The Gate of Fire (19 page)

There was a cry behind them both, and Mohammed risked a quick glance over his shoulder. Three Hashim had gotten past and had brought down poor Da'ud. They hacked at his body as he struggled on the floor in a spreading pool of blood. Then Roxane appeared in the doorway, straining to heft a heavy Roman-style
arcuballista
of ancient dark wood. A quatrefoil bolt lay in the cradle. Mohammed wrenched his head away, barely blocking the blow of the next Hashim through the doorway. He heard a sharp
twang
as the steel spring released, and a scream of pain, but no more. Two Hashim attacked; their blades a bright blur in the air. He locked one with his own sword and wrenched sideways. The second man's saber could not stop and hacked into his fellow's shoulder. Both men cried out in rage and Mohammed gave a mighty heave, throwing the two men back in a heap.

Uri rushed back and impaled one of the Hashim who had slain Da'ud, running the spear all the way through his body. The noble pushed the fouled weapon aside, and the man slumped to the floor, his hands clawing at the ash shaft that transfixed him. The remaining Hashim in the room had grappled with Roxane, but now he turned, hearing the sound of Uri's rushing feet. The Hashim warrior threw the woman down, and a long knife rasped out of the sheath at his side. The Ben-Sarid skidded to a halt, his fine-tooled leather boots sliding a little on the marble floor. His own dagger appeared in his hand; a blade of Syrian steel twelve inches long. The Hashim shouted and lunged, cutting sharply overhand at Uri's head. The Ben-Sarid ducked and slammed the Hashim in the chest with his shoulder. The two men grappled, hands locked on their wrists.

Spearmen crowded the door in front of Mohammed and he fell back, staying out of reach of the metal tongues. He tried rushing the man on the right side, but the others covered too quickly. Mohammed snarled at the men. "Uri, finish him and get back to the next room!"

Behind the Quraysh merchant, Uri and the Hashim were struggling on the floor, each trying to gain position. Sweat spattered off the Hashim into Uri's eyes. The Hashim's knife hand ground lower, the blade reaching for Uri's face. The Ben-Sarid wrenched to the side, escaping the bite of the knife, which scraped on the floor next to his head. Mohammed backpedaled past the two men, jumping over their legs, and—in passing—slashed down with his saber. The curved tip cut into the side of the man's head and blood fountained. The Hashim screamed and tried to roll away. Uri cracked the man's knife hand against the floor, sending the knife skittering away, and drove his own blade sideways into the man's chest.

The Hashim at the door howled in rage and pushed through, filling the room. Uri scrambled past Mohammed, who threw the next door closed. The Hashim were at it in grains, axe blows raining against the decorative ash panel. It began splintering immediately. Mohammed looked around for something with which to reinforce the door.

His daughter's handmaidens had a beautiful sleeping and sewing room, but it was woefully lacking in large heavy objects to block doors with. Uri looked back at him and shrugged his shoulders.

"Back to the next room," Mohammed wheezed. The battle was wearing on him; he was not so young anymore. "Has Sayyqi cut a hole to the roof yet?"

Jalal jogged up the street, twenty or thirty Tanukh and Quraysh at his back. Around him Makkah was burning as the pent-up hatreds of thirty years of quiet conflict erupted into open battle. Great mansions on the hill above and below him burned, their windows gaping wide with rushing flame. Clouds mounted to the dark heavens above, lit from below with ruddy light. As the Tanukh had ascended the hill, they passed scattered fighting and many bodies left to lie in the streets. Now they neared the residence of Lady Roxane, and Jalal slowed. He turned a corner and stopped, raising a hand in warning. Behind him the other Tanukh came to a halt. Some of their number passed the word, even to the clansmen who had joined them in their exodus from the Quraysh quarter in the city below.

The banner had done its work, as had their war cry. The clan, apprised of the danger to their favorite son, had risen fiercely against the Hashim, and now the green turbans hunted the black through dark streets and abandoned buildings. Steady streams of people were fleeing the city through the gates left open by the departure of their Hashim guardians. Jalal peered around the corner, his face wrapped in a long green cloth. Distant fires gleamed in his eyes. A street with three great houses on it lay before him. In front of one, where a gate had been broken down, a crowd of Hashim was loitering about, talking. Torches illuminated the scene, showing indistinct lumps in the street.

