The Steel Ring Read online

  Some twenty paces before them, the floor seemed to fall away into a pit. A raised platform, perhaps ten feet tall, partially encircled the pit. At either end of this semi-circular platform, stone steps led down to the ground floor.

  “Come ahead,” a voice soft yet clear said to them, beckoning. “No harm will come to you in this house of prayer.”

  Oddly assured by the voice, Mantrapoor rose to his feet, pulling Prahmasung up along with him. Checking to see if all was well with the baby, she pulled the blanket away from his face.

  The baby smiled as he looked upward. His eyes seemed to glisten as pinpricks of light from the flaming torches reflected off them.

  Prahmasung’s head jerked up and away from the baby, as a hint of motion registered in the periphery of her vision. It had come from the edge of the yawning pit they were approaching.

  The shaved head of a man seemed to pop up out of the pit. Then another and another, until at length she saw seven men seeming to float upward from the mouth of the chasm. In truth, they were simply ascending a staircase below her field of sight.

  When all had risen, they stepped forward as one, in a line. As they approached the peasants, both again fell to their knees and bowed their heads, humbly averting their eyes.

  There could be no doubt, they both knew. They were in the presence of the fabled Council of Seven, an august body of holy men whose lives were devoted to reflection upon the many mysteries of the universe. It was said they sought answers to questions no other mortals had ever even thought to ask.

  All the lamas were dressed identically, in loose saffron robes. The robes were belted in the middle by a long strand of prayer beads, knotted so that one end of the strand hung down before them, easily accessible. Simple sandals were their only other item of clothing. Because of their shaved heads, even their faces were barely distinguishable one from the other.

  It was far from the first time that the two peasants had seen the holy men, of course. They often descended to the village, usually in twos or threes, to purchase food and the like. Nor had they ever been anything but benign to the villagers.

  But the stink of the divine that clung to them was more than most mortals could bear, and Mantrapoor had always felt it best to maintain a healthy fear and distance from these priestly enigmas.

  One of the monks took two extra steps forward, separating himself slightly from the others. The man and woman recognized him as being the one called Brother Han.

  “What brings you here today, children?” he asked, in a gentle voice dripping with incense. Neither of the peasants could make reply.

  “It’s all right,” the lama assured them, smiling slightly at their simple innocence. “All are welcome here, and all are free to speak.”

  Taking a deep breath meant to steel his spine, Mantrapoor raised his eyes to look up at the monk.

  “We’ve come about the child, master,” he said, the sound of even his own voice in this fearsome holy place causing him to flinch. He motioned slightly toward Prahmasung, who was herself now gazing up at the monk.

  “Do you want us to bless him?” the holy man inquired.

  “Your blessings on us all, master,” Mantrapoor replied. “But there’s more.” He paused, concerned lest he was testing the monk’s benevolence.

  “Go on.”

  “A week ago,” Mantrapoor began, “a man came to our village. A man from the West. He brought the child with him, and told us its mother had passed away.”

  “What did this man want?”

  “Seemingly nothing, save some food and water, and a place to rest his head. But then, two days past, he told us that a great war was raging between all the peoples of the western continent.”

  “How did he know about this war?” Brother Han asked.

  “I don’t know. He just did. Or said he did. He also said he had to go join in this great conflict. So he left Oobang … leaving also a bag of gold and the baby.”

  “Did this man from the West tell you his name?”

  “He did not. When we asked him, he simply smiled and said, ‘I’m just a man’.”

  The monk’s eyes narrowed in thought.

  “Nothing in the universe is more perfect than a circle. And like a circle, our words have come back to the beginning. So I ask again: What brings you here today? And why have you brought the child?”

  “It took no time at all for us to realize the boy is … special, master. He’s been touched by a god, I think. Or a devil.”

  “Not a devil,” Prahmasung hissed, finally finding her voice.

  “What are your plans for this ‘special’ child?” Brother Han pressed.

