CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

And so we wake up. The nurse is bent over a medical monitor, with her back to me, when I speak.

“Hello.”

Startled, she screams, then calms down enough to summon a resident. The doctor examines me and walks away muttering. A special agent of the FBI arrives next, interested to know what had happened in that police station. I slip a fragmental into him and over the next few days, as my body grows stronger with exercise, I weave a suitable tale that will clean up the mess and keep everyone happy.

The authorities already suspect that Director Franklin and Special Agent Thompson were in league and engaged in dark deeds. I encourage these suspicions. No one can deny that Rose Gardner and Joanna Prall died while in their custody. Bourque Fournier is cleared of any hint of suspicion and set free.

It is now time to return home.

After renting a car, I drive north toward Cleveland, taking the back roads for their character rather the bland sameness of the freeways. A traveling carnival has set up business in a hayfield outside a small town in Kentucky. The grass has been stomped into the ground, lending a heavy odor of mulch to the air. After parking the car and paying for admittance, I find that wandering among the gaiety is relaxing.

A merry-go-round broadcasts its familiar music. Other rides flash lights to attract customers. Laughing children dash by, followed by exasperated parents. Couples in their teens saunter by, their arms intertwined around each other, trying to be as physically close as possible. We all hate being lonely.

It feels so good to loosen up. Many people seek relaxation through images of quiet nature. That does not work for me. Rather, I clear my mind of all thoughts. Such sweet bliss, a taste of oblivion. The interlude does not last long. Memories and images intrude. No longer can I force myself to forget, locking away my past. I will always mourn those people that perished at the hands of my enemy, especially those that died while he chased me.

Since my renegade’s memories are now part of my own, I force myself to wade through them: a wearisome litany of cruelty and excess, bland in imagination, though one incident intrigued me.

* * * *

After we parted from each other, my renegade fragmental made its way through the Parthian Empire and out into the arid heart of the continent. It found a small walled city that thrived by protecting the caravans of the Silk Road, exacting a customs toll. It took the body of their king and lived a life of debauchery and idleness.

When the king grew old, it transferred into the king’s heir and continued its ways. The people of the city lived in poverty and terror, while the king’s luxuries knew no restraint—silk clothes, rose water, delicacies imported over thousands of miles, the sweet scent on myrrh, and moisture wasted on elaborate gardens while the rest of the city lived on rationed water. The finest women and prettiest boys of the city became his concubines. Suicide was common. Any man or woman who harbored thoughts of revolt found themselves condemned by the king’s touch and sent to the dungeons for personal attention.

A horde came out of the desert, bursting through the gates with sudden fury. The people of city fought desperately, but their king lay in a stupor, drunk from too much wine. The warriors burned what they did not loot, putting the inhabitants to the sword because they had no use for slaves. When they reached the king’s chamber, the renegade collected enough sense to push itself into the man that sank his sword into the king.

Within a couple of days, the renegade realized that the wandering ways of the horde were not for him. The spartan life living in the saddle, drinking mare’s milk and tough meat, feeling too hot during the days and too cold at night, reminded it how much it missed the comforts of its court, so it turned its horse away from the horde and rode east, seeking another comfortable place. It felt no fear at being alone, having the casual arrogance of a person who had always dominated any situation.

The memories of the warrior that the renegade occupied did not include much in the way of directions and it became lost. When its horse stepped in a hole and broke her leg, it was forced to walk. The barren desert provided occasional mud holes and lizards that flitted from the shelter of one scraggly bush to the next. It sucked on the water and ate the lizards raw. Where were the caravans? After a time, it realized that the caravans had fled the horde.

A faint trail across the desert offered hope, and it followed the trail towards a clump of low-lying hills. The sun bore down with a relentless lack of pity and the warrior’s body actually collapsed for a time, and lay on the sandy dirt, quite senseless. Only the hardiness of the body, toned by a lifetime spent outdoors, kept the spark of life from leaking away. The renegade felt trapped, and forced the warrior’s body to stand and push on. Towards dusk, it came around one of the hills and found an oasis. Green trees lined a small steam, and irrigated fields of barley and gardens provided a lushness of life that the desert lacked. The hillsides were pockmarked with cave openings. The trail under its feet led to a small village of sun-baked brick in the center of the valley.

It walked towards the village. When a young man approached wearing a short cloak and loincloth, the renegade allowed its body to collapse to the ground. The man came up, knelt, and touched it. Desperate for a body that did not ache with thirst and hunger, it pushed itself into the man.

The man’s name was Juba and he had lived his entire life in the village of Peshedar. A girl had seen the warrior and went to tell the village shaman, who sent Juba to meet the stranger. Everyone in the village was related to each other, and only strict incest taboos and the occasional marriage of a girl brought from over the desert kept their minds and bodies clear. The village shaman was the exception. He was a dwarf, known to possess magical abilities. The dwarf came from a long line of dwarfs. Each generation married a normal-sized woman, but fathered only sickly boys and then usually only one or two.

The villagers lived off the produce and grain of their small farms and the goat herds that gnawed at the scarce clumps of vegetation around the oasis. The renegade did not push out Juba just yet, preferring to watch and wait, though it asserted strong suggestions. It caused Juba to look down at the warrior’s body, crumpled on the ground, hollow cheeks and cracked lips. The eyes were blank.

Juba took the iron knife and its leather holder from the warrior, pushed them into the belt of his loincloth, and walked back to the village. His wife sat in the shade of their two-room home, cracking open nuts. Rain was unknown here, so the roof covering the bricks was nothing more than sticks woven together and a bit of mud dried on top. Their three children played with the other village children down by the stream.

“Did you find the man that Aurel saw?” she asked.

“Yes. He is dead, the desert killed him.”

