The Gate of Fire (30 page)

Around him, people paused, halting in their arguments or gossip. Khalid nodded to his lieutenants, and they took up the cry as well, moving through the mob, their voices raised.

"Throw down the idols! Out with the foreigners! Cleanse the temples!"

Within a grain, one of the priests of Zeus Pankrator shoved a Mekkan merchant who had taken up the cry to "drive out the foreigners." The merchant pushed back, and one of Khalid's men, moving through the crowd behind the two men, threw a wine bottle. The bottle cracked open the head of one of the acolytes of the Pankrator Temple. The acolytes shouted abuse at the crowd and threw paving stones back. The Mekkans, hit by the stones, returned fire.

Within ten grains, the temple square surged with a full-blown riot. Priests were knocked to the ground and trampled by the mob. Massed fists beat acolytes barely out of childhood into bloody ruin. Stones and brickbats and offal filled the air as each temple faction raged against the others. The fire burned on, unnoticed. Khalid and his men regrouped near the entrance to the square, still raising a cry to "tear down the idols." The mob, tearing itself to bits, surged up onto the steps of the arcade.

Khalid laughed merrily and ordered his men back. They hurried along the passage, catching a glimpse of the fighting in the square from time to time through the archways that led out into the center of the temple district. After a few grains they reached the front of an imposing temple to Baalshamin. A cluster of priests huddled in the doorway, under towering statues of the god's winged servants. The scent of incense and myrrh and cardamom drifted out from the half-closed doors. The flickering glow of lanterns and torches highlighted the shaven heads of the priests. Khalid stopped, eyeing the doorway with interest. His men stopped, too, gathering around him.

"I wonder," Khalid said to his lieutenants, "if there might be idols that should be cast down in this place?" His eyes lingered on the rich vestments and heavy gold ornaments on the wrists and necks of the priests. His lieutenants laughed, too, a cruel sound, and nodded their heads.

"Yes, Captain, these idolaters must be
rich
in sin to affront the great gods so!"

"Ay! Lord Uri—you'll come to your death, charging around corners like that!"

Jalal resheathed his saber with a
snap
, trembling a little now that his body no longer expected imminent violent action. The Ben-Sarid fighters and the Tanukh faced off in the little street, half of the men in the shade of the buildings, the others in full sun. The Ben-Sarid were watching their lord for a sign, but the Tanukh made an ostentatious show of putting their sabers and spears away. On the ground between the two parties, the runner woke groggily, holding his head and moaning. Jalal put a friendly smile on his face and offered the lad a hand up. Still disoriented, the boy accepted and fairly flew to his feet as Jalal put some strength to it. "Be careful, lad, you could run into a pointy object." Jalal turned the boy around and sent him back to the Ben-Sarid with a gentle shove.

In the opposite line, Lord Uri frowned, but slowly resheathed his own blade. Jalal watched the older man's expression—reading anger and fear and calculation pass across the aquiline features. Finally, the Ben-Sarid lord nodded and gestured for his men to stand easy. Jalal bowed a little and stepped forward. "Lord Uri, my captain has fallen ill from smoke. Is there a place nearby where he may rest?"

Uri peered over Jalal's shoulder, seeing Mohammed's litter. "Yes," muttered the Ben-Sarid, frowning, "one of my cousins maintains a house here in the temple precincts. We can take him there."

Jalal nodded his thanks, and the Tanukh gathered around him again, preparing to move.

"What is that sound?" Uri asked, staring back down the street. "It sounds like the sea."

"No," Jalal said with a grim smile, for he had heard such a sound before. "It is the mob in full spate, crying out for blood and vengeance upon their enemies."

Zoë walked in a field of skulls. Her legion boots cracked and crushed the pale white fragments that covered the broad avenue. Tiny clouds of white dust drifted up behind her, then settled slowly in the still, hot air. She wore an enveloping white and pale green cloak, a Ghassani
djellaba
. It had a deep hood that fell over her face like a shroud, shading her eyes and the grim line of her mouth. The sun was westering, preparing to fall into hiding behind the barren hills that lined the valley to the southwest. She picked her way slowly with a twisty walking stick of Syrian thorn in one hand. Her other hand was hidden in the folds of her cloak. Ten paces behind her, Odenathus followed her with stricken eyes and a shuffling gait. While she stared straight ahead, her head held high, he looked all around, trying to take in the utter devastation that had been visited upon his home.

