A mistake? Tariq wondered. No, a clue from Abd-Es-Samad.
“Well?” a voice asked, shouting over the winds.
Tariq started and looked back at Raakin, who watched patiently from the steps. The searchlights in the distance swept through the gloom to touch the temple, but couldn’t reach. The soldiers would, undoubtedly.
“I need more time,” he said.
Raakin, his expression inscrutable behind his goggles and keffiyah, pulled two tri-barrel flintlocks from under his jacket. He turned and vanished into the storm.
Tariq turned his attention to the statues and the question of the birds. Twenty statues, and a bird apiece in each hand. That was forty birds, the number of all myths. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the forty days and nights of Noah’s flood, Moses alone with God on Mount Sinai, the years the Isrealites spent wandering the desert, the days Jesus spent in seclusion. Forty is not a number, his father told him. Forty simply means: A great many.
“And the Simorgh? I remember, father,” he said, the five year old in him touching the edges of the book, eager for adventure. As Tariq searched the frieze of metal birds and flowers, the poem came to him, again his father guiding him through the elegant verses of the great Sufi poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, and his seminal epic The Conference of Birds.
A council of birds set out to find the Simorgh to unite them, only to discover in their journey that Simorgh was a reflection of them all. “Could the inspiration for the poem be older? As old as this place?” Tariq wondered, his fingers touching upon golden larks and copper hawks and bronze sparrows. Then he saw a parrot inlaid with polished silver and his father spoke to him again. The birds stared into the pool where Simorgh lay and instead found their own reflection:
Come you lost Atoms to your Centre draw,
And be the Eternal Mirror that you saw:
Rays that have wander'd into Darkness wide
Return, and back into your Sun subside.
Silver was the most reflective of ancient metals, the mirror. Tariq pressed the bird and it shifted slightly in its groove. He pressed harder and it finally clicked down. Somewhere in the storm a flintlock roared, Raakin buying him time.
Tariq raced along the temple’s front facing, searching for the next silver bird and found a silver peacock, and then a nightingale, a falcon, a hummingbird. Each clicked with some effort until finally, he found the silver hoopoe. He pressed it, and the heavy metal door with the Simorgh mosaic rattled upward.
* * *
The storm curled at the mouth of the temple where its howls turned to chambered echoes inside. Sand poured from the ceiling in trickles, leaving drifts along the stairs, but any semblance to the Nabatean ruins in Petra and in Beyrouth ended there. Tendrils of snaking copper fluted the columns, the temple a shell for the wide stairs that descended deep underground. Brass pipes inset into the stone walls lay partially hidden behind a lacework of wood grates. They still fed the balconies overflowing with leafy Emerald Falls vines and peppered with white hibiscus and urn-shaped clusters of blue Muscari. If these northern plants grew here, then Ubar and the Empty Quarter must have indeed have been a paradise once.
Outside, gunfire continued, sounding closer, but Tariq felt drawn down the steps. He took the path between the sloping sand, the interior dimly lit by tear-shaped bulbs set into wall sconces and column brackets. The liquid within the bulbs glowed silvery-blue like algae-filled water alight at night in the wake of fish and swimmer alike. The same blue came from the murals, where etched figures glowed with inset glass eyes.
The stairs opened onto a large platform overlooking a massive cavern covered in vegetation and whose edges vanished in darkness. Wide stairs wended down either wall, following rock carved with alcoves and ledges, half-columns and statues, like the Temple of Jupiter in the cliff of Petra. An oasis sparkled a hundred feet below, fed by glowing blue water with the viscosity of mercury that cascaded down the swept supplicant wings of a giant statue of Manāt. They’d built her from gleaming metal, each texture a different polish. Behind her stood her giant Fedayeen guards, each ten feet high. Each wore an iron-plated cuirass embossed gold with the Goddesses’ wings, their spaulders and skirt-like cuisses covering their major joints.
Articulated joints, Tariq corrected. They could move, likely powered by the strange dynamos on their backs, their engines coiled with tubes and lit by glass capsules of the blue liquid. The same glow issued forth from the slits on their demonic faceplates. In their gauntlets they held a variety of swords and staves, axes and guns with a reservoir.
