“Lie down, daughter,” the old woman intoned. English again. “Let us see to your injuries.”
Safia had no energy to resist, but Kara guarded over her. She had to trust that her friend would protect her if necessary.
Safia’s blouse was stripped from her. The soiled bandage was then soaked in a steaming poultice of aloe and mint and slowly peeled back. It felt as if they were flaying the skin off her shoulder. She gasped, and her vision darkened.
“You’re hurting her,” Kara warned.
One of the three women had knelt and opened the emergency medical kit. “I have one ampoule of morphine, hodja, ” the woman said.
“Let me see the wound.” The elder leaned down, supported by her staff.
Safia shifted so her shoulder was bared.
“The bullet passed cleanly through. Shallow. Good. We’ll not have to operate. Sweet myrrh tea will ease her pain. Also two tablets of Tylenol with codeine. Hook an IV to her good arm. Run in a liter of warmed LRS.”
“What of the wound?” the other woman asked.
“We’ll cauterize, pack, and wrap the shoulder, then sling the arm.”
“Yes, hodja. ”
Safia was propped up. The third woman poured a steaming mug of tea and handed it to Kara. “Help her drink. It will give her strength.”
Kara obeyed, accepting the mug with both hands.
“You’d best sip, too,” the old woman told Kara. “To clear your head.”
“I doubt this is strong enough.”
“Doubt will not serve you here.”
Kara sipped the tea, grimaced, then offered it to Safia. “You should drink. You look like hell.”
Safia allowed a bit to be dribbled between her lips. The warmth flowed down into the cold pit that was her stomach. She accepted more. Two pills were held in front of her.
“For the pain,” the youngest of the three women whispered. All three looked like sisters, only a few years apart.
“Take them, Saffie,” Kara urged. “Or I’ll take them myself.”
Safia opened her mouth, accepted the medication, and swallowed them down with a bit more of the tea.
“Now lie back while we minister to your wounds,” the hodja said.
Safia collapsed to the blankets, warmer now.
The hodja slowly lowered to the blanket beside her, moving with a grace that belied her age. She rested her walking stick over her knees.
“Rest, daughter. Be at peace.” She placed one hand atop Safia’s.
A gentle bleary feeling swelled through her, fading all the ache from her body, leaving her floating. Safia smelled the jasmine wreathed about the cavern.
“Who…who are you?” Safia asked.
“We’re your mother, dear.”
Safia flinched, denying the possibility, offended. Her mother was dead. This woman was too old. She must be speaking metaphorically. Before she could scold, all sight dissolved away. Only a few words followed her away.
“All of us. We’re all your mother.”
2:32 A.M.
KARA WATCHEDthe group of women attend to Safia as her friend lolled on the blankets. A catheter was inserted into a vein in her right hand and hooked to an intravenous drip attached to a warm bag of saline, held aloft by one of Safia’s nurses. The other two rinsed and daubed the bullet wound in Safia’s shoulder. The injury was smaller than a dime. A cauterizing powder was sprinkled generously over the site, which was then painted with iodine, packed with cotton gauze, and expertly wrapped.
Safia thrashed slightly, but remained asleep.
“Make sure she keeps her arm in a sling,” the older woman said, watching the work of the others. “When she is awake, make sure she drinks a cup of the tea.”
The hodja lifted her staff, posted it on the ground, and pulled herself up. She faced Kara. “Come. Let my daughters care for your sister.”
“I won’t leave her.” Kara moved closer to Safia.
“She will be well cared for. Come. It is time for you to find what you have sought.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Answers to your life. Come or stay. It makes no matter to me.” The old woman thumped off. “I will not argue with you.”
Kara glanced to Safia, then to the elder. Answers to your life.
Kara slowly rose. “If anything happens…” But she didn’t know whom she was threatening. The nurses seemed to be taking good care of her friend.
With a shake of her head, Kara set off after the hodja.
“Where are we going?”
Ignoring Kara, the hodja continued. They left the trickling waterfall and fires behind and crossed into the deeper gloom that rimmed the chamber.
