Jerusalem Fire

by R. M. Meluch

  Roniva drew away from him as Jinin-Ben-Tairre rose to stand. “Thou art kind,” he said to the Fendi.

  “No, I am not,” she said. “I will not have thy death on my sword to weaken my rule.”

  “Then may I say thou art wise,” Ben-Tairre said.

  “Thou mayest, and I am,” Roniva said.

  Jinin-Ben-Tairre took a few steps as if moving in a body that was not his. It was strange to be dead. The reality was only now occurring to him. All that had been his life was gone. He didn’t know what was left. “Who am I?” he said, lost.

  “I never wanted thee as an Itiri,” Roniva said. “Because thy heart is in the wrong place. Thou wantest to be an Itiri so thou wilt not be human. But thou art human. Be thou human now.”

  Eren-Ben put his arm around Roniva’s thin waist and escorted her to the archway, leaving Jinin-Ben-Tairre in the center of the domed chamber like a lonely ghost. He called after Roniva.

  “May I have thine blessing?”

  It had not been offered. It was impudent of him to ask.

  “I should flay thee, Ben-Tairre. Thou art too forward, not to mention dead. Be thou gone from my sight forever.” She went out.

  Ben blinked, shuddered. Thunder crashed.

  He barely heard, for the loud rush of the driving rains, the voice of one leaning in through the mirrored jambs of one of the tall windows, barking:

  “With my blessing!”

  • • •

  Snow came after the torrential rains, and the cold encased the mountain in ice. The morning brought a fog, and all about the Aerie was perfect white. No one could see past arm’s reach, and no one could go outside unless he could walk the paths without sight. Pale eyes went quickly blind in the whiteness.

  The sign of year turned to the Cross. The clouds lifted near midnight, and the high winds swept them away. The cold night grew colder.

  Around the Aerie the air was still. Overhead, the stars shone bright in a velvet field. Around the rocks a powdery white scattering of phosphorescent blossoms dotted the ground like more stars underfoot.

  Alihahd walked alone in the starshine. It was the hour of the meteors, the beginning of the third watch.

  Thin air made sounds fainter. Snow muffled them. But the night quiet, the cold, seemed to fine-tune Alihahd’s senses. He listened.

  Jinin-Ben-Tairre was dead. Or at least gone. Alihahd had seen him descend the snake path toward the valley. Yet Alihahd still felt he was being watched.

  At last he stopped on the path, and spoke without turning. “Layla, why do you follow me?”

  All was silent, but for a distant wind. Alihahd waited. Then she appeared with a soft crunch of crushed ice. She dressed like a child set loose in a theater’s costume storage loft. Her head was veiled like a Muslim lady so that only her brown eyes showed, and she wore a down jacket, kalx-hide trousers, a pair of gloves without fingers, and a gold-fringed shawl which she’d tied around her waist. Her jeweled dagger was sheathed in one dun boot. Her gun was no doubt tucked in her pocket. Always a soldier, Layla was never to be found unarmed.

  She came to Alihahd’s side. Her head didn’t even come up to his shoulder. “Why does one move about at this hour and avoid the sentinels?” she demanded.

  Alihahd smiled. He realized he’d been skirting the sentinels’ vigilance. “Habit,” he said. “Is that not a sorry comment on a way to live?”

  The question was too nebulous for Layla, and she made no comment on it.

  Alihahd admired and envied Layla—her strength, resolution, and unshakable conviction. Layla was also slightly stupid. Blessed with a simplistic bullheadedness, no profound dilemmas ever disturbed her dreams. She was right. Her enemies were wrong. There were no shades of gray.

  Alihahd touched her chin through the Muslim veil. “Do you know what your name would mean in Jerusalem?” he said.

  “No,” Layla said.

  “It means night,” Alihahd said.

  “I like that,” Layla said.

  “Better than mine,” Alihahd said.

  Layla took his arm and walked with him a while. She pressed close to his side, not sexually. She was cold and he was there. She didn’t mistrust or hate him as she did Harrison White Fox Hall.

  Layla called Harrison Hall a slave master.

