The Gate of Fire (52 page)

Arad stood, and the wagon toppled away behind him. The
mobehedan
priest was only yards away, his hand raised in a motion of power, directed toward the south. A half sphere of sizzling blue-white fire ringed him, setting all that it touched alight. A path of burning tents and scorched grass wound away behind the priest. Arad could feel the flow of power from the sky and the earth rush past, fueling the priest's defense.

The third entrance was waiting, and beyond it, the power to shake the earth.

Arad raised a hand, scribing a swift pattern in the air. His fists clenched at nothing and he drew them in, toward his center. Hissing power flooded into him, shattering the wagon and shriveling grass. He stabbed out his right hand, palm out, fingers stiff.

For an instant, all that Arad could see was a jagged ultraviolet flash and a burning arc of darkness between his palm and the
mobehedan
priest, half turned. All else seemed to stop, even the wind, even the arrows that continued to rain down out of the sky. Fifteen feet away, Arad could see an arrow paused in flight, hanging frozen in the air.

Then, with a clap of thunder that blew down the remaining tents, time resumed. The bolt of darkness shattered the whirling shield of lightning, and the priest was slammed to the ground, crashing through a line of tents and into the side of a watchtower. The tower was already burning fiercely, set alight by the Hun arrows, and now it toppled, thick timbers shattering and the roof of planks cracking apart as it fell. Arad felt the earth jump under his feet as it slammed into the ground with a roar.

But he did not wait to see if the priest would rise again from the shattered logs. He leapt forward, his hands sketching a pattern of glyphs that spun out and rotated around him in the air. Lightning licked out from him, stabbing into the collapsed tower. Fierce explosions rocked the camp, and a rain of debris was thrown up. Something buzzed and flashed in the ruined tower. Arad ducked aside. A sickly white sheet of flame rushed past him, thrown in desperation by the priest who crawled from the wreckage, his face covered with blood. Arad spun, slashing his hand down. The earth rippled, tearing in a line between him and the Persian. The priest rolled aside, mouthing an incantation of ward. The stroke cracked across a half-raised shield of power, and the air shuddered. His mouth in a grim line, Arad sprang across the smoking logs, his braids blowing out behind him in the rush of air from the fires that raged around him.

Blood caked his fingers as he pulled the priest's head back. The Persian was barely alive—the side of his face crushed in by the Fist of Geb. Arad surveyed him with dispassionate eyes and then, without his command, his hands jerked, cracking the priest's neck. Dim light died in the dark brown eyes.

Arad shuddered, his body quivering as Lord Dahak boiled into the shell of his body. Yellow fire gleamed in his eyes. Thin fingers crawled over the dead man's face, and Arad, free of the compulsion that had driven him into the camp, raged in his mind at the cold thing that possessed his hands and feet and eyes.

He was still screaming, all alone and unheard in the prison of his own skull when Lord Dahak consumed the dying spirit of the priest. For a brief moment, Arad felt the
ka
of the other man rush past him, shrieking in fear and agony, before the dreadful cold that controlled him destroyed it.

Arad fell terrible anger fill his heart, but he could do nothing.

Come, beloved servant
. Lord Dahak's thought was filled with hunger.
We hunt
.

The night was filled with the sound of battle. The Huns were in the camp.

C'hu-lo sat on a fallen pillar, his legs crossed. A haunch of venison, taken from the burned camp down by the stream, was in his hand. He carved slices off it with the curved knife. It had been well seasoned, but he liked the salty taste. The valley between the frowning cliffs and the ruin of the great temple was filled with the sound of mallets driving posts into the ground. C'hu-lo was watching his men supervise the few hundred remaining peasants. His men were taking great joy in putting the lash to the poor wights, or cutting their throats if the dazed men fell.

The poles rose in a thick forest around the base of the ruined temple. A long slope ran up to the base of the stone walls. Once, it had been covered with trimmed grass and a garden of ornamental trees. Once, a stream had chuckled merrily down the slope, held between retaining walls of fitted stone. Now the trees were lumber for the poles, or for the fires that smoked and burned at the base of the hill. The stream was dry and filled with stones. A dim haze lay over the valley, cutting the light of the sun. Smoke rose in long, trailing columns from the fires. The air was thick with the sweet, cloying smell of roasted human flesh.