The graceful pillars were cracked and tumbled, the broad paving stones shattered by the heavy fall of hammers and siege engines. The fronts of the houses had been pulled down, leaving only hollow brick skeletons. The gardens that had hung down over the street, covering the walls with a lush spray of flowers and green garlands, were burned and dark with soot. And everywhere, in the streets, in the doors of the houses, filling the stairways that led to the upper floors, were bones and skulls and shattered ribs. The wind had worked upon the fallen dead, driving them into drifts along the lines of broken stones in the street. Doorways yawned on empty rooms dark with the mark of fire. White lattices of arm and leg bones cluttered there, making little pyramids.

Zoë marched on, climbing over the broken idols that had marked the tetrapylon. There, in that circular plaza at the center of the city, where the avenues of the
decumanus
and the
cardo
met, the bones of the fallen had been ground to dust, and the air itself seemed hushed by the heinous crimes that the buildings had witnessed. Empty eyes stared out from cracked heads bigger than a man. Odenathus climbed over them, too, his heavy boot finding purchase on the shoulder of the great god Baal, his hand in the pit of an eye socket. Beyond the plaza of the tetrapylon a quarter-mile of boulevard inched up to a great raised platform. Like the rest of the city, the opulent houses of the rich that had once lined it were torn down and smashed to ruin. Halfway up the ramp, Zoë stopped and turned, looking out over the wreckage of her city. Odenathus paused at her side, his heart sick with despair.

"Everyone is dead, cousin. Nothing is left alive in our city. We are lost, homeless."

Zoë ignored him, peering out of her cloak, searching the rooftops and tumbled piles of brick and stone for some hint of life. There was nothing but sun-blasted desolation. She turned again to the boulevard, her boots kicking a tiny skull away. It rattled and rolled among the scattering of white sticks that had once been a family of carpenters. The skull bounced away down the boulevard, finally tumbling into the side of an upturned paving stone and cracking to dust.

At the top of the ramp, the walls of the royal enclosure loomed up, a twenty-foot-high rampart of heavy granite and sandstone blocks. At the base of the gateway Zoë paused, and at last a sound escaped her. A ragged hiss of pain seeped out from between parched lips. The entrance, once flanked by two mighty winged lions and a high, strong gate of Lebanese cedar two feet thick, had been ground to ruin. The lions were gone, not even a wing or paw remaining. The sandstone and granite had been gouged out, as if by gargantuan talons, and the door smashed to splinters. Bodies were mixed in with the rubble—some still clad in silver mail. A half-crushed helmet in Scythian style with a tapering crown was pinned underneath a toppled block of stone that weighed at least a ton.

It was hard work to climb the rubble slope where the gate had been. The footing was treacherous, and the sandstone, smashed to powder, was slippery. At last they reached the top and stared into the central compound of the royal palace. Here they had grown up and learned their letters. Their families had worked here, ruling the far-flung trading Empire that had fueled Palmyra's enormous wealth. Here they had sat at the foot of the Silk Throne, listening in awe to the wisdom of the Queen of the city, the noble Zenobia the Fifth, as she held court and dispensed justice. Here they had seen their brothers and sisters born; here they had argued with their parents and fought with each other and played in all the years of their youth.

Now there was nothing.

The graceful white walls of the palace, two and three stories high, accented by red pillars and the long noble frieze of Aurelian's victory over the Three Emperors—they were gone. The frieze had stood twenty feet high, running the full length of the front of the palace; from his acclamation as Emperor of Rome by the Rhine Legions at the northern end, to the tremendous scene of his wedding to the first Zenobia of Palmyra—that which had sealed the Eastern Peace and restored an Imperial dynasty to a Roman empire riven by civil war and barbarian invasion—at the southern end. On the day that Zoë and Odenathus had departed to join the Legions, laden with the voyage-gifts of their family and friends, it had measured 306 feet in length. It had been one of the greatest works of art in the Eastern Empire.

Nothing remained. The palace had been razed to the ground, and not a brick remained upon brick. The lattices of marble and porphyry were ground to dust. The elevated gardens, watered by an ingenious system of pipes and a hidden reservoir at the height of the palace, lay in ruin, a tumbled heap of glinting copper and burned wood and stone. A thick layer of ash lay across the rubble, drifted into pits and crevices where once stairways had descended into cool storage rooms and crypts under the palace.