“Terdi will want to know,” she said. “We’ll have to take care of him.”

Juba walked to the center of the village, where a temple with a Buddha stood. The statue was no bigger than a man and the temple was only extravagant when compared to the village.

A dozen men sat in a semicircle around the Terdi the dwarf. He read to them from a scroll, teachings of the Buddha, the ways of peace and acceptance.

The renegade recognized that the power in the village rested with the dwarf. Juba walked up to the shaman-priest and touched him. The renegade pushed out, ready to leave Juba behind.

The renegade met a wall of mental resistance. Never before had it experienced anything like this. Instead of the landscape of the mind laid open for exploration, this wall pushed back. Juba removed his hand and stepped back.

“What are you?” the dwarf asked, putting the scroll aside.

“I am Juba. You know me.”

“Who is inside there with Juba?”

The renegade was stunned. Not only was the dwarf a wall, but he recognized that the renegade had tried to enter him.

“I am nothing, only Juba.”

“Everyone scatter quickly!” the dwarf ordered. “Bring spears! Do not let Juba touch you. He is an enemy.”

The villagers hesitated.

“Go quickly!” the dwarf cried.

The men scattered, shouting questions at each other, but obeying. The renegade considered attacking the dwarf and killing him. Juba was much bigger, but it decided to not waste the time. It pushed Juba out of his body, taking full control for quicker reflexes, then ran back to the man’s house. An empty water jar with a leather handle hung from a hook next to the door. It grabbed the jar, ignoring the questions of the wife, and ran down to the stream. The playing children watched his strange behavior as he quickly filled the jar, then splashed across the stream and ran across the other side of the valley.

The renegade had never run in its life, but the dwarf unnerved it. Scrambling up the side of a hill, falling and sliding on the crumbling dirt, forced to stop when it dropped the knife, it came over the top of the hill and found five of the villagers waiting for it. Their spears were as long as a man and held out firmly in front of them.

“Go back to the village, Juba,” one of the men said.

“No, I am leaving.” The renegade looked around, gauging its chances to either flee, or get close enough to touch one of the men. Moving to the side, it noticed that the spears followed it. These men used the weapons to hunt the occasional antelope out in the desert and keep wolves away from the goats. They were not fools with their weapons.

The renegade found itself pleading, a most unique experience. “You must let me go.”

“Go back, now.”

Deciding to wait for a better opportunity, the renegade obeyed, walking back down the hill and across the stream. The rest of the men waited for him with their own spears. The women and children of the village stood behind men. Three children clung to the wife of Juba.

Terdi the dwarf also waited. “Do not let Juba touch you,” he warned. “He has a demon inside.”

The crowd murmured as the men shifted their stances, gripping their spears more tightly, alert to any movement.

Another man came running from down the trail. “Terdi, there is a strange man lying on the road up there. He is dead.”

“That must be the one whom Aurel saw and whom I sent Juba to meet,” the dwarf said. “I regret sending him, instead of meeting the stranger myself, for I can resist the demon. Bring me my medicine bag.”

When a leather pouch was brought, the dwarf sat down in the dirt. He unrolled a leather skin and laid it before him. From the pouch, he placed three stones on the skin. He touched each of them in turn with reverence. The stones looked ordinary enough, rounded rocks from a river bottom.

“Since you are a demon, you may not recognize these stones. They have been part of my family’s heritage for many generations. They make me smaller in size than most men, but they give me the power of strong medicine. By this power, I demand that you leave Juba and return to the desert where you belong.”

“I cannot do that.”

“If you do not, I will drive you from Juba with stone and fire. Demons are weak, they cannot take the pain.”

“What if I just move to another person?”

“You can only move by touch. Besides, I recognize you now. I have never seen any of your kind before, but now that I know about you, I can see inside a man and know if you are there.”

The renegade believed the dwarf. “I want to leave, but I will take this body with me.”

“Juba stays, otherwise we will kill you.”

“You may be able to kill me,” the renegade admitted, looking around at the spears. “But I will take many lives before that happens. Let me leave here with Juba. He is already dead anyway.”

The wife of Juba let loose a shrill shriek. Her children looked confused and started crying themselves, clinging to her dress with tight fists. Other women in the crowd moved to calm the wife and comfort the children.

“You will leave, never to return?” the dwarf asked.

“You can be sure of that,” the renegade said. “Just point me toward the nearest people. A city or a place where caravans stop. And do not try to deceive me by sending me out into the empty desert, I have Juba’s memories.”

The dwarf looked dismayed. “His memories?”

The renegade laughed. “You think that you know me, but you have so little knowledge.”

The dwarf pointed towards the setting sun. “Go that direction and may the gods take their vengeance on you.”

* * * *

Now I understand why the dwarf feared me when I met him hundreds of years later. He must have been the descendent of the dwarf that my renegade fragmental met, and somehow he recognized the sort of person that I was. He did not trust me because my renegade fragmental taught him not to trust us. How could he do that? Is this some latent ability, a genetic mutation isolated in a far desert?

During the nights, my dreams continue to replay my memories. Having started the process, I continue to regress. I am passing through the centuries before Christ, when empires rose and fell in the Middle East; Romans, Greeks, Persians, Babylonians, Assyrians—a litany of the power of the sword. My former foe and I are one in the memories, reveling in our evil. I am all those things that I have always hated so much: manipulator, slaveholder, pedophile, torturer, sadist. Oddly enough, I am even a glutton; after all, I can always change bodies once my current host bloats into obesity.

There is something liberating about abandoning all pretense towards morality, to serve only my own needs—the exhilaration of a kill or a simple act of cruelty unmarred by twinges of guilt. That I feel such a sense of freedom is truly awful.

My quest into the past continues. I sleep yet again, and return to my final memory; or rather, by the logic of regression, my first memory.