Kara stared around. She barely remembered entering this cavern. She had been conscious of it, but it was as if she had moved in a pleasant fog, plodding behind a similarly clad older tribeswoman. After leaving the van, they had walked for well over an hour, through a shadowy forest, to an ancient dry well, accessed via a narrow cut in the rock. They had spiraled down into a mountainside, walking for some time. Once they reached the cavern here, Kara had been abandoned by the fire, told to wait, the fog lifting from her. With its dissipation, her headache, tremors, and nausea had returned like a leaden blanket. She felt barely able to move, let alone find her way out of this warren of tunnels. Questions she asked were ignored.
And she had many.
She stared at the back of the elder ahead of her now. Who were these women? What did they want with her and Safia?
They reached a tunnel opening in the wall. A child waited at the entrance, bearing a silver oil lamp, like something you’d rub to raise a genie. A tiny flame lapped the tip of the lamp. The girl, no more than eight, wore a desert cloak that appeared too large for her, the hem bunching slightly at her toes. Her eyes were huge upon Kara, as if she were staring at some alien being. But there was no fright, only curiosity.
The hodja nodded the child forward. “Go, Yaqut.”
The child turned and shuffled forward down the tunnel. Yaqut was Arabic for “ruby.” It was the first time she had heard a name spoken here.
She stared at the hodja at her side. “What is your name?”
The old woman finally glanced at her. Green eyes flashed brightly in the lamp’s flame. “I am called many names, but my given name is Lu’lu. I believe in your language that means ‘pearl.’ ”
Kara nodded. “Are all your women named after jewels?”
There was no answer as they continued walking behind the child in silence, but Kara sensed the woman’s acknowledgment. In Arabic tradition, such jeweled names were given to only one caste of folk.
Slaves.
Why did these women pick such names? They certainly seemed freer than most Arab women.
The child turned off the tunnel into a limestone chamber. It was cold, the walls damp, scintillating in the lamplight. A prayer rug lay on the cave’s floor, cushioned by a bed of straw. Beyond it stood a low altar of black stone.
Kara felt a thrill of fear ice through her. Why had they brought her here?
Yaqut walked to the altar, circled behind it, and bent out of sight.
Suddenly flames crackled brighter behind the stone. Yaqut had used her oil lamp to light a small stack of wood. Kara smelled incense and kerosene from the pile, scented and oiled for easy lighting. The kerosene burned away quickly, leaving only the sweet fragrance of frankincense.
As the flames licked higher, Kara saw her mistake. The dark altar was not opaque but crystalline, like a chunk of black obsidian, only more translucent. The glow of the flames shone through the stone.
“Come,” Lu’lu intoned, and led Kara to the prayer rug. “Kneel.”
Kara, exhausted from lack of sleep and shaky from the drain of adrenaline from her system, both naturally and artificially induced, gratefully sank to the soft rug.
The hodja stood behind her. “This is what you have come so far and searched so long to find.” She pointed her stick toward the altar.
<
br /> Kara stared at the block of translucent stone. Her eyes widened as the stack of wood blazed behind the altar, shining through it.
Not opaque stone… raw glass.
Flames lit the interior, illuminating the heart of the glass block. Inside, embedded like a fly in amber, rested a figure, plainly human, blackened to bone, legs curled fetally but arms out in agony. Kara had seen a similar stricken figure. In the ruins of Pompeii. A form turned to stone, buried and petrified under hot ash from the ancient eruption of Vesuvius. The same posture of tortured death.
But worst of all, Kara knew why she had been brought here, shown this.
Answers to her life.
She collapsed to her hands on the rug, her body suddenly too heavy. No… Tears burst to her eyes. She knew who lay buried in the heart of the glass, preserved in agony.
A cry escaped her, wrenching everything from her body: strength, sight, hope, even the will to live, leaving her empty.
“Papa…”
3:12 A.M.