  “We’re simple people, lord,” Mantrapoor continued. “Such things as this are beyond us. So we brought him to you.”

  “This is not an orphanage.” It was one of the other monks who now spoke. “And clearly none of us are wet nurses.”

  “We have an answer for that, masters,” Mantrapoor declared, scurrying forward slightly while remaining bowed and on his knees. He motioned toward Prahmasung.

  “My wife has recently lost a child, and her breasts are still full.”

  Prahmasung bowed her head sharply, feeling somewhat mortified.

  “She could stay here with the child,” Mantrapoor continued, “and provide what you cannot.”

  To his dismay, he saw that his words had elicited looks of disgust on the faces of the lamas.

  “You would give your own wife away?” Brother Han said incredulously.

  “Not just me, lord,” Mantrapoor hastened to assure him. “My brothers have agreed to this as well.”

  The monks knew he was referring to a practice quite common in this isolated place that formed the roof of the world. Because of the disparity in their numbers, it was not unusual for an individual woman to be married to multiple men, usually brothers. In Prahmasung’s case, it was Mantrapoor and two of his brothers.

  He didn’t feel it necessary to tell the lamas that their young wife had miscarried not just the once but a second time as well. His brothers had begun to complain that they would never get a child from her. Not a child of their own, anyway. And they had no interest in raising that of an outsider.

  “What of you, girl?” Han asked of Prahmasung. “Is this what you want?”

  “I do, my lord,” she said in a reverent voice. “I’ve only had him for a short time, but I love him.” She felt it unwise, and perhaps unnecessary, to express her belief that Mantrapoor and his brothers may have been as eager to be rid of her as they were the child.

  Han stared down at her in sympathetic silence for a moment, then turned to look to his fellow monks. Their grim faces spoke volumes.

  “Keep the boy if you like, child,” Han said to Prahmasung. “But keep him in your own home. There is no place for him in ours.”

  He began to walk away from the supplicant peasants, his posture telling them this audience was ended.

  “Don’t be too hasty, brothers.”

  All eyes turned at the sound of this new voice, ringing out with the deep resonance of authority. To the right of the two peasants, a tall figure had appeared, standing atop the high platform that partially encircled the recess from which the Council of Seven had emerged minutes before.

  They both instantly covered their eyes and bowed even closer to the floor. Unlike the other lamas, this was a man upon whom they had never laid eyes. But neither had the slightest doubt as to his identity. He could be no other.

  He was the Great Question.

  Many stories swirled around him, though which were true they did not know. No one knew his real name. He was believed to be incredibly old, perhaps even older than this ancient temple in which he resided, yet he had mastered techniques and disciplines that held the normal ravages of time at bay.

  From whence he came was unknown, even to the other monks. But he was the undisputed leader of the Council of Seven, which he had founded.

  Now, at the sound of boot heels clicking on stone steps, Prahmasung d
ared to lift her head ever so slightly to gaze at him as he descended to her level.

  He was by far the tallest man she had ever seen, over six feet. His shoulders were broad, his chest deep, his hips narrow.

  A hood of deepest black covered his entire head, save for twin holes for his eyes. He wore a laced tunic of gray, separated by a wide black belt from similarly gray trousers that fit his muscled legs tightly and were tucked into the top of shiny black leather boots that rose nearly to his knees.

  Clasped around his neck and trailing down behind him was a purple cloak. It shone as if silk, but seemed to Prahmasung not to hang or flap about like any cloth she had ever seen, but rather to move about sinuously like a serpent, as if alive and with a will of its own.

  He did not pause upon reaching the base of the stairs, but continued walking straight toward her, ignoring his fellow monks. She again averted her eyes.

  “Give me the child.”

  Prahmasung gasped in fear. The voice that came from the hooded figure carried the weight of life and death. It washed over her and chilled her to the bone.

