Just ahead she saw the entrance.
Smiling even wider now, Miriam turned through the crack in the canyon wall, which widened into a natural chamber that had been further carved out by hands long forgotten. Miriam stepped aside as she came to it, giving room to let Pantera see it all.
The Roman archer took in his breath as he stopped to stand and stare. “Miriam, it’s…”
Miriam nodded. “I know.”
The two of them unstrapped their bows, and she followed his example in carefully setting hers against the stone wall. Then she watched him as he scanned the little hollow. Following his gaze with her own, she tried to see it through his eyes.
He stared at the far wall, just as she had when she’d first come to this place. The light from the Small Siq illumined that wall first, so it was natural to look there while eyes adjusted to the dimness in the hidden space.
The long-ago carvers had known this, of course: they’d made their first decorations against that facing wall. A welcome, she thought.
They were niches, most of them: shelves formed by hollowing out the stone walls. Similar carvings could be found throughout the Small Siq and indeed all over Petra once you knew where to look for them. Sometimes left as simple indentations in twos or in threes, other times elaborately carved into the shapes of altars focused on a single indentation, the niches largely stood empty now, but older Nabataeans, like the ever-talkative Dorothea, would whisper of how most of the niches once had god-blocks in them, those rectangular stones meant to represent the mountains and the connection between men and their ancient gods.
While she could see such workings almost anywhere in and around the city, no place made her feel the antiquity of Petra more powerfully than this secluded, nearly forgotten place.
“I think it’s one of the oldest carvings in Nabataea,” Miriam whispered. “Maybe even older than the obelisks on the Mount of Moses.”
“Blocks again,” Pantera said, his eyes passing over the carvings. “Like the obelisks. And like the big temple in town. The stone uniting heaven and earth, like the mountains themselves.”
“Moses climbed a mountain to speak with his God,” Miriam said, her voice hushed in a tone of reverence. “I think that’s why they carved the obelisks there.”
“You think that the mountain here, above that tomb we saw them building, is the true Mount of Moses? I thought he was on Mount Sinai.”
“Sinai isn’t far. They passed through there on their way from Egypt. They found a home in the wilderness here.”
“So here they supposedly built the Ark.”
Miriam blinked. For a moment she was tempted to tell him that the Ark was real, that it was here, that even now it sat quietly at the foot of that very mountain—on the other side of it from the Siq and the construction of the tomb of Obodas—but she swallowed away the impulse. She’d sworn never to tell another soul. As if to remind herself, she raised her hand to her chest and idly fingered the metal symbol hidden beneath her clothes. She was a keeper of the Ark. She’d been born one.
“Supposedly,” she whispered.
“And a moon.” The archer pointed up into the shadows, to one of the higher carvings. Like so many of the oldest carvings, it showed a god-block of stone in an altar frame. But above it, curving like horns toward heaven, was a crescent moon.
It was this carving, more than any other, that had always seemed so special to Miriam. It seemed somehow older than the others. More vital. More important. She’d spent hours staring at it, wondering what it meant. Was it a sign of how the people who made this place worshipped the sun, that giver of light? Was it a symbol of the encompassing sky? Or was it the moon itself that they worshipped, a light in the darkness of night?
She’d never expected the Roman to see it.
“Maybe,” she said. “I look at that one a lot. It feels like home. I don’t know why.”
“Beautiful,” Pantera breathed from beside her.
“I always thought so.”
“Not the carving,” he said.
Miriam turned to him, saw that he was no longer staring at the ancient signs of worship. He was staring at her. His eyes sparkled. His mouth was parted in something like hope and astonishment. As she turned to him—as she returned his stare with her own—he blinked and stuttered. “I mean, the carvings are, too,” he said. “But I … well…”
Miriam smiled at him, and before he could say anything more she leaned forward and joined her lips with his.
* * *
They made love. Soft and discovering, wandering and tantalizing and pure and real.
