by R. M. Meluch
Suddenly furious, he dragged himself up and outside. The shelling had stopped. He glared at the city in a rage.
He went inside the office and punched on the command circuit. It was still operative. “Are we clear, Ra′im?”
“Yes, sir,” Ra′im answered over the circuit. “We are. But a lot of noncombatants have moved into the west quadrant.”
“Commence firing.”
Ra′im paused. “You don’t mean Ba′al, sir?”
“Yes, I mean exactly that!” Shad Iliya cried and punched off the circuit. Am I speaking Swahili? Is everyone suddenly become deaf?
He stalked out to the portico.
Jerusalem’s layers of radiation shields were impenetrable to any of the empire’s sophisticated death rays of a frequency higher than ultraviolet. But simple, primitive fire could pass through as unimpeded as visible light.
The ominous, dragon-faced tower of Ba′al came to life with a roar of flames and sent a long river of fire arching into the new city.
A shudder ran through Shad Iliya with the streaming flames and the long scream of his Jewish captive in the doorway behind him. Tears from some unknown emotion threatened his eyes. He inhaled unevenly, his shoulders, back, and neck taut. The scream from the city reached him even here. He shuddered again.
People flooded out of the western city, fleeing to the unburned part. They crowded toward the Old City. The Na′id would not destroy that part. There, the fighting would be hand-to-hand.
West Jerusalem was a wall of thick, flickering orange-black fire. Its gutted buildings belched up more hell-hued billows. Shad Iliya watched, wild-eyed, as if mad.
He felt as if this were the first time he had ever really fought a battle. His enemies, dying before his onslaught, were people. Part of him felt sick, part . . . .
His self sickened him.
In extremity, the veneer of humanity disintegrated. Shad Iliya was left facing his essential self and nothing else. And seldom answered in times of rationality was the question of what happens when one cannot live with what he finds. The great flames roared and billowed and snapped like a flag in the wind.
So unfurl our standard and fly our true colors. Flame and death.
The Jew’s wife, several paces behind him, cried a contralto wail over her beloved city, a pure emotion he could never find in himself. Shad Iliya never could act what he felt, and was never sure quite what or if he was feeling.
He beheld the city with his rounded, white-circled eyes, sweat on his brow, a lump risen in his throat. This felt like emotion. And the city burned.
The woman ran to his side with her shortened steps. “Stop it! Stop! I see you loathe it, too! You are dying before my eyes!”
He gestured for her to be taken inside.
A girl soldier came to his shoulder, looked aside at her staring general, then followed his gaze to the burning city. “Terrible, isn’t it?” she said.
Shad Iliya couldn’t speak. Terrible.
He saw the defenders braving the flames. Their heroism never failed. It wasn’t simple martyrdom—there was that, too—but these people wanted to live. Their energy, their spirit, their life could not be snuffed out. It put Shad Iliya to shame.
A black cloud drifted over the city and toward the Mount of Olives. Shad Iliya watched it come with detached disbelief. It was on him before he thought to go for a mask, and he was suddenly blinded, choking, and unable to breathe.
Someone groped to his side and pressed a mask to his face. It was the girl soldier, giving her general her own mask. Then she staggered off blindly for another.
Shad Iliya retreated inside the chapel and shut all the windows. He tore off the mask. The air inside was hot and close and hung with floating soot.
The comlink sounded. Shad Iliya grabbed it out of his pocket in surprise. A cold voice said, “You are brutal, Philistine.”
“Did you think you had a monopoly on that as well?” said Shad Iliya.
“I did. No. Not a monopoly. A supremacy. We can be ruthless when we need.”
“I am aware.” He replaced the link in his pocket and turned his eyes to the Jew’s wife, crouched in one corner of the war office. He and she were alone in the room.
Why didn’t I let them talk?
He knew why. He wanted her. He was alone and he didn’t want her to have someone else, least of all the Jew.
