The Watchers (29 page)
Another pause. If the other two had been sitting close enough to see his face, they would have seen his jaw muscles churning as Dylan brooded.
“Do you need to see more?” Okoye asked.
“Not really,” he replied lamely. “I don't know.”
“I don't mean to push, and you don't have to decide right this second, even though there are hundreds of men hunting for you in order to kill you, and this may be the last calm moment you have before meeting Him face-to-face. Other than that . . .”
She broke into a soft laughter, and so did Abby and even Dylan.
“But I do know this,” she continued. “Even though all of this business pales in comparison with the importance of knowing Christ and finding your name written in His Book of Life, I can also tell you this: I can teach you nearly everything there is to know about becoming a true warrior. Not some caricature of manhood running around half drunk on rage and revenge, but a warrior far more valuable to his King than anything you've even heard or read about.”
“And how do you know all this?”
“Because I am a proud warrior in His service. And while I don't have the power of a young man, or even of a young woman for that matter, I know about spiritual power. And I'll venture to say, Dylan, that it is exactly the opposite of everything you've been taught.”
“Well, it sounds fascinating. I'd like to learn, if you'd care to teach me.”
“Unfortunately,” she snapped like the closing of a trap, “it is of no use to someone who does not know Christ and follow Him.”
“All right. I've probably heard a hundred different twists on this through my life. So what, once and for all, does it mean?”
“Can I answer this?” Abby broke in.
Sister Okoye nodded with a smile.
“Dylan, it's simpler than you could ever imagine. And also harder, I suppose. God says that He just wants us to walk humbly with Him. To abide with Him, which basically means to hang out with Himâemotionally, spiritually. To spend time the way we would with a perfect father, if we could. Talk to Him, read His letters to us, tell Him how much we love Him through something called praise and worship.”
“What about the big, all-important prayer at the finish line?”
“You mean the
altar
? Yeah, I think sometimes we make too big a deal of that. A lot of people respond to what's called an altar call and get the impression that if they just say this bunch of words their whole eternal destiny's taken care of. I think that's hogwash. Sure, it's a good beginning. It all starts with a prayer, but then it grows and ends with prayer as well.”
“That's enough for now,” said Sister Okoye. “I don't want Dylan to think he is being sold a cow. Son, when the time comes where in your heart you want to pray that prayer, just ask one of us to pray it with you and start your journey. That is all.”
“You promise?” he asked, laughing.
“I always tell the truth,” she said, then stopped speaking, for just at that moment a midmorning rain shower grayed over the sun and began pelting them with large, warm drops.
The rainy season had just arrived.
Drenched to their skin by the prodigious downpour, the fugitive threesome floated from the confines of the river, which had swept them thus far down into a broad grove of swamps and marshes. Even with a cool wind whipping against her soaked clothes and chilling her to the bone, Abby found the experience refreshing, even exhilarating. She lifted her head into the torrent, flung her hair back behind her, and abandoned herself to the sensation of gliding through an unending lukewarm shower.
Just a few feet ahead of her, Dylan glanced back and felt himself pierced by the beauty of a young woman in the grip of such freedom. Was that how it felt, he wondered, to just surrender yourself to the will of a sovereign, loving God?
He could hardly imagine how it would be, after having lived for so long according to the highly strung confines of his own abilities. Self-reliance had been his life, his credo, indeed his very survival. A tightly strung dependence on his own instincts, his own wisdom, his own gifts. Right now, however, none of it seemed as fulfilling as this young beauty's blissful abandon.
Without even making a conscious decision, he found himself leaning his head forward and speaking inwardly.
God, if you're really there, I guess I would like to startâ
A sharp bump jolted him from the awkwardness of his prayerâ the side of their canoe striking the hard bank of their apparent destination. Sister Okoye now stood and was prodding the nearby soil with the rod.
It struck Dylan at once that what he had started to pray was far more important than exiting the boat at that moment. So even when the boat lightened with the departures of Sister Okoye and Abby a few seconds later, he remained seated and lowered his head again.
