The Gate of Fire (65 page)

"There was no garrison?" Khalid had nodded in assent as they had climbed the steps to the dingy tan building that had held the customs office.

Mohammed shook his head in amazement. "They were withdrawn to the north a month ago, according to Feyd here." Khalid had indicated a stooped man with a sun-browned face who had joined them once Mohammed's command staff had reached the center of the town. The man, obviously a local, had a green-and-white flash on his tunic loop. "There is some trouble brewing up in Judea and the governor has summoned all available troops to a muster."

Mohammed had turned, his hand on the hilt of his saber, and surveyed the big room with its arched roof. Once, it had held the men who worked in the customs house; now it would hold his messengers and staff. Windows with triangular tops pierced the southern wall, showing bits and pieces of the blue gulf beyond and the broad golden beach that marked the seaside. Aelana was not a big town, but it had long piers of fitted stone over compacted rubble that provided a fine anchorage for his ships.

"What kind of trouble?" Mohammed leaned close to the youth, his hand on Khalid's shoulder.

Khalid smiled. He loved to tell a tale no one had heard before. The three weeks that he had been in the port had allowed him to gather up every scrap of gossip and rumor he could find.

"The cities of the Decapolis are in an uproar," he said with a grin. "Word has gotten around that the Empire left Zenobia and the Petrans out to dry during the invasion. Apparently some new detachments of Imperial troops have come down from the north to take up the old camps, and people have noticed that their sons and husbands have not returned at all."

Mohammed had nodded, a shadow falling across his face. Obodas of Petra and Zenobia had led the whole might of the Decapolis and Nabatea and Palmyra into a butcher's holiday first at Emesa and then in the siege of Palmyra. Some thousands had escaped from the Persian victory on the field of Emesa, scattering off to the south, but the rest had followed Zenobia to Palmyra.

"Then," Khalid continued, "someone started a rumor that there was to be a census."

The remaining manpower of this whole region had died there, trying to hold on until the Imperial Legions could reach them, paying in blood for each day, trying to buy Heraclius the time he needed to break the Persian armies in the north. Mohammed turned away, his throat bitter with the taste of bile. He leaned on one of the windowsills, his bushy eyebrows beetling over closed eyes. It had been a trap, but not for Persia. Heraclius had never intended to turn south and succor the loyal cities of the Decapolis and Judea. He had struck east, instead, and seized the Persian capital at Ctesiphon and won his war.

"And that, of course, means new taxes." The youth smiled grimly, his eyes never leaving Mohammed's face. "No one was pleased about the news."

But every man who had followed Zenobia into the gilded cage of Palmyra had died; all save Mohammed and his handful of Tanukh, who had only escaped by a hair. Jalal had seen to that, dragging Mohammed's body from the ruin of the Damascus gate and fleeing before the Persians could recover from the mage-battle that had flattened half the city. The Tanukh knew secret ways into and out of the city, ones they had used to harry the Persians during the long siege. They had served, too, to let them flee. Zenobia had bought them that time, at least, holding out in the palace until the end, drawing the full attention of the dark power that strove against her.

"How goes the provisioning? What supplies did you find here?"

Mohammed pushed himself away from the windowsill and turned back to Khalid. The youth was ready, a marked tablet in his hands. The Quraysh smiled, seeing the eagerness of the young man to excel.

He will be an even greater general than I
, mused Mohammed, bending over the table to see how many barrels of water, sheaves of arrows, tuns of figs, and casks of dried meat were to hand.

The moon continued to rise as the Arabs climbed up out of the
wadi
. A wide plateau of stone tilted up from the streambed, and cairns of rocks marked a path across it. Now, Mohammed knew, they were nearing the head of Siq, where that narrow slot canyon opened out into the valley that held Petra. He looked back, seeing his men toiling steadily up the slope, a long dark line of figures with long shadows reaching before them. The moon was very clear in this high place and they moved swiftly.

A little time passed as they crossed the open plateau, passing before the gaping mouths of abandoned tombs cut from the rock, and then they came to another slot canyon athwart their path. A cairn marked a place where the path plunged down into the shadowed ravine. Mohammed could smell water and green growing things in the darkness below. Crouching at the lip of the slot, he listened, his eyes closed, his mind quiet.