He had never wanted a woman so strongly as he suddenly wanted this one. He couldn’t say why. Because she was here? Because she was his?
“Stop staring at me,” she said.
“I like you,” he said.
Her back straightened against the wall. “May I say, General, that you revolt me?”
Shad Iliya was stung. He replied wearily, “Why not? You Jews say what you like, to hell with ‘may’ or ‘may not’ anyway.”
He checked the computer monitors at his station. One was dark. The Na′id fire had taken out one of their own monitors.
He tried to brush soot from his uniform, then gave up. He was very dirty. Only his watery blue eyes were undulled.
“Shad Iliya?”
It was the woman, crouched in the corner.
He turned, mute.
“I didn’t mean that,” she said.
He shook his head to say it was nothing.
“I had to say that.” She stood. “You are my enemy.”
“I am only a man,” he said, very tired.
She shook her head, her mouth spread into what would have been a smile were it not so sad. “That is a Na′id view. I don’t see that way. I am not Na′id.”
He crossed to her and seized her shoulders in his big hands, beseeching and insistent. “You are human.”
“I am Jewish,” she said, helpless before the impasse. She wasn’t immune to the syndrome of loving her captor, but she could remind herself that she was a Jew and this poor monster was not.
She did love him. She knew its cause, knew it to be false, but felt it burn regardless, impervious to logic. She was surprised that it had come over her so fast. But that was what came of living at the brink. The law of mayflies. If you have one day to live, you live your whole life in one day, and brightly.
Shad Iliya still held her shoulders. He heard her breath deepen, and on impulse he drew her in to him and kissed her. Her mouth rose and opened to his in startling passion. He put his arms around her, held her, ran his hands over her hard waist and her moving hips that pressed against his groin. He buried his face in her long hair falling loose from its tie, and a deep, sultry voice in his ear said, “Take me.”
Shad Iliya laughed weakly. “I can’t. Not now. Later.”
“I won’t want you later,” she said. “I need you now.”
He covered her mouth with his, and they sank together to their knees as the flames blazed over her city and an all-consuming dark cloud engulfed the landscape and blackened the windows of the chapel.
Armageddon raged outside—the last great battle between good and evil. Except that there was no good and no evil. Just us.
And both of them were terrified beyond what the human body and spirit were meant to bear. They pressed together and groaned in animal abandon—the rest outside was madness and this the only sane thing being done in the world.
His passion-clumsied fingers had only begun to fumble at the closings of their clothes when one of his aides cried from outside, “General!”
Shad Iliya scrambled to his feet and ran to the door, forgetting his mask. But the slight wind over Jerusalem had shifted and the air outside was clearing.
The lifting cloud revealed a new scene.
A black-robed troop of Muslim soldiers had moved into the valley at the foot of the mount under cover of the black smoke.
They stormed up the slope with a hideous outcry, dying by the tens and twenties with every step as Shad Iliya�
�s guards cut them down in rows, and still they came with warbling shrieks. The Arabs used the most modern weapons—beams—which reflected off the modern Na′id screens. They themselves fell to simple old-fashioned bullets, their useless radiation screens aglitter, and still they charged as if there were immunity to death in their blood-fierce wails.
Shad Iliya took up a machine gun and mowed them down, row on row as they came at him, right up to his very feet.
When they were all dead, he took a staggering step backward. His hands shook. His eyes stared.
People. These were human. There were hundreds of them. Their blood was spattered on him. He licked sweat from his lips—tasted blood.
Dizzy, he dropped the gun, dead Arabs all around him, some staring glassily back at him, a ghastly mirror. This was what he saw inside Shad Iliya.
Shad Iliya clenched his fists.
It was their own fault they lay all down the slope in heaps. He wanted to scream at them. Stupid! Stupid! They carried the best weapons. But the best weapons didn’t work here. Rocks would have worked better.
Jerusalem, you are stupid!
Idolatry is worse than carnage—so said the Koran. How was the Empire to absorb such a people? They were oblivious to their human kinship. One could only kill them.