SAFIA WOKEto music and warmth. She lay on a soft blanket, instantly awake, but she languished in the moment. She listened to the soft stringed cords from a lute, accompanied by the soft piping from a reed instrument, haunting and lonely. Firelight danced across the roof overhead, limning the drapes of vines and flowers. The tinkling water added counterpoint to the music.
She knew where she was. There was no slow waking back to the present, only a vague muzzy-headedness from the codeine she had ingested. She heard voices speaking softly, occasional dazzling flashes of laughter, a child playing.
She slowly sat up, earning a grumpy complaint from her shoulder. But the pain was dull, more a deep ache than a sharp twinge. She felt inordinately rested. She checked her watch. She had been asleep only a little more than an hour, but she felt as if she had slept for days. Relaxed and rested.
A young woman stepped toward her, kneeling down, a mug warmed between her hands. “The hodja wishes you to drink this.”
Safia accepted the tea with her good arm. The other lay in a sling across her belly. She sipped gratefully and noticed a conspicuous absence. “Kara? My friend?”
“When you finish your tea, I’m to take you to the hodja. She waits with your sister.”
Safia nodded. She sipped her tea as quickly as its steaming heat would allow. The sweet tea warmed through her. She placed the mug on the ground and crawled to her feet.
Her escort offered a hand to help, but Safia declined, feeling steady enough.
“This way.”
Safia was led to the far side of the sinkhole cavern and down another tunnel. With a lantern in one hand, her guide walked her assuredly through the maze of passages.
Safia addressed her guide. “Who are you all?”
“We are the Rahim,” she answered stiffly.
Safia translated. Rahim was the Arabic word for “womb” Were they some bedouin tribe of women, Amazons of the desert? She pondered the name. It also held an undercurrent of divinity, of rebirth and continuity.
Who were these women?
Ahead a light appeared, glowing from a side cavern.
Her escort stopped a few steps away and nodded Safia forward.
She continued, feeling for the first time since waking a tingle of unease. The air seemed to grow thicker, harder to breathe. She concentrated on inhaling and exhaling, riding through the moment of anxiety. As she stepped nearer, she heard sobbing, heart-deep, broken.
Kara…
Safia pushed aside her fears and hurried to the cavern. She found Kara collapsed on a rug in the cavern. The elder hodja knelt at her side, cradling Kara. The old woman’s green eyes met Safia’s.
Safia rushed over. “Kara, what’s wrong?”
Kara lifted her face, eyes swollen, damp-cheeked. She was beyond words. She pointed an arm toward a large stone with a fire behind it. Safia recognized the chunk as slag glass, molten sand that had hardened. She had found such pieces around lightning strikes. They were revered by ancient peoples, used as jewelry, sacred objects, prayer stones.
She didn’t understand until she spotted the figure in the glass. “Oh, no…”
Kara croaked, “It’s…it’s my father.”
“Oh, Kara.” Tears welled up in Safia’s eyes. She knelt on Kara’s other side. Reginald Kensington had been like a father to Safia, too. She understood her friend’s grief, but confusion shattered through. “How? Why…?”
Kara glanced at the old woman, too overwhelmed to speak.
The hodja patted Kara’s hand. “As I’ve already explained to your friend, Lord Kensington is not unknown to our people. His story leads here as much as the story of you two. He had entered sands forbidden on the day he died. He had been warned, but chose to dismiss it. And it was not chance that brought him to those sands. He sought Ubar, like his daughter. He knew those same sands were near its heart and could not stay away.”
“What happened to him?”
“To tread the sands around Ubar is to risk the wrath of a power that has lain hidden for millennia. A power and place we women guard. He heard of the place, was drawn to it. It was his doom.”
Kara sat up, clearly having heard all this already. “What is this power?”
The hodja shook her head. “That we don’t know. The Gates of Ubar have been closed to us for two millennia. What lies beyond those gates has been lost to the ages. We are the Rahim, the last of its guardians. Knowledge passed from mouth to ear, from one generation to another, but two secrets were never spoken after Ubar was destroyed, never passed to our line by the surviving queen of Ubar. So great was the tragedy that she sealed the city, and with her death, those two secrets died: where the gates’ keys were hidden and what power lies under the sand, at the heart of Ubar.”
