The Caryatids

The cargo helicopter was lying precisely where its global positioning system had placed it, inside a rugged little declivity, with poor lines of sight but a decent amount of sunshine for its exhausted batteries.

Sonja had a hard-won philosophy when it came to long marches through harsh territory. Sonja believed in traveling light. Her cargo consisted mostly of fabrics.

Everything else within the helicopter, she had ordered as a wedding gift for the Badaulet. The Badaulet had no such minimalist philosophy about his own goods. On the contrary: He had a gorgeously barbarian "more is more" aesthetic.

The Badaulet's gifts were a sniper rifle, a plastic pistol, binoculars, a gleaming titanium multitool, self-heating meals for those of an Islamic persuasion, a canteen, chemical lightsticks, paracord, a radio, a razor-keen ceramic dagger, a global positioning system, ammunition, and a veritable host of horrible little marble-sized land mines.

The Badaulet was painfully shy about his nudity, so he quickly tunneled into his desert camouflage. He swiftly disappeared. His new uniform was spotted with colored chromatophores, like the hide of a squid. It had a similar bush hat, with a face net.

Sonja's signature garment was her blindingly white robe. It was a simple baggy mess of dust-repellent fabric. Any fabric that was "dust-repellent" was also somewhat skin-repellent, so it was a stiff and unforgiving thing.

Sonja lashed the fabric to her wrists and waist and ankles with her signature magic charms, which George had included in the shipment. Long, crisscrossed black cords, with hexagrams, yin-yangs, lucky ideograms, crucifixes, Stars of David, tiny Muslim moon-and-crescents.

Ernesto had once told her that only a madwoman would dress in such fashion. She had made herself a big white target for snipers.

But Sonja, who unlike Ernesto was still alive, had sensed in some occult fashion, she had known, that the war surrounding them was not about their supposed enemies: the real war was about the dust. It was about the black dust, gray dust, red dust, yellow dust, that catastrophic omnipresent filth that penetrated every aspect of human existence. Peace would come-it would only come-when brought by cleanliness. Cleanliness brought by something-an angel, a saint, a prophet, a machine, a system, an entity, anyone, anything capable-that was in the dust but never of the dust.

Time and again Sonja had walked into the hellholes where they stored the sick and dying-the dead factories, the empty schoolyards-where, at the first sight of her, a medic without any dust, the moaning, sobbing crowds fell silent...

In the midst of the filthiest inferno, there were people and things and actions and thoughts that were not of that inferno. They were beyond the grip of hell.

The people could never leave hell with bullets. They needed a figure shining and white and clean who would hold out her two compassionate hands and pour fresh cleaning water on their split and aching faces. Despair was killing them faster than any physical threat.

It was they, not she, who had begun hanging magic charms on her-the knickknacks they'd been clutching in their desperate hope of redemption. She looked different, she was different, and they were hanging meaning on her.

They needed to hope in order to live, and for a dying public, a public image brought hope. A radiance that might come to them, bearing a handheld lamp: radiance to the bedside of the sufferer at the midnight of the human soul. There to wash the filth from their suffering feet.

Hope would cure when all other methods failed, when other treatments weren't even noticed. True anguish, the killing kind of despair, could only be relieved by ritual...If the sky turned black and the air was brown, an armed general could reason and bluster and bribe and threaten-not a soul would stir, even to save their own lives. An emotionally damaged teenage girl could drift by, in spotless white, dangling superstitions and jabbering lines of poetry, and they would rise as one and they would follow.

At this point in her life, Sonja found it hard to believe that she had done those things. But she had done them. Repeatedly. Spontaneously, tirelessly, in inspired trances, drawing strength from the light she saw in others. Extreme times pulled strange qualities from people. There were times when it helped a great deal to know that one was not entirely human.

Some men called her crazy-her second husband, and her third, in particular-but they were merely putting their own madness into better order by piling accusations on her. Because if Red Sonja was the crazy one, why were they all dead?

The Angel of Harbin had the gift of giving. Those who took it in the proper spirit, lived. The others...men, mostly...