The Broken Sword (2 page)

I
nside the souks, a
cameraman kicked the battered metal cup out of his way as he shot some footage of the blood-spattered stall where Marshall had fallen. The cup rolled along the ground, coming finally to rest beside the blind girl.

"Grams," Beatrice sobbed, casting about with her hands. She hadn't risen since she fell over the camera operator's equipment. Her white stockings were torn at the knee, and her sunglasses lay crushed a few feet away. "Grams, please be all right."

"I'm here, darling." The old woman's voice quavered above the wail of the ambulance siren. She crawled over the rubble of fallen pots toward the girl and wrapped her arms around her. "Thank God you weren't hurt." Her tears fell on the dirty skirt of Beatrice's dress. "Oh, my, you've torn your stocking," she said, touching her handkerchief to the girl's scraped knee.

"What happened, Grams? Was someone shot?"

"I'm afraid so, dear. It was the American Pres... Good heavens." She rubbed Beatrice's knee with her finger. Her glove had blood on it, yet the wound was gone. "Your knee..."

"Grams, something's happening to me," Beatrice whispered. Trembling, she sat upright. In her lap was a green-tinged metal cup. Slowly, Beatrice's fingers closed over it. "It's coming from this," she said slowly. "It's warm."

"That? Why, it's nothing but an old..." She rubbed her fingers together. The blood on her gloves was still damp. “... thing...”

"I can see," the girl said.

Startled, the old woman looked up. Her granddaughter's eyes, clouded and crossed from birth, were staring directly at her, blue as the sea. "Beatrice, you must be—"

"I can see you, Grams."

S
he stood before the
mirror in the hotel room, touching again and again the smooth surface of the glass. The walk back from the bazaar had been nearly overwhelming for her: The riot of color and shapes and motion teeming around her was like suddenly finding herself on another planet. The sensations offered up to her had been so strong that she had felt neither joy nor fear, only immense surprise that compounded with every passing second.

But nothing had prepared her for the sight of her own face.

All her life, she had thought of her "self" as something internal—her thoughts, perhaps, or something beyond them. A being that only perceived, not an object in itself. And yet here she was, a girl who was nearly an adult, with creamy skin and red cheeks and frightened eyes the color of the sky she had seen this afternoon. And hair, gold-colored hair that hung down her back and tangled in front of her eyes.

"We should call a doctor," Grams said uncertainly, still reeling from the shock of Beatrice's revelation that her sight had been restored.

"No, not yet. I want to get used to things first. Everything's so strange."

It would have been different if she had been sighted at one time. She would have remembered what it was to see. But Beatrice had been blind from birth. She had never had a concept of the color red, never seen printing, never appreciated that old people looked very different from young people. She had not had time to prepare for the onslaught of visual sensations that had bombarded her from the moment she had picked up the rough metal cup, and the experience was at once magnificent and terrifying.

She turned the cup over in her hands. It was the simplest of containers, a plain bowl small enough to fit in the palm of her hand. Its exterior was bumpy, like a rock whose sharp projections had been worn away by time, but the interior was perfectly scooped, without a single chip or flaw. Its color was a deep blackish green and was translucent when held to the light, as if it were actually made of glass.

"Beatrice, are you sure..."

"Yes, Grams. I'm not making it up."

"Oh, I didn't mean—"

"No, of course not." She smiled at the old woman's guilty expression, and understood it. Her condition had been diagnosed as retinopathy prematura—massive hemorrhage in the retinal capillaries at birth—and was incurable. There had never been any hope that Beatrice would see. The doctors had made that very clear to the family from the beginning, and they had accepted Beatrice's blindness as she herself had.

But this was a miracle. As soon as the cup had warmed in her hands, it had become a part of her, as much a part of her as her arms or her organs. It was Beatrice's private miracle, and she would not let it go. Not ever.

Someone knocked, and the sound sent a jolt of terror through her. She had experienced the feeling only once before, on the night her parents were killed on a rain-slicked road twenty miles from home. Beatrice had been in bed, but the terror had been enough to send her screaming into the hallway.

