Secondhand Sorcery

It took them a week to get to a place where they could really feel safe again—at least, safe from attack by the Russian government. There were still plenty of things, and people, capable of killing them at a moment’s notice. Like tripping and falling from a kilometer up a mountainside.

A couple of days laying low in Kropotkin, while Therese scrounged for leads and arranged for someone to take care of Aare. Two more days tiptoeing across the Causasus backroads, getting lost and running out of gas in the middle of nowhere. Two more lost to negotiations, trying to persuade the ‘Sixth Imam’ to grant them a meeting, and hammering out when and where it would happen. And now, the actual journey.

First they had to drive more than two hours to the foot of the mountain, along narrow roads through the passes. The Imam’s men had set up checkpoints to monitor and report on their progress; there weren’t many branches in the road, but if they’d decided to deviate from the directions given, it would have been known in seconds. They were also informed, without asking, that the defenders of the Caucasus had shot down three government helicopters in the past year. This was the only possible approach, and if they offended their hosts, retreat would be long, difficult, and dangerous.

They left the cars behind in a mostly-abandoned town in the valley, and ascended to Gamsutl’ on foot. The trails were meant for herding livestock; Ruslan’s wheelchair could handle it well enough, but Nadia was glad to have local guides on hand. One of them decided to treat it as a tour, and told them that this mountain had been inhabited for two thousand years. It had been abandoned about twenty years ago, as the inhabitants left to find work in the modern world. The Imam’s people retreated to the highlands, and refurbished the ancient mountain villages, as part of their war against the White government.

Nadia translated from the Russian for Fatima, but she didn’t seem to be paying attention. She was unusually quiet, staring out at the spectacular view in silence as she pushed Ruslan’s chair. Nadia had a hard time believing the flocks of sheep and goats on the neighboring slopes were so interesting. “Fatima, are you all right?”

“Hm? Nah, I’m fine. It’s just … it feels like coming home, you know?” She waved an arm out at the valley below them. “Coming home after a long time away. It takes some getting used to.”

“Home? You mean Afghanistan?”

“Kinda. Yeah. I mean, I didn’t grow up in a place like this. Lashkargah’s one of the biggest cities in the country, and we had a house in the family compound, right by the river. And the river went through a desert. Nothing at all like this. Wherever this is. Still Russia, right?”

“Dagestan. Just north of Azerbaijan.”

“You say that like I should know where the fu—“

“Southwest Russia,” Nadia supplied. “But east of where we were. The Caspian Sea isn’t far, even if you can’t see it from here. What makes this place like Afghanistan? The mountains? The fact that they are Muslim?”

“Both, but there’s something else, too. I don’t know how to put it. Ask me later.”

“All right.” The talkative guide had courteously cut off his patter while they talked; now he resumed, telling them how they had had to rebuild all the old stone houses wall by wall, replacing the unsafe old clay binding with modern cement, and putting new roofs on the ruins. It sounded like an impressive accomplishment, but Nadia gave a half-hearted translation, with one eye on her sister in case she got too distracted and drove Ruslan over the cliff.

She didn’t know what Afghans looked like, but the three men shepherding them up the trail had features little different from ordinary Russians’. Certainly they were all pale. They wore long, old-fashioned coats of dark wool, each with a kind of built-in bandolier across the chest: a horizontal row of slots filled with bullets for the rifles on their backs. Their hats were big and furry, and they all had mustaches and full beards.

They got another half-kilometer up the trail before Fatima spoke again. “We had places like this back home, too. Papi called them ‘sheepfucker forts.’ The idea’s not that complicated, you just make yourself too big of a pain in the ass to get at for people to bother with you. So we usually didn’t.”

“It doesn’t sound like the local government bothers them here, either.”

“No, but they should, if they’ve been launching raids and shit. And knocking down helicopters?” Fatima frowned at the dust-clouds rising from their feet. “I don’t know what this dude’s after, but he’s got some balls, and he’s getting away with it.”