“The giants of Ubar,” a voice said.
Raakin leaned against one of the columns on the stairs, looking down into the cavern.
“You’re wounded.”
Blood flowed down Raakin’s limp arm and pattered on the floor. A blotch of mud matted the dark fabric at his shoulder, but he waved it off with the flintlock. “If they find this place, the Prussians will gain a considerable advantage, if not an insurmountable one,” he said. “I gave them pause and us time, but… the desert is reclaiming this place. Can you seal the doors?”
Tariq nodded.
“Then go, quickly.” Raakin handed him the flintlock. Tariq was about to refuse, but Raakin pushed it into his hands.
“I have never shot anyone.”
“The gun has.” Raakin shoved him up the stairs.
Tariq had a million questions that he wanted to ask, chief among them ‘why?’ but he understood as he raced upstairs and came upon the two-dozen bedu descending. They led their sheep and goats, their camels braying and protesting loudly at the steps, their clopping hoofs echoing sharply. Some of the injured bedu supported themselves on their flintlock rifles. A cluster of three guards protected the old woman from the tent; like the fabled Taureg tribe of North Africa, Tariq realized, they were matriarchal and trapped among enemies who did not understand their ways. The worshippers of the old gods did not die so easily out here.
The old woman nodded at him and Tariq continued to the door. A handful of bedu fired out into the storm, the sands a hornet’s nest that swallowed the city. The hillocks had already drowned the lower stairs and it felt as though the dunes themselves had begun to dwarf the buildings and columns… the frozen waves high above the doomed ship. Sand streamed and curled in through the door, and Tariq shielded his eyes.
Shapes moved in the storm at the base of the temple, and shots rang out as well as in. Something hot whined past Tariq’s ear. He sank to his knee, out of sight of the soldiers as one of the bedu stumbled back, his hand clutching at his breast.
Tariq’s heart raced. More shots whinged above his head, the shouting voices growing louder. He looked around him, trying to find the door mechanism, but his eyes refused to focus on any one thing. Was this how his father felt as they fled Damascus, the Pasha’s men on their heels?
No. I am not alone.
From the corner of his eye, he caught the movement of pages. On a ledge nearby, the corners of ragged papers fluttered under the rock that held them in place. They were torn frail things, harrowed by the ages outside the protection of the book. Next to them sat a great gear embedded in the wall, a lever next to it, raised and waiting.
Silhouettes against the storm appeared at the top of the stairs. Tariq fired his flintlock, the gun flaring and jumping in his grip. A gout of flame roared out like a dragon’s breath, and the figures jumped clear of the burst of fire, but not all. The bedu cheered, but if Tariq moved now, he thought the enemy might shoot him, kill him. That would be a mercy compared to losing everything, but after all he’d seen and come to know, letting these men take this place would be worse.
They’d chased his father from his truth once, and Tariq had done so again with his own heart. He would not let them triumph a third time. He ran for the lever, ran against the bullets that sang out for him. He lunged, dragging the lever down with the weight of his body, the hot blade of a round flashing across his back. Another bedu joined him, adding his weight to the teacher’s. The g
ear rumbled and spun, almost cutting into his shoulder as it tore his shirt. The heavy door slammed shut, drowning out all but silence.
* * *
They all stared quietly at the Garden of Manāt below them. The bedu marveled and muttered soft prayers, some already descending to explore the cavern. There were trees and vegetation lit by the strange blue light that had powered this city; and beyond it? Tariq didn’t know but the sleeping giants could not have come up by these stairs. There was more to discover deeper inside. Perhaps, even a way out.
A bandage covered Raakin’s arm, and one of the women tended to the graze across Tariq’s back. Tariq added the missing pages back to the tome and wondered what tales they would tell now.
How this place would have troubled the Muslims for its blatant iconography and delighted his father for its history. He could see the man now, his eyes narrowed in a smile, his voice delighted as he murmured:
Kan, ma kan.
There was, there was not.
