Jerusalem Fire

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Jerusalem Fire Page 27

by R. M. Meluch


  A pause preceded the answer. “I thought you people wore blue.”

  Shad Iliya snapped his heels together and inclined a courtly military bow to his unseen watcher. Then he said, “I detest blue.” An absurd answer to an absurd question.

  The Jew laughed.

  Shad Iliya avoided the traditional blue out of practical considerations. The shiny metallic-blue uniforms were designed to be an instantly recognizable announcement of Na′id loyalty. Shad Iliya didn’t like his soldiers to be so highly visible to enemy gunners.

  He glanced to the black tarp. He wanted to have this ordeal over, and to take control of the city with the fewest deaths. He’d never fought a campaign like this—trying to preserve both sides. He felt certain of victory but was uncomfortable with these new tactics. It would help if he knew his enemy. And he was discovering quickly that he did not know his enemy this time. Strategically hyperopic, he found that distance made for clarity of vision. Aliens were easy to understand and, therefore, predictable. These people were not predictable in the least.

  The inevitability of their defeat and a promise of clemency in surrender were not enough to make them give up their intransigent stand. They were bafflingly illogical.

  The two veteran generals, who had joined Shad Iliya on the chapel steps, had reported the same observations many times in past years. They watched the new general grudgingly, waiting for him to fall on his face as they had.

  He lifted the comlink again. “Are your Christian and Muslim colleagues with you?”

  “They are listening,” said the Jew.

  “Have you informed them of the terms we offer for surrender, or was the decision to refuse unilaterally yours?” Shad Iliya knew that this was an uneasy alliance at best. If he preyed on the suspicion that the Jew was overstepping his bounds, Shad Iliya might drive a wedge into their fragile unity.

  But his opponent was familiar with the methods of propaganda. “Such a bald ploy, Philistine,” the Jew said. “My colleagues are not impotent and they can speak for themselves.”

  The comlink was passed, and the Christian leader, Cardinal Miriam, gave her answer in a florid and prolix diatribe. She spoke in paragraphs of prose.

  Shad Iliya cut in, “Your Eminence, I know of only one person who regularly uses lofty rhetoric in private speech, and that is I. Since this is a closed circuit, please speak plainly to me now, human being to human being.”

  “As you will, General. Go to hell,” the cardinal said.

  Plain enough.

  Just then, from the loudspeaker in the minaret of the nearest mosque erupted a deep ululant Allaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah Akbaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!

  Shad Iliya took a step back, clicked off the com, and looked to his aides. “What is that?’”

  “Muezzin, sir,” Ra′im Mishari said. “Muslim prayer call. Five times a day.”

  “That hideous noise in the name of God?” Shad Iliya said and clicked on the com again. “Are you still there?”

  “I am, Philistine.” It was the Jew again. “But I fear our Muslim colleague must delay giving you his fond wishes. He goes to pray now.”

  “Then I shall talk to you later,” Shad Iliya said.

  “Keep the link with you, Philistine.”

  “You will be right in my pocket the whole time, Zealot,” Shad Iliya said and clicked off.

  The prayer call droned on for some minutes more. The crowded city began to crawl.

  “Look, General.”

  Muslims flocked to the mosques, filled them to overflowing, spilled out of the courtyards, and bowed down in the streets. Jews and Christians in that quarter walked around them.

  Shad Iliya marveled. Religious ardor reached fanatical heights under siege. Yet the conflicting faiths and conflicting sects of the faiths squeezed into the small area seemed to have put their righteous hatred of each other aside for the moment. “They cooperate rather well for avowed enemies,” Shad Iliya commented.

  “Don’t they realize that only proves the Na′id point!” someone said.

  “That end of it rather appears not to have entered into their consideration,” Shad Iliya said. He didn’t understand it either. He beckoned Ra′im to his side. “I require one crack pilot for a possible suicide run.”

  Twelve officers in and about the war office overheard the quiet request and leaped to volunteer on the spot.