When it was done, when the heat of their passion was spent, they lay upon the dirt floor amid their strewn clothing. Her chest rose and fell, her body more full of life than she’d ever known, and once more her eyes turned up to behold the moon upon the wall.
It was brighter now. Her eyes had adjusted so far to the shadows that she could see it now in a greater light. The god-block beneath it wasn’t a simple rectangle. It had what looked like little wings protruding from the sides of its top, as if someone had placed a flat stone atop the god-block. The crescent moon was centered upon that wider surface, and Miriam wondered whether it was meant to be rising or setting beneath that horizon.
Or was it meant to be, as it was, frozen in time? Had the moon been captured, locked by the carvers into this image of balance?
Pantera stirred beside her, and Miriam, smiling, set such wonder aside to find wonder in the joy of his embrace.
Late in the afternoon, when they at last roused themselves from their love and strapped their bows once more to their backs, they were slow to leave the solitude of the Small Siq. They walked with measured steps, hand in hand. Pantera spoke of his home in Sidon, of his family and friends. Miriam was content to listen to his voice, which was soothing and calm. They kissed now and again, and her heart yearned to linger, but she knew they needed to return to the city. She had been away too long.
Their smaller path emptied out at the mouth of the larger Siq, and there they turned to their right to begin making their way down its thin course toward the city.
Pantera, sighing, pointed to the beauty of the rocks around them, and it was the true that it was beautiful. When she looked closely she could see how the rose-hued stone was actually banded with shades of color, like grains in wood. Rain had crossed these with dark streaks where it had made its way down the high walls over thousands of years, and the eroded bends and twists in the stone made it easy to imagine faces and forms in the rock.
Perhaps, she thought, they were the faces of ancient gods. Perhaps all gods began thus.
They heard the sound of the construction before the Siq abruptly opened up and left them facing the busy scaffolding where in time the tomb of King Obodas would be. Here, too, Miriam wanted to pause, but she could see by the shadows upon the ground that the day was growing long. Pullo and Vorenus would be worried if she did not soon return.
Without a word to the Roman, Miriam began to make her way down the road toward the city as it wound through the canyon running west toward the large amphitheater on the southern edge of Petra. Pantera, as she expected, kept pace beside her. Whatever his thoughts were, there was a smile upon his face.
“Child,” came a voice. “I didn’t expect to see you out here.”
“And I didn’t expect you,” Miriam said, turning to see Dorothea. The old woman was sitting on a rock in the shade of the canyon wall, fanning herself with one hand. Her walking stick was set against the rock behind her, and at her feet was a basket of flowers.
Dorothea’s eyes glinted mischievously first at the bow upon Miriam’s back and then at the Roman archer beside her. “Practicing the bow again, are we?”
“It’s good to practice,” Miriam said.
“Good to hit the target,” the old woman replied, cackling a laugh. “I told you I’d find out the Roman who caught your fancy.”
From the corner of her eye, Miriam saw Pantera blush. For her part, she j
ust rolled her eyes. “Think what you will, Dorothea, but don’t be spreading whispers you don’t know are true. Aren’t you supposed to be back at your market stall?”
The old woman sighed. “Market is empty this afternoon, ever since word came about Herod. Thought I might see if the workers needed anything for their wives on the way home. Or lovers.”
“What word of Herod?” Pantera asked.
Dorothea fixed him for a moment with her gaze, apparently disappointed that he’d not risen to meet her teasing. “The king is dead. And you, young man, are no doubt expected at your camp. All the Romans are in a frenzy about it.”
When Pantera looked at Miriam, his eyes were filled with a fear that she’d never seen before. It was the fear that whatever he faced, it might be apart from her.
“We should go,” she said, and she grabbed the archer’s hand to begin pulling him away.
Dorothea nodded, again smiling to herself knowingly. But they hadn’t taken three steps before the old woman called after them once more. “I almost forgot, child. I think someone was looking for your uncles. A woman. She was asking in the market about a couple of Romans coming to Petra years ago. Around the time you came to the city.”
