[b]Atlas Mountains, Spanish Morocco[/b]

Julio Zuraban struggled to keep pace with Joaquin as they and a hundred other former prisoners scrambled across the desert sands and up into the rocky crags at the foot of the Atlas Mountains. Their presumed liberators, these masked men of the Sahara, rode alongside the sweating, panting caravan of malnourished Europeans on camelback. The steeds snorted and growled in annoyance as their riders bounced upon their humps and harried the beasts onward, maintaining a steady trot at the same pace as the Spaniards. A few of the riders cantered back to the tail of the sweat-moistened gaggle, demanding they move faster The words of these veiled men themselves were utterly foreign to the Europeans, but their exasperation communicated a demand for urgency that needed no translation.

This running trek through the desert would have been a challenge for Julio even under ideal circumstances. Though his duty as a Senator of the Spanish Republic had been a taxing post, as was his self-exile afterwards, neither line of work was particularly strenuous at least in terms of physical exertion. Though he was always a wiry man, Julio had never been able to call himself fit. Complicating his softness were months of neglect and imprisonment that had left Julio positively emaciated. An evening jog along the riverfront in Madrid would be a difficult proposition in his current state - to say nothing of a forced dash across the Sahara at the height of summer. Thick, cottony foam bubbled up under his tongue; his palate and tongue felt as if they would mummify with every breath of dessicated air that passed across his mouth and into his lungs. Atrophied legs threatened to bear Julio's strides no longer. He could simply collapse into the sand, let the others pass him by, and allow the desert to consume him. He could escape the hardship that had been the last four months - the last three years - here and now. At Arratzu, Julio [i]begged[/i] his captors for death, as Sotelo had hoped. Here he could have that death that days ago he had wanted so desperately, if only he could falter and submit to the sand and the heat.

But Julio did not submit. With every aching stride Julio chose llife: to accept this new lease at freedom offered by the camel-borne warriors who had saved him from a fate [i]worse[/i] than Arratzu. He would not squander his newfound freedom.

The desert sands sloped up in rippling dunes toward the sheer walls of the Atlas Mountains. Half buried slivers of rock sheered off the jagged peaks poked up from the dunes and presented a maze to the approaching prisoners and their mounted escorts as they drew closer. The Spaniards slithered through the boulders in a single line after the rider leading the prisoners, the man who had spoken to them in Spanish.

"This way!" Their scarf-veiled leader commanded in perfect Castillian. "Keep moving, we are nearly there!"

This man was distinct from from the other warriors. He was no Saracen, Julio knew that much. He had seen Bedouin tribes before once; a tribe of wandering Arabs outside of Damascus in Ottoman Palestine. Just as the ones that escorted them now to safety, they were merciful to strangers and ruthless to their enemies. The leader of these Bedouin was no native man. His Spanish was well pronounced and his grammar far more precise than that of self-taught speakers - he had clearly been educated in a more formal fashion. More tellingly, he rode his camel in a noteworthy fashion. He kept himself rigid upon the bobbing hump of his dromedary, whereas his comrades bobbed up and down in tandem with the trot of their steed. His method of riding was not as natural and organic as his companions, but learned and practiced. He was a foreigner of some sort.

A distant, percussive twocking echoed through the boulders and against the mountain face before them. This rumbling, mechanized din built in pitch with each passing second. The source could only be but one thing: helicopter rotors, and they were approaching fast.

"The Spanish are coming!" The foreigner exclaimed, wide eyes visible through the open slit in his scarf as he turned toward the haggard escapees. "Into the canyon! Move!"

Motivated by sheer terror for closing gunships, the prisoners burst forward as quickly as their legs could carry them after the foreigner Bedouin. The scarf-clad warrior dismounted from his camel and tumbled into the sand before leading his camel and the prisoners on foot into a craggy fissure running up a solid face of the mountain above. Joaquin stood at the threshold of the crack in the rock face, beckoning his companions through into the fault. Julio fell in behind a dismounted camel being walked through the narrow pass by one of the Bedouin. The Spaniards behind him pressed Julio forward into the rear of the camel, which groaned with annoyance as those behind him shoved him into the beast's haunches.