  The two veteran generals were gravely disgruntled. This kind of blind loyalty to a leader was unhealthy.

  Shad Iliya chose the nearest volunteer and instructed her to take an echelon of eight robot spy planes in a low pass over Jerusalem. “As low as you can manage without burying them.”

  “I’ll wave up to the minarets as I go by, sir,” she said. “Purpose of mission, sir?”

  “Your ships will be transmitting to this office a computer plot of the trajectories of all enemy fire which you draw. There will be a lot of it. So.”

  He left off there. The rest of it was understood, and he waited for her to retract her bid.

  She saluted, accepting the assignment.

  General Shad Iliya saluted, held it a moment longer, as he always did in the face of valor, then barked for a car to take the pilot to her spy planes.

  Two computers were activated in the war office to record the planes’ signals as they came in. “Don’t garble this,” Shad Iliya told the technician. “I shall not have this done twice.”

  He didn’t expect to see his pilot again.

  He stood out on the chapel steps to watch the pass.

  The sleek black planes went into Jerusalem in the 27th Army’s characteristic broken echelon.

  They came out in perforated echelon. The lead plane crashed into Mount Scopus, failing to pull up steeply enough. Three others fell to ground fire. The four survivors streaked into the desert. The war office waited, hushed, to see if they came back. No one knew which plane had carried the pilot.

  “Long live Shad Iliya and the 27th!” crackled over the transceiver.

  “She made it!” a technician called out to the steps of the chapel.

  The tall white general nodded with an air of near-indifference. But none of his soldiers supposed Shad Iliya indifferent.

  He said nothing, did nothing, seemed to be admiring the skyline, until Ra′im Mishari came to him with the tech’s report of the lowest angle managed by the defenders’ emplaced guns.

  Ra′im passed the verdict to him in silence.

  Twenty degrees.

  Shad Iliya thanked him. Their eyes met. No more words passed. Both knew what the information meant. Ra′im guessed what his general had in mind.

  The veterans of the 9th and 34th armies had no idea. All they saw was apparent catastrophe in the half-destroyed squadron of valuable spy planes.

  “With the supreme commander’s leave,” said one. “We told you their ceiling was covered.”

  Shad Iliya was unconcerned. “We shall not be going in from the air.”

  Faces slackened. “How, then?”

  Shad Iliya became impatient. Blue eyes glittered ice-cold. “Since we are not about to tunnel either, I leave it to you, gentlemen.”

  • • •

  Sinikar, the orderly, stepped out of the chapel to inform his general that the Jew was on the radio.

  Shad Iliya sighed, expecting this. These taunts would be on an open frequency to advertise the invincible general’s disastrous air pass to the populace.

  Shad Iliya went inside to the transceiver. “Yes.”

  “Well, Philistine, give up?”

  “No. I was just now telling my colleagues to start digging. We are tunneling in.”

  The Jew laughed, then said, “No, Shad Iliya. You just found an opening on the horizons. You’re coming in with an infantry.”

  Bald expressions of shock ringed Shad Iliya in the war office. Shad Iliya nodded, acceptin
g the fact that he would get no breaks from this man.

  “Yes, Zealot, I am.”

  “Good. That’s where we’re strongest. Not those guns.” That affirmation was spoken for the benefit of the people of Jerusalem.

  “We, too,” Shad Iliya said. He turned off the transceiver, looked to the two veterans, of whom he was already thoroughly tired, and said, curtly, “At least someone knows what he is about here. Pity he is on the other side.”

  The city immediately started bracing for a ground assault. Shad Iliya needed to move fast. The defenders would try to stall for time to redirect some of their guns to ground level—and to the Mount of Olives.

  The time-consuming element for Shad Iliya was proper deployment of the weary and dispirited soldiers of the 9th and 34th armies who had been pounding at the gates of Jerusalem for years. And they needed to be accustomed to the idea of an assault without ships, on foot, carrying projectile weapons. Wars simply weren’t fought that way anymore.

