by R. M. Meluch
“I begin to think so,” Shad Iliya said softly.
The Jew’s eyes flitted up and down him, to his sooty hair, dirty face, soiled uniform, and red-brown crusted fingernails. “You’re a bloody mess. So how does it feel to kill your fellow humans?”
“What?”
“No what, Shad Iliya. This is your day of glory.”
“I don’t understand,” he said, afraid that he actually did.
The Jew moved in for the kill. “Did ever an overwhelming emotion ripple your flat existence before they sent you to kill real men and women?”
Shad Iliya needed to interrupt and shift this line of talk. “And what about you?” he protested.
“No,” the Jew said placidly. “I am part of something larger. Something I believed in and still do. You—yours is up in flames.” He gestured up to the ash-smeared sky with his eyes. “See there the family of humankind blots out the stars. It’s splattered on your face.”
An explosion somewhere in the city punctuated the accusation.
“Shad Iliya, I am in a great deal of pain already. Please don’t squeeze my ribs so tight.”
Shad Iliya loosened his hold mechanically, hardly hearing him with his conscious mind, all the pitiless words driving straight to his heart and into his guts. He stared without real sight.
“Oh, Shad Iliya, you loved it. You were never so alive in your life. The rest is tasteless. You don’t even like sex. This is your lust.”
Shad Iliya uttered a groaning growl of fury under snapping rein. “You are calling me a pervert.”
“You are. The worst kind.”
“I fucked your wife.”
“No, you didn’t,” the Jew said as if he really knew. “Here is your ultimate act of love.” He slipped his dagger into Shad Iliya’s hand. “And you never loved anyone more than me.”
Incensed, Shad Iliya took the knife from the Zealot and stabbed into his chest. He didn’t know how many times.
Warm blood on his hands, Shad Iliya lowered the body to the ground—or pushed it off his lap. He didn’t know exactly what he did. He got up on wobbly legs to stand alone in the alley, not certain who had more thoroughly destroyed whom. The Jew was dead. But what am I?
Shad Iliya had only killed the Jew. What the Jew had done to Shad Iliya he didn’t yet know. The Jew had done something—irreversible and final as death. He was the last human being Shad Iliya ever killed.
He emerged from the alley badly shaken.
His officers brought to him another prize with which they thought he would be pleased—Her Eminence Cardinal Miriam.
Plodding slowly with swollen ankles, not to be hurried on any account, the stout, white-haired woman let herself be led, sedate and unresisting, but still righteously proud.
Brought before the general, she glanced at him once. “Your hands need washing.” And that was all she had to say regarding Shad Iliya.
She had blue eyes.
Two officers assisted the cardinal into a jeep to take her to the prison ship.
Shad Iliya wandered away with aimless, stumbling steps, his aides following uncertainly at a distance.
The crowded buildings opened to a wide way where the dead bestrewed the street, twisted in the shapes of a violent end, fallen over each other.
Shad Iliya stared with unholy awe. There was an obscene beauty in the stillness. He walked softly among the tortured corpses, unblinking.
Black-faced crows sailed out of the night sky and settled on the bodies.
Shad Iliya reached for his gun; didn’t have it; seized someone else’s—one of his aides’—out of its holster and shot at the birds.
The flock of them rose with a riot of hoarse squawking.
Shad Iliya screamed an order. “Get those things off our dead!”
“Those aren’t ours—”
“Keep them off!” He ran up the gradient bricks of a ruined wall and fired at the crows from the top. “Get them off!”
His aides rushed to see the command carried out. “Yes, sir!”
From his vantage atop the wall, Shad Iliya could see the red glow from the western city, and caught glimpses of his soldiers rounding up prisoners in various sectors. Sporadic gunfire marked the clearing out of remaining pockets of resistance.
He climbed down from the wall. He had a vow to keep. He mounted a jeep and ordered the driver to take him to the Dome of the Rock.
His orderly, Sinikar, offered him a gas mask at the door of the mosque. He didn’t take it.
He wished he had. Inside was a grisly scene. The fetor of mortification hit him in a suffocating wave. He held his breath. His eyes watered and throat constricted, trying to gag.
It was the same in all the mosques and churches and synagogues. The people had taken refuge in the houses of their God as if He would save them. He hadn’t. They died so easily. And He did not strike down Shad Iliya.
Allah had told His people: Fight for the sake of Allah those that fight against you.
They had.
Kill them where you find them. Drive them out of the places from which they drove you. Do not fight them in the precinct of the Holy Mosque unless they attack you there; if they attack you, put them to the sword.
The colorful walls of the holy mosque were smeared with blood, the floor piled with bodies wrapped in their prayer rugs because someone had tried to make it neat for him. The air was cooling with nightfall, but the place was still thick with a miasma of rot and rigor from bodies cooking in the ninety-degree heat of day.
Of a sudden, from above, the loud deep prayer call erupted in its changeless refrain. It was a recording. A dead voice calling dead Muslims to pray to an indifferent God.
Is anyone left to answer that?
Shad Iliya beheld all the prostrate bodies, a travesty of adoration in the reeking air. The voice blared and reverberated. Shad Iliya shook.
It’s dead! It’s dead! It has been dead all along!
He ran outside and put a bullet through the loudspeaker.
His aides came to him, worried. He bent over, hands on his knees, gulping air, his sides heaving. He tried to chase the foulness from his nostrils, his mouth, his throat, but even out here the sticky-sweet, sickening odor of burning human flesh permeated the city.
In a weary, croaking voice, he asked, “Do we have anything that will put out the magnesium fire?”
“Yes, sir, but—”
“Then put it out,” he said, lifting his head.
In the distance he heard the sound of human voices, many, chanting in unison.
