[b]Sevan Armenia[/b] "If you didn't hit the cow, then how did it get involved in the crash?" the nurse asked Sahle. She shined a tiny light in his eyes for some medical reason he didn't understand. Sahle was still dazed. The crash on the north lake road had left him scratched up, and his head was still spinning from everything that happened the night before. The Doctors, in the company of Sahle's friends, had kept him awake into the morning with questions, asking about what had happened and why Sahle had let Marc drive when the later was so chemically incapacitated. Only a few questions before, Sahle had admitted to his time with the Chinese prostitute, and that had sent an angry Aaliyah storming out of the room and back home to the Dead Man's Drink. "We bought it." Sahle answered deadpan about the cow. The nurse had big, brown eyes that gave him the feeling that she could see straight through his skull, so he avoided eye-contact. "You bought a cow?" she asked, her expression going from a scowl of impatience to a scowl of perplexion. Thick oil-black hair hung limp across her cheeks. "Yes." "Why did you buy a cow." "I am thinking a cow is a investment that is good to make." Vasily piped up in his typical facetious way. He was leaning against a steel locker in the corner of the room. "That is why farmers are into buying them." "Were these men starting a farm then?" the nurse snapped. Vasily shrugged. "There was a man." Sahle added. "He sold us the cow." "I am thinking..." Vasily rubbed his chin. Before he could finish what he was going to say, the nurse interrupted. "Why was this man selling you a cow?" "I don't know." "Your friend is very sick in there." she said sharply. "We don't know why you did what you did last night, but we want some answers. Are you are aware that you are facing criminal charges? Us Armenians take our country seriously." "A friend of mine said to me that he saw a local man put his pecker in a rabbit's burrow." Vasily warbled. "So I know that your people love your country. But my friend here, he will not be facing the law." "What gives you that authority?" The nurse argued, even more flustered than before. Vasily shrugged. "I am having no authority, but you will see that what I said is also true. My friend and me have other friends, and your hospital is knowing this." The nurse had reached her limit. She turned on her heels like a soldier on parade and blustered off into the conjoining room, leaving Sahle alone with Vasily. "Vasily." Sahle said. "I have a confession." "That you left your sperms in Vladmira's toilet and stole her sniff?" Vasily smiled. "I am already knowing this, and she was not happy. But you are not in trouble." "I was angry." Sahle lazily tried to excuse himself. "Vladmira makes many people angry. She is a beautiful woman, so she can do this thing even when she doesn't mean to. Better than other people." he paused for a moment, as if he was unsure whether or not to continue speaking. "I am wondering though... what did she talk to you about." "Oh." Sahle struggled to put the day before into focus. "She offered... we didn't talk about much. Chess." "That is strange. It is not the foreplay I would have been expecting." Vasily rubbed his chin. "But I am not knowing why she has shown so much interest in you." "Interest?" Sahle was intrigued. Suddenly, he imagined being able to get with her all over again. In his mind, he pictured the perfect shape of her ass, and he felt his body stir just a little. "She has been putting on the flirt for you. She has... eh... been around you and your friends a few times that were not expected." When Vasily said this, Sahle remembered how Vladmira had been with them when they met the doll maker, and he saw what Vasily was getting at. "I am not knowing, and so I will not know." Vasily shrugged. "Come now, we need to get you home so you can sleep." "No." Sahle shook his head. "I need to see Marc." When Sahle stood, he felt his head go light. He reached out helplessly at nothing at all, and Vasily grabbed his shoulders to steady him. "You hit your noggin, that is what the doctors are saying. Be taking a breath now. It will pass." The room had a sickly cream color to it, like a porcelain sink that had never been cleaned. It permeated the tile floor and most of the walls. The furniture, for the most part, was simple and utilitarian. Aside from the sterile steel locker that Vasily had been leaning against, there was a bed that was little more than a cot with a thin mattress on it, a cabinet with a sink, and a banana-yellow chair stuffed under a window. "Marc is sleeping. You should be sleeping to, I am thinking." Vasily said. In the arms of the Russian, Sahle suddenly became aware that the back of his hospital gown failed to cover his ass, and the entire experience left him feeling both ridiculous and humble. Sahle regrouped. "I can walk now." he told Vasily, waving him off. The Russian followed close alongside him anyway. Sahle walked timidly through the halls. The hospital had the appearance of a place that was doing more business than it was used to. The staff looked stressed and overworked, and they moved as if they always had several other place's to be. The rooms were filled with the remnants of the drunken city-wide party from the night before. There were families too, walking the halls in search of the specific rooms that their loved ones occupied. Some spent a few seconds looking at Sahle before politely looking away, though the children often forgot that courtesy and just stared. Africans were not the norm in Armenia, and though they fit on the