The Gone-Away World (26 page)

“Saffron! Yes! We have been saffron men since before the British!” he trumpets. “We were always saffron men. Our children are born with saffron hearts, our mothers sing the weights and measures to send us to sleep. There are no other true saffron men in Addeh Katir; Fudin is the place where saffron
wants
to be sold.” He leans close and grins. “If you throw a box of saffron up in the air
anywhere in the whole of Asia
(except maybe in bloody Russia, which is a crazy mad place full of the children of bears and wanton women from the ice), that saffron will blow in the wind until it falls like rain here in Fudin, and I, Rao Tsur, will be standing outside with a box to catch it in, and welcome it home. We know the secret whispers of saffron; we know how to love it and keep it, and we sell it only to the deserving, always at a fair price . . .” He peers at Gonzo, as if unsure, and then his eye lights on me, and on Leah, and he erupts again. “Saffron is for lovers! There! These two, they are lovers, yes? Hmm?”

And at this point, because our delighted humiliation is not complete, it appears that Rao Tsur has a wife. She is lean, and beautiful in a mournful way. She throws up long arms and spreads wide immense hands. Her elbows bend and straighten, and she looks like an angry heron.

“You are an oaf! Yes, Rao, yes, you are. I am married to a buffoon. May you be forgiven for your clumsiness, so that the shame does not grow too much for me and kill me stone dead where I stand. Yes, stone dead. Yes. My mother (bless her dead and departed soul) was an idiot when she promised me to you. Oh, she said, any child of my friend Seeta and my friend Li will be a fine man, because she is wise and he is beautiful and both are loyal. Oh yes, she said, it's a fine thing I do now for my daughter.
Bah!
Do you hear me?
Bah!
And I, fool child, I looked at the broad-shouldered youth they showed me when it was time, and I saw the fire in his eyes and it lit me up like a tramp! Oh, yes, we were young then, and I thought of nothing but arching backs and sweat and the pumping, clenching ecstasy! I nodded, I agreed to my own doom, thinking with my crotch! Hah! But now look! He is fat! Fat, here and now, when the world is starving all around! How does he do it? Who knows? Not me, who have grown scrawny! Thin like a spider, a witch to fright the children, a stick woman to be broken by the wind. Oh, there was a time when I was fine, with a proud chest like a maharaja's pillow, all covered in silk. A chest to drive frenzies of lust, to start fights and make women tear at their hair. Hah! But now look”—and here she thrusts out for our inspection an impressive bosom, little weathered by time or hard living, and the muscles in her neck pronounce her fit and strong—“I am a waif! A wreck! And all because of you!” she adds to Rao Tsur, who is admiring the presented cleavage with some interest. “And
now,
when you should be selling saffron to feed your family and maybe, just maybe, restore to your ailing wife her former strength and beauty, though God knows her looks have departed under your wastrel management and she is dowdy and no doubt you mean to put her aside like a torn waistcoat,
now,
I say, you are offending these good people, because a blind man could see they are not lovers, not yet, and you have embarrassed them and maybe now it will never be! You may well cringe, husband, like a lardy, corpulent dog with a mouthful of your master's dinner! You have placed their love in jeopardy, idiot man, and what price saffron in a world where love is unsound? Eh? Eh? Bah!” And with that she collapses into a chair and scowls at him, drumming her fingertips together.

Rao Tsur looks at us, apologetic, and draws close.

“Acute embarrassment. I mingle my responsibilities. This ailing madwoman was placed in my care (curse my compassionate nature and my promise to my father always to succour the weak!) when I was a younger man, just starting in the world. She believed herself a hedgehog then, and spoke not a word. It was a simple thing to tend to her. A bowl of goat's milk and a warm box of straw and she was quite content. Alas! I meddled, for she was of such surpassing beauty that I fancied God, divine and high above, could not intend her to be thus for evermore. No, I thought, surely this creature has a higher purpose, an angelic destiny. (Not that I fancied myself a part of it, you understand, no, no, for Rao is modest, you see. No, a mere conduit to greatness, a
catalyst,
is Rao.) Thus, I coaxed her to the schoolhouse and there educated her in simple language and science, what history and art I knew, along the way demonstrating the fallacy of the hedgehog conceit. She took to learning as if born to it, and I rejoiced, thinking I had played my role in God's creation. Oh, yes, I was quite cock-a-hoop. But, alas for Rao! I unleashed a monster! She delights in the most foul-mouthed and lascivious pronouncements, and her delusions evolved along with her cognition! Her lusts now focus not on male hedgehogs, which are at least able to defend themselves, but on poor honest Rao! She believes herself my wife. And worse, she has acquired (through ceaseless acts of copulation with troglodytes and roadside peddlers) a brood of children more appalling even than herself! Unhappy Rao, fettered to a howling succubus and her demonic brats, forever punished for his presumption . . . and yet . . . in this rare instance one perceives she has uncovered a fragment of the truth, as a pig scratching in the earth uncovers, without comprehending, the cornerstone of a temple. You are not lovers! I have offended you! I have spoken out of turn (this hag's infections of the mind are virulently contagious) and I would make amends . . . perhaps a reduced price, if you wished to purchase a large quantity?”