Gamsutl’ was at the very top of the mountain, and mostly built into its slopes. Whoever first made it had hacked out blocks of stone from the flesh of the Caucasus and stacked them into tiered rows of houses. From below, the buildings seemed to be right on top of each other; Fatima pointed out that they could drop grenades onto the trail from any number of windows.

Yuri was just starting to grumble about the hike when the village’s gate came into view. A thin, elderly man stood in the middle of it to greet them, hurrying forward to invite them in and offer them tea. His beard was on the white side of grey, and Nadia felt a brief, ridiculous thrill of terror that the obligatory rifle on his hunched back would make him topple over and tumble down the mountain.

Now that they were closer, the village looked less rustic and primitive than Nadia had expected. The ancient walls were roofed with modern corrugated tin, or in a few cases shingled, while ten or twelve makeshift windmill turbines poked up from the houses at the peak, their sheet-metal blades whirling in the breeze. Here and there armed men stood watch on rooftops; Nadia saw one lift up a radio handset to report something. There was a large receiver dish on a metal tower next to him, which looked like it could turn itself on a motor. Radar? She saw wiring running along some of the rooflines, bundled and strapped in place with zip-ties.

The streets below were narrow, and cluttered with a mixture of ammunition crates, fuel jugs, and prepackaged food. The last were apparently an emergency measure; Nadia saw a man butchering a sheep on a tarp down one alley, tossing bloody chunks of meat into an oil-drum. The old man (Nadia was annoyed to remember that he had given his name, and she had been too busy gawking to catch it) apologized for the mess, and explained that they were running low on storage space at the moment. Once they finished the latest round of repairs, all the supplies would be neatly stowed away.

“Are they getting ready for a siege?” Therese asked.

“It would make sense,” Fatima said. “Papi had to cut off a couple of these places, way back when, to teach them not to rob our convoys. They usually gave up and forked over some cash to say sorry, after starving for a couple of months.”

The old man looked curiously at them, and Nadia translated. He smiled broadly, and pulled a tiny tin whistle on a string from around his neck to blow a single piercing note. Instantly a mob of women—the first they had seen since they left the valley—came running out of every doorway in sight to set white plastic buckets up in a line down the street. Every woman had a shawl, scarf, or headdress over her hair, many of them embroidered.

When twenty or so white buckets stood in a row, and a row of women stood at attention beside them, the old man dropped his whistle and pulled out a long, silver pipe from inside his coat. He put it to his mouth, shut his eyes, and breathed deeply. After about thirty seconds, a shining bulge like a dewdrop appeared at the end of the pipe. He breathed some more, and it inflated, as if he were blowing up a balloon. A very large balloon, bigger than a beach ball in a few seconds.

It got darker as it grew, and took on a more definite shape, crosshatched with dark lines. When it was so big that the bottom touched the ground, it broke loose, and unfurled into an enormous net of tarnished silver strands, floating by the old man’s knees like a magic carpet waiting for him to board. His eyes were still shut in concentration, and he made an imperious gesture with one hand, waving for it to go away. It obeyed at once, rushing past the line of buckets quickly enough to set shawls flapping, and plunging over the cliff like a diving falcon.

Thirty seconds passed, the old man’s eyes still closed, before the net popped back up. Nadia stepped back in surprise; it was at least five times as large now, curled up into a fat teardrop, and dripping wet. It wobbled closer until it was hovering over the nearest bucket, then shuddered and contracted. Clear water gushed out of its bottom, filling the bucket in seconds. When it was done—only a little overflow slopped over the sides—it moved on to the next bucket, and repeated the process. Again and again it squeezed; by the time it reached the last bucket it was nearly empty. But not quite. The old man waved it away to a patch of grass, where it disappeared with a splash.

Then he opened his eyes. He was breathing much more heavily now, but still smiling. The women gave little half-bows of thanks and returned home with their full buckets; he waved acknowledgment as he said to Nadia, “I am new at my art, but I practice. The Oprichnik will not find it easy, to force us out of our mountain. Now, come. You must be hungry.”