  With all her heart she wanted to press this precious baby she had already come to think of as her own more deeply into the protective warmth of her bosom, to keep him from this faceless figure that towered above her and filled her with dread.

  But to her horrified amazement, she instead found herself extending her arms upward and outward, helplessly presenting the infant as if it was a sacrificial lamb being offered to some god of the mountain.

  With surprising gentleness, the Question took the boy from her, cupping it in a pair of powerful hands nearly as large as its tiny body. Fighting her fear, Prahmasung tried to look up. From this short distance, she could see the eyes behind the hood. They looked like yellow pools.

  Those eyes widened, and a muffled sigh came from the lama as the baby’s blanket fell farther away from his face and a hitherto unseen object around his chubby neck came into view.

  Without a word, the Question turned his back on the woman and walked away, still holding his fragile package. She reached out toward him with one hand, started to rise from her knees. But Mantrapoor grabbed her by the sleeve of her coat and pulled her back down, warning her with a stern expression to say and do nothing.

  “Look at this, brothers,” the Question said as he drew near to the other lamas.

  They bunched closely around him. He dipped a finger beneath the infant’s chin, and when he brought it back up, a thin metal chain was looped about it. Dangling from the chain was a steel ring, shiny as a small sun, its smooth surface etched with arcane, indecipherable symbols. As one, the monks gasped aloud at the sight of it.

  “Is it possible?” Brother Han voiced the question foremost in the mind of each. “Could this child be the one the prophecies speak of?”

  “Perhaps,” the Question replied. As he looked down, he saw the baby had grabbed his finger and popped it into his mouth, contentedly sucking on it as if it was a pacifier. “Time will tell.”

  He withdrew from his followers and returned to stand in front of the fearful Prahmasung.

  “In the meantime … we will take him.” He returned the infant to her eager arms. “And you, woman.”

  One of the other monks let out a gasp of horror. “No woman is allowed to reside in a lamasery!” he exclaimed harshly.

  “Considering the possible special circumstances at work here, brothers,” the Question replied, “I believe an exception can be made.”

  Given the unusually hard coldness of his declaration, most of the other monks nodded in agreement. Brother Huang, the one who had raised the objection, simply lowered his gaze.

  The Question’s almost-living cape swirled over Prahmasung’s head as the man turned on his heels and walked away from her.

  “The boy should have a name,” Prahmasung said hopefully.

  “Indeed he should,” the Great Question agreed. He had already reached the stairway from which he had so recently descended and was rising up its steps.

  “His father was simply ‘a man,’ you said? Then that’s what we’ll call this child.” The Question did not bother to turn back toward mother and child.

  “Aman.”

  CHAPTER II

  November 9, 1938

  The sound of shattering glass did little to drown out the screams that tore through the night.

  Most of the more than four million inhabitants of Berlin were safe in their homes or shops. The scars of the next two days would not be left on their bodies.

  You would probably not be able to say the same if you were a Jew.

  The same scenario was playing out in other parts of Germany as well, and even in parts of Austria. Nazi thugs, joined by too willing civilian mobs, were engaged in organized mayhem, all of which was directed at their Jewish population.

  This exercise in state sanctioned terror would come to be known as “Kristallnacht”.

  The night of broken glass.

  In the course of a mere 48 hours, 1,000 synagogues would be burned; 7,000 Jewish businesses would be looted; and their cemeteries, schools and homes would be destroyed.

  Nearly a hundred Jews would be killed, while tens of thousands would be arrested like common criminals.

  It marked only the beginning of the seven-year-long Holocaust that German Chancellor Adolf Hitler called his “final solution.”

  Near the Konigs Platz, a beautiful young woman named Natalia Nastrova hugged the shadows of the buildings as she frantically made her way down the street.

  She had arrived in the city only that morning, from Hungary, unaware that she would soon be descending into a scene straight from Dante’s Inferno.

