Stealing Sacred Fire (18 page)

Diyarbakir was a city of
contradictions. It was contained within a wall of black basalt,
built in Byzantine times; one of the oldest cities on earth, with a
violent and dramatic history. Hasim provided a tour lecture,
gabbling the names of lost empires: Urartian, Assyrian and Persian.
Alexander the Great had once conquered this city, when it had been
known as Amida. It was now hard to credit that such exotic people
had ever once thrived there. Over the years, the city had spilled
out of the walls, and its outskirts consisted of the now familiar
modern, concrete buildings. Tower blocks soared in the pulsing
heat. The city walls were punctuated by four main gates, as well as
several smaller ones. Its remaining length was dotted with
defensive towers. Hasim explained that a large Turkish military
installation lay to the south, while to the north a NATO airbase
provided a constant back-drop din of screaming jets and throbbing
helicopter blades.

The atmosphere in the city was
chaotic; fume-gushing traffic hurtled around them in disorganised,
honking streams. Nearer the centre, the modern buildings concealed
edifices of ancient times, although there was evidence of extreme
poverty and squalor along the narrow streets that coiled away from
the main thoroughfares. The heat was almost unbearable and, to
Daniel, the heavy, tense ambience of the place was equally
oppressive. Here, Kurdish refugees had flocked for over a decade,
driven from their homelands by war and persecution. They regarded
Diyarbakir as their capital city, but the might of powerful nations
around them denied them autonomy. Hasim installed his charges in
one of the better hotels and went off scouting for a guide.

Daniel sat in his room drinking
heavily sweetened tea. A fan turned lazily in the air above him,
complemented by a raging air conditioning unit that provided
physical relief in equal measure to aural discomfort. They had
reached the first of their destinations, but Daniel was anxious
about what might come after. After all he’d seen and heard, it
seemed the Yarasadi would be too concerned with their political
troubles to accept Shemyaza as a representative of all they
worshipped. Would they be seen as madmen or, worse, people who
mocked the conflict of the Kurds? They had become distanced from
the object of their journey, caught up in the grinding cruelty of
the real world, where nations were oppressed and irreplaceable
ancient sites violated and destroyed. The faint psychic impressions
Daniel received only served to emphasise these things. The eternal
conflict of angels seemed rarefied and unimportant in
comparison.

In the next room, Shem lay on
his bed while Salamiel went out sight-seeing. He longed to bang on
the wall to summon Daniel, needing help to banish the whispering,
deceitful voices in his head. Only your death can bring back the
knowledge of the past. Your soul must be snuffed out like an
exploding sun. Run away from it, Shemyaza. Disappear into the
world. Become Peverel Othman again. It is what you really want.
You’re not a saviour, you never wanted to be. Others have shaped
you in the image of their desires.

In the past, when he’d been
assailed by doubts, Daniel had been there to reassure him. Why
couldn’t he simply go into Daniel’s room now and tell him the truth
of how he felt. It seemed impossible. He must find Gadreel
instead.

In the morning, Hasim took them
to a tea-garden; an oasis of calm in a shaded courtyard, separated
from the noise and smoke of the street outside by thick walls. Here
groups of young Kurds in Western-style clothes sat chatting
together. Some sat alone, engaged quietly in studies, drinking Coke
or small glasses of sweet tea. Daniel was struck by the way that
the sexes mingled here without stricture; Kurdish women were not
generally secluded or veiled.

Hasim led them to a table beneath the
branches of a spreading tree, and here introduced them to a young
Yarasadi named Yazid, who was sitting waiting for them. Daniel was
surprised by Yazid’s appearance, for he was quite pale of skin with
thick, dusty blonde hair and dark blue eyes. His lively manner and
fine features combined to make him very attractive. After the
introductions were made, and everyone was seated with a drink
before them, Yazid explained that he was eager for Westerners to
witness the atrocities against his people first-hand and was
therefore more than happy to take them into the mountains. He told
them proudly that he was a peshmerga — a warrior committed to the
struggle against oppression.

Shemyaza questioned him
carefully about Gadreel. ‘Your prophet has made astonishing claims
— that you are descended from the angels. I thought the angels were
spiritual beings.’