Though his face was firmly planted against the camel's ass and he hadn't the faintest idea where they were going, Julio felt the sand give way into a coarse gravel crunching underfoot. A moist, refreshing breeze coursed through the chasm, beckoning the prisoners further into the shadowy depths of the fissure. Cool blue light filtered into the chasm as the gaggle of escapees pressed forward after their liberator. Over their anxious murmurings, a gentle babbling could be heard like that of running water falling onto stone. Julio glanced over the camel's hump and saw a gout of cold, clean water spilling out from a hairline in the rock above his head and patter against the gravel below in a waterfall of fat, sparkling waterdrops. The trickle carved a gurgling ribbon through the chasm that ran into the blue light beyond.

With little warning, the camel moved ahead and gave Julio and those behind him a glimpse of what lay beyond the chasm. The fissure opened up into a massive gorge walled on either side by sheer stone walls some twenty or thirty meters high. That tiny rivulet beneath their feet joined with the larger brook that had carved this canyon out over millions of years. Olive bushes grew from the watered banks, each quivering of the in the shade-cooled breeze that coursed through the canyon. Camels attended by turban-sporting natives slurped water up from the deeper pools, menacing schools of tiny minnows as they did. The herders beheld the gaggle of prisoners with palpable suspicion, which seemed to be partially soothed when the Spanish speaker addressed them once again.

"We are safe here. Their gunships will not find us in these canyons. We must keep moving, but you need not exhaust yourselves. Move at a relaxing pace within reason and refresh yourselves with the stream water if you wish, I assure you that it is clean."

Julio acknowledged the foreigner by collapsing onto his knees and dropping his head into one of the pools beside the camels. The surge of cold, bubbling water instantly extinguished the throbbing heat on his cheeks as he imbibed the surrounding water in humongous gulps. Upon surfacing, he found that nearly all the other prisoners had joined him in drinking from the canyon stream. The camel herders, still wary of the newcomers, had pulled their beasts away and continued down the gravelly corridor through the mountain. Joaquin, however, kept pace with the Bedouin leader as he and his fellow warriors went down through the canyon with camels in tow.

"Do you honestly think we are safe here?" Joaquin demanded of the foreign warrior. "You don't think that they'll not be suspicious when they find the wreckage completely empty when it should have dozens of people inside?" We can't afford to slow down. We need to put as much distance between ourselves and that plane or we will be found."

"The Spanish already know we are here, it is only that they do not know exactly where to find us. The destruction of their airplane will embolden them, their commanders will send more patrols out into the desert to locate us, leaving fewer men at their Mountain. We know full well what we are doing; who are you to question us?"

"He doesn't mean to come across so critically." Julio exclaimed, butting into the exchange. "Joaquin here is only concerned for us. He was a leader by profession, and he has his opinions what the best course of action is. We are all very grateful for you and your companions, and we are in your debt."

"We will address this debt of yours soon enough. The Amghar will see you now. He shall decide how your people will assist us."

The foreigner drew his hands across the scarves obscuring his face, loosening them and allowing them to fall upon his shoulders. He was a Subsaharan with characteristic nappy hair cropped short upon his head and forming a long yet well-kempt goatee that maned his mouth. His hazel eyes, light skin, and narrow nose however were decidedly un-African.

Julio's obsession with this man's identity distracted him from the walk through the canyon, as well as Joaquin's palm extended before him that immediately brought him to a halt and galvanized him from his reverie. It was then that he noticed the contingent of armed men standing before them at a bottleneck in the shady chasm. Great War machine guns nested behind stacked blocks of sandstone flanked either side of the narrowed pass, behind which turban-sporting North Africans trained on the Spaniards. The light-skinned African continued ahead, addressing them in Arabic once more. After a brief exchange, the guards lowered their guns and stepped aside, permitting the African and his following of liberated Spaniards into the narrows, but only with suspicious glares at the passersby.

Beyond the narrowing, the canyon opened into a massive sinkhole nestled within the bosom of the jagged mountains. The stream coursed through the narrows in a shallow riffle down to a cataract that emptied into a great blue pool. Waterfalls spilled out from cracks in the algae-stained walls of the sinkhole, feeding the oasis with meltwater from distant peaks. Majestic date palms grew to massive stature along the gravely shore of the oasis, their fronds forming a dense blanket that obscured the sunlight. Presumably, this curtain of palm leaves also hid the inside of the crater from anyone looking down from above. This, Julio presumed, was was the reason the Bedouin had chosen to place their camp here.