To Miriam it felt like her heart had suddenly leapt into her throat and stuck there. She swallowed hard. “Oh. Probably family, I guess.”
Dorothea nodded sagely. “I suspected as much. I told her about your family’s tomb, of course.”
Miriam’s heart skipped a beat, and her gaze shot toward the great rock of the mountain that sat between them and the tomb hiding the Ark of the Covenant. “Of course,” she mumbled. “Thanks.”
The old woman began to hum happily to herself, and Miriam’s legs began to carry her away of their own accord, onward toward the rose-red city that had become her home. Her mind raced. Her hand found the necklace around her neck, the twists of metal that was all she had left of her mother. Her fingers ran along the cold edges of the symbol of the Ark, then they wrapped around it and clutched it.
She was supposed to be there. Watching. Keeping it safe.
“Is everything okay?” Pantera asked from beside her.
“I don’t know,” she said. Then, as if waking to the danger, she suddenly stopped and turned to him. Releasing the necklace, her hands found his shoulders, gripping where she’d so recently laid her head. “I don’t know. But this is important. I need you to run and find one of my uncles.”
Though Pantera was still nervous around Pullo or Vorenus, he nodded his head vigorously.
“Good. As fast as you can. Find them. Tell them the keeper is in need.”
“Keeper?”
“They’ll know what it means.”
“What about you?”
Miriam looked up at the Mount of Moses, up toward the great platform where the two obelisks carved from the living rock were waiting. On the other side of the mountain was the Ark. On the other side of the mountain, somebody might already be trying to take it. “I’ll meet them,” she said. Not caring who might see, she stretched herself up to kiss his confused face. “Now go. Run!”
12
THE MOUNT OF MOSES
PETRA, 4 BCE
Though they called it by another name and had long ago forgotten its history, the Nabataeans still held the Mount of Moses sacred: there were altars to the divine upon its height, and distant generations had wrought from the living stone the bending processional path that rose up to meet them from the floor of the Siq. In some places the path was painstakingly carved out of daunting cliff walls. In still others it ran atop carefully cut stones and paving that flattened the slopes or filled in the great cracks of the mountainside. Through it all, hundreds upon hundreds of steps rose. Ever higher. Ever closer to the sky and the gods above.
Her heart pounding from more than the climb, Miriam took the ancient stone steps up the mountain two at a time. Around her the cliffs of the mountain rose and fell away, and the boulders and craggy rocks that lined the ancient path made strange shadows in the lowering light of the sun.
Not once had she truly imagined that someone could find them, that someone could find the Ark. Like Pullo and Vorenus she’d kept watch, but she’d never thought of the act as truly protective. It was something deeper for her: Pullo and Vorenus, the Ark and the emblem hanging from her neck … these were the only connections she’d ever had to her dead parents. Keeping watch was a duty to a memory that she’d made from the stories she’d heard of what they’d seen and done. The Ark was the only family she’d ever known.
Following the processional path as it turned and angled up a shadowy crevasse, Miriam pressed on without slowing. Her legs and lungs burned with a furious fire, but the discomfort was nothing compared to the gnawing feeling of dismay in her gut.
That the Ark could truly be in danger, that someone could have found it, found them … it made no sense. No one knew where they were. And who could now be looking for the Ark?
But there was no other explanation for what Dorothea was saying. Someone was in Petra. Someone knew they were here. A woman. That’s what Dorothea had said. A woman was looking for them.
And here Miriam was, a mountain away from the watch she’d promised to keep.
Mind reeling with questions, stomach gripped with guilt, she labored on. Panting but flying up the rocky steps, until she finally surged out of the crevasse, heaving herself up and over the last rise to where the processional path met the strangely flat plateau of stone where the two obelisks stood, lined east to west.
