Mario Reading - The Nostradamus prophecies

The man who had presented Sabir’s testicles to the knife came over and offered him a drink from a pottery cup. ‘Go on. That’ll keep the mules away.’

‘The mules?’

The man shrugged. ‘They’re all around the clearing. Evil spirits. Trying to get in. Trying to take…’ He hesitated. ‘You know.’

Sabir swallowed the drink. He could feel the heat of the spirit burning away at his throat. Without knowing why, he found himself nodding. ‘I know.’

Achor Bale watched the funeral ceremony from the secure position he had established for himself inside the shelter of a small stand of trees. He was wearing a well-worn camoufl age suit, a Legionnaire’s cloth fatigue hat and a stippled veil. From even as close as three feet away, he was indistinguishable from the undergrowth surrounding him.

For the first time in three days he was entirely sure of the girl. Before that he hadn’t been able to approach close enough to the main camp to achieve a just perspective. Even when the girl had left the camp, he had been unable, to his own entire satisfaction, to pinpoint her. Now she had comprehensively outed herself, thanks to her conspicuous mourning for her lunatic brother’s immortal soul.

Bale allowed his mind to wander back to the room in which Samana had died. In all his extensive years of experience both inside and outside the Foreign Legion, Bale had never seen a man achieve the seemingly impossible task of killing himself whilst under total restraint. That old chestnut of swallowing the tongue presented insurmountable physical difficulties and no man, as far as he was aware, could think himself to death. But to use gravity like that and with such utter conviction? That took balls. So why would he do it? What had Samana been protecting?

He refocused the night glasses on the girl’s face. Wife? No. He thought not. Sister? Possibly. But it was impossible to tell in this light, with the con tortions she was engineering on her facial features.

He swung the glasses on to Sabir. Now there was a man who knew how to make himself indispensable. At first, when he had established Sabir’s presence as a certainty in the camp, Bale had been tempted to make another of his mischievous telephone calls to the police. Remove the man permanently from the scene without any unnecessary recourse to further violence. But Sabir was so unaware of himself and therefore such an easy man to follow, that it seemed something of a waste.

The girl, he knew, would be a far harder prospect. She belonged to a defined and close-knit society, which did not easily venture abroad. Lumber her with a well-meaning Sabir and the whole process became intrinsically simpler.

He would watch and wait, therefore. His moment – as it always did – would come.

‘Can you walk?’

‘Yes. I think I can manage.’

‘You must come with me, then.’

Sabir allowed Samana’s sister to ease him to his feet. He noticed that, although she was prepared to touch him with her hands, she made great play at avoiding any contact with his clothes.

‘Why do you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Veer away from me whenever I stumble – as if you’re afraid I might be diseased.’

‘I don’t want to pollute you.’

‘Pollute me?’

She nodded her head. ‘Gypsy women don’t touch men who are not their husbands, brothers, or sons.’

‘Why ever not?’

‘Because there are times when we are mahrime. Until I become a mother – and also at certain times of the month – I am unclean. I would dirty you.’

Shaking his head, Sabir allowed her to usher him towards the caravan entrance. ‘Is that why you always walk behind me, too?’

She nodded.

By this time Sabir was almost grateful for the perverse and mysterious attentions of the camp, for they had not only secured him from the notice of the French police and cured him from an illness which, on the run, may well have resulted in his death from septic shock – but they had also comprehensively upended his notions of sensible, rational behaviour. Everybody needed a stint in a gypsy camp, Sabir told himself wryly, to shake them out of their bourgeois complacency.

He had resigned himself, in consequence, to only eventually learning what they required from him, when and where it suited them to enlighten him. And he sensed, as he supported himself down the rootstock balustrade outside the caravan, that this moment had finally come.

Yola indicated that Sabir should accompany her towards a group of men seated on stools near the periphery of the camp. An enormously fat man with an outsized head, long black hair, copious moustaches, gold-capped front teeth and a ring on every finger, sat, in a much larger chair than everybody else’s, at the head of the convocation. He was wearing a generously cut, traditionally styled double-breasted suit, made notable only by an outlandish sequence of purple and green stripes laced into the fabric and by double-width zoot – suit lapels.

‘Who the heck’s that?’

‘The Bulibasha. He is our leader. Today he is to be Kristinori.’

‘Yola, for Christ’s sake…’

She stopped, still positioned just behind him and to the right. ‘The Chris you were searching for? That my brother spoke to you about? This is it.’

‘What? That’s Chris? The fat guy? The Chief?’

‘No. We hold a Kriss when something important must be decided. Notice is given and everyone attends from many kilometres around. Someone is elected Kristinori, or judge of the Kriss. In important cases, it is the Bulibasha who takes this role. Then there are two other judges – one for the side of the accuser and one for the person who is accused – chosen from amongst the phuro and the phuro – dai. The elders.’

‘And this is an important case?’

‘Important? It is life or death for you.’

Sabir found himself ushered, with a certain amount of formal politeness, on to a bench set into the earth in front of and below, the Bulibasha. Yola settled on the ground behind him, her legs drawn up beneath her. Sabir assumed that she had been allocated this spot in order to translate the proceedings to him, for she was the only woman in the assembly.

The main body of women and children were congregated behind and to the right of the Bulibasha, in the position Yola always took in relation to him. Sabir noticed, too, that the women were all wearing their best clothes and that the older, married women were sporting headscarves and prodigious amounts of gold jewellery. Unusually, they were made up with heavy kohl around the eyes and their hair, beneath their scarves, no longer hung free, but was instead put up in ringlets and elaborate braids. Some had henna on their hands and a few of the grandmothers were smoking.

The Bulibasha held up a hand for silence, but everybody continued talking. It seemed that the debate about Sabit was already well under way.

Impatiently, the Bulibasha indicated that the man who had stretched Sabir’s testicles for the knife should come forward.

‘That is my cousin. He is going to speak against you.’

‘Oh.’

‘He likes you. It is not personal. But he must do this for the family.’

‘I suppose they’re going to joint me like a pig if this thing goes against me?’ Sabir tried to sound as though he was joking, but his voice cracked halfway through and gave him away.

‘They will kill you, yes.’

‘And the upside?’

‘What is that?’

‘What happens if things go my way?’ Sabir was sweating badly now.

‘Then you will become my brother. You will be responsible for me. For my virginity. For my marriage. You will take my brother’s place in everything. ‘