strip and in the slums just as much as any other expatriate, people from out of town were not used to seeing them. He did not care. He knew that racism against Africans existed, and he had seen it before, but it wasn't something that ever truly impacted his life. As an Emperor's son at university in Europe during his youth, racism had been represented by the pretensions of wealthy boys who still though of Africa as a place where monarchs lived in thatched huts and wore lion's pelts over their naked bodies. Their prejudice never did mean anything to Sahle back then; he even took a few of their sisters and mothers to bed. He had saw racism during his life in exile too, but it was a trifle compared to the life-or-death problems he so often faced. So when these hospital visitors stared at him, or gave him lingering glances, he did not think about his skin color. He thought about his naked ass. Once they had gone so far, Sahle knew that they would arrive at Marc's room at any minute, and an anxious tension began to build. What would he find? He felt partially responsible; it was his fault they had went out that night, after all. Sahle couldn't put out of his mind the look Marc had given him right before the crash. In that moment, with blood trickling out of his nose, Marc had looked like some sort of ghoul. When Sahle sensed Vasily leading him toward a specific room, he felt his anxiety grow at an exponential pace. Time seemed to hinge on the approaching moment where they would turn the corner and look inside and Sahle would get his first look at his friend. And then, like taking a plunge into cold water, the moment happened. Marc was asleep, and had been since the accident. His face was bruised up, and his hair was shaved where they had stitched up a wound. Yared was sitting in a yellow chair in the corner reading a newspaper. He looked up, and when he saw Sahle, he folded the paper and smiled. "You should know better than to ride with Marc after a party, brother." the bearded musician said before embracing Sahle. "How is he?" Sahle asked at once. Yared looked over at the sleeping junkie. "He took an overdose, friend." He itched his head and stared for a moment, looking uncertain. "I don't know much about these things, brother, I do not know at all. But they told me that he would need fluid? They are giving him that." Looking at Marc, Sahle felt the same feeling he had once reserved for Yaqob when they were children. It was not the comfortable love that he had for his mother, or the lust-laced fondness he had for Aaliyah. This brotherly love was a camaraderie: an absolutely complete trust in the other person, and one that came with an understanding that your brother trusted you just as much. It came with a burden of responsibility that had irked Sahle in his youth, and had caused some of the distance between Sahle and and his true brother Yaqob. But Sahle was older now. He had seen some shit during his time in the real world. Marc was an adult, and he was ultimately to blame for his problems. But had Sahle betrayed their brotherly trust by tempting him? It didn't seem like a sensible responsibility for Sahle to take - Marc found drugs, that was what he did, that was his specialty - but sensible or not, Sahle couldn't help but feel guilty. The entire thing made his head hurt. "I am thinking the doctors in Sevan have seen the drugs, eh? We might be saying that they are specialists!" Vasily said, chuckling through the last few words. "Marc will be fine." Yared nodded. "I will watch him here, friend, and if anything changes, I will call you at the Drink. I think you need to go back there and talk to Aaliyah." "Yes." Sahle nodded. "Aaliyah. How mad is she?" Vasily laughed. "Your woman is full of anger now. I would be apologizing if I were being you, or else I am afraid she might be going down and shooting people, and I do not want to be put in the jail because I gifted her that gun." "I need to get my clothes." Sahle said. "Then I can go back." "I will drive you to that place." Vasily said. And with that, they were done. Sahle found his clothes in his room and, once dressed, he rejoined Vasily on the street. -- Sevan cleaned up nicely. Only twelve hours earlier, the city had been drowning in booze and boozers, but there was no real sign of any of that left over now. The streets were clean and the dumpsters were empty, though Sahle couldn't imagine that the cleaners themselves had simply went to bed early to complete their tasks. They must have partied, and if they had drank as much as everyone else, they must have certainly worked through hangovers in the morning. Vasily waited near the curb, steam rising from his beat up truck as it rumbled roughly in the crisp Armenian air. Even in the summer, Sevan seemed like a cold place to Sahle. He was used to the equatorial heat of Africa, but what Sevan delivered was cool summers and freezing winters. Was it how life was in the north? If this was the norm, and not simply due to the mountains, then how cold did Europe get? And Russia, for that matter? Sahle climbed into the truck and wrapped his legs in a blanket as soon as he was in. As they pulled away from the hospital, Sahle noticed a thin plume of smoke rising in the north, and he pointed at it through the clouded windshield. "What is that smoke?" "The army games are finished, I am thinking." Vasily answered. "They have been doing the training exercises. Did you not go out to watch them? All of the other peoples in the city, they went out to watch them." "No." Sahle answered simply. "I went out." Vasily paused to shift a gear, and