She had been eight years old. Later, the psychiatrists who would become such a large and unwanted part of her life would say that she had imagined the premonition after the fact of her parents' death. They would explain away all of her special knowledge with the word "imagination."

But the danger inherent in the knock at the hotel room door was not imaginary, any more than Beatrice's certainty of her parents' doom had been. "Don't answer it, Grams!" she shouted, but by the time she'd found her voice, her grandmother was already turning the knob.

"No!" Beatrice ran toward her grandmother.

The door slammed inward, hitting the old woman's head. A gray-bearded man in Arab robes caught her as she fell with one hand and turned her frail, small body away from him. Then, pulling a long knife from the sleeve of his robe, he slashed once, powerfully, against her throat.

For a moment Grams hung suspended in the man's arms, her blood bubbling out of her, shooting across the room. A spray, ripe with the odor of her grandmother's warm blood, hit Beatrice's face.

For a moment the girl stood frozen, too shocked to utter a sound. Then she saw Gram's body slide out of the man's hands toward the floor.

Oh God, no, no,
she thought as she backed away from the Arab.

He approached her slowly, his face as expressionless and efficient as the manner in which he had killed Grams. He lifted his robes as he stepped over the pool of blood that had shot out of the old woman's neck. With an almost elegant gesture, he flicked the blood from the long blade away from him so that it would not stain his garments. His eyes narrowed slightly.

He was trying to figure out how to kill her, Beatrice realized. She retreated further. Her back struck the open window; she could feel her buttocks trembling against the sill. Then the man's forehead cleared, and he took one step to the right. He had calculated the exact angle of his attack.

His arm drew back slowly, a small, economical movement in which Beatrice felt the man's complete concentration focus to a pinpoint. With a gasp, she scrambled onto the sill. Then, as he reached for her, she fell with a shriek toward the pavement four stories below.

She struck the stones of the courtyard with a thud and the sickening crack of broken bones. A smattering of people—a European nurse sitting on a bench beside a stroller, an old man reading, a young couple holding hands—leapt up at the intrusion. The young woman screamed. Beatrice sighed once, aware of the pain streaking through her body. When she opened her eyes, she saw the flap of a white robe from inside her hotel room. The man was coming after her.

Got to get up,
she thought, dazed. The people in the courtyard were moving toward her, their movements slowed as if she were experiencing a dream. And while they were moving, their expressions stunned, their hands trembling, Beatrice felt her bones knitting, the warmth of the cup spreading through her injuries, healing the broken blood vessels, pulling her cells back together.

The cup.
She was still holding it, clutching it so hard that her fingers were white. It throbbed hotly in her hands, singing to her as it did its work. The cup was what the man wanted. He had killed Grams just to get to Beatrice, to
this.

Get up,
she screamed at herself.
Get up now.

Groaning, she pulled herself to her feet. The onlookers in the courtyard halted in their slow-motion pilgrimage toward her. The young woman fell to her knees, either in prayer or simple astonishment; the old man blinked owlishly. Around Beatrice were scattered droplets of her own blood, from wounds now entirely healed. She stared at them for a moment, struggling to believe her eyes, then lit out from the garden into the streets of the city.

Beatrice tore through the cluttered street, stumbling as she crashed into a stall where gaily colored scarves danced lazily in the hot desert air.

The stall owner shrieked at her in Arabic. Across the serpentine market street, two veiled women turned to one another, giggling. Beside them, squatting before a blanket strewn with trinkets and glass beads, an old crone in a filthy burnoose directed a gesture toward Beatrice, hands brushing together as protection against whatever spirit had driven the European girl with the long golden hair crazy.

This might be a dream, she thought hopefully. It certainly seemed like a dream, from the shooting in the bazaar onward. Maybe she hadn't seen her grandmother murdered in front of her. Maybe she hadn't fallen four stories to a stone pavement and broken nearly every bone in her body. Maybe there was no cold-eyed Arab who moved with the grace of a dancer chasing her.