  “Men and women were not meant to be slaves,” Alihahd said. “The Na′id are not without a point in that matter. The class system on Eridani before the coming of the Na′id was wrong. I think even Mr. Hall can see that.”

  “I think he sees nothing,” Layla said. Hall was bad. Therefore, nothing about Hall could be right.

  “I think I can understand Mr. Hall better than you can,” Alihahd said. “We are both ruling class, he and I.”

  “You more,” Layla said.

  “I?” Alihahd said. Layla knew nothing about him. She didn’t even know whom he ruled.

  “It just sticks to you,” Layla said. “Harry insists too much. You do not say anything. You do not need to.”

  “His empire fell,” Alihahd said. “It makes a difference.”

  “Did not yours?” Layla said.

  “No. Not yet,” Alihahd gave a sad smile. “It is a tottering tower of cards. It will fall. I may even weep when it does.”

  “You think the Na′id will destroy it?” Layla asked.

  “Yes,” Alihahd said. “The Na′id will destroy it in the end.”

  A sudden bright light flaring in the valley drew his gaze.

  The roaring followed, lagging behind the light that had begun its ascent. It blazed toward the heavens to the stars and was gone.

  Alihahd stared in disbelief. “Goddamn,” he breathed. His shoulders drew back, his blue eyes flashed, and his voice became a rolling roar. “Goddamn.”

  A starship. A starship had left Iry without him.

  He pulled away from Layla with a growl. “Where is Roniva?”

  “Do not anger her,” Layla said.

  Alihahd cared nothing for the warning. He would not be treated so. Roniva had said he would leave on the next ship.

  He parted from Layla and crossed the footbridge in twelve steps. Aerieside was black without torches, soulless in its majestic repose. Alihahd filled his lungs. Then, into the imposing silence of the caverns and arcades, Alihahd bellowed the Fendi’s name.

  • • •

  The echoes of his wrath faded to the night quiet. The wind moaned in the crevasse softly.

  She would not come to him. Damn it, he was going to find her.

  A single dim light glowed from within the Chamber of the Golden Dome, the place where Jinin-Ben-Tairre had died. Alihahd went inside, his footsteps loud in the cavernous space, ringing off the nine walls and the high metal dome. The snowy owl loomed over the throne. The rustle of its feathers startled him. The owl’s round yellow eyes stared at Alihahd unblinking. Cold gusts blew in the windows and the archway, swirling the leaves in the hollow place. This place was deserted. But she was here, even when she was not here. She filled this chamber.

  Alihahd met the preternatural yellow eyes. His voice tremored with rage. “Where is your master?”

  The owl clacked its black beak.

  Alihahd didn’t hear anything, but he perceived a presence behind him. He turned.

  Roniva stood in the archway. “Here is the creature’s master,” she said.

  “Forgive me if I abuse your hospitality, Fendi,” Alihahd said bitterly. “But your hospitality is not all you would have me believe.”

  “Explain.” Her brows were drawn together in a pained squint over her eyes.

  “‘When one of us next leaves Iry, thou mayest go also.’ Whose words are those?” Alihahd said.

  “Mine,” Roniva answered.

  “Then what the hell was that?” Alihahd pointed skyward.

  The Fendi’s brow smoothed
in surprise. Then she squinted again, puzzled. “A ship has left?” She turned her head aside and held up her fist. “Eho!”

  Her owl appeared on her fist.

  “Find,” she snapped, and threw the owl into the air. It disappeared. Roniva folded her spidery black fingers and assumed an attitude of waiting. “We shall both know shortly.”

  The owl reappeared on the throne, crying three notes.

  Roniva turned back to Alihahd. “No one left on that ship,” she said. She rubbed her temples and moved toward the door.

  No one? “Lie to me, Fendi?” Alihahd said.

  Roniva halted. A volatile word, lie. Alihahd was too incensed to care if he angered a woman who could stop a tungsten-plastic blade with her bare hand.

  “It was Jinin-Ben-Tairre,” Roniva said, her own anger withheld. “He is dead. He is no one.”

  “I am no one with whom to try semantic tricks,” Alihahd said.