when he did, the transmission whined like a mouse with it's nuts in a vice. "There was nothing to be seeing from the shore. It was a waste of time for me." They passed through the city slowly, and Sahle watched the familiar scenery go by with dull interest. They passed the theater that had been shot up in the night, and Sahle found it amusing that the broken light-bulbs had already been replaced. The streets were quiet. Though the street cleaners and hospital staff were still on duty, many of the town's employees had the day off. The day before had been Independence Day. For some less necessary employees, two days off of work could be afforded. They arrived at the Dead Man's Drink. Sahle felt nervous about Aaliyah. It was odd to him that, after spending so much time worrying about his obsession with Vladmira, it was the pussy he paid for in the Chinese den that got him in trouble. He tried to think about what he would say when he did finally talk to her, but his brain was all mush now. He would have to improvise. Vasily followed Sahle and they went inside. The familiar smell of mildew and stale alcohol filled his nose. They walked down into the bar, stepping as soft as they could to dampen the groan of the shitty wood in the floors. "I need a drink." Sahle said. He was trying to stall, to avoid talking to Aaliyah as long as he could. He thought that, given some time, he would formulate the perfect excuse, and all of this would be over and they could go back to their lives. He sat at the bar as Vasily, taking the hint, went to find if there was anything easy that he could serve up for the both of them. As he waited, Sahle looked up at the corpse encased in glass above the bar. He stared into the leathery pits where it's eyes had once been and thought of nothing useful. "Who are you?" he heard Vasily say, and when he saw his Russian friend staring across the room, Sahle followed his gaze and saw a middle aged African man in a grey trench coat entering from the back. The man had dark grey hair that he kept trimmed close to his head, and he had the coffee-brown skin of an East African. Seeing somebody from his own part of the world made Sahle feel nervous. It was rare for Sahle to see people that looked so identifiably East African, and when he did, a paranoia of being recognized always seemed to take over his thoughts. The stranger stared at him, and just like that his paranoia was starting to become panic. "Well. I did not expect this." the stranger said. Sahle's heart started to flutter. He felt like he was entering some nightmare, but was he? He was being ridiculous. This stranger greeted him, and he was responding by looking like a startled gazelle. "Prince Sahle." the stranger grinned. And there, with those words, the nightmare became real for Sahle. He stood frozen. What could he say? He had been identified. For the first time in three years, he had been called by his real name. "I am not knowing any princes or Sah-lays." Vasily answered for him. The stranger looked wearily at the Russian. "He is. I know the face. Hid it under a beard? That was a clever move, my prince. Your brother is looking for you, you know?" Sahle remained still. It was as if his mind had been cryogenically frozen. No matter how much he tried, he could no longer string a thought together. The stranger moved forward. Before Sahle could shake himself out of his shock, Vasily pulled a gun. The stranger reached instinctively for his belt, but once his hand had found its holster, it stopped. Vasily had the advantage. He had the stranger pinned at gun-point "What is it that is going on?" Vasily asked. "I do not understand this game that we are playing now. Let us just end this." And then there was another voice. A girl's. "Vasily, it is okay, this man is with me." Sahle recognized it as Vladmira's. His head jolted to the side to see her walk in from another door. Vasily, completely baffled, holstered his gun. "I am Assistant Director Amare Debir of the Ethiopian Walinzi." the stranger announced. "I was just as surprised as you, Vasily, when your associate Vladmira sent word that Sahle was living under an assumed name in Sevan. In all honesty, the Walinzi assumption was that he had died during a botched Spanish raid back in '77. But no, I see that he is alive now. And right here. Sahle, you are under arrest. Your brother would like to see you again. You have a lot to talk about." Sahle struggled to come up with an answer. All he could formulate was an awkward "No!" "I am not giving you a choice." Amare answered. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a ziptie. He came up to Sahle and forced his arms behind his back. "Vladmira. Is our boss knowing what you are doing with this bounty hunting?" Vasily asked the beautiful blonde that Sahle, up until this moment, had been obsessed with. "This one fell into my lap." she answered. She was completely ignoring Sahle now. The time they had spent naked in bed hadn't even caused a polite interest in his existence for her. "But I read the bulletins, Vasily. How did you have a fugitive Emperor under your nose for so long and not even notice." "I am not a bounty hunter." Vasily replied in a low, defeated tone. "I'm Samel." Sahle finally managed to mumble the tired lie. "That is my name. I am Samel. You have the wrong man." "Not a chance." Amare said as he tightened the tie around Sahle's wrists. "What type of name is that anyway? Samel? They both start with the same letter too. Not very creative, my prince." "Don't call me that." Sahle blurted. "I am not a prince." "Not anymore, you mean?" Amare replied. "You