection so I convinced some Emerson College classmates to join me and we took a train from Boston to NYC the day of the show.

After dropping our bags at a friends small studio apartment where we all slept on the floor, we headed to Washington Square Park in search of “loose joints”. What we purchased was closer to oregano than Panama Red, but undeterred and a bit lighter in our wallet, we headed back uptown to MSG for the big show. We had tickets in the Garden’s top deck. The infamous blue seats where the NY Ranger’s faithful reigned supreme. They were nosebleeds, just to the side of the Clarence Clemons end of the stage. Our vantage point decidedly higher than we were, but we were ready for an epic night.

It turned out to be was an unforgettable evening of music. Gil Scott Heron in peak form with his conscious brand of jazz funk (before he would ultimately succumb to a spiral of heroin addiction), wowed the crowd with his No Nukes themed “We Almost Lost Detroit”. 

Then there was the always entertaining Peter Tosh. At the time, Bob Marley, was still alive and the world’s biggest reggae star, but Tosh was arguably the coolest. Signed to Rolling Stone records, he was hanging and touring with Mick and Keith and the “World’s Greatest Rock and Roll Band”. I vividly remember him prowling the stage in his Japanese robe and middle eastern Keffiyeh smoking a giant spliff backed by the legendary Sly and Robbie. Bonnie Raitt was next, she was nearing the end of the first chapter of her storied career. Not long after, she would enter a tough stretch, ultimately dropped from her label before triumphantly re-emerging 10 years later with her platinum selling, Grammy winning “Nick Of Time”. 

The big question mark was Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers. We weren’t sure what to make of him at the time. Were they a new wave band like their name seem to indicate? Petty and his crew were two albums and a couple of cult singles in at that point. In those pre MTV days you didn’t have much to go on without seeing the band live. You could only judge an artist by what radio played, what Rolling Stone wrote, or what the album cover looked like. The band’s breakthrough “Damn The Torpedoes” would be released a month later. Petty and his band delivered a confident and strong set that night hinting of big things to come.

Finally it was time for the main event. This was a home town crowd and they were ready for Bruce, who would be playing a shorter set than usual. He and The E Street Band hit the stage and the place nearly exploded. I had only seen him live once before and was blown away by his energy and intensity. But just seeing him for the second time that night night I sensed a slightly different vibe. A shorter more urgent set played with the wild abandon of man at odds with himself. He was a house on fire. 

Bruce has grown up in a 60′s culture that believed “Don’t trust anyone over 30” while listening to The Who proclaim “Hope I die before I get old”. Some of those sentiments had to be in the back of his mind that night.

During the show Bruce was presented with a birthday cake that he weirdly, in a rare moment of petulant behavior, tossed into the audience. Later, he had a young woman (later identified as his former girlfriend, photographer Lynn Goldsmith) dragged up to the stage by security only to be immediately escorted out of the building. Even having only seen him once, I knew this was all a bit odd. But the crowd did not seem to mind at all. He blasted through an abbreviated set that had the upper deck bouncing and rolling like an LA earthquake. I have only felt a crowd that frenzied a few times in my life. 

It’s 40 years on and he’s still at it. I’m sure he couldn’t imagine it then, but he would ultimately navigate the challenge of “growing up” in the music business, redefining what it means to mature in the rock world. A few months after this show, he would release “The River” a double album with themes and lyrics pointing to a rapidly maturing songwriter grappling with the issues of getting older.

That night, on the verge of turning 30, performing alongside his peers, playing like the slipper was about to come off his foot when the clock struck twelve, he stood exhausted and triumphant in front of an adoring crowd, diving defiantly headfirst into his thirties and rock and roll adulthood. He really had no choice, because as revealed that night , he’s “just a prisoner of rock and roll” and he’d already been issued a life sentence.

Happy 70th Birthday Bruce.

undefined

[afrojonathan]

Day 24: Fes and Chefchaouen, Morocco

Another big day here, even if it was bifurcated into a Fes morning and a Chefchaouen evening.

I got moving early to take some photos of side streets in the Fes medina that I absolutely loved, but didn’t look as resplendent (nod to Brett Cluff) at night. I also went to the oldest library (attached to that Mosque I errantly entered yesterday) to see if I could get myself in today. There was a different guard, but seemed very dismissive (I couldn’t tell if it was closed or he just didn’t want to let me in - I’m presuming the latter. The internets were unclear whether I would be able to make it in or not, so, worth a try). A local heard my fruitless conversation, and took me to a nearby medersa (old university) that I thought was going to be that library (but perhaps a different entrance). It wasn’t, but I don’t think he was hustling me, I think he thought I was looking for this. I gave him 10 dirhams, admired the architecture in this tiny place, and then headed back to the riad for the comically large breakfast. I even tried to tell them to bring me less, to no avail.

The manager of the riad was nice enough to come help me flag a cab to the bus station, as well as get me a great price (2 bucks, as opposed to 3). He went to give me a kiss on each cheek, which I roundly botched, but we kind of made it happen. (Also, my brother says the Swiss do 3, [which just seems to fit his need for affection and is unclear if true] so I had that in my head during the whole exchange).

The bus station was as unpleasant as any bus station, no more no less. The ride was bumpy and kind of nauseating, but otherwise uneventful.

As we pulled in to Chefchaouen, I saw the mountainous blue-splashed landscape, and knew this place was going to be special. Upon checking in (entirely in Spanish), I realized my apartment was on a pretty iconic street here. Note the steps with the colored pots below. I’m sure I ruined more than a few photos popping out of the apartment, as there was always a line of folks taking photos here.

Intent on making the most of the remaining few hours of sunlight, I walked through the very manageable medina. Things are are pretty relaxed comparatively, which is a welcome change.

I had dinner on the roof terrace of the Clock Cafe, where there was someone playing a guitar-like instrument, and someone singing. It would have been awesome, except 3 teens sitting near me were playing music on their phone and generally being super annoying. Apparently my frosty looks whenever they played music weren’t being recognized. I debated between couscous and a camel burger, and went with couscous. I should have gone with the camel burger. THAT’S IT THIS TRIP IS A BUST.

After meandering around quite a bunch more, I saw a shop that was only lit with candles, and the light was wonderfully reflected with the shop’s many geodes. I walked by it twice, and something finally compelled me to go in. I sure am glad I did.

I perused the geodes and shells that were on display, in this small, cavernous and sexy space. It was definitely the coolest shop I had seen in all the medinas. As Spanish is spoken fairly prevalently here, I spoke mostly in Spanish with Ibrahim, the owner. There was an older French woman Carole in the shop as well, and though I eventually asked, I never really understood their dynamic (and they gave a coy answer about the world being a small place). I eventually bought something there, and as I was out the door, I popped back in to take one more photo. Ibrahim invited me to sit with him and Carole to have some slightly hallucinogenic kif, which is smoked out of a long, thin pipe (I believe it is legal here, based on my readings). I originally declined and went to leave, and then my brain just said “why wouldn’t you embrace this foreign experience, Jonathan?”

The three of us passed it around and chatted in Spanish, English and a wee bit of French. We talked about travel, humanity, kindness, our homes, etc. Ibrahim even brought me some delicious COLD tea (finally! Something other than scalding hot tea in these hot Moroccan days!) I think the cold tea maaaay have gotten me sick, but more on that later. This was one of those moments (and I told them this) that you dream of as a solo traveler. Off the beaten path, chatting with locals, partaking in local customs. Eventually a younger French woman Claire joined us, though I wasn’t clear on her connection to the others.

At one point, I heard lots of car horns and general cacophony, and asked what they thought it was. A wedding, I was told. I joked about American weddings (and how I’m so popular at them 💁‍♀️), and I talked about how I can’t imagine a wedding without alcohol. “How do the weird uncles get on the dance floor then?” I mused, to their enjoyment. After feeling I had stayed a good amount of time (and being mindful to not overstay), I politely excused myself and walked back into the main part of the medina in a bit of a haze.

I somehow ended up right in the thick of the cacophony from before, as it seemed half the Town was marching and celebrating this wedding. I stopped at a corner right as the groom (presumably) walked by carrying a...actually I don’t know the word...a covered throne thing? I assumed the bride was in it. I marched along with the wedding for awhile, and no one seemed to mind (I’m giving credit to the keffiyeh!) They were chanting the same things, and quietly joined in. I walked with them for about 5 minutes, but I had another goal in mind.

