Wildfeather

The twentieth and final chapter of Microcosmia

Microcosmia

Chapter Twenty

Wildfeather

It was easy as pie to track the Afar’s little romp over the Danakil. Captain Wildfeather led his team of three auxiliaries--a pair of jumpy green privates and a pest of a photographer--alongside the unmistakable trail of over a hundred stumbling, rapidly expiring Mamusetans. Occasionally the photographer paused to take a series of snapshots and jot down some notes. During these little unscheduled breaks one of the soldiers would hang back a ways and glare while the other scanned the horizon. Wildfeather was always grateful for an opportunity to segregate himself, and so return his full attention to the desert floor. He was keenly aware of a constant pattern in the prints: while followers were continually shuffling over the course of their leaders, there remained two sets of parallel prints that staggered along in tandem, always around three feet apart and made slightly deeper than the others by a shared burden. And though in many places it was obvious a straggler had collapsed and been dragged, it was clear this had been a one-dimensional, tightly-grouped exodus.

Wildfeather, part Yakima Indian and part Yukon Inuit, was well-versed in detection, assessment, and pursuit--had in fact earned his promotion to Special Forces by successfully tracking the infamous Wraith Brigade during Operation Desert Sabre. It was jocularly rumored that he could determine, through vestigial evidence alone, the age, gender, and political persuasion of a midget pulverized in a cattle run.

So Wildfeather was actually disappointed by the obvious tale-of-the-trail; they’d might as well have assigned a Camp Fire Girl. He was annoyed, too, by the absurdly paranoiac waltz of his assigned men, needlessly sliding and swerving to confound imaginary assailants, and by the intermittent load of the photographer, who was searching for atmosphere rather than evidence. Wildfeather long ago decided he wouldn’t play this man’s game; humoring him was like walking a dog that insisted on stopping to sniff every flower bed. Sooner or later you stop fighting the leash and start leaning on the lash. Or, as in this case, you let go and walk on.

Wildfeather paused to study an oblique line at the top of a lonely rocky table. The pillars of heat surrounding this groove would have thrown off an untrained observer, but for Wildfeather they only exaggerated the anomaly’s nearly horizontal aspect.

“Mackaw!” he said loudly, without turning. “If you still want that Pulitzer, get your perennially dragging butt over here!” The two soldiers, instinctively tensing and crouching, swung their rifles in broad arcs. The photographer rushed up to Wildfeather, now waiting like a bored pointer.

“Yeah?”

“You see that funny slope on the table up ahead?”

Mackaw raised his digital camera, allowed it to self-adjust, and rapidly took half a dozen shots of a depression a hundred yards to the left. “Got it!”

“No, Ansel, I’m talking about that breach in the hard stratum. Notice how you don’t see any heat waves above it? That’s because the darker gray beneath is a source of ventilation. It’s an opening in the rock, probably a cave’s vent. Underground streams used to rush out below the Highlands, through these rocks and onto the dead terrain behind us. They certainly would’ve left a system of east-west caverns, perhaps a series of labyrinths.”

Mackaw licked his lips. “You think that’s where all those natives went?”

Wildfeather looked at him with distaste. “Not natives. They’re people, just like you and me. You watch too many Tarzan movies.”

“I’ll get my lights set up!” Mackaw grasped Wildfeather’s upper arm. “This is it, huh, Scout? This is what we’ve been looking for?”

Wildfeather used one hand to peel off Mackaw’s claw and the other to grip him by the lapel. “Now listen, picture-boy. I’ve been real patient with you up to this point. But I’m not going to let you make a farce out of a tragedy. I’m not permitted to b***h-slap a civilian, and anyway it wouldn’t teach you a thing. But I want you to stop being selfish for a minute and just listen.”

All four men stood stock-still and perked up their ears. Half a minute passed.

“Nothin’!” Mackaw said. “This place is so dead I can hear my career dying.”