Yazid nodded earnestly. ‘We
were led to believe that, yes. The memory of our history has been
hidden from us, but Gadreel made us remember. It is important that
the whole world understands what is happening here. In the past,
the Ancient Ones were wiped out and now we, their descendants,
suffer the same fate. It must not happen. You will tell of our
troubles, so people will know.’

Yazid owned an ancient Transit
van — even more rickety than Hasim’s vehicle — into which they
piled their belongings. After bidding farewell to Hasim, who seemed
as grieved to see them leave as if they were life-long friends,
they began their journey further east. Yazid said they should go to
the town of Van, on the shores of Lake Van, a vast inland sea
surrounded by mountains. Here, he would be able to make provisions
for them to make contact with Gadreel’s immediate followers, who
were the only people who could feasibly arrange a meeting with the
prophet.

The roads were now almost impassable,
so full of pot-holes that the travellers felt as if their insides
were bruised by the constant jolting. The landscape became even
bleaker. Yazid drove through the sites of military attack, Kurdish
villages and towns reduced to rubble. Daniel felt as if he were
travelling through the scenes of a post-Holocaust movie. The world
had been scoured of greenery and those who survived had to scavenge
in order to live. He forced himself to look upon the horrifying
scenes: people squatting in the ruins of their homes that had been
bulldozed flat; children riddled with disease from impure water;
casualties of the fighting hobbling around with missing limbs and
ruined faces. The people they saw sometimes had blond or red hair
with green or blue eyes: true Kurdish stock with the physical
traits of their long-forgotten ancestors still visible upon their
bodies. Despite their adversity, the people were cheerful and
welcoming. Daniel felt humbled by their spirit, then felt guilty,
for his feelings seemed absurdly patronising. Shem seemed
particularly disturbed by the torment he witnessed, perhaps because
it evoked memories of what had happened to his half-human children
many millennia before. Only Salamiel seemed unmoved by all they
saw.

They had come here seeking the
past, and maybe they had found it. But not in the way they’d
imagined.

The countryside around them
changed, becoming more mountainous; rugged and sparsely populated.
The journey now became slower, owing to the increasing
deterioration of the roads and more frequent check-points. On
nearly every occasion, the travellers were grilled by suspicious
guards as to why they were in the area. Now, their story had to be
changed. They were a group of post-graduates from an English
university, travelling to Old Van to visit the ancient tombs there.
Yazid seemed unperturbed by these interrogations; Salamiel barely
held his contempt in check, while Shem acted indifferently. Daniel,
sometimes, felt sickened by the atmospheres he picked up. He could
sense that violence was never far from the soldiers’ thoughts.

Finally, they reached Van,
approaching it in the late afternoon. The town was like so many
others they had passed through; modern and grid-like, held in the
splendid cup of the mountains. Both Daniel and Salamiel voiced
their disappointment about the towns they’d visited. They had
expected softly decaying cities of minarets and domes; not miles of
concrete and glass. Yazid explained that Van’s appearance was
mainly due to a serious earthquake which had devastated the town in
the 1950s and had destroyed what remained of the ancient buildings
there. Old Van, the original town, had been demolished by war in
the early twentieth century, although ghostly remains of it still
existed, arrayed around the Rock of Van, a huge natural formation
that rose up beside the lake. The new town did boast an airport,
and Yazid told them that there would be more amenities for
travellers.

As they drove in, the great
Rock of Van was visible from the road, rising up from the sprawling
remains of the old town. Shem began to speak quite openly about how
this site had once been the location of an ancient Grigori
stronghold, during the time of the wars after the Flood. ‘I have
read the ancient manuscripts that describe it. Rituals were held on
the shores of the lake, in the early morning and evening when the
water shone like gold. The towers of the ancient city rose up
around the Rock, and there was a palace built upon it, crawling
over the stone like moss.’

Yazid eyed him speculatively as
he spoke, but did not comment. Daniel was sure the young Kurd was
privately surprised and intrigued by what he heard. Shem made no
attempt to hide the fact that he was directly connected with the
ancient race. Daniel wondered whether Shem was dropping these clues
into the conversation deliberately, in the hope that Yazid would
report them back to Gadreel’s followers.