Yuri voiced his incredulity as their host led them to their new quarters. “He’s got a VRIL, and he wastes it on chores?”

Fatima sighed, but didn’t bother to correct him. Therese said, “It’s not something I was ever trained to do, but it would be useful here. Unless someone dams the river, they will always have water.”

As guests, they got one of the bigger houses, with a real shingled roof. It had two bedrooms: one for Nadia, Fatima, and Therese, and one for the ‘married couple’ Yuri and Maria. Nadia didn’t know if they took it at face value that a couple of teenagers had gotten married, or if they were only being polite. Ruslan, who had no real privacy anymore, got a bedroll in the main room, where everyone could keep an eye on him.

Lunch was already waiting for them, a concoction of boiled dumplings and roast mutton with a tomato-garlic sauce. It was definitely Lent now, and she had just seen a butchering five minutes ago, but it didn’t seem polite to object, so she sat down, shut up, and did her best. The room was sparsely furnished, just a bunch of cushions, a rug, and a single oil lamp; Nadia didn’t begrudge them for saving the effort of hauling chairs up the path.

They hadn’t been eating two minutes before a woman came in to set up Ruslan with his ‘meal’ from their store of IV bags. Fatima eyed her suspiciously until the old man told her the lady was a trained nurse. Then she shrugged, and shook her head, and went back to her food.

“He’s losing weight,” she grumbled to Nadia. “And, sure, he could stand to drop a couple pounds, but he doesn’t look good.”

“Well, the bags aren’t really food, are they? Just, I don’t know what. Sugar, salt, and water. Maybe a few other things.”

“I know that! But … “ she gestured helplessly at their brother, whose eyes swiveled to track the motion but didn’t appear to recognize it, or them. He was a little better lately. He reacted to noises and looked at things. He just didn’t speak, or eat, or really move in any purposeful way. He couldn’t go on like this.

“Amina is very good at her job,” the old man assured them. “We rely on her and her friends to keep our fighting men healthy. We have no doctor here.”

“Yeah, sure,” Fatima said, once Nadia had translated. “I’m not worried about that part. This old fart isn’t the Imam, is he? I thought he was supposed to be, you know, young.”

Nadia took a moment to arrange her words into a more respectful formulation. Their host answered that he was only the current guardian of Gamsutl’, that he had been using his pipe for almost three years now, and that the Imam would be with them before evening.

“We haul ass all the way up here to meet this douche, and he’s not even here?” Yuri squeaked. “What the hell?”

“It would be for security,” Therese told him. “He has no reason to trust us. Now shut up, before you offend him.”

“So, the Imam trained you?” Nadia asked the Guardian of Gamsutl’, who nodded with a bashful smile.

But Yuri wasn’t done being obnoxious. “Why’d he pick this guy, though? He looks like he could have a heart attack tonight. Big old waste of effort.”

“I’m sure he had his reasons,” Nadia told him evenly, trying not to let her face or tone of voice show her irritation. They didn’t need to give this man a poor impression of them already. “Is the Imam training many of you that way, sir?” She didn’t know where he would get new pipes from, and knew better than to ask.

His reply was a little hard to understand, and she turned to Fatima for help. “He says you have to be a … a hifaz? What is that? Some Muslim thing?”

“Hafiz,” Fatima corrected. “That means you memorized the whole Quran.”

“Are you shitting me?” Yuri burst out again. “So he’s only going to train people who wasted their whole lives memorizing some moldy old book? Like, a pious geezer strike force?”

Fatima didn’t share Nadia’s concerns about keeping up a good front. “First of all, ass, it doesn’t even take that long to memorize the Quran. There’s schoolkids, barely our age, who do it. They only have to have a longer attention span than you. Second, it’s a great idea, and you’d know that if you’d shut your fool mouth and think for a change.”