C'hu-lo took another bite of venison. He had taken wine, too, from the tents of the priests. The holy men had come well equipped to this place—they had not lacked for luxuries: soft cushions, exotic garments, iron braziers to hold coals in the cold night. Books filled with their blocky writing. C'hu-lo had thrown those things into the inferno of the bonfires himself. The silk of the double-peacock banners had burned merrily as well. The wine, however, was a strong tart vintage, from Shiraz in the south. C'hu-lo did not believe in wasting wine.

The sound of mallets rang across the valley, each dull thud driving a sharpened pole deeper into the ground. The Persian slaves wept in fear as they tilted up each pole, for those that they had emplaced before were now festooned with the bodies of their fellows.

C'hu-lo thought it was a good touch to put the bodies of your enemy's strongest men on display. Each priest of the twelve who had fought and struggled and died in the camp during the night battle had merited his own post. Some of them could no longer be recognized as the bodies of men.

The T'u-chüeh Prince took a long swallow of wine. This was thirsty work.

"You see? The fire is dead. Even the ashes are cold."

Arad felt nothing, staring down into the rubble-choked pit. Some fragment of his consciousness railed at him, urging him to lash out at the serpent who walked beside him. But his limbs did not obey his will, and the anger had dulled, becoming a dim flicker in the back of his mind. The horrors of the night—the heady rush of a dying soul flooding his body, the taste of blood and cracked bones, even the sickening delight that seeped from the cold mind of the sorcerer as his thumbs punched into the gelid wetness of a man's eye sockets—they were muted. The sun, riding high above the haze, seemed cold and distant.

This place, this acre of shattered walls and gravel and splintered marble strewn across the hillside, felt empty. The sorcerer crawled among the rocks and poked down into dark recesses in the tumulus with a long iron staff. Dahak seemed filled with a bubbling joy, constantly talking to himself as he bent to pick up a broken bit of pottery.

"They thought that this fire would burn forever," Dahak said, smiling as he rummaged among the stones. "See? They were wrong. This fire will never be lit again."

Arad looked away at the sky. It was a pale blue. Mountains rose up in the west, high and dark with only a glimmer of ice crowning them. He ignored the sorcerer, who continued to talk to himself while he dug about in the ruins. Memories stirred in the man, something bright and shining with the sun, somewhere in the west.
Was it beyond these mountains?
he wondered.
Something beyond this cold world?

"Their light has failed!" Lord Dahak screamed at the sky. The sound died quickly, swallowed by the empty air.

The old house stood alone at the center of the plaza. After the fire had gutted the temple, workers had cleared away everything but the original, open-roofed building. Hundreds had labored for weeks under the guidance of the Ben-Sarid, carrying away the broken stone and brick. The ash had been swept up and carried out to fertilize the fields that lined the
wadi
. The old statues had been broken up with mallets and iron bars and used to repair the walls of the city. Only the oldest temple remained, as Ibrahim had raised it at the founding of the shrine. It was small and dark, its walls of fieldstone blackened by centuries of ceremonial fires. At one corner of the square building, a section of the old wall was still smooth. In some unimaginable past, men had carved a block of fine-grained sandstone and—by great labor—had carried it to the precincts of the well of Zam-Zam and placed it here.

Within that smooth facing, in a cavity worn by the hands of countless pilgrims, a stone gleamed. It was a stolid black, uncut, unmarked. Altogether unremarkable to the eye.

Mohammed stood before the stone and heard it singing.

Though he knew that no other person in all the great throng that filled the plaza to capacity and beyond could hear it, he knew it was the voice of his god, the great and compassionate one who had made the world. "And men," he whispered to himself, "from clots of blood."

Clad in enveloping robes of white and brown, a tall, thin young man edged his way through the throng of people standing in the square of Ka'ba. His face, half shrouded by a gauze scarf, was grim. He limped slightly, for he had taken a bad fall from a horse. Despite this, he wore heavy armor of iron lamellae bound with loops of wire to a tunic of cured leather under the robes. It was blasphemy to bear arms within the precincts of Zam-Zam, but the young man was well past caring.