In Van, the group booked into a
comfortable hotel, where Yazid told them he would take them into
the mountains the following morning. Yazid disappeared before
dinner, presumably to contact the people they had come to meet.

In the morning, their journey
resumed, taking them higher into the mountains, heading south
towards Babylonia. Here, the landscape seemed so vast; it was as if
they were exploring a new world. Rolling grassy slopes reached up
to distant peaks that were capped with glowing snow. After a day or
so of slow travelling along less-frequented and therefore nearly
impassable routes, they passed the invisible boundary between the
countries. There was a check-point, but Yazid bribed the Babylonian
guards effortlessly with the money and cigarettes that Shem gave to
him for that purpose. The guards seemed bored and swallowed without
question the story that Shem and the others were archaeologists,
intent on exploring the ancient tombs and wall-painted caves that
were hidden amid the rolling landscape.

They drove slowly now, under
cover of darkness, resting during the day. Often, when the gradient
of the treacherous road permitted it, Yazid turned off the truck’s
engine and they rolled and bumped along in silence. Yazid never
used the headlights, seemingly navigating by instinct alone.
Overhead, the sinister throb of helicopters trailed them like
powerful predators. Salamiel made jokes that at any moment they
might drive into a Babylonian patrol that would be more officious
than the Turkish border guards. Daniel suspected that in some ways
Salamiel relished the idea of conflict. Yazid, however, seemed to
know the mountains tracks so well they managed to avoid any
horrifying confrontations. Perhaps it was down to luck rather than
strategy.

Now, they travelled through more
abandoned villages, where the buildings looked as if they’d been
clawed by frenzied monsters. Yazid wept openly as he described the
atrocities that had been committed against innocent people. Entire
communities had been gassed or shot; he also spoke vaguely of
other, less tangible attacks.

‘The weapons are evil and
cruel,’ he said, ‘but those from the fire are worse.’

‘Those from the fire?’ Daniel
said.

‘Djinn!’ Yazid replied, in a
defensive tone as if his passengers would not believe him.

‘Djinn are used in attacks?’
Salamiel said from the back of the truck. He glanced at Shem who
was sitting beside Yazid up front, his arm along the back of the
seat.

‘I have heard of that,’ Shem
said. ‘More precisely, the rumour is that Nimnezzar’s Magians
invoke djinn into the Babylonian soldiers. I’m not convinced of
this. It could just be an exaggerated story.’

‘You have not seen it,’ Yazid
said.

‘Is he one of ours, Shem?’
Salamiel said. ‘This new king?’

Shem shrugged. ‘I don’t know.
We’ll have to find out.’

Early one evening, Yazid
announced they were only a few kilometres away from the village
where they would meet with Gadreel. This news heightened everyone’s
spirits.

Daniel felt now as if the
weight of history, the history of Shem’s people, was pressing like
a crowd of ghosts upon his mind. The setting sun brought out the
hectic colours of the mountains; copper lichened with verdigris;
rocks of poison-green malachite, and blood-streaked porphyry. The
air was almost narcotic with the scents of greenery and summer
flowers crushed by the delicate hooves of goats. The sheer rocks,
veined with their ophidian colours, reminded Daniel of the
serpentine cliffs at the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, where
Shemyaza had reclaimed his divine kingship. Perhaps the last thing
the exiled Grigori had seen when they’d left these lands were the
splendid colours of the mountains. The serpentine cliffs would have
been their first sight of England too, when they made landfall at
the Lizard. Was that part of what had drawn the giant race to those
shores?

The village was half-ruined and
many people appeared to be living in tents among the rubble. Smoke
rose from cooking fires into the evening air, along with the cries
of playing children. Women and men were dressed alike in army
fatigues; the garb of modern warriors.

Armed peshmergas halted the
truck and spoke to Yazid in Kurmanji, the local Kurdish dialect.
Yazid answered their questions, constantly pointing at his
passengers as if to illustrate a point. Eventually, they were
allowed to pass on.