Jalal signaled behind him for Shadin. The other man hurried up, a great longsword in his hands.

"There are Hashim at the gate," Jalal whispered into Shadin's ear. "Send the archers forward. Everyone else in two columns—we will go far left and far right, running to the attack. The archers will fire down the center. We must take the gate quickly."

Shadin nodded sharply and moved back down the line of men, whispering commands. At the corner, Jalal drew out his bow and strung it, keeping one eye on the Hashim. Very faintly he could hear the sounds of men shouting in the house. Perhaps there was still some resistance.
No matter
, he thought,
if there is no one left alive, then the captain's funeral pyre will be lit by a mound of foreskins
. Jalal grinned unpleasantly at the thought. Shadin returned to his side with a group of men close behind him.

More shouting came from within the great house, and the men at the gate turned to look inside. Jalal chopped his hand down and jerked it forward. The bowmen fanned out past him into the street. Shadin was hard on their heels, and the Tanukh split into two horns, rushing silently forward. Jalal drew his bow in a smooth, violent movement and sent the first arrow hissing away.

The night suddenly filled with the flashing passage of arrows, and the first man at the gate was gasping in pain, clutching at the sharp sensation in his back, then his neck, before anyone had even turned at the sound of running feet. The Tanukh flooded past Jalal as he fired and fired again. Half the men at the gate were thrashing on the ground before Shadin leapt through the gateway, his huge longsword whirling around his head. Screams pierced the air from within, and the clash of steel on steel followed.

Jalal swung his bow over his shoulder and drew his saber. "On!" he growled at the other bowmen. "This will be sword work now."

Mohammed spun sideways, his saber catching the downstroke of a Hashim blade. The shock rang up his arm like a hammer on an anvil. He ignored it. The blood fire was burning in his veins, and the whole world had shrunk down to a gray tunnel filled with the angry faces of his cousins. Blows rang against his guard, and he pushed his muscles to greater and greater speed. A tickling began at the back of his mind, creeping along his spine as three and then four of the Hashim came against him. Their swords flickered and rang harshly, and he parried, spun, and struck again and again. He drove pommel to pommel with one, then threw the man backward with a powerful surge. The other three piled in, raining cuts and thrusts, but his hand was a blur and his old sword slipped two strokes and then blocked the other with the flat. His riposte tore one man's arm open from wrist to elbow, and the Hashim fell away, gasping with pain.

Very faintly, through the enormous sound of blood hammering in his ears, he could hear someone shouting at him from behind. But the Hashim came on again, more men pushing through the doorway to get at him. The floor was slick with blood, and the delicate cushions and silk draperies of his daughter's bedroom were torn and scattered. He had picked up a dagger for his left hand somewhere and when the Hashim came at him again, he blocked one blade into the floor with it, then circle-parried to the right, tangling a man's weapon. The man fell back, freeing his weapon, but Mohammed jumped into the break in the line, taking two blades on his own, and slashed the dagger across the throat of the first Hashim warrior. Blood blinded the other man, and Mohammed gutted him without thinking.

The gray tunnel filled the world, and Mohammed spun and parried and danced at the center of a whirl of steel and blood. More Hashim came at him, screaming curses and oaths, and he chopped them down, or shattered kneecaps with his iron-shod boots, or left their faces a bleeding ruin.

The shouting came again, and this time it registered. His daughter was screaming at him from the hole in the roof, begging him to follow them out. He beat aside the weakening attack of a Hashim spearman, chopped the spear haft in twain, and sank his saber into the man's armpit. Wrenching it out, he leapt backward and swung up onto the great pile of furniture that led to the rudely hewn exit in the roof. Above him he could see Roxane's face and her arm reaching down at him.

A chair toppled away under him, and he grasped at the edge of the opening. Roxane grabbed onto his shoulder, her long nails digging into the torn shirt. Her face contorted as she strained to pull him up. Mohammed's feet scrambled for purchase, and he caught the edge of the other chair, boosting himself up. Roxane managed to catch his belt and heaved, pulling him halfway into the opening. For a moment he was blinded, his head caught in her gown.

There was a sharp
twang
sound, and the sound of something heavy slapping into meat.