“Exactly,” Wildfeather murmured. “You saw the tracks of those people.” He pointed with his rifle. “They went up this path here, almost as if they were storming the place. They must have been out of their minds after crossing this desert.” The men clambered up the winding path until they came out on the table’s flat shelf. They all stopped to crouch maybe twenty yards from the fissure. “Well, they went down that narrow chimney there, one on top of the other. It’s a flue, a kind of blowhole from back when those streams were interacting with molten rock. The whole perimeter of the Danakil is volcanic. And those people weren’t some prancing merry file, you guys; they hit that hole like Gangbusters. See how it’s all torn up around the opening? That was one helluva crowd, and it was mighty important for ’em to get down there in a hurry.”

Mackaw gently shifted his gear. “So what?” he near-whispered.

“So show a little respect,” Wildfeather said. “I’m experiencing a deep sense of the sacred.”

One soldier rolled his eyes comically. The other grinned.

“I saw that,” Wildfeather said. “You guys go ahead and laugh all you want. But you’re gonna be yukking it up on the outside. You too, Mackaw. Until I give the go-ahead, you three are stationed back here. Willard, you and Barnes watch my back. Keep a sharp lookout for rabid Mau Maus, and if you see any suspiciously pregnant-looking Eritrean hausfraus, well, you just make sure you shoot first and ask questions later. Mackaw, I’m depending on you to record every mind-blowing moment of the madness while I’m gone. It’s your job to save for posterity what only your genius can define. If you don’t see me again, give my regrets to Broadway.”

“Wait a minute,” Mackaw objected. “You can’t order me around. How many times do we have to go over this, Captain? I’m strictly civilian. I’m being paid to save this whole ordeal not only by Life but by the goddamned American State Department. I’m an independent observer and freelance photographer. Don’t you forget that. It’s just as important to my bosses that we find Vane’s body as it is to your bosses. So if you’re looking for more medals here you’re gonna need me on your good side when you’re posing.”

“I couldn’t agree with you more, Mackaw. You’ve got a real talent for sizing up a situation. That’s why I know it’ll be crystal clear to you when I tell you that, if you really do want to be on my good side, you’ll stay back here until I say otherwise. When I signal, you are to enter only with Barnes and Willard covering your silly civilian front and rear. Until then, everybody stay well back from that opening.” He walked quietly to the fissure and peered inside. The passage downward was nearly spiral and not too steep; a man of medium height could manage it without hunching. He stepped down, using his rifle as a probe. After about thirty feet of descent, Wildfeather came to a level floor. His nostrils twitched and his pupils dilated. Despite the excellent ventilation there was the strong smell of a charnel house. He was surprised to have not noticed it outside.

This subterranean world was wonderfully cool and dim, eerily illuminated by sporadic shafts of light emanating from surface fissures. Carefully laid out on the cave’s floor was a broad miscellany of masks, figurines, and baskets. Most appeared damaged beyond repair.

Wildfeather knew not to trust his eyes exclusively. He aimed a flashlight and flicked it on and off--one, two, three, four--while swiveling on his toes. He was in a roomy cave leading into a much larger cavern. He froze. His fourth flash had briefly exposed a lurking shape to his right. Wildfeather kept his eyes trained on that spot, knowing that whoever or whatever he had lit would be dazzled, if only for a moment. He simultaneously pointed the rifle and flashlight while his body automatically went into a crouch. At near floor-level he snapped on the light and kept it trained. He saw an ancient, horribly disfigured little man dressed in a tattered sanafil tied on the right in the manner of Afar pastoralists. The man was sitting in the lotus position on an oval mat of interwoven acacia fronds. Wildfeather’s beam probed the yawning eye sockets and distorted features before sweeping down to a ratty lump at the little man’s side, where he saw the wretched figure of a rigid white dwarf camel, her feet bound so as to not be outthrust in rigor mortis. The sitting man had one hand buried in the camel’s scruffy fur. The other lay upturned on his knee. The smell of the dead camel made Wildfeather grimace.

“Batsu wem ji’ Saho?” he tried.

“Parle vu France?” the little man replied.

“Um…propos quelques…seulement?”