I took off deep into the Moroccan night, following a rumor towards a bar. All I wanted these last few days was an ice cold crispy boy.

Wandering the darkened streets of Chefchaouen, I eventually came across a waterfall. I decided I’d come back and check it out in the day, especially because there seemed to be some people lurking in the shadows. After going to the completely wrong place and asking for a beer (of which I think I offended greatly), I found my way towards the (actual) bar OumRabie. On the way, I wound up again amongst the wedding, this time a line of endless cars with people hanging out the sides, cheering, honking, etc. I danced along to the music as I made my way to the bar. I also thought how weird it was that everyone was driving post-wedding, and then remembered that no one would have been drinking there.

The bar: what a site to behold. It was similar to the worst dive bars in NY (Holland Bar near Port Authority comes to mind), plus people were just ripping butts. It felt like nothing had changed in here since the late 80’s. I sat at the bar and chatted with the server in Spanish, all the while a Yanni YouTube playlist was being broadcast. The other grizzled patrons were in RAPT attention with the Yanni, and truth be told, so was I. I had a Casabalanca, a Flag Special and a Stork. They were damn fine beers on a sweaty summer night. Around 1am I decided I had smelled enough smoke and wasn’t really looking to get dinged up, so I walked the 20 minutes back through the quiet and slightly spooky medina, reveling in the experiences of the day.

[silly-nonny-fics-are-for-fandoms]

Memories, Chapter 2: For the one who has everything.

Chapter 2 of my Magi BB fic! This time, it’s Sin’s birthday! Have fun!

Ja’far prided himself on many things, one of them being how well he knew his king. Especially his interests. The king liked his wine slightly bitter, smooth but with a burn as you swallowed, aged for at least ten years, with an underlying sweetness to it creating a blend which soon became addicting. It came from Reim and was renown as a favorite of all who tasted it. He liked his women the same in personality; Someone who was happy to please, but teased and played with him. He wanted to earn sharing the night with them; A reward for nothing is never as sweet as one that is earned, he’d say.

The advisor had sailed with the man for many years, and because of that, they’d shared many memories together.

But, for the life of him, Ja’far couldn’t think of anything to get for Sinbad’s birthday.

He had everything he could ever want; His country, his life, the sea ever present, beautiful women and his favorite wine, delicious food, more power than anyone else in the world, and the love of his subjects. If Sin wanted something—Within reason, of course—he need only ask, and it was his.

So what do you get for someone like that?

He’d been wracking his brain for weeks, months even, to think of something.

Jewelry? No, he has plenty of that.

A day off? No way. He’d never get back to work.

Maybe a night to do whatever he wanted? No… Sinbad would go crazy.

Ja’far groaned, leaning over his desk in slight despair and shutting his eyes tightly. Sinbad was his most important person, and his birthday was only two weeks away… He needed to think of something, and he needed to think of that something fast.

“Hey, Ja’far? Ja’far?” There was a deep, yet soothing, voice from above him. Ja’far looked up, eyes a bit red, even if he hadn’t been crying.  

“Yes, Sin?”

“Woah,” Sinbad recoiled a bit before placing his hands firmly on the desk, a determined look on his face, “Ja’far, have you been working without sleeping again? I thought we’d talked about that!”

“I have been sleeping…” Not much as of late, but sleeping.

“Really? And how much sleep have you gotten in the last week?” An eyebrow raised, Sinbad sat down on the desk and stared down at his general.

“Two full nights’ rest, and two bell long naps.”

Sinbad stared for a moment, then sighed.

“Alright. But…” Sinbad leaned in and quickly kissed Ja’far, who blushed, and the king whispered, “You’re having dinner with me tonight… That’s an order.”  

“Really, Sin? You could have asked.” Ja’far chuckled, looking up at his king and lover. This man, he was simultaneously the reason for his stress, and the best way to relieve it. Yes, they had an odd relationship, but they understood how fragile it was with Sinbad’s position. One day, Sinbad would either need to adopt a child or to father one; Both for which he would need a queen to raise and or birth that child.

“But then you’d forget my request for your work! You never forget an order, Ja’far, so I’m expecting you.” Sinbad’s voice was smooth and deep, the tone he used when seducing a woman. But Ja’far was no woman, and Sinbad knew this.

The only problem was, simply, that voice did similar things to Ja’far that it did to women.

“Of course, Sin. How could I possibly ignore a direct order from the king, hm?” Asked Ja’far taking the quill from nearby and returning to work.

“You can’t. I’ll be on my way then; I think I’ve let that paperwork stack up a little too much…” If too much meant the papers could no longer physically fit onto the desk.

“As thrilled as I am that you are finally getting to the papers, Sin, you can’t today. You have a meeting with the leaders of the Seven Seas Alliance at the next bell.”

“Ah, damn, I forgot that was today.” Sinbad chuckled, rubbing the back of his head.

“Sin, the next bell is in ten minutes.”

The look of amusement faded to shock, wide golden eyes and the king ran out of the office in a hurry to make it to the meeting room across the tower before the rukh’s eye conversation began.

“That idiot…” Ja’far sighed once his king left, “What am I going to do with him…”

The rest of the day passed quickly, oddly enough.

There had been several meetings, preparation for Sinbad’s birthday, and before Ja’far knew it the sun had begun to set on the horizon, and the great bell rang thrice to signal dinner as well as the end of the work day. The general stood and organized his desk before leaving, waving goodbye to some of his subordinates, knowing he would see them the next morning.

And, waiting for him outside of the offices, was the king with a smirk on his face.

“Don’t think you’re going to be able to get out of that order, my cute advisor.”

“One, I am not cute. Two, I would never dream of avoiding your direct order, my king.” Ja’far smiled softly, a bit too happy to indulge the whims of his king and forget the problem of his upcoming birthday.

“You? Not cute? Ja’far, you have seen yourself, right?” Said Sinbad, a look of shock on his face as they walked to his chambers.

“Yes, I have, Sin. And I am most certainly not cute. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Pisti?”

“I’m quite sure I am thinking of you.” Sinbad chuckled as they turned the corner, waving to a few maids and silently wondering if Ja’far talked like that to set him off.

“Hmmmmm… No, I can’t think of myself as cute. Are you under the impression that I look the same as I did when I was a child, maybe? Mnn… No, I wasn’t even cute back then, too many scars—“ Ja’far was interrupted by Sinbad grabbing his wrists and pressing him against a nearby pillar.

“You,” Sinbad purred in Ja’far’s ear, one hand slipping down to smooth over his advisor’s small waist, “are adorable. Scars and all.” The king gently started kissing down the smaller man’s pale neck.

“S-Sin- Let me go—Not here—“ Ja’far groaned, pushing against the other. When he wasn’t let go, he lifted his leg and kneed his king between the legs, face bright red.

“I told you to let me go!” He huffed, watching as Sinbad fell to the ground in pain, curling in on himself.

“Y-You’re right—Sorry- Let’s wait until after dinner… Ogrrhhhh….”

Okay, maybe that was a bit harsh, Ja’far. However, he didn’t help his king up and instead waited until the man felt well enough to stand on his own.

“You kick hard, Ja’far…” Mumbled the King, leaning on his friend.

“I am aware of this, Sin, so next time let me go when I ask.”

“Yes, yes…”

And before they knew it, they’d arrived at the king’s quarters and had already finished dinner, the sun set and the moon risen.

“So, Ja’far, shall we continue from the hall?” Sinbad asked, eying the smaller man up and down hungrily.

“I don’t know, are you up for it?” Ja’far asked, sliding into Sinbad’s lap with a smile.

“Of course. Hmmm…” Sinbad began kissing gently down the advisor’s pale neck, unbuttoning the man’s white shirt with one hand and the other resting at the small of Ja’far’s back, “Should we try with an equip? Never done that before.”

“W-Which one?” Asked Ja’far, sighing gently and slipping his jacket off, as well as his keffiyeh.

“Baal. First djinn, first time using an equip in this manner, why not?” Sinbad pulled back for a moment, smiling that cheeky grin of his.

“Sure… Why haven’t we done that before?”

Sinbad chuckled a little at the slightly bleary look on the freckled red face before replying.