Shad Iliya went back inside the chapel to find the Jewish woman. She was dead—without wound, fallen to a beam shot. She was the only person on the mount downed by the Arab attack.
Shad Iliya knelt with a groan. She appeared to be sleeping, her face relaxed into rough-cut prettiness. He didn’t touch her because he was covered with blood.
Wake up, woman. I need you.
He tore himself away from her side and stood.
Who is killing whom and why—does anyone know? Do I?
• • •
In the evening, the first faction of the defenders surrendered. The Christians were far and away the most reasonable of the three. Racially, they were the most Na′id-like, a mixture. They knew suicide when they saw it. Not that they hadn’t martyrs. Every people had its share of martyrs, thought Shad Iliya, except the Jews, who were made up of nothing but martyrs as far as he could tell.
Once the Na′id forces occupied the Christian quarter, the Muslim resistance collapsed into confusion and left the Jews outflanked.
Shad Iliya climbed to the summit of the mount at day’s end. It was a bloody sunset, the sky aflame with tortured hues. The sun’s long light cast a red wash over the burning city.
I warned you, Jerusalem. Did you not believe me? You are my city. What did all your blood gain you?
He stood immobile, a tall, angular silhouette against the flames, his straight arms held a little out from his sides, his feet planted wide on the ground, his head thrown back. The wind fluttered his clothes. He tensed and trembled as if in great pain.
This is yours, Shad Iliya.
The recorders, standing ready to immortalize this moment, caught the victorious general so, surveying his conquest; this was the scene that would go over the Net.
Down below, Na′id soldiers poured into all parts of the city. An aide came to his general’s side.
Shad Iliya’s voice was deep. “Inform the Bel: The city is ours.”
The veterans of the 9th and 34th armies ran amok in the streets, wreaking their personal vengeance on the city that had spat at them for so long. Out of control, they killed, raped, and maimed.
“There will be charges filed in cases of excessive violence,” Shad Iliya ordered over the command circuit. It was a threat only. He didn’t intend to carry it out. “I want this rampage stopped. And I want the Jewish Zealot. Alive.”
Then he secured his personal screen, holstered a handgun, and descended into the city on foot, stepping carefully down the slope cluttered with the bodies of Arabs he had killed. He waded through the garden of Gethsemane, muddy with blood of the faithful.
The Lion Gate opened for him, and the supreme commander entered the Old City. Blood flowed down the Via Dolorosa, where the fighting had been close-in with bayonets and scimitars.
Shad Iliya turned into a darkened side street, illuminated his lantern, and proceeded slowly down the crooked way. Moldering walls hugged the avenue. It was strewn with sand and debris, smelling of spice and vegetables and urine. He heard rustling and he halted, lifting his lantern high, expecting snipers.
A herd of mangy goats gazed down at him from a rooftop.
A clothesline stretched across a third-floor balcony, its sooted wash waving in the night wind.
A black kid ran bleating across his path in the stepped, zigzag street, and skirted behind a boarded-up kiosk beside a rickety wooden table on which sat the aluminum keg and three dirty glasses of the water seller. The street’s single videophone lay smashed on the concrete.
A jeep whined, careened around the corner, flashing blue-and-red lights. It jounced to a stop and an aide jumped up. “Sir!”
“Yes.”
“The Jewish commander, sir. We have him located.”
Located, he said. Not We have him. “What do you mean, ‘located’? Is he dead?”
“No, sir. He’s holed up in an alley. He has a weapon and we can’t get near. We’re afraid to try stun. He’s critically wounded. Should we move an armored tank in, sir?”
“No. Take me to him,” Shad Iliya said and climbed into the jeep.
The vehicle swerved through the crooked streets, scattering flocks of geese and chickens before its path and avoiding bodies of the dead and groups of prisoners corralled by the occupation force.