A small city of tents and tarp-roofs covered nearly every meter of available space in the sinkhole. Under draped tarps and betwixt palm trees, makeshift shelters housed every sort of supplies needed to fight a small war. The ancient clashed with the modern here; farriers hammered out horseshoes on forges built from oil drums and fueled by prepackaged grilling charcoal; horses and camels stabled under the same tents where anti-tank rifles were inspected and cleaned. Storage areas held dozens of sheathed swords resting on tables beside metal ammunition boxes. Julio had to make a double take when he saw a swarthy Saracen unloading long, silvery rockets from a crate stamped with Chinese lettering.

"Where in the Hell did all of this come from?" Joaquin blurted, wondering aloud.

"It was difficult." The African responded, slinking past a duo of natives carrying a long wooden crate down the path between the tents. "The weapons especially. Good men died to bring them here. It is my hope that they kill many Spaniards."

At the far end of the sinkhole, the African and his company came to rest before a pavilion - large and made from a rude, beige fabric. As the Spaniards caught their breath, a wizened and stoic Sarecen clad in a billowing robe pushed his way through the door flap. A long, gray beard hung from a face made into tanned leather by a lifetime in these inhospitable lands. It was face whose features spoke of immense displeasure.

"You have brought the enemy to our camp!" He rasped, a trembling hand feeling for the pommel of the sheathed sword on his hip. "This is a foolish thing indeed. You told me that you were wise in the ways of war. What wisdom is this, what kind of adviser are you? God willing, you have an explanation."

"These are no enemies, Amghar." The African explained, reverting to Arabic. "They were aboard the airplane of the Spanish that was shot from the sky. We slew the pilots, but found these people within the airplane's belly. I think that they are prisoners of some kind."

"Prisoners? This plane was flying toward the Mountain?"

"There is nowhere else it could have been going, Amghar. It is possible that every plane we have witnessed passing over these lands is carrying prisoners like them to the Mountain."

"That is impossible." The ancient Saracen huffed. "It defies logic. Why would the infidel expend such resources to transport their prisoners to the Mountain? Are there no prisons in Spain? I cannot believe such a thing. These men are agents of the Dajjal. What else could they be?" 

The Amghar drew his sword, eliciting visible fear in the prisoners as the straight-bladed longsword cleared the sheath. Despite his advanced age, the Amghar found ample strength to point the silvery tip at Joaquin's chest.

"They are agents of the Dajjal. They are captive enemies. Our people do not keep captives. You know this, Dejene."

"These men [i]are[/i] prisoners, Amghar." A woman exclaimed, commanding the attention of everyone. A silky hijab obscured her hair, but left her face visible. Her skin was fair and light - far lighter than any Arab or African. She was of obvious European descent. How she had come to arrive at this place was anything but. She made her way to the elder. "Please, lower your blade."

"You would let them live, Graciela? So that they will betray us and deliver us on a plate to the Dajjal?"

"Sotelo is as much an enemy to these men as any of us. Dejene could not have found more dependable allies than them. They have been beaten within an inch of their lives, this because they threatened Sotelo's autocracy. In the past year, some among them have been taken from the prisons and sent away by plane. My father and his people were likely among them. I didn't imagine that they would send them here."

"They are taking Spaniards to the Mountain? As they have with my people?" The Amghar asked, lowering his sword from Joaquin's breast at last. "I had thought that place was a fortress. Now you are saying that it is a prison?"

"I don't know. Arratzu - where these people came from - was a prison. The facility here, [i]La Cabeza[/i]... I don't know.

But these people might. If anyone knows what lies in wait for us in that place, it will be them. Let them live and allow me to speak with them. They will fight alongside your warriors, Amghar. But we must show them that they are safe here first."

The Amghar stood silently for a time, staring into the gravel beneath his feet as he thought to himself.

"I will let this be.

Graciela, Dejene... speak with the Spaniards. Feed them as we are able, and find out all that they know of the Mountain. Find out what is in store for us."