“Because, before it broke, it felt like my dad’s spirit was… Staring at me through the sword, and I think it’s finally settled with me that I don’t have it anymore.”

Something clicked in Ja’far’s head, and he tensed up.

“Hm? Ja’far, something wrong?” Asked the king, looking at the man sitting in his lap.

“I… Have to go, Sin. I just remembered something crucial, so if you’ll excuse me, I’ll take my leave. I’ll make it up to you later.”

Ja’far slipped out of Sinbad’s grasp and grabbed his keffiyeh as well as his jacket, running out of the room as he heard a faint “Hey!” from the room he just left. He ran straight to the treasury; Down the long and winding staircase, past Silver Scorpio and Black Libra, fixing his clothes as he did. The freckled advisor knew that if he waited until morning, Sinbad would become increasingly suspicious of his actions. This wasn’t the first time he halted their nightly activities in lieu of something important, and Sinbad never really questioned that, but if Ja’far was fast, he could accomplish his goal without arousing his king’s curiosity.

As he approached the bronze doors, his heart beat louder and louder with every step. Four guards stood there, and when Ja’far stopped in front of them, they looked at him curiously.

“General Ja’far, what are you doing here this late?” One asked, voice deep and gruff, and it reminded Ja’far slightly of Drakon.

“There’s an object in there which our king has asked me to retrieve, so I will politely request that you move so I may commence with my duties.” The lie fell easily from his lips as he looked up at the taller man, who he now recognized as the man in charge of the nightly patrols, Asad.

“Understood. May I enquire as to what this object is?” Asad asked, and to anyone else it would seem he was merely curious, but Ja’far understood the man was questioning his real intention.

“An old, broken sword. It is to be repaired and placed in the King’s quarters, as it is the only remaining object given to him by his father.”

A look of slight shock fell upon the elder’s shadowed face, and the guards parted for Ja’far to enter the treasury as the magical torches lit once the door had closed behind him with an echoing thud.

It’d been three years since Sindria’s war, and three years since Badr’s sword broke. Now, it lay in the treasury, where Ja’far had placed it unbeknownst to his king once the war had ended. He had spent days searching the wreckage of the country once he was well enough to, and he believed he collected all the pieces.

He walked over to an old chest to his right and opened it with a creak of the hinges as dust flew about. The ex-assassin coughed slightly, looking down into the wooden chest. Moving the cloth covering the broken pieces, he studied it for a moment. There were several pieces, and the leather scabbard sat underneath the broken pieces, having been broken by Barbarossa during the war.

Ja’far remembered that day as if it were yesterday…

The rebels fleeing to Sindria, Barbarossa and his warriors attacking the small island under suspicion of their hiding, the blazing fire, and above it all, he remembered seeing Sinbad’s real rage for the second time in his life. Blue lightning crackling all around him, the sky darkened by storming clouds as he fought against the enemy general. Then, like a flash, the battle was over, and the sword was broken, Barbarossa’s corpse falling through the air and landing on the solid ground as Ja’far’s entire body was alight with the pain thundering from his household vessel. Then, there was a silvery glint in the distance, a Bowman raising to avenge his master, and Ja’far dashed to his master who was landing.

“Sin! Watch out!” The boy cried, his legs aching and bleeding. Like this, he wouldn’t last long. Bleeding, aching, and his body was sluggish as a result. He’d been fighting, and he’d taken down so many people, but a small teenager could only have so much magoi, and the manipulation of his darts required that magoi.

In a final attempt, he threw his darts forward, pushing all of the magoi he could into making them hit their mark. Sinbad looked at Ja’far, distraught and confused at the outburst over all the calamity, and as the teenager reached him and darts whizzed by his head, the color drained from his face.

Ja’far’s darts hit their mark, taking the archer down, but the arrow had already been fired. Yet, instead of striking Sinbad, it hit the assassin in the shoulder.

Sinbad’s best friend fell, bloody tears falling from his bloodshot eyes. The red liquid dribbled from the boy’s lips as he fell into the king’s arms, head falling back as the elder kneeled. The last thing he saw was Sinbad’s face, and a giant flock of birds coming from the distance before everything turned to darkness.

The rest of the Seven Seas Alliance had arrived.

It had taken a lot of healing magic, but Ja’far had pulled through that ordeal. He couldn’t say the same for others, however. Sinbad had bedridden him for a week even after and confiscated his blades for months. He had snuck out during the night to find the pieces, knowing Sinbad would miss the item no matter how much he said that it was just a sword. At that time, he’d had no idea of the deaths that occurred. Those people were stronger than that, he’d thought. He’d hoped. He’d prayed.

Ja’far snapped out of his reverie and shook his head vigorously. If he focused on those painful feelings for too long, he’d start crying, and he couldn’t face the guards when he came out if his face was all red and puffy.  

“General Ja’far!” Called Asad from the other side of the door.

“Yes?” Asked Ja’far, gathering the shattered metal in the cloth as well as the scabbard.

“Is everything all right, sir?”

“Ah, yes. It appears the item had been moved during the last allocation affirmation, thank you.”

Ja’far opened the door and bowed to the guards before walking away towards Purple Leo once more. However, he did not return to his king’s quarters, and instead went to his own to retire for the night.

By the time the sun rose the next morning, Ja’far had already finished his work for the day and had set out to begin his plan for the king’s birthday.

The market had already begun, though few were out this early, and much of the attention was on Ja’far. It was to be expected, even if he took the time to wear the one outfit Sinbad bought him the previous month to wear, so he had something else to wear when he left the castle on unofficial business.

“General Ja’far!” Some cheered, waving to him and we waved in return. Usually, he wouldn’t leave the castle. However, this required something special.

Ja’far walked down the streets, past the market and the red-light district, until he came to his destination.

A small blacksmith’s shop, hidden almost by the narrow road. The smith, a man from Sasan who rejected their doctrine and as such left the country.

“Hello?” Ja’far asked, walking in and feeling the wave of heat hit him like a wall.

“Yes, just a moment!” Called the owner, voice smooth and tired. The freckled man knew it was early and it was likely the other had yet to open, but he needed to accomplish this task before his absence was noticed in the palace.

From a door stumbled the Sasanese man, tall and muscular with long red hair braided behind him and slightly tanned skin. He wore a simple tunic and pants, as well as a heavy smith's apron.

“G-General Ja’far! It’s an honor. What brings you to my shop?” The man said, bowing.

“I need your assistance, sir. There’s a special sword that’s broken, and I was hoping you could either fix it or remake it using the metal of the original.” Ja’far placed the bag holding the broken pieces of Badr’s sword and the hilt on a nearby table and set the scabbard next to it.

“Of course I can, sir,” Said the man, lighting the torches around the establishment.

“Perfect. I’m afraid it’s quite shattered, so I apologize if there’s not enough here to remake it. I have brought the scabbard as well if that helps at all.”

The man walked over to the table and studied the pieces of the broken sword, murmuring a bit to himself.

“Parthevian imperial in design… Probably used by a warrior… Uh, sir, what’s this symbol here?” He asked, pointing to the eight-pointed star on the end of the blade, broken in half with jagged edges.

“Ah, that’s the djinn’s symbol. This used to be the metal vessel belonging to Baal, and so I’d appreciate it if you could engrave that symbol in the new one.”

The man looked at the shattered pieces in awe, seemingly afraid to touch it.

“If this is so important, why did you not bring it to the palace’s smith? Or even General Sharrkan? I heard he’s good at smithing.”

“If I’m completely honest, sir, I’m getting this fixed for the king as a gift for his birthday. This sword used to belong to his father, and it’s the only thing he has left that connects them. So, can you do this?”

“I-I can, General Ja’far,” He nodded, looking at the broken pieces as if they were an irreplaceable treasure, “Uhm, would it be alright if I reinforced it with different metals?”

“Do as you deem necessary, and I hope this payment is adequate for the job, otherwise let me know,” Ja’far responded, placing a bag of gold coins on the table and walking away.

“Wait! This is too much!” Said the man, looking at the general as he left.

“Keep it; Think of it as my thanks for your willingness to do this, and get it done in such a short amount of time. If you still think it’s too much, would you ask your wife to touch up the scabbard and hilt? I’ve been told she’s quite the skilled leatherworker.”