T
HE ROAD
goes by slowly, miles of hill country giving way to forests. I drift, lulled by the soft, easy pressure of Leah's rump against my lower body. She leans back onto me, perspiration diffusing through her clothes, a wicked, sexual marzipan smell, brushed with a sharp tar of hospital. She cannot fail to be aware that I am daydreaming of her, of her mouth and her buttocks. We are too close together now for such secrets. She lets her head rest against mine, and breathes out against my skin. There is a waft of this morning's mint toothpaste, and then I can taste her lungs; intimate exhalation.

We round a corner and the road becomes a dirt track and it winds up a madly perfect woody hillside—maybe even a mountainside—to a temple-shaped sort of thing with minarets and a long jutting balcony facing west, and I realise that this is where I'm going. I'm having my date in Shangri-La. Leah gasps and yips, and Gonzo throws me a pure puppy grin like “Did I do you proud?” and I nod and laugh out loud at the sheer amazingness of it and smack him on the back, and we wind on up the snaky path.

We park in a forecourt strewn with actual gravel. Leah and I start trying to unload the gear and Gonzo sternly tells us to go get ready and if they're still fixing the place up when we get back, we can stroll a bit. He actually says “stroll like lovers” and Leah and I look hurriedly away from each other in case one of us is thinking no or maybe in case we're both thinking yes, because that would be too soon, too much, all crunched up before we've had a chance to enjoy courting. Leah nods at me and scurries off breathlessly to “get changed.” The SpecOps waiters abduct my command table and Sally “Eagle” Culpepper vanishes to the top of one of the minarets and unlimbers her long gun and seems to disappear against the stonework. Gonzo draws me off to one side and produces of all things a camouflaged suit-carrier, from which emerges a dark suit in approximately my size and a shirt not stained with dust or blood. He shows me to an empty, dry little room with a cracked mirror and an orchid growing in through the window.

When I return to the long balcony, Leah is standing at the very end in her jumpsuit and I feel a bit awkward in my knock-off Armani, until she turns and her eyes light up and she seems to be sizing me up in a most pleasing manner. Then she reaches for the zipper on her jumpsuit and pulls it all the way down, and it drops off her shoulders and she peels it down over her chest and reveals a shiny, rippling gown which tumbles in a lean curve from white shoulder to well-turned ankle, because from somewhere, no doubt by girl magic, she has located a silk dress. Gonzo, master of all things, obtained for me a civvy suit, but not even he could manage
glamour.
Without his help, using only the secret communications of women, Leah has contrived to look like an Oscar winner. She wriggles. The creases fall out, and she steps from her jumpsuit, barefoot, and kisses me, then breaks away and whoops into the gathering dusk. A whooping woman in an evening gown is a woman to delight in.

Candlelit dinner for two at Maison Gonzo lasts until one in the morning. It is not actual Italian cuisine, but rather a wild blend of Asia and southern European, moistened with a wine-like drink bought from a friend of Rao Tsur, who makes it out of mango. We look at one another across the table, and our fingers touch when I pass the water jug and it is almost unbearable, and then there is dancing. Annabel (known to me now as Annie) sings jazz and Gonzo accompanies her on paper and comb. Big Jim Hepsobah is percussion, and there's a ring of steel around us, a one-hundred-metre hard cordon backed up by Eagle and her imaging gear and that scary gun—although Gonzo assures me, as he leads us to our accommodation for the night, that Sally's night goggles will not be pointed our way from now on. This is private time. He throws wide the door to a prince's chamber and hugs me, and departs to go do whatever reconnaissance he has promised in exchange for this date. There are two beds, but Leah has no time for my chivalrous notions and we tumble desperately into one. And that is all you need to know about that part. Sleep takes us sometime later, wrapped in rich musk and honeysuckle.