“Dylan . . .” Abby called out impulsively. But Sister Okoye, who had sensed what he was doing, stopped Abby by placing a hand on her arm.
. . . God, I really don't know how to do this. But for some reason I find myself totally believing in you. In your existence, in your love for me, in your love for this messed-up world. I know this involves Jesus somehow, and what He did on the cross . . . that He died for me. I get that now. He died for me so that you and I could . . . what's the word,
abide
in each other? Abide. I like that word. God, I'd very much like to abide in you, forever. Will you forgive me for being such a moron and take me in?
He opened his eyes and turned to the sight of two women standing motionless in the middle of a driving rainstorm, yet weeping so hard that even with a wall of water falling across their faces, he could make out tears streaming from their eyes.
He stepped from the boat and felt the pair converge on him at once. Sister Okoye's arms were short but strong and threatened to squeeze the air from his lungs. She spoke as she wept, using words no English-speaking personâperhaps no one but the angels and God himselfâwould understand.
Abby, for her part, knew how to hug like a good American girl. He could feel her tears fall into the crook of his neck, warmer than the surrounding raindrops.
“Oh, Dylan,” she cried, “you should see them! They're surrounding you!”
He knew precisely what she was speaking of, and the thought of it sent a shudder of wonder down his spine. He pulled his head back and glanced around him to see if he now had the ability to see them. Both women took his tiny release as a cue to withdraw, and suddenly he was standing alone in the downpour. And amazingly, the clouds over the sun thinned all of a sudden, casting a bright pale backlight onto the sheets of falling water. The effect was both dazzling and profoundly affecting. Dylan blinked again. Had he seen something,
someone
, in the wet radiance of the light burst?
Maybe so. But for now he was content not to look too closely, because the outward picture could hardly match what was happening inside of him. For the instant that he'd lifted up his prayer, he'd felt a proverbial weight lift from his shouldersâfrom his heart, and most of all his mind. The sensation had been so specific and vivid, he could still hardly believe it. It felt like someone had just sprung loose a ratchet that had been pulled tight for years, against every muscle in his body.
Then, at once, he knew what it was.
It was the tension of self-reliance, of feeling every second of every day that he had to be perfect, the by-the-numbers solo performer.
Although the old tightness was such a familiar old companion that he almost felt a twinge of sadness at feeling it melt away, the new reality of walking freely was so breathtaking that he could not bring himself to mourn the old.
He looked up. Sister Okoye was shoving their canoe off into the current. Even though he knew she was just wisely ridding them of a dead giveaway, it struck him in a rush of coincidence that her act was the perfect mirror image of what he was feeling. To cast off the old into the current and let it float off into oblivion. Amazing.
How thankful he felt, all at once, for the arrival of this monsoon! It was perfect, because just then he truly felt washed clean, immersed in something cool and pure. Feeling stupid and bold all at once, he felt his arms rise into the air and his fingers point up into the rain.
Thank you, God. Thank you for making yourself so clear to a confused and dense fool like me
.
He felt someone else's soft fingers strain to wrap themselves around the digits of his right hand and pull them downward. Looking down, he saw Abby moving to tug him away from the swamp's edge. In the distance, Sister Okoye was already a wet smudge against a drenched backdrop of stone, beckoning for them to follow.
He did not feel the need to release her hand as they ran after their mentor, through a foot-soaking morass of mud and matted grass. When they caught up with her, she was hurrying down into an oddly formed passage between suddenly towering walls.
“This is our stronghold,” she announced proudly, pointing up. “The Iya Agba heartland. Sungbo's Eredo.”
“What is it?” asked Abby as she craned her neck in every direction.
“Is this man-made?” asked Dylan, trailing his hand across the wall's weathered surface.
