The Caryatids

After savoring her shrieks and sobs for a while, the Badaulet grew reluctant. Finally, he belted his pants and pulled her off his legs. "Woman, why do you always carry on so? Put on your clothes! What is wrong with you? I didn't hit you so hard! It's just-when Heaven is manifesting miracles, you can't talk nonsense! We could both go to Hell!"

He was a hundred times more frightened than herself. The basis of his universe had been kicked out like a hole though a bucket. "Forgive my stupid chatter, dear husband! Thank you for punishing me!"

This submission stymied him. Of course the Badaulet had no idea on Earth what to do about this tumult in the heavens. Otherwise he would not have beaten her in the first place.

The sky was writhing violently with silent electrical phantoms. The wind died. In the absence of her vanished screams there was a vast and awful silence with not so much as a cricket.

"There is a great danger to my soul tonight..." he muttered. "I know that much, I know that is certain truth..."

"Let's watch the sky together! Is that all right?"

"It's cold. You are shivering, your teeth are chattering."

"I'll bring the mat! This might be a splendid omen, and not an evil omen! Look how beautiful it is! Maybe heaven is blessing our love, and our lives are changing for the better!" Sonja scurried into the tent and brought out a wadded double armful. "Lie down! I will hide my eyes and hold you tightly. Because I'm afraid."

She made a nest for them. Grudgingly-for now he felt ashamed of himself-he climbed on the puffy mattress.

He was shivering with cold and fear, so she warmed him. Mollified, he relaxed a little.

Time passed. The Badaulet watched the heavens writhing in silent display. Ghostly colors were leaching out of the sky...with the planet's nightly twirling and the sun's axial tilt, some confluence of distant fields was fading. The tongues of fire were in retreat.

At last he spoke up. "Woman, I believe that Heaven has blessed me. The world is changing, and a life as hard as mine must surely change for the better. I cannot always suffer."

She said nothing. She loved him only slightly less than before he had beaten her. He was a man: angry, vulnerable.

With one pinch she could rip the inner workings of his throat. He would drown in his own blood. Her legs were still smarting, so the temptation was there. She could leave him here, dead as mutton. Who would ever find him in a godforsaken place like this, who would ever know?

But why should he die at this one moment among all other potential moments to die? Wouldn't he die soon enough no matter what she did, or what he did? Her tears would dry on their own.

She turned her face to the flickering, guttering cosmos. He was already asleep.

HE WOKE HER in the chilly predawn, fully dressed and insisting that she start the robot from its bed of dust. The aurora was long gone, vanished as the Earth wheeled on its axis.

She advised him that the robot would run better if they unrolled its solar panels in daylight and let it crack some grass for fuel. The Badaulet stiffly rejected this counsel. He didn't much like her for giving it.

The Badaulet had tired of the magic distorting his life. He sensed, correctly, that it was somehow her own fault.

So, at his imperious demand, they set off reeling in the predawn cold and dark. She was hungry and thirsty, so she tried to drink from the rumen bag, knowing it wasn't ready yet. There was protein cracked from the cellulose there, and the taste seemed all right.

The robot conveyed them, in a crazed dance step, up ragged slopes, down black canyons, and across declivities. It ran across ground that would break a human leg like a dry stick. Queasy and low in spirits, Sonja felt unable to speak, and when dawn redly stung the rim of the world, the Badaulet suddenly began to confess to her. He was making up to her: not because he had beaten her during the night, for he considered that act entirely proper; but to revive her morale. So he spoke about the subject that always engrossed him most: his enemies.

The Badaulet was an agent of Chinese order in the midst of the central Asian disorder. He was always outnumbered, if never outgunned. His allegiance to the distant Chinese state was vague, and superstitious, and deeply confused, and lethally passionate. It was like a Cossack's love for Russia.

His faith, to the extent that he could describe it to her, was a cargo-cult patchwork of militia training, radical Islam, herbal lore, hunting and herding, and the shattered, scrambled, pitiful remains of Asia's traditional nomadic life. The Badaulet was not from any historic Asian tribe: he had no ethnic group. He was a native of globalized chaos.