Mohammed got out both arms out of the hole and levered himself out onto the roof by main force, carrying Roxane on his shoulders. There was a chill on his back and he rolled over, catching her limp body. The night was lit with great clouds of smoke, glowing sullen red and orange. He rolled Roxane over, and her sightless eyes stared up at him. An
arcuballista
bolt had taken her in the side of the neck as she had dragged him out of the opening. Below her pale perfect face was a ruin of white bone and red tattered flesh. Mohammed stood slowly, heedless of the screams and shouts that rose from the ragged gaping hole in the roof. Ashes drifted out of the sky, settling in his silver-streaked hair and on his face. He stared down into the room below, seeing his Tanukh—come at last—hewing their way through the trapped ranks of the Bani Hashim. In his eyes, the fires of the city gleamed.

Thyatis, her long golden red hair tied back behind her neck, slowly descended a flight of sandstone steps. Her gait was stately, her head held high. She was dressed only in a short cotton chit on and a pair of beaten copper bracelets on her left arm. She stepped down onto a floor of marble blocks covered with fine white sand. A great room opened out around her, vaulted above with a huge dome. The walls were lost in shadow, showing only the feet of massive pillars set at regular intervals. Sunlight, dim and diffuse, filtered from a circular opening in the ceiling high above. Within a shaft of light falling from the oculus the slight figure of Mikele stood waiting. As before, she was dressed in long plain white pantaloons of soft cotton, with a tunic of subtle yellow and a round collar. A second, tighter fitting shirt with long dark sleeves that came to her wrists was worn underneath the tunic. Her hair was tied up into a tight bun at the back of her head.

Thyatis stopped at the edge of the circle of light and bowed deeply, her hands pressed together in front of her. Behind her, at the top of the curving set of stairs that ran down the side of the room, Shirin waited in a long loose gown that covered her whole body. Her hair, too, was tied up and bound back behind her head, out of the way. At the edge of the circle, Thyatis looked up and met the little woman's eyes.

"
Sifu
, I bring a candidate who wishes to learn the Way of the Open Hand."

Mikele did not stir, but her voice echoed off the hidden pillars and the dark spaces in the room. "If there is a student, a teacher will appear. Is there a student here?"

"Yes,
sifu
."

Thyatis bowed again and stood aside, stepping to the base of one of the great grooved pillars that ringed the central space of the room. Shirin descended the steps, the light
pit-pat
of her feet audible in the quiet room. At the edge of the circle of light, she stopped and bowed, even as Thyatis had done. "I am a student," she said in a clear high voice. "Is there a teacher here?"

"Yes," Mikele said, still unmoving. "Show yourself in the circle of light."

Thyatis bit back a soft hiss as Shirin shrugged off the loose gown and stepped into the circle. Under the pale light, her skin seemed to gleam with health; a rich dark olive. Her full breasts were bound with a
strophium
of fine Egyptian cotton, and she wore a slight loincloth to cover herself. The months of training on the decks of ships in Arabian and Egyptian waters had trimmed away the baby fat that had accumulated in four years of soft, palatial life in Ctesiphon. She seemed to float in the air, poised and ready. Thyatis swallowed, seeing her exposed in the pale light as if for the first time.

"I am a teacher," Mikele said, and she moved slightly, making a soft bow, no more than an incline of her head. "Do you wish to learn?"

"Yes," Shirin answered, taking a step forward into the center of the circle of light and bowing. "I wish to learn."

Mikele regarded her gravely for a moment, then a flash of a brilliant smile crossed her face. "Then you shall learn."

Thyatis sighed and turned away, quietly making her way up the curving flight of stairs. Behind her, the other students of the Way, who had been sitting quietly in the shadows, came out, their voices and laughter filling the old domed temple that was the center of their school. At the top of the stairs, Thyatis looked down, her face sad, to see Shirin talking earnestly with the other girls. At the edge of their throng, Mikele was looking back at her, her high-boned face calm and serene. The Roman woman turned and left. She felt excluded from the life of her friend, though she had intended this all along. It hurt.

A wooden man stood at the side of a room with a wooden floor. The floor was worn and rubbed smooth by the scuff and passage of many feet. The wooden man, his stiff arms held out before him, was polished, too, though the patterns were uneven. His neck and face, his elbows, his crotch and knees were all grooved with wear. Once there had been features painted on the face—a fierce red beard and bushy eyebrows—but they had vanished long ago.