Tariq finally understood why now—that what his father had sacrificed in the moment was nothing compared to what he was protecting. He’d left Damascus with the shirt on his back and his son’s hand in his. What more did he need? Tariq understood, now, that not having everything was not the same as having nothing.
Tariq smiled. “There is, father,” he said, and joined the others as they descended into the chamber.
Hatavat Chalom
Lillian Cohen-Moore
It is as always, the same.
The gates of the city rang beneath the siege forces, summoning sonorous booms that rivaled any thunder to be found in nature. Bombards and culverins filled the sky with sparks and smoke. Their wheels turned beneath them, large and unforgiving. The condottieri on the battle field followed the shouted orders of their Capitans, bound not by loyalty to the city state, but to the pay to come. The gendarmes were deep within the fighting; cutting men from their horses with bewildering speed, taking men from the battle as if they were of one mind, a many-headed malakh ha-mavet, the Angel of Death come to the battlefield of mortal men. For every gendarme taken from his horse, another took his place. The ground was carpeted in bodies, man and horse alike.
A once smoke-stained blue sky above them soon grew darker still. As if an eclipse was forming in the heavens above them, darkness began to fall over the battle. A single swath of long black shadow, married to a rumbling that shook the ground, a sound threatening to eclipse the clash of armies. It was not painted in the livery of a city-state, or that of a foreign King. It rose up from among them, its body metal, dark, the great grinding of wheels and gears serving as its own cracking vertebrae and clicking teeth. It steamed and moved, its gait steady. Its first step drew no great notice, but the second shook the ground.
It was a beast. A monster of gargantuan proportions, taller than a ballista, a mockery of the men around it, be they French or Italian. For it was not a man, but a wide expanse of metal unlike any they had ever seen. Its encroaching wheels came down upon a few unlucky fighters, and if they screamed louder than those dying around them, there was no way of sorting the sounds of their ignominious death from the slaughter at hand. It stopped moving, as mercenaries and loyal armies looked upon its visage, its black and copper body. For a breath, the world pulled upon itself, unsure of the thing that had entered it. The fighting slowed, ceasing in its shadow. And as the trembling fighters began to move away, its chest opened, a black void from which hellish smoke billowed, and from within it came a great wailing sound. Twin vibrations shook along the air, fire and forge laboring together.
The dream was always the same, the too-sharp smell of battle and fear, the intake of breath as they gazed upon the dark hole and the depths within it. From inside it came the flash of muzzles, and unholy sound of dozens of culverins, firing as one from inside its dark form. It was still the last thing she saw before her eyes opened to see the ceiling above her bed.
As she had for many mornings, Margarita Contanto woke screaming, the sound being torn from her body one of mindless, primal fear. Her Aunt Caterina was the one person in their home brave enough to try comforting her, to hold the thrashing younger woman firmly in her arms, ignoring the smears of tears soaking into the front of her dress, or the screams that caused her ears to ring.
Caterina would rise before the sun to take on matters of the household, but it was Margarita who would wake as the sunrise crept over the ghetto for the past month, waking the household along with her through the sound of her tortured screams.
Margarita joined her Aunt in her morning labors after she prepared herself to greet the day, returning the books hidden in her bedside to her absent Uncle’s study. Math and science were for the hours no one was awake. Her morning would be one of labor with her family. Margarita’s cousins, Lorenza and Fiora, were part of the complicated morning dance of cooking, sewing and correspondence. When Margarita reached for another piece of mending, her hand closed around an envelope instead. Startled, she raised her head to see her aunt.
“You have done more than enough work for the morning.” Caterina reached out to touch her on the cheek, a gesture that summoned vague recollections of her own mother. “You must take this message into Ghetto Vecchio. There is a household there that awaits it.” Caterina curved her fingers, pulling a few of Margarita’s unruly curls behind one of the young woman’s ear. “You will bear the letter for me, to Isaac de Fonseca’s household. Give the letter to his sister, Veronica. Tell her your Uncle will come to them in a few weeks, when both he and Isaac have each returned from their journeys.” Caterina waited for her niece’s hand to withdraw the letter from the basket, and press it gently against her chest.