B
OOTED FEET
on stone, and clattering intensity. Gonzo, at speed and professional, and I wake because some part of me, even post-coital and even after a period of separation, knows the pattern of his urgency. I am standing by the time he reaches the bed, and he tosses me two bundles and Leah wakes smoothly too, because nurses know about crisis. I shake the bundles out as Gonzo vanishes again through the door, and realise that he was wearing a full moonsuit, and that we too are being put into biochem gear, and this means something very bad; it means that they or we have gone non-conventional, and since we don't have biochem (we have more terrible things, as I know well) it can only be them, and they have made a very serious mistake and this theatre is about to be the testing ground for Professor Derek's baby. That's a horrible idea and I want to be appalled by it but that will have to wait, because right now I am zipping Leah into her moonsuit and taping the tag down and she is doing the same for me in turn, and we are trotting, shuffling, galloping out of paradise and back to the convoy, and the suit smells of other people's armpits and latex and silicon and my own fear, and ever so slightly of Leah's body and mine.

“Chemical,” Gonzo is saying, “sarin base, five kilometres. Wind?”

And Eagle says, “Thirty off,” which means the gas will probably blow past us, because the wind is thirty degrees off true, true being the line between the gas contact and us. And then some bastard says:

“Second contact!” and it's Gonzo. The gas is on a broad front, and thirty degrees will clip us, test our moonsuit seals, and everyone checks their seams again and Jim Hepsobah in the other RV tosses some silicon to Annie and tells her to come inside, no one's going to shoot at us right now and if they do we're just gonna run like hell, and we career away down the road. Sally Culpepper is on the radio warning the units ahead of us and the rest of the SpecOps waiters are alert but basically pretty chilled out, because they maintain their own suits and they
know
there's nothing wrong with them. Leah puts her hand in mine and she is shaking, just like me, and she rests her helmet against mine and stares into my eyes and I know, I
know,
that as long as we look at each other like that, everything will be fine.

Everything is fine.

Until we get to Red Gate and Captain-idiot Ben Carsville.

Captain Carsville is a fantasist who lives war as movies. He's something between a running joke and a sucking chest wound. He made captain in peacetime, promoted over better soldiers because he looks good on a poster and he walks and talks the way a soldier should. He dodges and ducks under fire, scurries this way and that, panther-crawls and rolls and dummies. For the record, the best way not to get shot when you're under fire is to run as fast as possible in a moderately straight line towards the nearest cover and stay there. If you have to advance, then you leapfrog one another, each man doing this until you get to the target. Unless you are very, very close indeed to the person shooting at you, zigging and zagging just tires you out and gives him the opportunity to shoot at you for longer.

Ben Carsville is preternaturally beautiful in a profoundly masculine way. Looking at him makes you want to listen, rapt, to his perfect voice and his perfect wisdom as it proceeds from his perfect mouth. Sadly, when he speaks, his perfect tones are the harbingers of the perfect screw-up. Carsville grew up on war porn: films made by guys who had never seen real war, comics about men with names like Private Grit and Big Roy Solid. He was a cadet, and then he was a lieutenant on a police action which never really kicked off beyond a few riots and a car bomb which didn't go off. His only combat experience comes from some brief forays on the fringes of this war, “fact-finding” with visiting politicians. Ben Carsville thinks war is a sort of manly sport, and casualties are just what happens when you play.

He also thinks this gas attack is some sort of ruse. Gonzo and his guys have been taken in by the Enemy. They have been fed false data somehow, and now they are being used to convince wise and mighty Captain Carsville to abandon his position so that the Enemy can simply wander in, whereupon the Enemy will have some sort of party in which they will throw soft-boiled eggs at pictures of Ben Carsville and
mock him with their smiles.
He has, in accordance with his moderately weird perception of the situation, not given the order to his soldiers to suit up, and has not told the Katiris in Fudin what is happening. Anticipating an assault on his position, he wants us to hang around to support his troops, and he intends, seriously, to send Gonzo & Co. back along our route to assess the threat. This does not put Gonzo in a cooperative and conciliatory mood. It puts him into a big, angry, SpecOps snit.