It had only been a few years since Miriam had unlocked the secrets of this flat space and the two obelisks. Like so many others, she’d imagined that the points of stone, tall and thick as they were, had been somehow brought here and raised up into their places. But then one day she had climbed here from her watch at the tomb of the Ark below and in her boredom had looked closely at the stones. The obelisks, she saw, were not shaped stones piled upon one another like the pillars of the great temple in the city. They were, instead, of one piece. More than that, like the tombs carved out of the cliff walls far below, they had been hewn from the mountain itself. Whatever the shape of the Mount of Moses had once been, ancient hands had stripped away the rock heart of it here until all that remained was this smooth plateau and the two obelisks, rising into the sky like fingers pointed at the gods.
For the Nabataeans, the obelisks had little meaning now. They were like lonely sentinels, guarding the path as it continued onward: down a short, sharp slope to a little saddle, where the ceremonial buildings huddled against a small ridge of striated natural stone. Beyond them was a farther summit just north of the plateau, one that overlooked Petra itself. The Nabataeans called it the High Place, and none but the high priests and those who attended the sacrifices were welcome there. Like the obelisks, the altar of the High Place was carved out of the stone, open to the air but cut off by a wide and thick wall that ran like a fence across the ridge. The wall was meant to hide that most sacred space and protect it, but of course Miriam had long since ignored the processional archway with its locked door and simply climbed the walls to see what was on the other side.
Her path today wouldn’t take her there, though. And no matter what she wondered about the past, for the moment the flatness of the ground mattered only in the fact that her legs welcomed the change in slope. Her pace did not falter.
Hurrying down past the obelisks, Miriam came to the saddle where the processional path forked. To her right, the path passed the low stone buildings where the priests would prepare themselves for the sacrifices on the High Place and then proceeded up the steep slope toward the wall enclosing that farther summit. To her left, the steps instead headed downward: a second route up the sacred mountain that rose up out of the canyon on its western side—the canyon where stood her family tomb and the hiding place of the Ark of the Covenant.
Taking a deep breath, eyes focused on her feet to prevent a misstep that would break bones or worse, Miriam began skipping steps—downward
now—back into the shadows of the approaching night.
* * *
Coming down the path toward the city, on flatter ground now, Miriam at last caught sight of the tomb that Pullo and Vorenus had purchased to hide the Ark when they came to Petra. There were other big tombs in this canyon, but the columned tomb with the statues of her parents, Caesarion and Hannah, looking down from their high niches still caught the eye. The statues were Pullo’s idea, and he and Vorenus had spent weeks with the sculptor ensuring that the representations were as accurate to their memories as they could make them. The sculptor had been frustrated, Miriam was sure, but the two old Romans had paid well. And Miriam was forever grateful to them all for what they’d done. Now, when she thought of her parents, she had faces to imagine—stone or not.
The statues looked down on an enclosed courtyard where the family of the dead could gather for dinners and prayers within the privacy of its walls, a Nabataean custom of bridging the death of the tombs with the life of those left behind. As Miriam skittered to a halt on the path, she saw that the statues ahead of her looked down on something else, too.
The path beside the walled courtyard was not empty. There were two women in simple traveler’s clothes there, standing and staring over the wall at the tomb in the mountainside. One of them had leaned over to the other, whispering something in her ear, then nodded and took a step forward toward the door leading into the courtyard.
With hardly a thought, Miriam slipped the bow from her back, one hand pulling free an arrow while her eyes remained fixed on the two women below.
It wasn’t a long shot. Not by Miriam’s trained and practiced eye.
She pulled the string, her breath slowing in perfect accord to the tensing wood in her firm grip. She focused, saw the mark in her mind, framed the shot, and loosed.
The arrow shattered on the paving stones just inches in front of the feet of the woman approaching the door.
The two strangers gasped and spun in Miriam’s direction, but already she had another shaft nocked and pulled back.
The Realms of God--A Novel of the Roman Empire (The Shards of Heaven, Book 3) Page 13
