The Broken Sword
Authors: Molly Cochran
Tags: #Action and Adventure, #Magic, #Myths and Legends, #Holy Grail, #Wizard, #Suspense, #Fairy Tale
BROKEN SWORD
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Molly Cochran
Warren Murphy
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For Sarah Young
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THE CUP
Marrakesh, Morocco
B
eatrice listened to the
distant strains of exotic music as she walked toward a food stall packed with Moroccan delicacies.
"Kibbee," the stallkeeper droned, somewhat less than enthusiastically.
"Kibbee!" Beatrice squealed. "I've heard of it, Grams. Oh, may I try some, please?"
Her grandmother looked askance at the array of aromatic dishes. "We don't know when this food was made, dear," the old woman whispered.
"Made fresh just now, beautiful ladies!" Meryat Haddish, the stallkeeper, waved a fan over the goods, momentarily dispersing the flies that had come to roost.
Ordinarily he wouldn't have bothered with them. They were English, for one thing. English women were always stupid about food. The old one looked as if she ate nothing but white potatoes, and the other was a girl who probably made faces at everything that wasn't pizza.
And they were rich. The price of the girl's dress alone could support Meryat's family for a month. What had her father done to pay for that dress? He hadn't stood over an oven all night with grease in his hair and sweat on his face, that was certain. He hadn't walked to the souks at dawn thinking about how his oldest son had cut the leather of his only pair of shoes to make room for his toes.
He sighed. There was no point in complaining about the strange ways in which Allah worked. Besides, the two English ladies might be the only customers he'd get all morning. The damnable Americans were parading their frail old ex-President through the bazaar, and the Secret Service was practically driving away the crowds at gunpoint. Meryat hadn't seen anyone except photographers and cameramen for the past half hour, and they never ate anything. Meryat could almost see his beautiful kibbee turning rancid in the sun.
"So, ladies," he said, forcing a smile at the approaching pair. "You try kibbee, okay?" He held up an aromatic stick, to which the wrinkled old bat responded as if it were a turd.
"I'm sure your... merchandise... is quite nice," Grams said, pulling gently on Beatrice's arm. "Oh, my, there's a stall filled with lovely pots and things. Shall we go over there?"
Meryat shook the meat stick gingerly. "No, no. No buy pots there," he whispered conspiratorially. "Is thief. Pots made in Taiwan. Only for tourists."
The old woman was staring longingly at the pot stall.
"You English ladies?" Meryat asked, waving the kibbee to distract her. "My brother, he go to London now ten years. Drive taxi." From beneath his counter he produced a British Union Jack and stuck it in a crack on the side of his stall.
"God save the Queen. Is beautiful lady." He broke off a piece of meat and held it out to her between grimy fingers. "Free sample. You like?"
"Gracious, no," Grams said.
"I would, please." Beatrice held out her hand.
She stood two feet away from the stall. Evidently the girl didn't want to venture too close to the natives, Meryat thought. The corners of his mouth turned down belligerently. If the English princess expected him to leave the counter and walk to where she stood in order to offer her a free piece of his delicious food, she would have a long wait. He crossed his arms. The girl stood in silence for a moment, adjusting her movie-star sunglasses, then finally took a step forward.
"Ah, the beautiful young lady, she knows the food is excellent." Meryat dropped the kibbee onto her palm.
"Oh," she said, startled. "I was rather expecting a pastry."
Meryat was incensed. "But you can
see
â"
"Don't eat it," her grandmother commanded.
"Is good," Meryat said, eating the rest of the piece himself. "Typical Moroccan dish, but better in Marra-kesh than Casablanca or even Tangier. Meryat, myself, makes it best of all."
"Lamb," Beatrice said, sniffing the object. "And saffron, parsley, garlic, andâ"
"It sounds perfectly dreadful," Grams said sourly. "Here's a handkerchief."
The girl popped the meat into her mouth just as her grandmother lunged to intercept it, knocking off the girl's sunglasses. Both of them immediately went to the ground, the girl's hands making broad sweeps over the dirt.
Involuntarily Meryat sucked in his breath. He hadn't guessed. The girl was so beautiful, with hair like spun gold and perfect white teeth and her rich-girl confidence.
She was blind.
"Now your hands are filthy," the grandmother chided, but the girl seemed to pay no attention to her. She found and replaced her dark glasses and smiled up at the stallkeeper. "Thank you. That was delicious," she said.
Meryat laughed to cover his embarrassment. "Did I not tell you my kibbee is the best? Now you buy some, please, beautiful lady. Only two dirham."
With a snort of exasperation, Grams reached into her pocketbook and gave him two coins. In exchange, Meryat handed her a greasy paper with three pieces of kibbee placed lovingly upon it.
The old woman grabbed Beatrice's hand and spread her flowered handkerchief over it before handing over the food. "I suppose it will be pointless to make plans for dinner now," she said. "I expect you'll be complaining of stomachache by this evening."
"Never a stomachache, beautiful ladyâ"
"Oh, do stop calling me that!" Grams snapped. "Excuse us, but we really must⦠Good heavens, that's President Marshall," she exclaimed.
Meryat peered past his awning. "Kibbee!" he roared. Quickly he replaced the Union Jack with an American flag.
"My brother, he drive taxi in New York ten years!"
Grams gave him a hard stare. Meryat shrugged.
"God bless America!" he shouted as the elderly English lady propelled the young blind girl toward the pot stall.
F
ormer President William C.
Marshall picked his way slowly through the bazaar, smiling genially for the photographers, trying without much success to hide the limp from his bad knee.