“Same here. But it’s a lovely language.”

Wildfeather’s eyes narrowed further. He lowered the beam.

“Thank you,” his host said. “Save your batteries. Speak with me a spell while your eyes adjust.”

Wildfeather switched off his flashlight and slung his rifle behind his shoulder. He took another look around. “You live here, Mister…?”

The tiny man inclined his head an inch. “Xhantu of Outer Danakil.”

Wildfeather found himself nodding in return. “Captain Marlon Wildfeather of the United States Army. I’ve been sent to locate and return to the States the body of one Cristian Honey Vane. He is reported killed by an Eritrean assault force advancing on Addis Ababa. That force was routed.” Still disoriented, he absent-mindedly handed Xhantu a full-face photograph of Vane. “Oh!” he said, recovering. “Forgive me.”

The sage slipped the picture under the folds of his sanafil at the waist and secured it with the sash. “You do not say! That, then, would explain the pell-mell flight of once-sanguine camel drivers.” He tweaked his head to forty-five degrees off the perpendicular. “Eritrea is attacking Addis Ababa?”

“Unfortunately so.” Wildfeather could now make out an enormous arched mouth in the rock, perhaps a hundred yards along. It was the source of that deeper coolness he’d noticed upon entering. He felt he’d been conservative in his previous assessment: immense underground rivers, not merely streams, had ages ago torn into what was once the Danakil Sea.

“This man Vane,” Wildfeather went on, “was an American philanthropist and social engineer who decided to assist people of this desert rather than those who were hurting back home. He was disgustingly rich; he could have bought Montana if he wanted. Instead he bought a large tract of land northwest of here called Mamuset, and made it into a kind of kinky high-tech commune to show the rest of the world just how clever and generous the filthy rich can be.” Wildfeather brushed the rock floor with one tip of perhaps the world’s only pair of steel-toed moccasins. The rock was streaked and daubed with brown smears of blood. He swept his light. Smears also appeared here and there along the cave’s walls. The trail of dried blood went down the chamber and through that gaping archway into the unseen.

“This Vane guy,” Wildfeather said, “was outrageously successful. After some gossip magazine did a spread on him he became a real big shot back home; a household name with all the draw of a movie star or politician. Sure enough, people stopped hating him for being rich. Now he was both popular and rich. Other rich people caught on, and began gabbing about his operation and dressing down--you know, wearing sandals in their limousines, adopting refugees for photo-ops and so on. Now he’s about to become a martyr. After that, who knows? Christ reincarnated?”

“You are very cynical, sir.”

“The Eritreans napalmed Mamuset and turned it into a volcano. A shame, really. Not because the rich boy got his, but because all those poor people were actually a whole lot better off for a while there. Anyways, the survivors, hysterical and half-alive, took off through the desert. I guess they too had become cynical, Mr. Xhantu.”

“That must have been a terrible trek,” the sage said, sadly shaking his head. “No one could survive the Danakil.”

“Oh, they survived all right. Most of them did, anyhow. They came in a single burned and bloody wave, and they knew just where that wave was breaking. They made a beeline for your door, Mr. Xhantu. They came down that chimney, burst into this chamber, and went kicking and screaming through that archway.”

Xhantu nodded. “They were much distressed; that is true.”

“Let’s go see,” Wildfeather said, “why they dropped by so suddenly.” He helped the sage to his feet and they walked arm-in-arm to the arch. Wildfeather immediately halted at a blast of stench. He looped a small disposable nose-and-mouth mask on his face and offered one to Xhantu. The sage shook his head emphatically at the feel of a mask on his face, but Wildfeather insisted. Once they were both masked they stepped into the great cavern, whereupon Wildfeather’s arm went out like a shot to block Xhantu’s progress. The captain’s eyes narrowed. At least a hundred burned and twisted corpses were laid out on the gigantic floor, each in a 5 x 5 square defined by lines drawn with soot. The soot’s source was evinced in numerous imported charred items, now arranged in elaborate and decorative stacks against three of the cavern’s walls. These soot-squares were marked wall-to-wall around a central, unoccupied square of identical dimensions. Most of the dead had perished in their personal squares, some prostrate, some in a lopsided sitting slump. But all faced the central square.