Therese agreed, but looked less enthusiastic than Fatima about the idea. “It would make sense from his perspective. Everyone in his hierarchy will have proven he is a sincere Muslim. A spy couldn’t do it—not without training for years.”

“Yeah,” said Fatima, “and now he’s going to have the whole damn region on fire to brush up on their Islam so they can get ahead. That’s how you get a real movement going, see?” She turned to Nadia. “It’s not just that they’re Muslims, or that their boss is a convert. They take this shit seriously, they’re willing to fight for it, and they’ll do what it takes. They’re ghazis, hardcore, just like Papi. Not lazy scrubs like we met in Turkey.”

“Kemal was—and is—a sincere Muslim,” Nadia reproved her. Fatima only rolled her eyes.

The old man had been watching, but obviously not understanding, the whole argument. He looked a bit nervous. Now that they were finished, he spoke up to fill the silence. “Now, with your permission, I will tell you of the Imam and his war.” He cleared his throat, sat up a little straighter, and spoke slowly, as if reciting a formal composition: “When the Almighty saw fit to overthrow the deluded government of the unbelievers, many of their servants, forced to flee from the jinn and their masters, sought shelter in these mountains. Of these an enlightened few quickly saw the folly of their former ignorance, and abandoned their unbelief.“

He paused politely, so that Nadia could tackle the theological difficulty of translating all that accurately without seeming to endorse it. She more or less succeeded (she thought), and Fatima nodded intently. The elder continued, explaining the long history of Dagestan and Chechnya in an ornate style. Nadia soon realized that she was hearing the official history of a new government, or something like it, and had trouble keeping a straight face when she heard twenty-first-century men quoted as speaking lines that would have fit in a fairy tale.

But Fatima smiled, settling back with her head resting on Ruslan’s knee, and nodded in appreciation at the pompous lines. When the old man turned the tale back to the Nineteenth Century, and the first Imam’s war of defiance against the Russian Empire, she raised her fist in a little salute, as if she could see him ordering men to the walls of his fortress with her own eyes. Nadia wondered if she even realized she was doing it.

After a while she got used to the corniness, and settled into translating it all more or less verbatim. Yuri and Therese seemed to find the interruptions a little bothersome, and Yuri actually critiqued her word choices once or twice until Therese threatened to slap him. Maria, on the other hand, seemed about to fall asleep. But Fatima was plainly delighted, and Nadia kept up the work for her sake, even as the old man kept at it for the better part of an hour, and had to break to take ever more frequent sips of tea. The woman Amina moved discreetly back and forth to take away dishes and refill their cups.

When he was finally done with his two centuries of history, Maria was lying down with her head in Yuri’s lap, and Yuri had his arms petulantly crossed. Therese’s face went from polite resignation to faint gratitude that it was over, and Nadia got to work on her latest cup. Too late she wondered if they had anything like modern plumbing in this place.

But Fatima lifted her head from Ruslan’s knee to ask questions about the kind of Islam they practiced here, and the local Sufi tradition, and all sorts of other things. It was all awkward to translate when Nadia didn’t understand half of it, and Fatima kept correcting her pronunciation of Arabic terms. She had just about made up her mind to get to her feet and find a bathroom when she saw that another man had entered the room at some point in the old man’s story.

He too was wearing the long local coat, but his was a bright red, and he had a sword at his belt. His face was ruddy and boyish, and wisps of blond hair appeared around the edges of his furry hat. He had a golden mustache, and looked like he had to shave the rest regularly, but couldn’t have been much older than Keisha. Nadia thought he had a nice smile, but there was an intensity to it that made her nervous too. Especially given that he was looking right at Fatima.

The old man, noticing a delay in her translation, looked up, and saw the new arrival leaning against the doorframe. At once he struggled back to his feet, an arthritic display that made Nadia wince, and hurried to introduce the Fifth Imam of Shamal al-Qawqaz, Ramzan Magomed al-Murid.