Fire had raged across the noble buildings, both before they had fallen and after. The marble slabs were discolored and cracked by heat. Sandstone facings were streaked with soot and distorted by some terrible pressure. In the low places, sheets of bubbled glass shimmered green and gray in the afternoon sun where the cauldron of flame had transformed the sand and dust of the dying palace into a cruel mirror.

Zoë sat heavily on a slanted stone that had once formed part of the wall of the Hall of Oceans. Now it tilted at a dangerous angle. The thorn staff fell from her fingers and rattled dully on the slope of broken stone. Odenathus sat, too, more carefully, and wearily put down the heavy bag of supplies he had carried on a staff over his shoulder since they had left their camels outside of the city. His fingers trembled a little as he worked the cork stopper out of his water bag. For some reason he had trouble making his hands work the way he wanted. There was only a little water left, and he barely wet his mouth before pressing the bag into Zoë's hand. She held it, unseeing and unnoticing. Odenathus roused himself enough to scowl and press the leather mouthpiece into her mouth. She drank, but still seemed vastly distant from this world of bleached sunlight and barren broken stone.

"I'll see if the spring north of the theater is still running," he croaked at last. "We need to find water. Shelter, too. Night will fall soon, and it will be cold."

Zoë ignored him, staring across the ruin of her city with cold, dry eyes.

Odenathus picked his way through fallen pillars and great slabs of cut sandstone that had once formed the facade of the theater of Helios. The street here was very dangerous. There had once been tunnels and rooms dug under it, to hold wild animals and performers for the theater and the amphitheater that backed onto it from the north. Now whatever had raged through the buildings had torn open the avenue, leaving deep pits and channels gaping wide in the surface of the street. A block beyond the theater there had once been a well that had served the northern half of the city. Odenathus remembered a dry voice lecturing in his youth, speaking of the effort that the city had invested into the aqueduct that had supplemented this water source from catchment basins in the hills to the west.

He stopped at the top of a long, sloping hill of rubble. A great cavity had opened in the street, swallowing two houses and part of the theater market. Its bottom was in shadow, thrown by a lone building wall that stood forlornly to the south of it. Disgusted, he rubbed his nose and sneezed. The city was filled with a fine brown dust that got into everything. It was even worse than the grit that blew in from the desert. Though the collapsed street and the fallen buildings obscured it, he could make out the edges of the underground cistern fed by the spring.

Grumbling to himself, he swung his bag of equipment over his shoulder and bound his long dark hair back with a fillet of twisted green cloth. Two empty water bags slapped against his thighs, tied to his back with leather thongs he had made during the long ride south from Antioch. Prepared, he began to pick his way down the slope, cautious of loose shale.

Zoë sat on the shoulder of a fallen giant—once the image of the god Bel, who had blessed the city for so long. His face was gone, that which had stared down (in grave majesty) upon the supplicants in the court of the Silk Queen. Now only a white marble shoulder remained. The rich paints that had adorned him and given his cold skin the semblance of life had been burned away. The sun and the wind had done the rest. Here on his shoulder, Zoë sat above the city looking out upon the devastation that had shattered nearly every house and building within the circuit of the walls. Even those granite and sandstone ramparts, rising thirty, forty, or fifty feet high, had fallen to the enemy. Wooden stakes had been driven into the stone and flushed with water until the wood, swelling, had cracked away the ashlar facings, sending the walls crashing down to lie in heaped piles along the outline of the city. The two great gates—that to the west, toward Damascus, and that to the east, toward the distant Euphrates and the trading station of Dura Europos—had fallen. The looming towers had been torn down, leaving only a shell of the once-powerful gatehouses.

She sat, silent and still. The fierce anger that had driven her forth from Antioch and the arms of the Imperial Legions had drained away. A haunted emptiness filled her, looking out at the ruin of all her dreams. She knew deep in bone and blood that not one person she had cared for within the circuit of these walls lived to walk the earth. The windrows of bodies lay too deep to give her false hope. Not a soul had gone forth from this place in chains, the captive of the Persians. No hope of ransom was held out to her, even if she could dig in the ruins and find the treasuries and storehouses of the Queens of Palmyra.