  “Not semantics,” Roniva said. “To us, he truly is no one. I am not accountable for the actions of the dead. When someone leaves Iry, I will know and thou wilt know. That is all.”

  Alihahd rumbled, “That is not all!”

  “I become wroth,” Roniva warned softly. “Not easily done.”

  “I had not noticed that particular fact,” Alihahd said acidly.

  “Done!” Roniva cried.

  “Easily,” Alihahd said.

  “Oh, thy tongue is a sharp sword and thou art evil. Ben told me so. I should have let him kill thee. You would both be gone from me now!”

  Alihahd was shocked to wordlessness for several moments. Then he continued in a softer voice. “How does a neutral nation justify aiding the Na′id Empire by holding one of the opposition’s leaders prisoner here unable to lead?”

  “I was aiding the opposition by saving said leader’s life,” Roniva countered. “Neutral, I should drop thee back in the ocean whence I dragged thee.”

  “Perhaps you should,” Alihahd said quietly. “If I am to be your prisoner.”

  Roniva threw her arms wide in exasperation and cried, “Thou took exception to my aiding the opposition by training thy Harrison Hall. Which side art thou on?”

  Alihahd threw his head back and gazed up at the tall ceiling that was suddenly too low for him. He cried, “Humanity’s! Trying to be!” He slapped his palm against a pillar behind him, and almost laughed at his own uselessness.

  “As I am the Itiri’s,” Roniva said. “Remember thou who I am. May I go now?”

  Alihahd gave a bark of pain, frustration, and absurdity. “Ili! Ili!” he cried.

  “What sayest thou?” Roniva asked.

  “I am saying, ‘Go. I am sorry. Dismiss everything I ever said.’ Why not? I am as no one as Ben.” And he ran from the chamber.

  • • •

  Serra listened to the rain falling outside. The fire in the hearth sputtered as drops strayed down the chimney. Harrison Hall rose from the breakfast table and took his rain fur from the peg by the door. “Be careful,” Serra said.

  Hall navigated the slushy paths pitted with footprints, while on either side of the trail the rain pocked the untrodden snow with wet perforations. He came upon a moody Alihahd, his blond hair wind-tossed, his ears and fair face stung a deep red, his blue eyes half closed in the cold wind. Either from self-torture or neglect, he was not dressed for the weather. From the look of him, he had been out here all night. He looked deep in thought. Hall sensed anger.

  They stepped around a spongy euglenoid colony that was creeping across the path, soaking up the rain.

  Hall walked along in silence. When they had come at length to the entrance to Alihahd’s cave, Hall asked for words. “Captain?”

  Alihahd expelled a breath, shook his head, said nothing. He went in.

  Hall returned to Serra’s cave. Serra, Amerika, and Vaslav were at the table. Hall hung his rain fur on its peg and joined them.

  “Mad,” he said. “Absolutely unpredictable. He’s as regular as the damned weather.”

  “No,” Vaslav said.

  Hall frowned at the boy. “No? What do you mean, no?”

  Vaslav explained that Alihahd was not erratic at all. According to Vaslav—and Vaslav’s chronometer—Alihahd kept a perfect twenty-four-hour Earth standard cycle.

  Harrison Hall seized the boy’s wrist and stared at his chronometer. “Are you sure?”

  Vaslav swore it was so. He didn’t understand it, how Alihahd did it, but that was what he was doing. Alihahd rose every day at the same time—on Earth. He went to bed at the same time each Earth day. At any given Earth time of day, Alihahd was to be found in the exact same place. The schedule put him far out of rhythm with Iry’s days and nights. Not to be regulated by an alien sun, Alihahd rose and slept as his inner clock bid, no matter the position of the Iry sun.

  Hall’s smile was slow and evil, breaking into an open grin. His gaze turned aside with glinting eyes, toward the door and the outside where the rain had turned to snow.

  12. A Winter Conversation

  ALIHAHD WOKE AT SUNSET, just as Vaslav was crawling into bed. Vaslav glanced at his wrist chronometer. The time was exactly 0735 on the Earth meridian.

  How does he do it? Vaslav marveled. I have the clock!