“I… Of course, sir… Have a good day…”

“And the same to you.”

The days flew by as if they were seconds, and before he knew it, the king’s birthday was upon them and the gift delivered to his room, boxed as to keep the gift secret.

This was a celebration the citizens would talk about for years; grander than maharagon, more exquisite than the anniversary festival, and Sinbad was drinking up the attention like wine.

Or, he usually would be.

“Sin? Is something wrong?” Asked Ja’far, a bit worried about his king, despite hiding the gift box behind his back.

“I’m aging, Ja’far… Next year, I’m gonna be twenty-five…” Sinbad groaned, leaning back in his chair. Oddly enough, the two had been left alone; Everyone else had gone to mingle, and the usual women Sinbad had hanging from his arms were nowhere to be seen, as the king had requested to be with his advisor.

“And that’s not so high a number, Sin. Think of it this way; you’ve got six years until you turn thirty. Think of all the things you did in the first six years I knew you.” Said Ja’far, taking a seat in front of his king, keeping the box behind him.

“Yes, much can be done in six years… But it feels like the gap between twenty-four and thirty is huge…” Sinbad brooded, putting his chin on his hand, looking sullen.

“Then why not go enjoy the celebration with your subjects?”

“I’m not in the mood for it, Ja’far.”

Ja’far stood, smiling softly, and walking towards Sinbad.

“Oh, so you aren’t in the mood for this either?” He said, sitting on his king’s lap, and pulling the present into Sinbad’s view.

“Uhm, Ja’far? What are you doing and what the heck is in that box?” Asked Sinbad, looking at the smaller man, surprised.

“What does it look like I’m doing? I’m giving you your gift. Happy birthday, Sin.”

“You’re not usually this forceful, but damn. I think I like it.” Sinbad chuckled, shifting slightly so he could open the box.

It was long and made of dark wood, smooth and bland. When Sinbad lifted the lid, however, he froze up.

Inside, laying in the silk lining, was the sword he’d broken so long ago. The scabbard, once torn and worn down and fraying in parts, was pristine. Almost as if he were seeing it for the first time, laying in his father’s coffin.

“No… Ja’far… You didn’t…” Tears welled in his eyes as he picked up the sword with shaking hands, and gently unsheathed the sword. Beautiful, shining even in the moonlight.

Just like back then.

Sinbad embraced his lover, hands trembling as he cried into the smaller man’s shoulder.

“Eh? Sin is something wrong? Do you not like it?” Ja’far asked worriedly. If his gift brought Sinbad to tears, he wasn’t sure if that was positive. Sinbad cried so rarely that he had little experience with it, and had no idea what to do.

“No, Ja’far… Thank you… Thank you so much…”

Ja’far wrapped his arms around his king gently, rubbing the elder man’s back to soothe him.

“Then why are you crying?” He whispered.

“Because… Th-this… I-I thought… I thought we’d lost it forever… When Baal transferred, I didn’t—I don’t… How…? No, never mind the how… Thank you…” Sinbad continued to cry, soon turning to near sobs. This sword, the only thing he had left of his family, was returned to him.

When he’d run out of tears to cry, he pulled back from Ja’far’s now soaked shoulder, wiping at his face.

“Sorry about your clothes.” He said, voice a bit rough.

“Mn. It’s okay. Are you?”

“I am now.”

“Good.” Ja’far nodded, moving to stand up.

“Oh, no you don’t,” Sinbad smirked, holding onto Ja’far tighter, “You still haven’t made it up to me for leaving two weeks ago.”

“I left so I could get started on your gift, Sin!” Ja’far huffed as Sinbad placed the sword and box on a nearby table.

“So? You told me you’d make it up to me, and you haven’t done that yet.” Sinbad purred, looking over the curvy man hungrily.

“Sin—“

Ja’far yelped a bit when Sinbad’s hand fell on his rear, squeezing a bit while the king started peppering kisses down the pale man’s neck.

“Ngh… Ah, Sin—Not here, there are too many people…”

“Then, care to join me in my room?”

“Yes… My king…”

The twenty-fourth birthday of Sindria’s king would be known for many reasons, but the one everyone spoke of was the king’s drunken harassment of his advisor. However, little did the people know that Sinbad was sober, and Ja’far secretly enjoyed the ministrations of his king in public.

Though, like a good birthday present, that must be kept secret until the right time.

[sinfulfolk]

The Iraq Incantation -- An excerpt from the novel Wilderness of Mirrors

Read below for this subscriber-only excerpt from the forthcoming Wilderness of Mirrors by Nicholas Hallum

Download PDF Version here

An excerpt from the novel

Wilderness of Mirrors

by Nicholas Hallum

    DECEMBER 2001

IRAQI DESERT SKYRISE SECURE OPERATION

The CIA team bought black Land Rovers from a car dealership in Beirut on the first day, with American money laundered through the Syrian-funded group now calling itself “Huzbollah” and no one caring for business receipts in those heady mission-driven days right after 9/11. Cash was available, and the mission trumped all other concerns. The team departed Damascus on the second day, with the idea they would drive through Ad Dumayr before crossing the Iraqi border and moving to points east in the uncharted desert. They drove on a line drawn on a map by Ishmael, the CIA station chief in Beirut, a man who had a compass, an out-of-date U.S. made cartographic map from World War II, and no sense of direction.

The out of shape chair monkeys around him turned red as lobsters and sweated profusely when the air conditioning was turned off to preserve gasoline. None of them had been prepared for a Special Forces-style Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, but here they were.

Then of course there was Peter himself. This was a young man’s journey, heading into the heart of the Arabic Empty Quarter, and he was no young man. By the end of the third day, they’d dug the tires out of the soft desert dirt twelve times and Peter’s calves ached with a deep abiding pain. Yet in comparison with the CIA men along for this ride, he was in comparatively good shape. Despite the sun and the work, he was sadly in better shape than half the CIA personnel.

They were desk baboons, out of their cubicle jungle, trapped out here in the middle of the Syrian Desert, approaching the uttermost limits of the Iraqi desert. Most of them would be lucky to never have to hike two days straight in the desert. For all he knew, they’d once been trained as great strategic thinkers at Harvard and Stanford. But he knew these noobs would never survive.

Peter kept playing that morbid game in his head: who would survive? Besides himself and Ishmael, there was the silent European man with the Chinese wife back home. He had been trained by the Spetnatz, but he was always silent, always watching. Hendrick was his name: he might make it.

Peter shook his head every time the Land Rovers choked on dust. Here he was, at fifty-one years old, on a damned cowboy adventure in a war zone, still being forced to hump over-weighted cars out of desert potholes.

***

Hours after they left the half-maintained roads of Jordan, road one hundred and seventy miles east of Beirut, Peter glimpsed the figure of a man in the distance ahead – a figure waiting for them in a traditional keffiyeh lounging against the side of a weather-beaten Toyota pulled to the verge of the dusty expanse.

Peter had read the files of all the agents they could have deployed in this region – he had read many of their emails and listened to their phone calls as well. There were a variety of Syrian mercenaries they could have called upon as guides – and some ex-PLO Jordanians who might also be helpful in these famished places. There was supposed to be a private CIA deal with the Israelis to provide them with a desert guide who would be freed from prison to take them deep into Iraq.

So on the road ahead, he was prepared for any number of hungry desert guerrillas, strong from long labor, raw and desperate from Israeli interrogation. But as they approached nearer and nearer to the man standing resolutely beside the car, Peter began to think that it wasn’t a mercenary or a PLO fighter that their CIA team had hired at all.

The man standing resolutely against the old white car looked indeed to be Professor Mahmoud El-Amin, the Arabic scholar Peter had last seen two weeks ago in Prague. Peter had last seen the scholar in a dusty Café by the St. Charles Bridge, but he looked rather different now, on the open lonely road outside of Beirut. First, the red-checked Bedouin keffiyeh wrapped around his head and the traditional djellaba he wore transformed him into a denizen of the desert. Even his posture was more vigilant, like a desert vulture –Peter would not have been surprised to see an AK-47 held casually in his hands.

After their posse of Land Rovers slid to a halt, Mahmoud was instructed by the CIA chief – Ishmael – to leave his car behind. But the Arabic scholar demurred: he asked for payment for the ratty old car. Peter was again surprised – the scholar negotiated like an Egyptian market shopkeeper, with a gameful ferocity of purpose.

