6.
 “When I awoke, people had carried me into a house. I lay in a bed. What a house it was, a small palace with all the latest conveniences, but it was a very old place. You could tell from the wear in the wooden paneling on the walls, and the mosaics in the floors that looked almost Roman, and statues with broken noses standing around bubbling fountains. I tell you, Latchloose, the very air smelled different, faintly fragrant like a spring garden, yet faintly musty as if it was pent up somehow a long time. The people here looked different than those I was used to seeing. They seemed concerned, but languid and without fear. Everyone else in the world has that dark, gnawing look of worry—especially people who don’t speak proper English, and live in a land of perpetual war. These people seemed languid and self-assured. I grasped that they had rescued me, taken me into their estate, and that I was quite safe. I learned all this as they moved around me—yet nobody spoke, at least not a language I could understand. I think they spoke mind-to-mind, telepathically, as if they were exchanging warm blood among each other as one organism. It was quite strange, even for that region, to be sure.
“I wasn’t badly injured and mended quickly, but I felt very weak and slept a lot for some undetermined time. I spent most of the while in a small apartment unit overlooking palm trees and a river in quite a lush garden. As soon as I felt a bit better, I demanded to leave, so I could return to my unit. Finally, a tiny little dark-haired woman appeared in the doorway and beckoned me to follow her. She wore an intricately designed silk dress much like a mustard-green Indian sari, with many delicate little flowers printed into its folds. She brought me to a garden in which sat a very odd man upon a large burgundy pillow with tassels on each corner. He was dressed somewhat like a pasha of the old Turkish regime, with a red fez wrapped in a turban. He was wrapped in a robe and had a broad sword by his side in a lavishly embroidered leather and linen sheath. My guest, he boomed at me in our own language, as plainly as I speak with you now, only his words flowed silently around me, throbbing softly in my ears like the beating of my own heart. My guest, you are feeling well enough to leave?
“I thanked him for his hospitality and told him I was indeed ready to rejoin my unit. To that he replied, We will gladly do for you what else we can—we have already done more than you know. For that I thanked him, and asked what I might do in return. He shook his head and took me down a long, dark hallway into the bowels of his palace. What a place this was! No Western person would ever live this way. The floors were of marble polished to a high luster, inset with marginal mosaic patterns in semiprecious stones. Silk and brocade draperies hung down, too long for the walls, and piled in stiff folds on the floors. The halls were carpeted with the finest Oriental rugs, sometimes four or five deep. In wall niches stood statues of all kinds, from mythological heroes and writhing cherubs to beautiful goddesses like Diana with her bow and arrows, and her wild animals that tore men to pieces if they glimpsed her swimming naked in a forest pond.”
At that, Arthur laughed. “You must have been hallucinating!”
“Maybe, Latchloose, maybe; who knows? I had been injured and sick, and who knows what drugs they poured into me to help me mend? I glimpsed a room with pillars surrounding a pool steaming with perfume and littered with flowers, in which pale nymphs laughed and splashed each other. The air had an odd, incense-like tinge, and I saw flickering candle-flames in wall sconces shaped like seashells. The whole thing was like a dream, I tell you. The pasha descended from his dais. The old woman led me from one hall to the next, past separate rooms, in which handsome young men sang softly, and others in which shrouded young women played all manner of exotic instruments. In the pasha’s company, we came to a single room in which stood only one thing—a very ornate clock.”
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Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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