“Exactly,” said Sister Okoye with a smile of a schoolteacher receiving an unexpectedly correct reply. “This is the least known yet most important historical relic in all of Nigeria. It is a wall over one thousand years old, over one hundred miles long and seventy feet high. It is the outer rampart of a kingdom largely forgotten by history. But not the lore of the Iya Agba. Abby, this is why we came here. Here we will find the next stage of your search. Come, follow me and I will tell you more.”
Energized by their arrival, not to mention the relief of not having to sit in a narrow canoe, she bolted forward and began to run along the rampart's edge. It proved tough going, for veils of rainwater ceaselessly poured from its flat expanse, directly over their path. Twice Abby slipped in the mud and fell hard against the wall, stopping herself just in time with an outstretched hand.
They turned a corner and saw that, indeed, the wall continued just as straight and as tall for a great distance. The depression at its foot deepened into an overgrown channel. “That's the moat!” Sister Okoye called back, playing the enthusiastic tour guide.
They continued on for over an hour, feeling their awe at the massive construction deepen by the minute. And just as they began to weary of its unceasing height, Okoye leaned sideways into its slope, stepped upward, and began somehow to scale its face. Abby and Dylan peered, and finally saw that she was climbing with the aid of cunningly positioned natural protrusions in the earth.
“Iya Agba created these patterns in the wall long ago,” she called down. “We memorize them, for they seem invisible to all others. And they are the only way to safely reach the top.”
Glad to be moving somewhere different and decisive, Abby planted her foot into the first indentation and forged ahead. The way up proved surprisingly easy, although the constant rain was beginning to wear on her. She looked ahead and saw that Sister Okoye was almost three-quarters of the way to the rampart's top, scurrying like a Sherpa. Well, she'd just have to catch up . . .
. . . with a horrified rush of blood to her head, she felt her foot slip into free air, her body slide sideways. Her perch alongside a veritable mountainside sheared off into nothing.
She felt the scream of the doomed begin to gather air within her. Her will rebelled, her sense of destiny recoiled at the fate of such a capricious ending to her life.
After all those close scrapes, only to perish now in a fall off an archaeological relic? No, it couldn't end this way, it just couldn't!
The reply came courtesy of a painful grip on her right hand. The hand forming this grip belonged to Dylan, who forcefully yanked her back up to the stepped path. Her legs flailing, her feet kicking the air in their desperate bid for purchase, she finally felt one foot nick a step's base and burrow in.
“Thank you!” she gushed while pressing her side against the comfort of solid flatness.
He smiled, not trusting himself to utter a word. Again, her hand sought his. He reasoned that given her near fall, there was every innocent reason for the clasp to take place. Yet as he stepped up the wall's side, hurrying to match her enthusiastic ascent, he couldn't help but thrill at the touch.
Soon they had reached the top, the very lip of the massive wall. Stepping up, they saw that it was much thicker than any wall they had ever known, nearly fifteen feet across.
Sister Okoye was nowhere to be seen.
“Sister! Sister!” shouted Abby into the unrelenting shower.
“Sister Okoye!” Dylan yelled now, with a man's force and command.
Then the older woman appeared, her face peering out and smiling through the rain. A stray hand beckoned them to her side, behind an outcropping that curled deceptively around what proved to be a sheltered hole.
Bending down through a low entrance, Abby and Dylan stepped into the shocking sensation of dry air, accompanied by the stale smell of a cave and the sudden flare of a torch bursting to life.
“Welcome to our place of refuge.”
AMSTERDAM
“Is Shadow Leader in our custody?” the Elder asked, not bothering now to conceal his rage.
“The man knows his fate, my Brother,” replied the voice on the television screen. “He avoided it first by hopping that plane to Africa. Now he has undertaken to find them all by himself. Hearken back to his younger days, I suppose. He seems to think he can emerge a hero and avoid any consequences whatsoever. Wouldn't we allâ”
“I wouldn't,” barked the Elder. “I would run a proper command post and coordinate the people working for him, like a proper leader of people. Instead of jumping in like some overage Rambo.”