Let this be a dream,
she prayed.
Oh God, yes.
She would wake up in the small squishy bed next to Grams', and daylight would be streaming through the window, and...

And I'd still be blind.

She pumped her legs faster, gulping for air. No, she had never dreamed like this. She had had running dreams before, but the landscape had been entirely different. It had been the amorphous nightmare world of the blind, in which menace exuded from hidden sounds and smells and shapes that bumped her as she passed. This was different. Color screamed at her from every inch of the universe. Shapes were not something you felt when you drew near to them, but real objects that assaulted and intruded into you from a far distance. The buildings she saw were not the perfect monolithic structures she had imagined, but crumbling towers of stone and wood. And people in this new world were all strangers.

Behind her a shot rang out. Someone screamed.

Beatrice cast a glance backward and saw a woman fall. The people on the street looked wildly around to see where the shot had come from. Voices rose in a frenzied crescendo as the mob of terrified pedestrians trapped in the tight bottleneck of the ancient street sought to get clear. They ducked into doorways and flattened themselves against the sides of the narrow buildings, trying to make themselves invisible to the invisible gunman.

That was for me
, Beatrice thought as she watched the woman's still body sprawled on the garbage-strewn street. The man in the white robes knew exactly where she was, and would kill whomever he needed to get to her. Her only hope was to manage somehow to melt into the panicked crowd.

"Thanatos," a woman shrilled as she crossed in front of Beatrice.

A man responded in English. "He's here?"

The woman nodded tearfully. "That is what they say. At the bazaar today, an American diplomat was shot. Assassination."

Just then Beatrice caught sight of her reflection in a small mirror hanging outside a rickety stall. The sight was terrifying. Blood painted one entire side of her face. Her yellow hair was matted with it. For a moment she stood still, frozen at the sight of herself.

It was no wonder the man could spot her. Quickly she grabbed a loose garment from inside the unattended stall. The soft fabric stuck to her blood-sticky fingers.

Her grandmother's blood.

Beatrice choked back a sob. She had died in Beatrice's place, just as another woman had now died.

Leave the cup,
she told herself.
Leave it and hide. He won't search for you in this crowd once he has the cup. You'll he safe.

Her fingers trembled.

And blind.

"No," she whispered, her face set. The cup belonged to her, and so did her sight. If the Arab wanted either, he was going to have to kill her first.

As she ran back toward the crowd, an old beggar carrying a large sack over his shoulder crashed directly into her. Then everything happened almost too quickly for Beatrice to follow. A second shot rang out, this time very close. She felt a thud as the bullet tore into the rag bag the beggar had slung over his shoulder.

"Who... what..." she began, but the beggar fell with his full weight on top of her, then picked Beatrice up and ran with her toward the cluster of buildings just beyond the panic-stricken crowd. She struggled to get loose, but the old man's strength was astonishing.

There are two of them,
she thought. "Help me!" she shouted, but the crowd of onlookers was too terrified to respond to her plea. She still held the cup in her hand. She brought it up and crashed it down on the old man's head with all her strength. The beggar staggered, and Beatrice struggled to wriggle free, but at that moment another bullet cracked behind them.

This time it smashed into the old man's back. Beatrice saw the coarse fabric of his robe fly apart in a gaping, smoking hole where the bullet entered. She screamed. She was still screaming when the old man fell at the mouth of a narrow alleyway.

Stumbling to her feet, Beatrice looked down at the old man, then in the other direction, toward the far end of the alley. Out there was freedom; the alley was certain capture and death at the hands of the white-robed man.

Hesitantly, she touched the old man's head. A vein throbbed in his temple. He wasn't dead yet, though with the bullet wound in his back, he would surely die soon.

Unless she helped him with the cup.

Three dead for me,
she thought.
How many others will I allow to die so that I can keep the cup?
She looked again at the sunlight at the end of the alley.

Three is too many.

With a sigh, she knelt beside the beggar and gently turned him over. At least the cup would do some good before it was taken from her.