First Mahmoud described, with great dramatic flourishes, how the car had served him and his family well for nearly a decade, and now it would be left behind. The desert dust and sand would drift over it in a matter of days, and the wind-blown grains would strip the poor, abandoned vehicle down to the bare bones of its mechanical skeleton. Mahmoud – and his car, and his family going back three generations – could not abide such shameful treatment. By the time he finished, it was a matter affecting his great-grandfather’s honor.

“In’shallah, in’shallah – show me mercy – in the end, there will be nothing left to me,” he wailed. “Save the word of the prophet, blessed be his Name.”

Finally, after much arbitration and negotiation, Ishmael named a very high sum that Mahmoud agreed to, and he jumped in a Land-Rover without a glance backward at the dented Toyota. After that, they kept moving across the desert with the professor in the backseat, crammed behind Peter and two CIA men who reeked of days-old sweat and halitosis.

Mahmoud, in contrast, smelled sweetly aromatic, coriander burnt in the sun. He slipped the CIA payment – in U.S. dollars – into the pocket of his djellaba and settled back into his seat, sans seat-belt. Then he turned to Peter.

“As-salamu alaykum,” Mahmoud greeted him. “We are a long way from St. Charles Bridge, are we not, my friend?”

“Wa alaykumu s-salam wa rahmatullah.” Peter gave the extended form of the greeting reply, as an acknowledgement of their comradeship. May the peace and mercy of Allah come to you also.

Mahmoud gave a broken-toothed grin as Peter fumbled the Egyptian pronunciation. “I do not know if we will find peace and mercy here, my friend, and I hope that God is with us, but I do not know, in’shallah.”

On the next day out from Jordan, the CIA’s Jordanian station chief received an encrypted signal from Washington. The orders arrived at four a.m. – and the orders said to split the team. On this day, the majority of the team was to go overland to the north – shamal – into the border region controlled by the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan and the Al-Qaeda affiliated group Ansar-al-Islam. They were to collect intel on Ansar activities, document the al-Qaeda fighters they found and discover if there were any chemical or biological weapons in the villages in northern Iraq.

Mahmoud and Peter were to be left behind with supplies, but no transportation. Ishmael, the CIA officer, looked concerned. While the other men worked yet again to dig the Land Rovers out of a rut in the road, Ishmael walked with them to a vantage point outside of range from their camp. “Apparently, you’re dead to me now. No communication. No rescue even if you guys are in trouble. Some kind of double-blind black op you’re on, I guess.”

He turned to Peter, his face gray as a corpse in the early morning light. Ishmael looked down at the encrypted tablet on which he’d received the orders. “Here’s the thing,” he said softly. “Whenever you reach the rendezvous point the Bedouin are taking you to, you’re supposed to activate your beacon, and paint the target bright. You can communicate then, right? Keep your GPS live from that point out, you copy?”

Peter nodded. A glance at Muhmad showed him nothing.

Ishmael’s voice dropped to an even lower whisper. He shook the tablet nervously, as if the orders might change. “You have to wait there until you get a signal confirmation from the forces in Kuwait. They’ll send out a division of the 10th Special Forces Group.”

“On your signal, they’re sending them across the border – that’s an act of war – so you better be damn sure you’ve got the right spot, and you’re ready to kick off this fuck’ng party. Operation Iraqi Freedom will start when you turn it on.”

Peter looked down at his GPS unit. A signal from that device would start the cascade. That’s what was making this man nervous: a war would start on Peter’s word.

“You send your signal, then we’ll see the elephant,” said Ishmael. “You copy?”

See the elephant. Peter recalled the phrase from his early days in training in the Army Signal Intelligence School in the 1970s. Even in the modern era, centuries after Hannibal’s elephant-led invasion of Asia, military men still described the onset of warfare as the moment one saw the elephant – a shocking advent of destruction. Once war began, the momentum became unavoidable, it became a power in itself, thunderous and terrible as any earthquake.

***

On the next afternoon, as they came into a desert wadi, there were riders on camels in the distance. He squinted, trying to ensure this was not another sun-spot apparition. Peter watched as the camels lolloped across the desert toward them, driven on by cries of ‘hut, hut!’ and ‘yalla, yalla!’

Two camels with empty saddles were yoked to their train: one for Peter and one for Mahmoud. They came quickly into the wadi. The men slowly unbent themselves and swung off their stringy-muscled steeds.

“Al kuwa,” said one of the riders, speaking badawi, Bedouin Arabic, his voice coarse and gravelly from desert dust. God give you strength.

“Allah-i-gauik.” Mahmoud gave the traditional reply. God strengthen you.

After that exchange, the Bedouin men did not ask for their encrypted identification codes or mention any of the protocols that had been discussed in far-off Washington D.C. Such identifiers mattered little in such a wasteland. After the greeting, the Bedouin turned to their priorities of water from the deep wadi well for their camels, grain and dry grass measured out in small quantities, and the treatment of small wounds and abrasions on their camels’ legs.

Mahmoud was left to explain who they were, and he did so in the Egyptian manner, by reference to their familial heritage. “Bedu,” said Mahmoud. “They are Kufra Bedouin, Sanusi, descendants of the Banu Sulaim.”

Peter watched the men work in their careful manner. Their camel’s legs mattered, and the feeding of the beasts, and then the cleanliness of the water, and after all that was done, only then did they see to their own feeding, and water and comfort.

Matters of sustenance and survival were of infinitely higher importance to these men than the implosion of some distant skyscrapers. For centuries, tribespeople such as these had trickled through the desert’s too-porous boundaries – just as they did in the 1960s with Kim Philby and Robinson Gale – just as they had done forever, through the vagaries and incursions of the World Wars. Peter wondered if such Bedu tribesmen who wandered the desert terrain between Jordan and Mecca, even cared which nation they were in any more. They ranged freely over the great escarpment of the Arabian Peninsula, and further north, crossing the Sinai and into Egypt and the great southern Sahara desert, crossing without regard for the national borders of such recent “countries” as Syria and Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Even now, as this new highly vaunted “War on Terror” disrupted nation states across the region, the destination of these people would always be the horizon – their strategic goals the next well, the next wadi, the next grazing for their sheep and camels. The Bedouin might play a part for a time, but the next move in the great game was for such travelers only a momentary pulse in the great and everlasting current of the desert.

***

As the sun set across the expanse of wasteland, the men somehow produced a live lamb from their packs. A small snuffling white thing, seemingly nearly comatose from its day-long journey on the back of a camel. With words that sounded like a muffled oath, one of the men struck the head off of the lamb – an act that came as a shock to Peter because the violence came with no warning – and the man held the blood draining onto the ground in a shaking circle but without interest or enthusiasm.

Yet as Peter watched the lamb’s blood splash out in a shaky circle around the edge of the wadi, passages he’d read as a child came to him: the lamb sacrificed for the sins of the people, the wave offering and the meat offering. This was the land, this was the world in which such sacrifices were done, and here they were not abnormal at all, but every day.

Moments later, the lamb was skinned, the fleshy meat impaled on sticks, sizzling over the blazing fire. They ate in the traditional Arab manner, using their hands to dip the meat and the bread into sauces and spices on its way to their hungry mouths.

Satiated, Peter sat back part way through the meal and watched the men laugh and talk and trade stories with one another. His Arabic was very good, but these men spoke in the accents of the deep wastelands of Syria, and it was hard to catch their meaning.

Mahmoud saw the same. “The desert abides, and the Bedu abide, in the care of Allah, most merciful, most bountiful,” he murmured. Peter knew what he meant, for as they watched the camels step carefully through the desert, Peter felt himself out of time.

It occurred to him that foreign travelers had come here for nearly a century, caught in the wasteland, sending signals up to bounce off the ionosphere, sending signals home. Even T.E. Lawrence had used radio, ancient vacuum tube contraptions. Hypothetically some of his signals still bounced around the ionosphere, degraded now beyond deciphering.

The journey took seven days. Slow plodding on camelback, no wasted energy or effort under the hot sun and the frigid nights. For it was January – winter here too, in this latitude – and in the Iraqi desert, the temperature dropped precipitously in the late hours. Peter found himself thinking of the T.S. Eliot poem, a description of another journey in the middle of winter. He muttered those words at dawn, as they all crawled groaning and shivering out of their bedrolls. “Ahlan, what do you say?” said Mahmoud.