  Jerusalem had the superior numbers. But even had each and every person in the city been a soldier, they only had hand-held projectile weapons for a few—because wars were not fought this way anymore.

  Shad Iliya also took care to make wise use of his dregs. In case there actually was a battle, it would be finished quickly and efficiently. He still didn’t believe it was going to happen.

  While the preparations progressed, the general sent saboteurs into the city to disrupt the defensive measures, while he instructed his own people to challenge any unfamiliar person in their midst to give a password, which was “Shad Iliya is God,” in hope that the defenders would be unable to say it even if they happened to learn it.

  For himself, Shad Iliya spent the first night rereading the Bible. He sat on a spartan bed under an open window in a small chamber of his war office. He found words that struck him to the heart and that would come back to haunt him later.

  If it be possible, let this cup pass from me.

  The garden was down there at the foot of the mount.

  He closed the book and stepped outside to the chill desert night. He watched the lights of the city spread out at his feet. The dry air carried to him the scent of cypress planted around the chapel. He overheard the exchange of night sentries:

  “What is it with these Jerusalemites?”

  “They think they’re God’s chosen people.”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, if God wants them, let’s make sure God gets them.” The slapping sound was a palm on a metal weapon butt. “Chosen people. I’ll show them chosen people.”

  Shad Iliya left the temenos of the chapel and strolled over the mount in the dark.

  The Mount of Olives was teeming with graves, millennia’s worth, sleeping under the fig trees and the pink-flowering oleanders. One could not walk without tripping over the marble fragment of someone’s marker.

  Shad Iliya did trip and alarmed a sentry at the edge of a stand of pine trees. “Halt!” the girl commanded, and pointed her weapon.

  Shad Iliya spoke before she could demand the password. “I shan’t call myself God, so do not ask.”

  “Sir!” The sentry shouldered her gun and snapped to rigid attention. “Sorry, sir.”

  “No need. Very good”—he squinted at her uniform in the dark—“Sergeant. At ease.”

  The girl shifted her gun on her shoulder and bowed her head. “Was a hell of a lot easier when the enemy didn’t look like us,” she said wistfully.

  Suddenly sad, Shad Iliya nodded and laid a hand on her close-shorn curls. “Yes, it was.”

  The muezzin’s stentorian wail, distorted through the loud speakers, split the night’s peace, and Shad Iliya lifted his hands in dismay.

  He had wondered why he hadn’t counted five prayer calls during the day. Here was the fifth in the middle of the night. They were going to drive him mad.

  Either they or the Jew.

  Jerusalem’s commander called on the comlink at intervals to harass his adversary. Unlike the muezzin, however, the link could be turned off. Shad Iliya never did turn it off, and realized only too late that he should have. It was the Jew’s most powerful weapon.

  In the morning Shad Iliya woke, itching from a bout with stinging nettles which he had walked into unawares the night before. The Jew’s voice sounded cheerily on his pillow. “Good morning, Philistine.”

  Shad Iliya rolled to the comlink. “Good morning, Zealot.” He cleared his gravelly throat. “Surrender?”

  “Never.”

  Shad Iliya looked to his chronometer and calendar. “Today is my birthday.”

  “Happy birthday, Philistine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Your sixtieth?”

  “Thirty-fifth, villain.”

  “You will be here for your sixtieth.”

  “I think not.”

  “Your army has been rotting outside Jerusalem for a hundred years.”

  Shad Iliya sat up in bed. “Not my army, Zealot. Not my army.”

  “Your great alien-killers? You will fare no better than your predecessors.”

  “How can you even talk like that on a closed circuit? Do you not blush? I know you are lying and you know you are lying.”

  “Maybe God knows better than both of us, then.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I must say, though, yours is the most thoroughly brainwashed army ever to knock at our gates.”

  “You mean that your propaganda does not work on my soldiers.”

  “Exactly.”

  The propaganda didn’t work because it had been aimed at the wrong targets. It attempted to undercut the Empire, the Na′id tenets, the Bel. But the soldiers of the 27th Army weren’t fighting for any of that. They fought for love of Shad Iliya. And the sterling Shad Iliya had no vices for a propagandist to use.