Wildfeather pondered the display critically, feeling the place, taking notes in his head. After a space he reached into a pouch on his belt, extracted a small flash camera, and took several shots from various angles. The click of the camera’s mechanism cracked like a whip in the cavern. He then made his way along the west wall, occasionally looking back. The sage was close behind, adroitly stepping around the carefully stacked remnants, the delicate probe of his hand walking swiftly along the wall like a hairless tarantula. The whole setup gave Wildfeather the creeps. When he attained a point opposite the empty square he tiptoed between the bodies to the blank space and went down on one knee, clearly discerning a large smudge created by a slow seepage of blood and sweat. The smudge became a narrow smear that snaked between squares to the east wall. Wildfeather took several shots of the square and smear. The sage crept up behind him, his bare feet making tiny smacking sounds. The two stood side by side.

“Like a cathedral, perhaps?” the sage offered, his voice muffled by the mask.

“Nah. Cemetery on a chessboard. Man’s surrender to mathematics.” Wildfeather’s cynicism fluttered bravely before plunging. “Y’know, I feel very small in all this.”

“Perhaps this rich American you speak of was not so callous and manipulating after all.”

Wildfeather stared. “Sir,” he said quietly, “we are standing in the middle of an empty square that lies at the center of perhaps a hundred similar squares, each containing a deceased individual--from my observation members of the Afar group. The slow dissolution of their bodies in this cool chamber has reached the point of putrefaction. It’s the source of this miasma, and the reason I have insisted upon your donning the breather. Judging by your deep familiarity with this place, and by your demonstrated ability to perceive the particulars of your environment, I am going to assume you are perfectly aware of our circumstances here. That said, I am going to request you be perfectly honest with me today, and save us both considerable trouble and embarrassment.” He took a breath. “To what,” he said, tracing the square’s borders with the rifle’s barrel, “do you attribute the significance of this single empty square?”

Xhantu nodded in acknowledgment. “Apparently, Captain, it is some kind of space meant to signify a pivotal presence. I am not familiar with the intricacies of the indigenous religions; my intellectual and spiritual leanings are chiefly Western. My guess is that it represents a focal point of some sort, perhaps a kind of hub, or heart. A center is very basic to most faiths, and many Afar have received varying degrees of Islamic instruction. Could it be, do you think, a space meant to represent Mecca?”

The captain grinned wryly behind his mask. “Okay, Mr. Xhantu. We’ll play it your way. You’ve suffered enough without having to be intimidated by the United States Army.” He tapped the tip of his rifle’s barrel along the central square’s borders and watched closely as the sage’s face precisely followed the tapping sounds. “Now, the arrangement of these bodies is immediately reminiscent of the American’s operation in Danakil. The floor’s grid-like markings support that proposition. Furthermore, there are stains within this square that are highly suggestive of blood and sweat.” He strained against the heaviest shadows. “Dead men don’t sweat, Mr. Xhantu.” Wildfeather’s eyes swept the cavern, picking up details, at last resting on a nondescript, pencil-thin beam of sallow light. He was having trouble weighing duty against spirit. “Sir,” he said, “forensic operations would be very hard on you here. It would be difficult, expensive, and time-consuming to run DNA tests, as well as to gather print and soil samples. But it is fully within my authority to quarantine you elsewhere for the sake of preserving the site’s integrity.”

“Then you are running late, Captain. I would have had plenty of time to sully the place were its forensic significance of any interest to me. What you are witnessing is solely the doing of these people you find dead about you. They arrived, as you have postulated, in a frenzy, many badly burned or otherwise injured. I cannot help but agree with your general assessment. Your description of their floor plan definitely resembles what I have heard of the site created by the American. I have never visited Mamuset; I learned of its specific arrangement in my wanderings tribe to tribe.”