No sound of man or beast came from below, only the ripple of water on stone and the drip-drip-drip of some seeping spring. If he remembered aright, this canyon led down past two or three catchment dams to a bowl in the mountain where the passage of Siq ended and the city itself began. There would be guards there in plenty.

He shuttered his lantern and motioned for the men behind him, squatting on the ground, to do the same. Here they could descend behind the guards at that gate, taking them by surprise, but sound carried easily in these canyons and they would have to go slowly and carefully.

He stood, squinting back at the shadowed lumps of his men, and motioned for Shadin. Jalal and Khalid, along with the bulk of the army, were waiting in the swale of Wadi Musa, beyond sight of the first gate into Siq. They were waiting for a signal that the raiding party had seized the entrance to the city from behind.

A dark figure detached itself from the shadow under one of the great boulders and scuttled toward him.

Listen! Do you hear it? Do you hear the doom of men?

Mohammed started, surprised. But the voice had already faded. There was a sound, a whisper, carried on the night wind.

Mohammed stopped, listening. Then, faintly, he heard it: massed voices on the air. He looked up and saw, on the mountaintop that rose to the south of the city, the glare of a bonfire and the outline of hundreds of people standing in the High Place. The people of the city raised their voices in homage to some god that lived behind the sky. When Mohammed had passed through the red city before the furtive nature of the locals, their odd, secretive customs and the bitter aftertaste of the water had just set his nerves on edge. Now the sound of that chanting and the half-heard words ignited a cold anger in his breast. He stopped, feeling his arm trembling.

"My lord?" The Quraysh turned, his face grim. The bulky Tanukh was at his side, his helmet and armor wrapped in dark cloth to muffle the sound and prevent any betraying gleam of light. The man's eyes glinted in the darkness, catching a reflection from the lights of the city and the fire on the mountaintop. More Sahaba moved past, as quietly as they could, filtering down the stair with their weapons out.

"There is a ceremony underway, there on the High Place." Mohammed pointed up, indicating the red glare that lit the mountaintop. "I must stop it. I will take half of the men and go up the Long Stair. You take the rest and seize the guardpost at the end of Siq. With luck, Jalal will be waiting for you. Then follow the plan."

Shadin nodded his understanding and turned, catching the shoulder of one of his lieutenants. Mohammed hurried down the long flight of steps that wound down to the streambed, taking them two and three at a time. The memory of a voice echoed in his mind, urging him to hurry. The faces of the Sahaba flashed past as they turned in surprise. If Shadin could open the gates at Siq, then the army could pour into the city unopposed. The next good place to mount a defense would be on the steps of the palace. Taking away half of the men that were to accomplish that task would not make it easier, but Mohammed was sure that he had to get to the top of the High Place as fast as possible.

Fly, O man, fly!
The voice was urgent, thundering in his mind.

Tradition said there were 999 steps from the red sand of the streambed at the base of the mountain to the twin obelisks that stood on the verge of the High Place. Mohammed had not bothered to count them tonight, but his thighs and the backs of his calves had marked each one and were ready to tell him all about it if he stopped for a moment. The fifty Sahaba at his back were winded, too, and they held their mouths open, gasping for air as silently as they could manage.

Beyond the great obelisks, each towering twenty feet into a dark and cloudless sky, a saddle opened out on the summit. To Mohammed's left, a jumble of slabs marked the head of another set of stairs that led down the far side of the mountain. To his right, where the peak of the High Place rose up, jutting out over the central valley of Petra, a redoubt of squared stones had been raised to bar passage into the sacred precincts.

A gate stood at the base of the tower, though it stood ajar, lit by two large iron sconces holding torches of pitch that guttered in the night wind. In their light, stairs could be made out, marching up the last ramp into the temple itself. The chanting was louder now, though broken by the wind, and the blaze of fires and torches could be seen in the darkness above the stone wall. Bats and nighjars swooped through the illumination, feasting on clouds of insects that had been drawn from the wasteland.