“I shall go now?”
Caterina went to reach her hand out again to touch her niece, but instead let it fall, her expression inscrutable. “Yes. Go now. I will see you when you have returned.”
Margarita dwelled on the conversation as she went to prepare herself to leave for the Ghetto Vecchio, full of Levantine Jews from the Ottoman Empire. She repeated the directions back to Caterina three times before her Aunt would let her step out the door. Carrying the message against herself, arms folded over her chest, she made haste to cross the island of the Ghetto Nuovo. Between the two ghettos was a simple bridge over a canal, and it was that slender ribbon of connection she would use to cross into the other ghetto. The rain falling on the stones beneath her feet was not yet a downpour, content to fall upon her as a mist, with few droplets rising back up from the ground, inundating her with the smell of moist cloth and stone. For a moment, the earthen smell of wet stone tugged at her memory, the smell of the battered city walls beneath the siege engines. Had it been raining in her nightmare?
She shook her head as she went over the bridge, quickening her pace. It was a dream. A strange, frightening dream, and one day it would go away and she would be as she was before it came—without a single recollection of a dream. Her passage into the Vecchio streets was unremarkable. The smells of bread, pastry, wet stones and hot air were the same in either ghetto, though the scent of metal was still curiously stronger off the island and on the streets of Ghetto Vecchio. Even with the rain, the sunshine still struggled through the clouds above her. It would be hours till sunset, and she would surely return to Ghetto Nuovo by then, ready to be locked inside with the rest of her people, as she had every night for as long as she had lived. Only from dawn to dusk were they even remotely free.
Distressed by the dark turn of her own thoughts, she raised her head, eyes and nose drinking in the Vecchio streets. At least confined to the ghettos from dusk to dawn, locked in by the government, they were safer from those who hated the Jews of Venice. Margarita shook her head, as if to force the thoughts away, focusing on her task. Across the streets, away from the canals, the scents of unfamiliar spices would weave across the air, scents that grew stronger, even in the slowly worsening rainfall, when she approached the home of the trader Isaac de Fonseca.
Their front door was a blue unlike
any she had seen, and the house of de Fonseca was considerably larger than the Cantanto residence. She sat with no little apprehension in the reception room after a servant abandoned her, in order to fetch Veronica. Margarita blew gently on the envelope as she waited, as if her breath would somehow cure the dampness of the paper. The reception room was both familiar and jarring, filled with Italian furniture of an older style, and art that rang as clearly foreign. Perhaps art from the Empire? She mused on the origins of what she saw around her, uncertain about something as normal as décor, and attempted to estimate the mathematical measurement of the room and furniture to pass the time.
Veronica de Fonseca did not enter the reception room, she graced it. Her hair was thick and dark, strands of white darting in and out without pattern or reason. The rings she wore on her hands were different from the jewelry Margarita had seen worn by women in Venice. Margarita had no chance to introduce herself; no sooner had she risen to her feet, Veronica seized her hands, envelope pressed awkwardly inside their clasping hands.
“Caterina always promised she would send you to me someday!” She took in Margarita’s befuddled expression, transferring the envelope to one of her own hands as she continued to clasp one of the younger woman’s hands, pulling her down with her to sit upon the couch. “I am a friend of your Aunt and Uncle’s. I have not been here in many years, but Caterina had sworn she would let me see you.” She clicked her tongue against her teeth, smiling. “You were such a beautiful little girl, now a lovely young woman.” Veronica took back her hand, prying the envelope open with ease. “You must stay for lunch.”
Margarita watched Veronica reading; saw the brief flicker of concern on her face. “I should be going. My Aunt will worry if I’m gone too long.” Unspoken, the knowledge of the curfew hung between them. Veronica raised her head, smiling again, the crow’s feet around her eyes forming a nest of marks around her crinkling eyes. “We will get you home in time. But I insist you stay for lunch, and tell me all about what Caterina has been up to. I only just returned to Venice, and she has not found time to come to me!”
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