They arrived at the entrance to a cul-de-sac where was amassed a broad array of firepower and soldiers hiding behind either corner. Trapped inside the dead-ended alley was one man.
“What kind of weapon has he got in there?” Shad Iliya asked, dismounting the jeep and reviewing the assemblage of arms and artillery that held the Jew at bay. “An atom bomb?”
“No, sir. A pistol, sir. And a knife, we think,” the captain said.
“A pistol and a knife,” Shad Iliya muttered. “We think.” He drifted toward the alley.
The captain gasped and seized his general’s shoulders as he wandered too close to the alley’s opening. “Stay out of the firing line, sir. He shoots at all comers. He killed our medic.”
Shad Iliya shook the captain off and stepped toward the alley.
“Sir, he’s a madman!”
“I know that,” Shad Iliya said. He walked out into the open and threw his own gun aside.
At the far wall of the cul-de-sac lay the solitary man of about fifty years, short and muscular but not big, his scanty black hair graying, his legs sprawled at odd angles as if his back was broken and he partially paralyzed. He was hardly an impressive figure, and Shad Iliya wondered if this was indeed his adversary. Not that he expected more. He simply realized that he didn’t know what his Zealot looked like now that he was unarmed and within this man’s range. His gesture had been very rash. Have I a death wish?
The wounded man lifted his balding head and saw the White Na′id at the mouth of the alleyway. He smiled as if actually happy to see him. “Ah. Philistine.”
Shad Iliya let his hands drop loosely to his sides. He spoke, emotion-choked. “Zealot.”
The Jew let him approach. Shad Iliya knelt, lifted the Zealot’s head and shoulders off the pavement, and cradled him in his arms. The Zealot let his gun slip from his hand.
Suddenly Na′id soldiers rushed into the alley, but Shad Iliya held up his hand to stay them, and they all froze. “Out,” he said.
“But, sir—” the captain started.
“It is not my custom to repeat orders!” Shad Iliya roared, still holding his fallen enemy, and the soldiers hastily backed out of the alley.
The Jew shut his eyes, a faint smile on his lips. “Damn, I could’ve used a voice like that,” he murmured. He
was badly hurt, Shad Iliya could see now, some of his bones crushed, his lower organs probably damaged and slow-bleeding. He was dying.
“Our medical technology is better than yours,” Shad Iliya said. “You can be revived—”
“I’ll cut my throat,” the Jew said quickly and gripped the hilt of a knife sheathed at his belt.
“Very well.” Shad Iliya had expected that answer. “You are going to die, then.”
The Jew winced in pain, but accepted it, his imminent death.
Shad Iliya suddenly could not. He realized that he didn’t want the man to die. It frightened him unreasonably.
“If I asked you to live?” Shad Iliya asked.
“Why?” the Jew said. “For you?”
“If I ask as a man?”
“Which is to say, ‘as a Na′id.’ No, Philistine. I like you well, but the life of a man is not at stake here.”
“Then tell me what is, and do not say your damned God!”
Brown eyes opened and gazed up at him. The eyes were large, long-lashed and beguiling, the eyes of someone who enjoyed life, lived it very hard, and loved women. “Do you know what freedom means?”
Shad Iliya sighed. “No. I guess I do not. I don’t understand.”
“Go to Masada, Shad Iliya, if you would understand Jews.”
Brown eyes closed. He wasn’t a big man. Then why was he so heavy in his arms?
“Tricks, Philistine,” the Jew spoke again, reproaching, his eyes still shut. “You resorted to tricks. I was foolish not to recognize that flamethrower. Who would have thought it? In this century.”
“I had to,” Shad Iliya said apologetically. “Your soldiers were better than mine.”
“They fight like demons—yours. They do all right for not being Jews and having nothing of substance to believe in.” He grimaced with a spasm; relaxed again. “Do they really believe so strongly in that Na′id drivel and doubletalk? What makes them go?”
“They believe in me.”
The Jew opened his eyes. “You don’t worship a heathen god. You are one.”