Each word spoken by the old woman raised a thousand questions in Safia’s mind. The Gates of Ubar. The last of its guardians. The heart of the lost city. Hidden keys. But some inkling reached through to her.
“The keys…” she muttered. “The iron heart.”
The hodja nodded. “To lead to Ubar’s heart.”
“And the spear with the bust of Biliqis, the Queen of Sheba.”
The elder bowed her head. “She who was the mother of us all. The first of the royal house of Ubar. It is only right she adorns the second key.”
Safia reviewed the known history of Ubar. The city had indeed been founded around 900B.C, the same period during which the historical Queen of Sheba lived. Ubar prospered until the collapse of a sinkhole destroyed the city aroundA.D 300. It had a long reign. But the existence of the ruling house was well documented.
Safia questioned this fact. “I thought King Shaddad was the first ruler of Ubar, the great-grandchild of Noah.” There was even a reclusive clan of bedouin, the Shahra, who claimed to be descendants of this same king.
The old woman shook her head. “The line of Shaddad were administrators only. The line of Biliqis were the true rulers, a secret hidden from all but the most trusted. Ubar gave its powers to the queen, chose her, allowed her to birth her line strong and sure. A line that continues to this day.”
Safia remembered the visage on the bust. The young women here bore a striking resemblance. Could such a line remain pure for over two millennia?
Safia shook her head, incredulous. “Are you saying your tribe can trace their lineage all the way back to the Queen of Sheba?”
The hodja bowed her head. “It is more than that…much more.” She lifted her eyes. “We are the Queen of Sheba.”
3:28 P.M.
KARA FELTsick, nauseous-but not from withdrawal. In fact, since her arrival here in these caves, she felt less jagged, the shakes slowly subsiding, as if something had been done to her head. But what she now suffered was a thousandfold worse than the lack of amphetamines. She felt crushed, heartsick, worn thin, devastated. All this talk of secret cities, mysterious powers, ancient lineages meant nothing to her. Her eyes stared at the remains of her father, his mouth frozen in a rictus of agony.
> Words of the hodja had locked up her brain.
He had sought Ubar, like his daughter.
Kara recalled the day of her father’s death, the hunt on her sixteenth birthday. She had always wondered why they had traveled all the way out to that section of the desert. There was good hunting much closer to Muscat, why fly out to Thumrait Air Base, travel overland in Rovers, then start their pursuit on sand cycles. Had he used her birthday as an excuse to hunt those lands?
Anger built in her chest, shining out of her like the flames behind the chunk of glass. But it had no focus. She was angry at these women who had held this secret for so long, at her father for throwing his life away on a deadly quest, at herself for following in his footsteps…even at Safia for never making her stop, even when the search was destroying Kara from the inside. The fire of her fury burned away the dregs of her sickness.
Kara sat back and turned to the old hodja. She interrupted her history lesson with Safia, her words bitter. “Why was my father searching for Ubar?”
“Kara…” Safia said in a consoling tone. “I think that can wait.”
“No.” Anger put command in her voice. “I want to know now.”
The hodja remained unimpressed, bowing before Kara’s fury like a reed in the wind. “You are right to ask. That is why you are both here.”
Kara frowned from lips to brow.
The woman glanced between Kara and Safia. “What the desert takes, it also gives back.”
“What does that mean?” Kara snapped back.
The hodja sighed. “The desert took your father.” She waved toward the gruesome stone. “But it gave you a sister.” She nodded to Safia.
“Safia has always been my dearest friend.” Despite her anger, Kara’s voice flared with emotion. The truth and depth of her words, spoken aloud, struck her bruised heart with more impact than she would have imagined. She tried to shake them away, but she was too raw.
“She is more than your friend. She is your sister in both spirit…and flesh.” The hodja raised her staff and pointed it at the body entombed in glass. “There lies your father… and Safia’s. ”
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