can't hide who you used to be. The past still exists, even if you don't want it to." A sound like thunder filled the room just then, and it was so loud that Sahle lost his hearing for a few seconds. At first, sound came back to him in the form of a shrill ringing. He was still intact, but as he regained his bearings, he realized that he was covered in blood. His body was numb. Was the blood his? A new fear pulsed through his limbs then; a fear that he was going to die. But where was the blood coming from? He heard Vladmira's voice cry out. "No!" she shouted, but thunder rung again, not as loud to him this time, and he whirled around in his stool to see what happened. The first thing he saw was the Walinzi Agent's ruined corpse on the ground. His head was bloody, and it had a deflated look to it. Next to him was the lifeless body of Vladmira. Her eyes were looking up toward the mummified corpse on the wall with an expression of horror. Sahle looked over to Vasily now, but the Russian did not have a weapon in hand, and he was looking up toward the stage with an expression of bewilderment. There, on stage where a microphone usually stood, was Aaliyah, wearing a white dress and with a smoking gun in her hands. -- Vasily freed Sahle's wrists. They spoke no words at first. What had happened had happened quickly, but it had been powerful enough to change everything about every relationship in the room. When Sahle's hand were free, the first thing he did was to check himself for any wounds, but he found nothing except for blood. None of it seemed to be his own. Aaliyah had fallen down into a heap on the stage. She was crying now, and the ceramic mask that covered the ruined side of her face slipped so that her real eye was not even with the fake one. "Are you a prince then? No, I am not asking. You are. You make the face that says that the dead man told the truth." Vasily broke the silence. Sahle's throat was dry. "I... I still need that drink." Vasily grabbed a beer and tossed it to Sahle. "We need to get rid of the bodies. This man was an important man from your country, I think he will be missing and people will be looking into him being missing. This is what we will be doing. I will be getting rid of the bodies, and I want you to both lock yourselves into your room. Aaliyah, please don't be shooting the prince." "Why?" she moaned. Sahle felt that one word from Aaliyah strike him like a knife in his chest. "Because I am having uses for him." Vasily said. "The bounty is not interesting me, but I know a man will want to meet our Emperor drummer. Do not be killing him, or I will be very upset. I will hide the bodies, and I will be coming back for Aaliyah. She will be needing to hide with the other band people. I know where. I am fond of you, so I will make sure that you are safe." They followed his orders. He locked them in a room in the back, where they sat in the dark and Aaliyah continued to cry. "I am sorry." were the only words that Sahle could produce, and so he produced them. It felt like he was pissing into the wind, as if everything he tried to do to make this better would just come back to hit him in the face. "I will make this right." She kept crying. "I don't know what to do now, but we will get better." he said. She looked up at him with her misaligned eyes, one fake and one real. "I don't know who you are." she said. "I... I murdered those people! But... I don't know you!" "I'm still the same person." Sahle tried to say. "You lied to me! You always lied to me!" she cried. "I couldn't say who I was." he tried to explain. "I always wanted to, I've always thought that maybe things would change and I could go back home and you could be my queen." That did not help. She was still sobbing. "I murdered those people for Samel! But there is no Samel! You... I look at you, and I don't know you now!" "Just give me some time to make it up..." "You don't get it!" she yelled. "Samel is dead! You are a stranger!" They didn't talk after that. Vasily returned an hour later and took Aaliyah away, leaving Sahle lost in the dark. He wondered if he would ever see Aaliyah again, or Marc and Yared for that matter. He also wondered, as if from nowhere, whether or not he would ever see his brother and sister again. He had came close when the Walinzi agent arrested him, and he had nearly been caught by Taytu when they almost crossed paths at the Suez. Was this his last chance? Vasily returned again, this time to collect him. Sahle had every reason to be suspicious of Vasily's motives. If Aaliyah had rejected him because of his secret despite the fact that just months before they had talked about getting married, then how would a mercenary like Vasily react? Was he about to be sold to another buyer like royal cattle? But what other choice did he have? The Walinzi knew where he was now, and his life in Sevan was in shambles. Vasily was the last option he had left to him. They went out to the Russian's car and drove. They left Sevan, taking the northern lake road. A strange sense of Deja Vu gripped him as they passed the very place where Sahle and Marc had been in an accident the night before. There were even skidmarks in the road where it had happened. If they were taking the northern road, that meant they were heading away from the major cities of Armenia. Where were they going? Where was he being taken? "What now?" he asked Vasily. "I am taking you to my boss. I am thinking he will be interested in meeting an Emperor." "Where is he?" Sahle had a hunch, but he could not be sure about anything anymore. "Home." Vasily smiled. "Russia."