Peter spread his arms, and said Eliot’s words loudly like an invocation, as dawn came across the horizon:

“A cold coming we had of it, just the worst time of the year.” He skipped the part about summer palaces and silken girls bringing sherbet. Not so useful to think of now. “A hard time we had of it. At the end we preferred to travel all night, Sleeping in snatches, With the voices singing in our ears, saying That this was all folly.”

Peter stumbled. “I forget the middle,” he said. “It ends with “I should be glad of another death.”

Mahmoud grimaced at him. “I thought you would offer words of hope, not such dark sounds. You drink too much poetry.” He gave Peter a look, mingled disgust and compassion, and packed up his bedroll. After a moment, he handed him a steaming cup of the dark Turkish coffee, their breakfast, such as it was.

***

The Bedouin had a destination in mind and kept them moving through the hot hours and through dusk and sunset and into the next night. As the sky darkened, the stars above grew from pinpricks of light to a sweeping constellation, a river of sparkling brightness. Peter glanced upward and shivered as he sensed a flickering uncertainty in the wavelength of light, a vibration that caused the night sky itself to seem to waver for a moment. He looked down, watching his camel make its careful way across the dim desert landscape.

Finally, they made their destination. They had come to a new wadi – a well or small oasis – at a rocky place the Bedouin called Ba‛al Hadad, or in the ancient Semitic languages, the place of the worship of Hadad, the storm and rain god of the ancient Sumerians. However, the well at Hadad was dry and useless to them – it was filled with stones and sharp bits of grit. The weariness of the day took much from them, and they had no energy to search for other water now.

“The Bedu say this dry well is where Moses watered his sheep, a thousand years ago,” said Mahmoud after consulting the Bedouin. “He was a sheepherder, you know?”

“It was longer ago than that,” said Peter. “And he was more than that.” He pictured the Moses portrayed in the illustrated Bible he’d read as a child, holding a flaming rod of power, calling down the angel of death upon the Egyptians.

In the dark hours at Ba‛al Hadad, night terrors came on Peter. Not insomnia, but instead terrible dreams of cannibalism and worse. An hour before dawn, the sky was a deep blue, like the bottom of the ocean, and Peter was unable to even try to sleep.

Finally, when he turned his flashlight on, he could see bones all around their campsite. Human bones, slick and raw and warm to the touch still: and the bones were distributed in rotating patterns, creating vast unnatural vertices and graphs, the shapes out of sync with human geometry or natural ability.

He put his light across the dead fire, towards the hobbled camels, on the other side of the huge stone. But the camels were gone too, every one of their bones stripped bare and distributed around the campsite as well.

Something moved across the great stone shelf of the Ba‛al Hadad. He flinched only to realize that it was merely desert mice – jerboa – hopping among the bones, their random movements startling him afresh.

He turned desperately towards Mahmoud’s bedroll: but Mahmoud was alive, and snoring happily in his sleep, oblivious to the world. Peter turned back to the pillaged campsite. At the outskirts of the camp, he could hear a great wind beginning to rise, hissing and spitting as it came closer.

Among the scattered bones, he found the men’s clothing, separated thread by thread.

Colonel Schwarzkopf had told him this hard truth in Washington D.C. before they departed: “We’ll arrange for an enticing offering, one that will be willingly devoured.” Peter winced to remember that statement now. He had known all along, in his heart of hearts, how few might return. He thought of their families, the wives and children they had mentioned back in Jordan and Syria. If their families were confronting him now, what would he say? He doubted that he could appeal to the “cost of freedom” as a justification for his actions.

The wind was rising over the stone slab: the desert preternaturally calm in the pre-dawn darkness.

Peter quivered with unshakeable fear: his hands trembled and shook as he desperately dug through their belongings. He had to upend their packs on the dirt before he found the military- issue short-wave radio that they’d been given, for use only in emergencies. He had to search again for the frequency code, and finally found that in his wallet, where he’d placed it for safe- keeping nearly a month ago, when he was safe in Alexandria, Virginia.

His fingers shook so much he had to take multiple stabs at the “On” button on the short-wave. Finally, he hit it, and he turned the dial to set the frequency. He plunged the tiny speaker on its wire into his ear. Static surged in waves on his radio, screeching sounds rising and falling as he tuned in. Mahmoud stirred and opened his eyes, looking at him in concern.

As if in response to the sound on the radio, the wind around him gusted, the dust and dirt of their campsite wavering in the air. He glanced away from the great stone shelf of Ba‛al Hadad on the horizon. He had the weird sensation that a sandstorm was coming their way, even though they were several thousand miles from the open Arabian desert of the Empty Quarter. A static storm was rising on his short-wave, a raspy buzz of nonsense filling the spectrum. He felt as if he were standing akilter on the world, his feet or his head askew, and now he could hear in his head that apocalyptic sonnet of John Donne’s, the words echoed eerily in his brain:

At the round earth’s imagined corners blow Your trumpets, angels, and arise, ARISE From death, you numberless infinities Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go ; All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,

Static crashed in his head. He felt himself mesmerized by the oncoming sound of the wind. There was an illness in his inner ear, nausea and dizziness overwhelming him. He fumbled again at the frequency, hoping to hear the station numbers come in clear. He found himself muttering words he only half-understood: “All whom the flood did… war, death, age, agues, tyrannies…”

He tuned the dial back and forth, trying to raise the station despite the black spots that filled his vision, the disorienting ebb and flow of his pulse in his veins. He felt as if a whirling thing were moving through him, edging hard against the rhythm of his heart. He punched the access code in, the Morse code bits falling out of his fingers as he peered at the paper: dit, dash, dit dit, dash, dit dit. The solidity of the Morse calmed him. The military would take care of this, just thinking of the efficiency of the military calmed Peter down.

Despite his dizziness, rising nausea, and uncertainty, he saw that Mahmoud was awake now. But he was muttering archaic Arabic words Peter could not understand, eyes closed as if in concentration. Perhaps he was praying. When Peter touched him, he found himself pushed back by static electricity, as if something were grounded there, like a high-tension electrical wire sending power popping and hissing as it ran current into the ground unnaturally.

A voice spoke in his ear, a sound he did not expect to hear. “Acknowledged. Enter validation code, ID: Strike Wanda Forty-Two.”

Peter found himself breathing faster at the sound of the military voice, and he fumbled the first time he entered the code, and had to re-enter it. The validation voice changed the signal, transmitting his voice to his command officer. The voice came in, a bold brassy American sound, but wavering over the miles, in and out of range.

“So, Fisher, you’ve found it? What’s your GPS lat long, we’ll do a pickup next week, all right? Got it all locked down there? Mission complete?”

“No, no,” stuttered Peter. “Goddammit, we need immediate evac, I think it’s gone all wrong. I don’t feel safe. We’re in danger here. It’s not safe – I didn’t expect to – ”

“Need those GPS coordinates though,” came the calm voice over the air. “Don’t care if you’re under fire, won’t help us find you without coordinates.”

Peter wildly wondered if the GPS coordinates could shift and move under the stress of whatever Coriolis force was whirling around them and through them. What if the coordinates moved like a will-o-the-wisp? What if they were gone, and by the time the military arrived, the solid earth and its precise geo-location had moved hundreds of miles away? What if the location was lost to them, and Peter and Mahmoud with it?

It had been a long journey from Lebanon across the Syrian desert and through to this last well at Ba‛al Hadad. He was weary beyond belief. And now the bones of their Bedouin guides were scattered in precise patterns all around them.

He groped desperately through his pack until he found the GPS unit, and he saw that the unit was solid and the numbers on it unmoving. He read off the numbers, and asked for immediate evac again. Mahmoud had stood up now, he was shivering in the strange wind.

“All right,” said the blustery man on the radio. “But the weather guys tell me there’s some sort of storm coming in, around your location, so we can’t send a chopper to you through that. We’ve got a Stryker brigade starting your way though. Your coordinates are about 800 klicks away. We should be there in about forty-eight hours. Let’s say 1600 hours Tuesday, if we come straight through.”