  Alihahd went through his waking ritual with seeming meticulousness, putting on his clothes in habitual order, remaking the bed just so—first the quilt, then the woven blanket, then the brown fur, then the silver fur. He brushed his teeth twice.

  Then he went outside without his rain fur like a forgetful old man.

  The cliff paths were slick with snow. It fell lightly from the high clouds. No one was about at this hour except the two sentinels, who were easy to avoid. Alihahd’s walks had settled into a set pattern that kept him away from others as much as possible.

  Alihahd wallowed in his solitude. He didn’t feel the cold.

  Then a voice split the silence and dragged him out of his reverie. “Why art thou always elsewhere than thou art, Alihahd?”

  He knew the voice and was shocked that it should address him directly.

  Waiting in shadowed ambush on his accustomed path, alone and unattended, was the Fendi Roniva. Blending in with the black shadow she was barely visible but for her white teeth, the whites of her glittering black eyes, and the broken red scars on her cheeks. She wore no jewels to catch the starlight. Alihahd was so amazed that he had nothing to say.

  “Thou livest out of time,” said the Fendi. “Be here now.”

  He wondered what she wanted.

  She drew closer and passed a leathery hand over his wet hair. She shook the snow crystals from her hand. “Thou hast little regard for thyself,” she said. “That is not good. Thy spirit is not well.”

  “How may I serve thee, Fendi?” Alihahd said at last.

  “Dry thyself. Eat. Wear warm clothes and come to me.” She turned sharply and glided across the bridge.

  Alihahd had detected a subtle nervousness about her he’d never seen before—something in the stiffness of her shoulders, a thin edge to her voice. Nothing blatant, it was the held-back tension of the brave solemnly facing something dreadful.

  Alihahd quickly complied with her wishes. He went to Hall and Serra’s cave. The two of them were usually to be found up late.

  “Good morning, Captain,” Hall said, smiling.

  Alihahd frowned.

  Serra fed him. Hall gave him warm dry clothes and his own fur-lined parka. Before Alihahd left, Serra slipped a packet of breadcakes into his pocket. “Take. It will be a long night.”

  Alihahd took her shoulder in his hand. “You know what this is about, Serra?”

  Serra kept her eyes lowered as a good Eridanin woman would to a strange man. “I think so.” She tied the leather drawstring of the parka’s hood under his chin. Her shoulders were as stiff as Roniva’s. Her voice had g
one husky.

  “Am I in danger?” Alihahd asked.

  “No. You can walk away. She cannot.”

  Serra didn’t explain. The topic was upsetting to her.

  Alihahd left the warmth of the cave. Using the safety line, he crossed the bridge to Aerieside in twelve steps, starting with his right foot.

  Roniva hadn’t told him where to go, so he went where one always had audience with the Fendi, to the Chamber of the Golden Dome.

  Even as he approached, he could see yellow light from its arched doorway and its tall windows, darkened by flitting shadows of people moving inside.

  He stood at the entrance and witnessed an odd little ceremony in progress within.

  Roniva stood in the center of a ring of ma-hanina. She wore only a loose flowing ice-blue shift pinned at her shoulders. Her hair was loose. Her bare arms were crossed over her flat chest. Without all her enameled toques Alihahd could see how very wrinkled was her neck.

  A warrior-priest stepped into the circle and emptied a bucket of ashes over her neat, glossy head.

  She didn’t move against him, only closed her eyes and frowned in revulsion. She uncrossed her arms, all her corded muscles taut. Her body was firm and thin and hard beneath the sheer shift that was no protection at all against the cold.

  Alihahd was aghast to see the shift suddenly stripped from her and she was driven out naked into the snow.

  Alihahd lunged forward to help her.

  Her leathery hands met his as she stumbled. Then her face turned up to him, resigned, and silenced anything he might have said.

  All was happening as it was meant to be.

  She spoke, smudges of white ashes on her black lips. “I am of an age to demand a companion. Walk with me, Alihahd.” She straightened herself and marched into the winter night.

  Alihahd cast an appalled look back at the other warriors now assembled in a row barring the cave entrance and the golden glow of warmth within. Jewels sparkled on their thick robes. Alihahd ran after the old woman with ashes on her head.