  “You will find my army immune to your quasi-religious unreason,” Shad Iliya said. “So you may as well desist—if you can. Disseminating lies comes naturally to your ilk, does it not?”

  “Such insults!” said the Jew. “But what shall I call Shad Iliya? I can say nothing about Shad Iliya. Shad Iliya is perfect.”

  Shad Iliya smiled. “You have been talking to my soldiers.”

  “What don’t you confess, Philistine? You’ve no addictions. You drink but a little. You’re loyal to your wife even in the field for months on end. You’ve no strange hobbies. No hobbies at all. You must be a monster. You terrify me.”

  Oh, but no, Shad Iliya thought. We have hardly begun with terror.

  The noose of ships and soldiers tightened around Jerusalem’s hills, still out of direct sight from the city. Among the Na′id artillery was a great dragon-carved cannon several stories high, an enormous, primitive-looking thing like the figurehead of a bronze-age warship.

  The Jew acquired a picture of it from his recon team, broke into disbelieving giggles, and opened his comlink at once in high spirits. “I like your pet, Philistine. It’s cute. What’s its name?”

  “Its name is Ba′al,” Shad Iliya said wryly.

  The Jew belittled it blithely. At first, Shad Iliya thought his adversary was fishing for confirmation of a suspicion, but as the derision continued, Shad Iliya realized that the Jew had made his first overconfident blunder.

  The Jew thought that Shad Iliya was assuming Jerusalem’s shields were weak at ground level in the same way the city’s offensive guns were lacking at the ground, and that Shad Iliya was basing his attack on that erroneous belief. The Jew thought Ba′al was an n-cannon.

  Shad Iliya’s fate whispered to him again. No doubt now. No doubt.

  You stupid Zealot; dragons breathe fire.

  The weapon was actually as primitive as it looked—Man’s oldest weapon after the rock.

  Perhaps we could use those, too. Shad Iliya thought, ironic.

  But fire was the
one that had first given humankind supremacy over all life on Earth.

  And Shad Iliya went to sleep with a burden on his chest, like something sitting on his heart, cursed with the knowledge that, as a certainty, he could not lose this battle.

  The muezzin woke Shad Iliya on the third morning. He rose from bed, dressed quickly without his slave’s help, threw open the door of the side chamber that had become his bedroom, and stomped out to the front steps of the war office, where the sentries stood.

  “Take out that minaret.”

  Uncertainly, the sentry changed his grip on his gun. “Really, sir?”

  “No.” Shad Iliya reached his open hand to the side. His orderly knew the motion and put a cup of coffee into it.

  Shad Iliya’s brow furrowed with a headache. He hadn’t slept well. He marched back to his room and found his alien slave, Pony, making the bed. He chased Pony out and sat on the cot, brooding. His fingers laced around his coffee cup.

  God damn you, Jerusalem.

  Of the defense, he worried most about the Jewish forces. There was something charming and endearing about the Arab disorder and disunity. He could sometimes count on them to blow up their own weapons because of an incurable tendency to ignore strict directions and maintenance schedules.

  But there was something inhuman about the Jewish unity, precision, and capability. This battle would be a horror. Shad Iliya still refused to believe it would take place. Something would happen to intervene. Surely the leaders would come to their senses. He had given them time to make a patriotic show of defiance. Now it was time to be reasonable.

  He rolled onto his back and propped his head up on the pillow against the wall, which was frescoed with faded and chipped Easter lilies. He flipped out the comlink and waited for the inevitable “Good morning, Philistine.”

  Shad Iliya dispensed with being pleasant and lashed out at the commander for his adherence to and willingness to let a city die for an antiquated religion.

  “Antiquated!” the Zealot said. “Old makes it wrong? No, Philistine, old makes it right. Do you think if God were to reveal Himself to Mankind He would wait until now? What of the generations who went before? If there is a Revelation, it is an old one.”

 

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