Peter felt himself exhausted, his voice hoarse, his pulse pounding in a weird syncopation. He felt as if he were going to have a heart attack. “What the hell are we supposed to – ” Peter began. But the military voice interrupted again.

“Put Professor El-Amin on the line.”

Mahmoud listened seriously for a long time. He was trembling with the same syncopated rhythm that affected Peter.

When he got off the radio, his face was ashen in the ruddy light of the oncoming storm, and the unreal reddish twilight of the dawn. “Begin negotiations, min sadiq, that’s what your Amerikanee military wants us to do.”

“But we’re surrounded by dead bodies, and they want us to write mathematical formulas? It’s unreasonable to – ”

Mahmoud was not listening to him. Mahmoud had scratched the beginnings of a great seal of Solomon, and added the vertices that made it into what Peter knew to be the precise geometric form known as a Petersen graph, on the desert ground itself, close beside the great shelf of stone. Peter’s own equations and mathematical algorithms, in neatly printed form, were rapidly unrolled by Mahmoud from the case near their side.

Mahmoud swallowed hard and looked at him. “Min fadlak, do you really want this thing on the side of the Amerikanee?”

“We must,” said Peter, hesitating. “It currently it is on the side of Saddām, he feeds it. I have been instructed to bargain with it. And if it is on anyone’s side…”

“You will choose to feed it? They are insatiable.” Mahmoud turned to him, his eyes wide with terror. “Do you understand what I am saying in these ancient words of Aramic and Arabic? Do you know what your great masters told me to do, what you are offering this… this thing?”

As Mahmoud spoke, the words sounded corrosive, acidic in his throat. Sweat poured off his skin; the tendons stood out on the backs of his hands as he wrote in the dust and the blood. Peter stared at him, seeing a small vein that curled like a snake at his temple throbbing from strain. Mahmoud wrote furiously in the sand, a border line of protective words all the way around them, and an invocation.

Peter nodded his head slowly. He had designed this work, these mathematical systems.

“Then you are cursed,” Mahmoud pointed at him, in the Arabic manner, with three of his fingers. “You should pray to Allah, most-merciful, that you do not know. I hope this is truly what your country of the Amerikanee wants. For there is no re-negotiation of such promises.”

Peter looked up at the night sky. Will this all be worth the cost? That one last thought filled his head as a green aurora rose on the horizon and encompassed the sky, the brightness casting abnormal shadows across their camp as it swept towards the Ba‛al Hadad, overwhelming the world in a tidal wave of light.

***

In his dreams later on that fateful night, Peter was standing on the stone carapace beside the Ba‛al Hadad, a luminous and unnatural fog drifting around him. Mahmoud was with him, and this time, he saw a bearded King approaching them over the mirage of a reflecting pool.

Mahmoud spoke, his voice like a dry leaf before a storm. He mouthed the ancient words of greeting:

“Oh great one, blessed are you and blessed be your fertile lands.”

The ancient King held up his hand, turned it, discarded Mahmoud’s statements with a backwards brush of the hand, in the Arabic style. “I do not rise to hear your praise, I come because you call me with a promise of blood and flesh.”

Our own dead bodies, thought Peter desperately, that’s what he means, not any future deaths, not any more.

The King glanced at Peter, as if he could read his thoughts. “And I see you wish to make me promises of more. Much much more!” The King clapped his hand formally, as if in command, and in some kind of unnatural joy at the prospect.

“Now,” said the King, bending close to them. And his breath was redolent with corruption, of long unburied bodies. “You have been entrusted to make an offer to me. I am beholden to a self- styled Lord of this Land, the man Ṣaddām who comes of the tribe Hussein al-Takriti. I can leave this Assyrian emperor’s service, as I am not held securely by him, and he has not fulfilled all his promises, but I cannot leave without knowing what you will give me for my honored service. What do you offer me in return?”

“Much more, much more,” said Mahmoud, echoing the King’s words from moments before. And Peter saw a vision of bodies laid in concentric circles all around him in the desert, bodies laid out in dead and dying patterns as far as the eye could see. Cities of the dead, all for the taking. Mahmoud read from his text to the King, but Peter could barely understand the words he said, as his head buzzed and sang in the dream.

“And furthermore,” said Mahmoud. “You will not be bound to a structure, you will instead be free to act upon this land as you will, taking the lives you need to serve us. Our masters also offer many many up as a willing sacrifice: at least one hundred thousand souls. And in the end, the Amerikanee offer to grant your freedom.”

The King frowned, but Peter saw he was concealing a smile in the deep folds of his beard. “This is well, min sadiq, this is well. But as you will not be binding me, how shall we then speak, as we must for me to know your commandments? We cannot always meet in dreams, you know. The visions are not always clear to you with such short lives.”

Mahmoud hesitated, and Peter realized that no one knew enough about such entities to know about the difficulty that a semi-free entity might pose, in terms of basic communication. How to give battlefield commands to such a creature? Peter found himself dismayed, and turned to leave the dream.

And then a new vision burst into his sight: he saw a group of orange-suited men, tied in grotesque positions, being brought to know death over and over, but not dead – not yet. Instead, they were brought to the borderline between life and death, and muzzled and incoherent, blind and deaf in all their human senses, forced to exist on that borderline until they absorbed the djinn’s reality. They spoke only in the creature’s harsh and guttural tones, their voices and their very souls subsumed in the creature’s corrosive and unnatural tones.

The King pointed, and as Peter watched, the orange-suited slaves faded away.

“These will serve me, these will be my speaking voices,” said the King. “You will destroy these simple tribespeople for me, and through such half-dead creatures, we will have concourse. I agree to these terms. You may honor me now.” And Peter and Mahmoud then both bowed down flat on the ground, to show they understood.

***

When Peter woke in the morning, he found himself still in the posture of worship, legs and arms and neck cramped from long obeisance before the vision in his dream.

Mahmoud hardly woke at all. He was hot to the touch, and his lips were blistered, as if they had been all night held to a hot kettle. “Ma`amaltesh hāga ghalat,” he muttered in his delirium, and Peter laboriously translated: I haven’t done anything wrong.

Mahmoud sang gently then – an Urdu song, a traditional ghazal. An ancient poem, nearly forgotten by time. Peter didn’t even know that Mahmoud knew Urdu – it was a language of Pakistan. And the fact that he was reciting poetry unnerved Peter to the core.

What if the poetry was an invocation, just as the many poems that his father had forcibly made him memorize over the years – the haunted elegiac poems by John Donne and George Herbert and Angleton’s favorite, T.S. Eliot. Was Mahmoud invoking something, or trying to stop something?

“Mahmoud,” said Peter. “We’ve got to get out of here. Or if we can’t do that, we should complete the ritual. Fulfill our mission and get the hell out of here then.”

Mahmoud did not open his eyes, but he croakingly his voice emerged. “We have completed this thing we were sent to do, min sadiq. We have done the task.”

“’Ana ’āsef,” muttered Mahmoud. I am sorry. “I’m sorry too.” Peter fumbled frantically in his backpack. With his eyes closed, he managed to

get the radio on and the frequency dialed in. “’Ana mehtāg doctor.” said Mahmoud. I need a doctor. Min fadlak. Please.

“I know, I know,” whispered Peter. “I’m looking, I’m trying.”

Peter opened his eyes and initiated his call sign on the radio in a kind of trance. The voice on the radio was brusque in response, demanding an answer. “What did it say? Did you present the terms of the negotiation? Do we have a deal?”

“The answer is Yes,” Peter said. “I don’t know – I think it said yes to all the terms. Some modifications – some necessary adjustments – but yes.”

“It is the end of me,” said Mahmoud. “I am sick to death – ’Ana `ayyān.” “You’ve got your damn answer, ok? Can you get us immediate evac?” yelled Peter into the

microphone. “I don’t care what it takes. Goddammit, I got a guy dying here.”

“We’re close, son,” came the calming voice over the radio. “Close enough to see your position on the horizon. We’ll be there within an hour.”

Mahmoud coughed then, unexpectedly, and then he spoke aloud, desperately. “But you must warn them, the djinn will take the first sacrifice which is offered – this is the fee we must pay him upon his emergence. And the men in their Stryker jeeps, they do not know this. You must tell them to seek a djinn’s protection, seek some sign of protection.”

“What? I don’t understand.”