He was sixty-seven years old. It had been more than a decade since he had held any official position with the American government, but it seemed he was busier now than he had ever been. Despite a less than stellar reputation with the American press, he had been called upon more than fifteen times since leaving office to settle some disagreement or other in foreign countries ranging from obscure new African countries to international hot-spots.
His own government had not sent him on these missions. They were too dangerous, the National Security Council said after the first foreign emissary had journeyed to Marshall's home in Pennsylvania. The United States would take no responsibility for his death while attempting to negotiate a peace in some unpronounceable country in which civil war had been raging for years, said the CIA. Aside from the usual Secret Service protection granted any former President, Marshall was to be on his own.
"He'll make a laughingstock of me," said the current President.
Yet Bill Marshall had succeeded alone where the entire political apparatus of the international community had failed. And he had done it fifteen times.
About fourteen times too many, he thought as he pretended to admire a ceramic incense burner. Who used incense, anyway, he wondered. If someone smoked a cigar or passed wind, you opened a window. You didn't stink up the place even worse with something that smelled like charred flowers.
Marshall set down the pottery after the cameras were finished with him and took out his handkerchief to wipe his face. It was hot as blazes out here, and his bum knee was killing him. This job, he decided, had even more of a downside than the Presidency. He still had to put up with the ill-mannered photographers and reporters, but his stints away from home were now measured in months, not days.
He missed his house on Apple Tree Road, where he had lived since he was a boy. He missed his wife, who had accompanied him everywhere when he was in office. It was too dangerous for her now. Without the extraordinary precautions taken for a visiting head of state, he was a sitting duck for any of a thousand terrorist organizations that wanted to get its name on the evening news.
That was especially true of this mission. The United Nations had long since abandoned hope of negotiating any sort of treaty between Israel and the Palestinians. In Marshall's own heart, too, he believed this effort would fail. He had been approached, not by a representative of either government, but by a contingent of rabbis and Islamic holy men. This would be a mission of peace, they had argued at the house on Apple Tree Road, brought about by men with differing faiths but the same God.
And so it had been for God that William Marshall had undertaken the task of meeting with both reluctant parties in the neutral setting of Marrakesh, because God could work miracles, and it would take no less than a miracle to pull this off.
But God and Man were two different species. No one was holding his breath on this one.
"Good heavens, that's President Marshall!" a refined-sounding old English woman shouted from the next stall.
Marshall sighed as the four Secret Service agents assigned to him closed ranks. They assumed everyone was an assassin, even white-haired old ladies who squealed at him in recognition.
She was towing an adolescent girl who didn't seem to be able to walk as quickly as the old woman might have liked. The girl tripped over some camera equipment and fell sprawling on the ground. Then the cameraman started shouting, the old woman shouted back, and the Secret Service agents were all over everyone like a coat of paint.
"For crying out loud," Marshall muttered. "She isn'tâ"
Something ripped into his chest. A split-second later, as he was falling backward into the pottery stall, he heard the report from the gun.
It all seemed to happen so slowly: The Secret Service men, forgetting the scuffle between the tourists and the cameraman, leapt up into a crouch as if they had been jerked upright on strings, their weapons drawn, their heads all swiveling in the same direction. On the ground, the teenage girl screamed first, followed by other, more distant shrieks. Marshall felt the flimsy stall counter collapse under his weight. One by one, the wares for sale crashed onto the ground. The incense burner that he had been holding flew out of his hands and glided past the stallkeeper, whose horrified expression seemed to be permanently frozen onto his face. Two of the agents broke into a run, their legs pistoning in unison as a leisurely stream of clay pots struck Marshall's pulpy, blood-soaked chest. Another barked into a cell phone. The fourth turned with the slow grace of a runner in a dream, and loped toward the ex-President.
He was thirsty. As he closed his eyes, Marshall saw an image of his house back in Pennsylvania. There was an old well up in the woods, now dry and boarded over, where his grandfather used to keep a bucket and a battered tin ladle. Occasionally the bucket would bring up a tiny spring frog or a dead junebug, but nothing tasted better than the water from that well.
Something warm was on his body. His hand closed around it. It was metal, like the tin ladle at the well. He squeezed it tightly, feeling the pulse in his fingers as his heartbeat ebbed. He tried to lick his dry lips, but found he lacked the energy. Blood was pooling on the inside of his cheek.
The two remaining Secret Service men were approaching him, and the souks had broken into a wild pandemonium, but Marshall no longer saw or heard anything.
The ladle in his hand was warming. Warming... getting hot...
An errant thought passed through his mind that it wasn't really a ladle at all, but some sort of battered metal cup. He wasn't back on Apple Tree Road. He was in Marrakesh, and he'd been shot in the chest by some invisible assailant, and he had lost a lot of blood. The wound was bad. Bad and getting...
â¦better â¦
Better?
Much better, Marshall thought with astonishment. He opened his eyes. An ambulance was blaring into the souks. Propping himself up on his elbows, he sat up. Immediately two Secret Service pushed him down again and then lifted him carefully, expertly, onto a gurney. One of them took the metal cup from his hand and tossed it away.
"The cup," Marshall said weakly, but no one paid attention to him.
As soon as he was in the ambulance, a paramedic cut open his shirt. The ambulance was already roaring out of the marketplace when the blood-soaked strips of broadcloth were peeled away and Marshall's chest was swabbed.
The paramedic looked up, bewildered. "Where is the wound?" he asked one of the Secret Service men.
"For chrissake," the agent snapped. "Rightâ" A deep line creased his forehead. With his fingers, the agent probed around the iodine-tinted hair on Marshall's chest.
All he could find was a single puckered dent, like an old healed scar.