M. Wren: A Gift Upon the Shore

I shout, “Help!” and nothing comes out but a rasping croak, and all the while Miriam is chanting and digging. The lights haven’t reached the gate. I try again, head pounding with the effort. “ Help! ” The sound dies in the still, balmy air, and Miriam rises. I put up my right hand to fend off the expected attack. But she ignores me. She sweeps up the dark bundle, takes it to the corner of the vault, uncovers it, and I can see the stacked dynamite sticks, the silver bullet of a blasting cap, all wrapped in a black ribbon of fuse.

I look down toward Amarna. The lights are past the gate, but the distance between me and that constellation of lights approaches infinity.

“Miriam, don’t you see them?” I’m shouting, yet she doesn’t seem to hear me. She places the dynamite in her excavation; her hands catch the lantern light, and they’re streaked with her own blood.

“Miriam! The family—they’re coming!”

And she chants, “Mine enemy… mine enemy is delivered…”

“Miriam, they’ll know you destroyed the vault, they’ll know you murdered me!”

She laughs ecstatically. “Yes, they’ll know! Oh, Lord, I am the instrument of Thy will! And they’ll know! ”

There are four lights. I’m sure of that now. They’re spread out in a bobbing line across the pasture, and the first has started up the steep slope. I can see small, dark shapes moving ahead of them, a flash of white ruff. Shadow. She is in the vanguard, barking incessantly.

And the plan worked. She has led the family to me, and they will know. They will know Miriam.

Too late.

The fuse coils in the grass like a thin, black snake. Miriam’s bloody hands are shaking as she unfurls it, then, with an oblique look at me, cuts the fuse—cuts it only a foot long. I hear shouts in the distance, my name and Miriam’s. Jerry’s voice, Jonathan’s, Stephen’s.

She opens the glass face of the lantern, thrusts the end of the fuse in, and it erupts in a sputter of sparks, then seems to die. But there’s no hope in the lack of visible flame. It is hideously alive, burning within itself, sending out spurting fingers of blue smoke and the acrid smell of smoldering tar. Miriam rises, shouts skyward, “I am the instrument of Thy will! The Lord be praised!” then begins a stumbling retreat down the slope, and she has left the lantern, left it so I can see the fuse trailing out from the corner, and I can see exactly how fast it is burning and exactly how much is left.

I wrench myself toward the dark snake that consumes itself second by second, stretch across the stone wall, straining against the handcuffs, but my free hand falls inches short of the fuse. The key. I fumble in my pocket, fingers closing on the key to the handcuffs. The barking and shouting are closer, and Miriam cries, “Go back! The Lord’s wrath will strike! Go back!”

I can’t find the lock. Angrily I jerk at the handcuffs, gasp at the pain. The lock, damn it—damn her!—find the lock. My hands are shaking, I hear my panting over the hiss of the fuse. There! Key in the lock. No, it slips against the metal, and I can’t hear the deadly hiss for the barking in my ear. Shadow leaps at me in a frenzy of joy. She has found me, as I taught her. She has found me. And knocked the key out of my trembling hand and out of sight somewhere in the thick grass.

“Shadow, get away!” Less than six inches of fuse is visible. “Shadow, go back! Get away from me!” I strike out at her, and she yelps; she can’t understand why I hit her, can’t understand that she’ll die if she stays with me.

I run my right hand through the grass by the stone plinth, vainly seeking the key. My hand closes instead on my cane, I stretch toward the fuse, beat at it with the curved head. But the spurts of smoke won’t stop. I hook the cane around the corner to dislodge the dynamite and find no purchase. Shadow is barking hysterically, and I hear Jerry’s voice near—too near. I look around, see him no more than twenty yards away, but Miriam is running toward him, she shrieks a warning, throws herself at him, and they fall together.

And the fuse has burned past the corner.

Shadow won’t leave me, paws at me, whining, and it’s too late for her now. I press my face into her satiny fur, remember the night I lay in Rachel’s arms while she died. “I’m sorry….”

And I wait. Listen to the sputter of the fuse. Such a small sound, yet it drowns out every other sound. Until it stops.

It simply stops.

I wait.

But there is no explosion. The sounds of the night—the frogs in the pasture, the murmur of the surf, the plaintive cry of an owl— softly fill the vacuum of silence in my mind.

The dynamite didn’t explode.

Maybe Miriam didn’t attach the blasting cap properly. Maybe the dynamite or the fuse were too old, stored too long in a damp climate.

It doesn’t matter.

I begin to laugh. I shift, put my back against the door, hug Shadow to me, and I laugh. I laugh with relief, I laugh because I’m alive, I laugh at the sheer absurdity of this little drama, I laugh at the thought of Miriam playing with the technology of destruction bom in an age she can’t begin to understand, I laugh at myself for believing an artifact of that age would in her hands be a real threat, I laugh at the irony of Miriam witnessing the wretched failure of her act of god. I laugh until I cry, and the constriction in my chest seems only part of the laughter, the electric pain in my left arm only inevitable after the abuse it’s had in the grip of the handcuffs.

The other witnesses to this failed act of god have drawn nearer, but now they stand transfixed. There’s Jerry, with Jonathan and Stephen flanking him. Esther, her hand on Isaac’s shoulder. Enid and Bernadette. Someone had the sense to keep the other children out of this. Grace must be with them.

These people aren’t laughing with me, and I’m vaguely surprised. It’s all so ludicrous….

They’re staring at Miriam.

And my laughter and tears cease when Miriam lifts her white-sleeved arms to form a ghostly crucifix, and the moonlight flashes on the knife still in her right hand, when she throws her head back, and from her throat emerges a single syllable stretched into a shivering cry of anger and anguish. “No!”

And I hear in that word other words unspoken: My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ?

But Miriam hasn’t forsaken her god.

She faces me, then moves suddenly, runs at me with the knife raised, and I gaze at the translucent light shining through her gown, remember a picture I once saw of a snowy owl sweeping down on its prey, and it was as beautiful and terrifying as Miriam is in this instant of time that I recognize as my last.

“ Mary !”

A blur of motion rushing at me from one side, an abrupt, crushing weight—something, someone falls on top of me, comes between me and the downward arc of the knife. Stephen . And Miriam staggers off balance as Shadow hurtles against her, teeth ripping into her forearm. Miriam shouts in pain, kicks at Shadow, sends her tumbling, yelping, and Jerry and Jonathan and Isaac close in. Isaac, his small face tormented with bewilderment, reaches out to her, wailing her name. But she doesn’t hear. Like a hunted, cornered animal, she strikes out blindly, and the knife is still in her hand.

A dark fountain in the white light, and Miriam’s gown is dappled with blood, and it still spills out as Isaac sinks into his mother’s arms, as she sinks to her knees under his weight, and Isaac lies with his head canted back, Miriam’s hand pressed to his throat to stem that hideous fountain, and blood pulses dark from between her fingers.

I cling to Stephen with my free arm as he clings to me, and Isaac’s beautiful face is still, and if it weren’t for that deluge of blood, I might think Miriam is only singing her son to sleep, but her lullaby is a broken whimpering rife with anguish, and her son will never wake again. The pressure in my chest has become adamant pain as if something unseen were trying to squeeze the lifeblood out of my heart as Isaac’s has poured out. So willing, it seems, that outpouring, as if the sacrifice were embraced in ecstasy.