Wildfeather, looking directly at the sage, found the man’s face trained dead-on his own. “Mr. Xhantu, the government and people of the United States of America are not going to be satisfied with an empty body bag.”

Xhantu didn’t budge. “Then you must search Mamuset or the surrounding desert. When these people appeared they bore at their fore but one man. They carried him toward the center of this cavern while chanting the name ‘Mudahid’ over and over in a manner suggestive of great grief. He was certainly dead or mortally wounded. It would be natural to assume it was he who occupied this central space, and his serum you have observed.”

“Then where is this man Mudahid? And why would his body have been removed?”

“Sir, I do not know. I did not observe the goings-on subsequent to the hysterical arrival of these people. I was flung violently aside upon their entrance, and did not regain access and full control until all was silent.”

“And how long was that interim?”

“The space of a week or more, Captain. Apparently they considered the passing of this Mudahid person a considerable loss; their grieving was absolutely prohibitive of my entry. The sound of that great grief commenced each morning precisely at sunrise, becoming weaker day by day. And then…silence. The people had starved to death, and thirsted as well. It is my impression they did not molest my reservoir; nor did they, indeed, depart from their spaces once ensconced. These, as I say, are merely my impressions. Other than salvaging what I could of my artifacts, I have left this place as they left it. I have walked well around the grid to secure water for myself and little Pegasus. In that sense, Captain, this place is pristine for your investigation.”

“I appreciate that, sir,” Wildfeather used his rifle to indicate the brown smudge at their feet, and then to follow it, lazily, into the shadows of the east wall. “Mr. Xhantu, I’m pointing at a dark stain. The trail of this stain leads off the grid, almost as if a body had been dragged away.” He shifted his rifle over his left shoulder and took the old man by the hand. “Let’s go.” They stepped between bodies carefully. “This smear,” Wildfeather went on, “runs resolutely to the east wall, although it veers constantly back and forth, as if the guiding hand took great pains to avoid impinging upon the dead. Now, Mr. Xhantu, on the supposition your haunts are not haunted, I’m going to postulate a very solid intercession here--I’m going to suppose the body of your ‘Mudahid’ was dragged along…here…and here…borne sliming all the way to this depression, where it appears a fresh water basin, your ‘reservoir’ awaits.” He crept partly round the rim, flicked on his flashlight, and calmly peeked in the pool. After a minute he said very quietly, without raising his eyes, “Bingo.” He turned to face Xhantu directly. “Sir, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to come with me. The United States government will financially provide for your move, for your placement, and for your comfort. I have been authorized by the Army to make pertinent decisions in the field regarding my mission, which is essentially to wrap up the matter of Cristian Honey Vane. In that respect I am empowered to issue commands, and to have two American servicemen stationed outside carry out those commands. I also have--” He was cut off by a low, grieving moan issuing from the far end of the cavern.

Wildfeather was aware of Xhantu’s death mask trained on him. The sound rolled out of the labyrinth’s bowels, swelling as it came; now steadying, now oscillating like a banshee in labor. Wildfeather shivered, from the heels of his moccasins to the bill of his camouflage cap. A steady breath of rock-cooled air played with his scalp hairs, made his ears tense up like an animal’s.

The song of the wind came on, crying through twisted alleys, piping up pinholes and calling down wells; filling the cavern with a chorus that was as beautiful as it was plaintive. Then, for a few delirious seconds, the deluge of air was sucked out the dozens of scattered fissures, and the great cavern became a whistling, wheezing calliope. The strange music made Wildfeather’s toes cramp, made his gonads go for his gut. The music just as gradually lost its multitonality, at last becoming the sound of a giant blowing into a bottle. Even that passed. The two men stood tiny in the fading echoes.

Wildfeather walked straight up to the sage. “Mr. Xhantu, I feel like a Humvee just did the hula in my head.”

“Pardon?”

“Nothing worth repeating.” They stood very close for a long minute. The sage spread his arms, and Wildfeather reached round and hugged him as a son would embrace his father. He patted him very gently on the back, afraid the little old man might disintegrate like a puffball in a breeze. When they pulled apart the sage seemed almost too frail for words.