  The flames from a hundred fires danced and crackled, casting fingers of light all about. In their glow, she could see the towering Victory Column, erected to celebrate the great victories of the Franco-German War of more than sixty years past.

  The shadow of the column fell over the Reichstag itself, and Natalia wondered if Herr Hitler, like a latter day Nero, stood there watching the fiery fruits of the hatred he had sown.

  Natalia pressed against the side of a building, unsure of which way to go, which way was safe. She bit down on her fist in horror as she saw an old man, blood streaming down his weathered cheeks, staggering blindly down the street, pursued by half a dozen toughs armed with clubs. She knew there was nothing she could do for him, so she stumbled onward.

  Her gaze kept returning to the old man, though, causing her to trip and nearly fall over something that blocked her path.

  Natalia’s dark eyes widened in horror and she screamed, knowing even as she did that her cry would merely blend with all the others until it spiraled into nothingness.

  On the sidewalk at her feet lay the body of a young Jewish woman. She appeared to have been both shot and beaten, and her eyes still stared upward with hopeless entreaty to a god that had seemingly turned his back on her and her kind.

  But it was the baby the dead girl still clutched to her bosom that caused the tears to nearly blind Natalia. Was the mother still alive, she wondered, when some unspeakable monster had sliced the infant’s throat from one tiny ear to the other? Had he felt pleased with himself as he watched this small, innocent soul bleed out on the pavement of a once beautiful city?

  Unable to tear her eyes from this horrible sight, Natalia managed to step around the bodies. Glass crunched beneath her heels like teeth grinding in pain. Once past the victims, she again plastered her back to the wall, warily looking about her.

  Her left hand, sliding along the brick and mortar behind her, now slipped into empty space as the building ended. Without taking her gaze away from before her, Natalia slipped around the corner and began backing away from the main thoroughfare.

  After cautiously shuffling backward until she felt confident no one in the Platz could see her, she turned in the direction she was now heading. Her eyebrows knitted in worry as she found herself facing a bare stone wall several feet in front of her; she had in
advertently headed down a blind alley.

  Natalia turned to retrace her steps, and froze in her tracks. At the mouth of the alleyway, blocking her retreat, now stood two men.

  Neither appeared to be armed, but as they slowly made their way toward her, she became convinced that they were of the mob.

  One, a slender blond with a hawkish nose, had several spatters of blood on the front of his shirt; the blood of others. His companion was shorter than him, darker of both hair and complexion, but more heavily and powerfully built.

  Both were smiling.

  Not smiles of mirth or friendship, of course. Smiles of lust and dark intent.

  “Do you think she’s a Jew, Karl?” the blond one asked.

  “I don’t care, Walter. Do you?”

  “Not at all.”

  Even though she almost literally had her back to a wall, the men fully expected the woman to try to run from them. In truth, they hoped she would. It would add to the fun.

  They were both surprised and disappointed when she instead calmly started to walk resolutely directly toward them. She too was smiling, and they passed furtive glances of puzzlement to each other.

  “You don’t want to hurt me, boys,” Natalia said, in a soothing voice. Her dark eyes seemed almost to swirl in their sockets, casting out faint sparks of warm light.

  Amazingly, both men found themselves agreeing with her. Dazzled by the flashing lights in her eyes, beguiled by the voice that promised far more than mere pleasures of the flesh, they now smiled at her like faithful puppies.

  This was a power Natalia held over most men, once she was in close proximity to them. Blossoming from within her when she herself bloomed into young womanhood, it had saved her from similar situations more than once in the years she had spent living with the Roma, the gypsies who had raised her.

  Stepping closer still to the pair of thugs, she placed the palms of her hands against the chest of the taller of the two. Walter’s smile widened as he felt the warmth of her body spread into his.

  Then the smile froze on his face. It was more than warmth he felt, it was rather like electrical energy, making his body tingle in an unpleasant way. Looking down, he thought he could actually see a glow beneath her fingers.