Mahmoud stared at him, once last time. ’Ana ’āsef, he said again. I am sorry. And then the radio connection was gone, the signal fading away. “Ma`as-salāma,” said Mahmoud, and his eyes closed. Good-bye, my friend.

Then Peter recalled the words he said when he was standing beside his small Toyota on the desert road. There is now nothing left to you, my friend, nothing. I hope that is worth enough to save you now. Peter gently closed the man’s staring eyes. Blessed be your name.

A negotiator, who had completed his final bargain. He remembered Mahmoud negotiating for his car, and he hoped that the man had been just as fierce in negotiating a settlement for his family in the event of his death on this mission. None of us ever think we are going to die.

He looked down at Mahmoud’s sunken cheeks and unmoving chest, where the blackened stone from the Washington monument was resting uselessly. Even that stone had not been enough to prevent Mahmoud’s mind from cracking under the strain of this invocation. He remembered what Colonel Schwarkopf had told him with such confidence: we’ll arrange for an enticing offering, one that will be willingly devoured.

***

The Stryker battalion arrived at the Ba‛al Hadad one hour later. Mahmoud had not moved in all that time, but Peter was very much alive. He opened his eyes to see a man with the stripes of a lieutenant general bending over him, shouting at him in American desert fatigues.

Peter looked around, confused. He was lying on bare desert ground beside the dusty prone form of Mahmoud El-Amin. Above them was a bright blue sky and a few faint clouds.

The sergeant wordlessly handed him a bottle of water. Peter looked around, still halfway expecting to see the bearded King. Yet he knew that they’d been living in a desert dream.

“We’ve got a whole damn NATO contingent here for you, boy, I hope it’s worth all this.” The lieutenant general pointed behind him, where European flags waved.

Peter turned his head, to see German and French troops standing far back, coming after the Americans. Then he laboriously got to his feet, feeling bone-weary in heart and body. He leaned against the jeep, and took a long drink of the proffered water. There was a tank moving ponderously through the dirt towards the stone, and a brace of rugged-looking Strykers. A quartet of Humvees in close proximity, full of healthy looking soldiers disembarking and securing the location.

He looked around at the men with their guns moving into the haphazard campsite, all around the Ba‛al Hadad.

“So where is this thing?” said the sergeant impatiently.

Peter gulped down another drink of water and pointed towards the great black stone shelf. “But there’s danger,” said Peter. “You shouldn’t – ”

Then it was too late.

As the carapace protecting the great spirit of Ba‛al blew apart, and the stones began to fall from the sky like hail, Peter felt himself to be hallucinating, everything colliding in his head: the heat, deprivation and the undeserved death of Mahmoud all overwhelming him at once, numbing him to the sight of terror. A great whispering reverberated through him.

***

Twenty yards ahead, the soldier standing next to the useless tank with its heavy armaments put his hands up nervously to his brow, as if to brush away a gnat. Peter saw a thin line of blood trickle out of the man’s ear. By the time the soldier got his hands to his hairline, the shuddering rhythm had done something to how the man held his fingers.

Peter watched as the man took a firm grasp on his own head and jaw, and wrenched, snapping his own neck with his bare hands, and the last time that Peter saw him, the man’s eyes were turned round the wrong way staring at him with a terrified knowledge as the body collapsed sideways to the desert floor.

Somewhere in the distance, the howling of jackals or desert wild dogs seemed to jerk together in a simultaneous uncertain cry. With a chill, Peter knew then that the sounds he’d been hearing in the distance were not made by jackals or dogs.

A susurrating, shuddering rhythm emanated out of the deep desert. It came closer to them every moment. The sound was enthralling, and made it hard to think as it pushed into them, welling up and down like an electrical current, a wave coming up out of deep, deep water.

The iron token Peter held in his coat pocket wouldn’t be enough to protect him.

“Do you have a dollar bill?” Peter said urgently to the sergeant standing next to him.

“What?” the man was staring open-mouthed at the soldiers sinking slowly – some resisting – to the desert floor around them. There was no sound as they were rendered immobile – no screams or moans of agony. They simply stopped moving.

“Do you have a fucking dollar bill?” Peter screamed, and wordlessly, the sergeant reached in his wallet and handed one bill over as a line of blood seeped out of his left ear.

The current rose around them, cycling stronger. And Peter shut his eyes and desperately massaged the shape of the pyramid on the back of the wrinkled dollar bill, feeling the swelling power of the eye that looked unceasing, and he could feel the current slow to ebb around him, a tidal flow moving subtly around a battlement.

He could feel the weak ties of this ancient symbol pulling him through that vast sea of power, slowly towing him back out of the deep waters to safer ground. But he was oh so deep in this mess, and safety was so very far away.

And without even thinking about what he’d heard, Peter knew that the explosions had come in unnatural patterns of scorched concentric circles, one overlapping the other in an endless disharmony of waxing and waning. Circles, branded into the desert forevermore.

There was a great throbbing lurch and the world fell sideways. Peter’s eyes shot open in time to see the tank vibrate wildly, sinking into an uneven mirage, before it disintegrated into smaller and smaller parts that hung in the desert air for a moment before blowing outward in an angry and soundless explosion. Behind the tank, Peter could see the great stone carapace of Ba‛al Hadad blowing itself to bits as well, every solid iota of it exploding outward into the desert.

The stones went up into the atmosphere; he saw an immense expanding cloud of material silhouetted against the night sky, occluding the stars.

Half the stones came back to earth with a rumbling crash, dirt and rock flying past the remaining Humvee and the prone bodies of the dead men. The stones whistled madly as they flew past him. With a sharp penetrating pain, a small sliver of errant rock sliced into his belly and upward to lodge against his rib. The grinding agony of it came a moment later. He clutched his side and cried in breathless anguish.

The escarpment of stone had vanished as each stone was propelled outward as the thing inside finally, irrevocably, moved. His wound throbbed, and Peter knew that the bait had been taken.

He moved to the side like an automaton. A solitary Humvee was still standing next to him, solid metal, unshaken. With a wondering finger, he touched the small Chinese symbol scratched into its hood by a superstitious soldier. That ancient symbol was the only reason why the vehicle was untouched, why the person inside had survived thus far. Peter saw that he was, in fact, still alive. But unmoving.

In the driver’s seat sat a man frozen in terror. Hendrick, said a NATO name tag. The young man was shaking, eyes bloodshot and hollow with fear. Without further thought, Peter pushed the trembling Hendrick into the passenger’s seat. Peter got into the driver’s seat. He turned the key and shifted gears. Then he pulled the wheel to one side to avoid a body lying across the road. His hands were sticky with blood. He glanced down at the spearhead shaped wound in his side.

Peter found himself panting hard. Blood bubbled out of the wound in a slow leak with each of his breaths. The purifying light of that blast had hollowed him out – he felt himself now to be just a moving husk.

Three hundred yards ahead, he could see the observer post, where the rest of the NATO contingent had halted, while the advance team of Strykers went in and never came out. But although he could see the cracked stone shelf where they had been at Ba‛al Hadad, the NATO contingent had disappeared already, the unified force already on the move. In the far distance, a plume of dust showed the path that they’d taken towards al-Shad and points beyond. Kuwait was ahead, if they drove for forty hours straight, and were lucky as hell.

Peter shifted gears frantically as the tires snarled and slid in the gritty sand. He never let go of the dollar bill with its talisman, clenching his fingers tightly around it like a claw. His face was streaked with the lines of dried tears. It felt like his face might crack apart along those fractures. The man next to him was whispering, mumbling to himself now, a mad mantra: I was following orders, orders, orders, just orders.

Peter tried to ignore the man’s insane mutterings. After all, he had seen what had happened to Mahmoud. He felt that would happen to him as well, he saw no way to avoid that fate. In his heart of hearts, Peter knew that he was welded now to this thing in the desert, that he was tied irrevocably to this moment.

Always, Peter saw that great phosphorus light exploding in his head, cauterizing all his memories, everything he’d ever been.

An excerpt from the novel Wilderness of Mirrors by Nicholas Hallum

I write dark fantasy, horror and SF as Nicholas Hallum. You can follow me on my Amazon Author page here, visit me on Twitter or Facebook.

  The Iraq Incantation — An excerpt from the novel Wilderness of Mirrors was originally published on Ned Hayes