Before the fall of Yathrib, he had been an acolyte in the Temple of Hubal. He had been a quiet, rather reserved young man. Like his father before him, he was named Maslama. Thoughts of his family brought fresh pain. They were all dead, murdered or killed in the fires that had raged through the city in the wake of the Mekkan capture of the eastern gate.

Under his robes, his fingers were firm on the hilts of a sword. He had found it—along with the armor—on a dead Mekkan soldier outside the city. It had taken a long time to crawl through the desert night and steal the body. But it was worth it. Ancient tradition drove him—his family had been killed—and he was due recompense in blood. His height let him see over the heads of the men and women pressed together. The old temple-house loomed up. The chieftains of the Mekkans would be nearby.

It was midday. The sun rode the meridian, a pale white disk of fire. The air was still.

Even among the tens of thousands of men and women and children that filled the square, there was silence. It was not complete—robes brushed against robes, children coughed, there was the quiet susurration of a multitude breathing—for there is always sound. Mohammed bowed and stepped back from the stone. He felt a great peace fall over him, even as it had upon the mountaintop once he had heard the voice speaking from the clear air.

The Tanukh that hovered nearby, their dark faces taut with worry, moved away and the crowd pressed back. Ka'ba was ringed by a thick crowd of those who had followed Mohammed to fight at Yathrib. Beyond them were the multitudes of the city and the surrounding districts. The word of the war among the Mekkans and its fierce end in the fall of Yathrib had traveled far and wide. Men and women alike had come on camel or horse or shank's mare to look upon the man who had ended a generation of strife.

Mohammed heard the stone singing, and he paced along the outside of the old building.

The Tanukh moved with him, hands on spears and bows. As the Tanukh moved, so did the crowd of veterans of the fighting against the Hashim and their allies. Mohammed circled the building, listening to the song, letting his heart fill with the word of the Lord who spoke from the air.

This place was raised by the first of men
, he thought to himself. His eye sought out the careful placement of the stones in the foundations. He knew that the first man had raised up the black stone and had placed it in the wall. He knew that six hundred years later, the sons of that first man had carefully removed the stone from its crude mortar and placed it within the sandstone facing. He knew that those men, who could still hear the Lord of the World speaking in the dawn and in the dusk, did not bow down and worship the black rock.

How could they? The stone was not the merciful and compassionate one.

Mohammed completed his circuit of the house of the black stone. He looked up and saw the crowd standing in the hot sun. He was surprised to see the number of people who had gathered.

"Jalal?"

The burly mercenary came up, his eyes squinting and nervous. The soldier was watching the crowd, one hand close to his saber. Mohammed frowned, but then saw that all of his other men—the companions who stood with him in his struggle, these Sahaba—were equally wary.

"There are enemies?" Mohammed looked around in surprise.

Jalal almost laughed aloud in relief, seeing that his chieftain had roused himself from the waking dream. It had been weeks since Lord Mohammed had been alert. The Tanukh grinned and scratched his beard. "There are always enemies of the righteous, my lord."

Mohammed smiled back, feeling suddenly awake. There was an odd feeling in the air, like the bitter taste that comes when you ride into a steep-walled
wadi
, expecting an ambush. "Men who follow the straight path," Mohammed said, checking his own blade, "need not fear unrighteous men. The great and good Lord will provide."

Jalal nodded agreeably. "My father always said that a righteous man should not fear to look after his own business. He gave me my first bow and sheaf of arrows. My lord, there are many people here, and it crosses my mind that more than one of them might mean you ill. We should go, if you are finished with your devotions."

Mohammed's brow creased in puzzlement. "My devotions?"

Jalal indicated the old house and the stone. "It seemed that you prayed before the stone. I thought that you made obeisance to it."

Brief anger glittered in Mohammed's eyes, but then he remembered that Jalal had not heard the voice coming from the stone.
How can these men understand me?
he wondered,
if they cannot hear...
"Jalal—send a man to bring my horse."