The High Place was a pinnacle of bare rock that rose at the southeastern corner of the valley of Petra like a helmet. Here, almost at the top, Mohammed could see a vast sweep of desert and mountain and valley lying about him under the moon. A cold wind ruffled his robes and plucked at his hair. It was odd to look out over the tumbled massif of the Ad'Deir hills, here in the heart of night, and see it illuminated by the moon almost as if by day. He tore his attention away from the vista and the knowledge of the three-hundred-foot drop that lay just at his right hand.

There did not seem to be any guards at the gate, but nothing prevented them from standing just within the entrance, hidden in shadows. Mohammed crept forward, his saber out, and held parallel to the ground. The first five men behind him were archers with long black arrows already fitted to the bow. Wind whipped the sound of the chanting away, but now Mohammed could feel it in the stones under his feet.

The tip of the saber passed through the gateway, and Mohammed felt it tremble, meeting some unseen resistance in the cold night air. He stopped, his hand raised in warning to the men behind. A sudden sense that
she
was with him made the hairs on his arms prickle up. The blade trembled, for it seemed that
her
cool touch was on the back of his hand. He remembered her, standing in the darkness of her chambers in the palace, her hand touching his wrist as he prepared to go out to die on the walls of the city. Her city. He remembered that she had given him this blade after his own had been chipped and nicked beyond use. He looked through the pillars of the gate.

The stairs were empty. There were no guards. Beckoning to his men, Mohammed sprinted up them, pushing the pain in his legs away. There would be time for groaning and lying about while dark-eyed servant girls rubbed his thighs with cool minty cream later. Unlike the plain stone steps in the canyon below, these were faced with marble and fitted into a brick support. He leapt up them, two and three at a time.

At the top of the stairs was a second gate in a wall of brick, marked by twin slim columns of marble. The summit of the High Place made a rough trapezoid, bounded by cliffs on three sides. On the western side, facing the setting sun, perched high above the center of the city, was a rectangular raised dais. Before it a deep pool had been cut into the rock of the mountain. On the dais, an altar of uncarved stone flowed up from the rock like a man's fist rising from the earth. As Mohammed came up to the top of the stairs, there was blood on the altar and the body of a young woman squirming under a stone knife.

Priests in long red robes crowded around the altar, their hands gripping her white flesh, holding her down. The girl was trying to scream, but only a bubbling red froth almost the color of the priests' raiment came out of her mouth. At the head of the altar, a figure had his hands raised to the sky and saffron-colored heat lightning flickered and flashed around him. Between the gate and the pool, hundreds of supplicants knelt, their voices raised in the long rolling chant that Mohammed had heard on the wind. The parishioners wore hoods of red laid over their workaday clothes, but even those were rich and finely detailed.

You will make no sacrifice of blood at my altar,
boomed the voice in his mind, making him stagger.
You will submit yourself to the straight path and you will live a righteous life!

The line of Mohammed's chin tensed, and his eyes narrowed, taking in the scene. There were no graven idols here, no statues crowded together like a forest, but he knew as surely as the voice had spoken to him on the mountaintop that darkness was oozing into the world here, called by blood and iron. He pressed hard with the saber and felt the resistance in the air seize up, testing his strength.

O my Merciful and Compassionate Lord, give me the strength to meet this test!

A bright white flash cut the night, throwing the carvings and pillars of the temple in the cliff face into sharp relief. Shadin's head jerked around involuntarily, his saber rising to ward off whatever made the light. The snapping crash of thunder rolled right behind the glare and the men in the little oval valley cried out, clapping hands to their eardrums. In the residue of the brilliant light, Shadin was left with an image of hundreds of the Sahaba pouring out of the narrow Siq into the broader stream bottom before a great tomb. The rattle and boom of thunder echoed again, and the summit of the High Place lit up like a thunder-head.

"That's done it," he howled over the rolling echo. There would be no surprising the city now. "Forward!"

Jalal ran up, his boots splashing water from the streambed. Centuries of current had worn it smooth save for a thin layer of sand. He had his bow in hand and an open-faced helmet tied under his chin. Men in half armor and shields ran past, their banner leaders and lieutenants urging them on. Around the inner gate, the scattered bodies of the Petrans who had been on watch lay in pools of blood. The attack from the hidden stair had taken them completely by surprise.