“Captain,” he said, “it would seem we are in a quandary.”

Wildfeather clasped his hands behind his back and paced in a short circle. “As a soldier, Mr. Xhantu, I am trained to follow orders without question. Obeying my spiritual impulses while in uniform would be most unprofessional.”

Xhantu bowed. “Just so. And I am certain that you, sir, are every bit the professional.” He cocked his head. “Yet you know, Captain Wildfeather, at this juncture you impress me as a man with a chronic case of microcosmia.”

“Microwho?”

“Nothing worth repeating.”

They retraced their steps across the grid; the sage a study in quiet contemplation, the soldier every bit the seeker struggling with his deepest demons. Finally Wildfeather nodded emphatically.

“I’m ordering these caves burned out and sealed, that no future investigative body be exposed to the perils of mass putrefaction. The search for Vane’s remains will be focused on Mamuset, and I will personally campaign for an intensive look into elements of the Eritrean Army, on the premise that said remains may even now be held somewhere obscene.” At the west wall they paused. “I want to apologize, Mr. Xhantu, on behalf of my country, for this grave turn in your situation, brought about by one of her citizens who, spiritually at least, had no business meddling in the affairs of ancient, respected cultures.” They followed the wall out the archway and into the antechamber. “I hope you will not be left with the impression that all Americans are so self-absorbed.”

They stopped. “Not at all, Captain. And you need not apologize for the limitations of others. You possess qualities, both spiritual and intellectual, that are of the highest order.” He turned to face Wildfeather as a master faces his disciple. “As a matter of fact, sir, you strike me as a man of vision.”

Wildfeather grinned, embarrassed. “Nah. I’m as short-sighted as the next guy.”

“And modest, too! Amazing.”

Wildfeather cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Very well, then.” He pulled off his face mask. “I’ll have my men remove these keepsakes of yours, and I’ll allow you to oversee their safe handling. I’m going to radio for a guarded truck, that you and your property may be securely transported to a base in Djibouti. Sorry, but things are still too hot in Ethiopia for now. I’ll make sure someone from our embassy is there to discuss your options with you.” He preceded the old man up the twisting shaft. Once outside, Wildfeather dropped his sunglasses back into place. “Mackaw!”

The photographer scurried up, sandwiched between Willard and Barnes. The three men took one look at the sage and froze like rubbernecks at a pileup. Then Mackaw cried, “Man!” and raised his camera.

Wildfeather stepped between them and ripped the camera right out of Mackaw’s hands. With a voice hot and cold he said, “You’ve got five minutes, and not a single minute more. Put on your breather. You are allowed up to the archway of the great chamber. There you will find an unpleasant scene worthy of many frames. Take all the pictures you want, but under no circumstances are you permitted within among the bodies. Willard and Barnes will be accompanying you, and will make certain this last order is followed to the letter.” He held out the camera. As Mackaw’s hand lunged for it, Wildfeather pulled it back out of reach. They went through this little ritual twice more before the soldier allowed the civilian to reappropriate his property with a modicum of courtesy.

A small hand lit on Wildfeather’s forearm. He inclined his head and the sage whispered in his ear. Mackaw got two close-ups.

“Mr. Xhantu,” Wildfeather proclaimed, “would like a private moment to say goodbye to his home. Go ahead, Mr. Xhantu. Take your time, but make sure the mask stays on.”

The sage glided back to the entrance, and, white rabbit, disappeared from view. He paused to run a hand over Pegasus, then hurried across his antechamber and into the great cavern. Xhantu felt his way halfway along the west wall, turned ninety degrees, and tiptoed between the bodies until he reached the pool.

He took a deep breath before extracting a picture gripped in the folds of his sanafil. Slowly, methodically, he tore the photograph into ever smaller pieces until he had a little handful of paper shards. He made a fist and held the contents high above the dreaming pool. Xhantu unclenched his fingers, and his final thoughts of Cristian Vane fell like petals on the Nile.

[email protected]