His aide was speaking. “But, sir, it will burn itself out by morning.”
“Put it out!” he shrilled.
The voices in the distance gathered strength and volume. He could make out the words. His name.
“Shad Il-i-ya! Shad Il-i-ya!”
He rubbed his hands against the sides of his uniform, but there was not a part of him clean of blood.
He remembered what the Jew had said. It is on your head, Shad Iliya.
In the aftermath, he felt it.
“Shad Il-i-ya! Shad-Il-i-ya!”
It is on your head. Shad Iliya.
He knew it was. There was nothing he could do to change it.
He could only keep silent and wish his station would allow him to cry.
Upon taking the city, Shad Iliya was immediately relieved of supreme command of the combined armed forces at Jerusalem. Someone else was put in charge of normalization. It would not do to have a nazi lord over the city. And Shad Iliya was grateful not to linger over the kill. Later the honors and decorations would be heaped high to bury the implicit slight.
Shad Iliya was uninterested, totally oblivious to the state of his honor. He roamed his ship listlessly. He was bathed and dressed in a fresh uniform of olive drab, his blond hair stripped so clean it drif
ted up in untamed oilless wisps. Everything around him was scoured and spotless. His bare feet collected no dust on the pristine deck. His fingernails were cut very short, smooth, white, and immaculate. It had taken hours to steam the feel and stench of death from his pores.
Some orderly or officer was always there to wait on his every order and whim. He said, staring, “When you stab someone more than once, it means you are deranged, does it not?”
“Oh, the Zealot, Abram,” the adjutant said. Shad Iliya really had made a mess of him. “Don’t worry, sir. That part didn’t get out to the news Net.”
That was hardly the point. Shad Iliya walked away from the adjutant.
He was still in shock, still bewildered. “I don’t understand,” he murmured. “I don’t understand Jews.”
Go to Masada, Shad Iliya, if you would understand Jews.
• • •
Birds sailed through the canyon, small and swift and smooth, black with dull orange atop their wings. Shad Iliya looked down at them from the top of the massif, a height that was dizzying for its steepness rather than actual elevation.
Desert. All pale brown and white earth surrounded the fortress. No growth but a bare touch of sparse, dull scrub winding along the dried-up wadi far below. Silent but for the wind. Utter silence broken by high lonely cries of the birds sailing through.
Zealot, you are mocking me with this.
He wandered among the ruins alone, sat on a step of a building that was long gone. Bewildered.
Masada was a desolate tell among several other eroded desert mesas banded in brown and lighter brown strata. Piles of scree slipped down the cliff faces and lay in fans at their bases. The air was very dry, making details clear, flattening everything to cartoon unreality.
Shad Iliya brushed away a fly.
This is me, not you, you stupid Jew.
Magnificent, wind-blown waste.
Hard shadows. Sky blue above. Dusty, pale horizons.
On the other side of the tell were more cartoon-stark canyons and the turquoise Dead Sea.
Why must everything be dead?
He had come here for an answer, and there was something here. He wished someone would explain.
The sun rose higher; shadows shrank. The jagged, sharp shadow of the massif drew in toward its western face in the advancing daylight and became something ominous and awesome in Shad Iliya’s sight. The shadow of Masada. It did not talk.
I don’t understand Jews at all.
• • •
The Bel invited Shad Iliya to a fete in his honor at the palace on Mat Tanatti. Shad Iliya requested time to recover, so the Bel sent him to a villa on the coast of the Levant, a beautiful, relaxing place, and sent Shad Iliya’s older brother there personally to ensure his comfort. The hero who brought the hundred-year battle to an end could ask for anything and it would have been granted. He wanted nothing.
One of his aides, a lieutenant, worried that his general was despondent, but he wasn’t of a rank to say so and be heard.
Shad Iliya prowled the halls of the villa, not to be consoled by anyone. Neither did Na′id philosophy soothe: Time destroys all. If you had not fought them, still they would have died.
Because it wasn’t the carnage that haunted him. It was the liking it. He mentioned it in an unguarded moment to his brother.
“Oh, bosh, Shadi. You’re the gentlest, most philanthropic person I know.”
Shad Iliya whirled on him, eyes ablaze, teeth bared. His brother exited quickly.
He boarded a ship for Mat Tanatti, deciding Shad Iliya needed a few days in relative solitude. His famous brother was simply distraught from the battle and his herculean efforts. And the incident didn’t merit repeating.
• • •
Shad Iliya sat drinking at a painted wrought-iron table in a chair set out for him on the beach. His aides stayed apart except to replace the bottle and to bring to the table a receiver which would pick up the Bel’s speech when it was broadcast over the Net.
This is the hour of humankind’s greatest victory. . . .
The air above the water shimmered in the summer heat. Shad Iliya’s head lolled onto his shoulder. He poured another glass of cognac—poured twice as much as made it into the glass. No matter. The bottle was always full.
. . . a new nation in which we are all brothers and sisters. And no human being calls anyone Master. . . .
The words shimmered with the air, as if he could see the sound. It was coming from all sides. No. It was inside his head.
. . . Babel refounded. We are one people once more. United we stand and even God shall not sunder us ever again.
Before him the glittering Mediterranean lapped at the brilliant strand. He was hot. His blond hair felt as straw tinder to the touch of his hand.
The water lured. He gravitated toward it. The beach was soft and difficult to walk on. His feet kept sinking in the burning white-gold sand, making his steps more staggering.
At last he slipped into the warm water. Either it was warm or he was drunk. Probably drunk, he concluded, because he had taken his glass with him. He was perplexed to find saltwater in it instead of cognac when he took a drink.
He swam. His thoughts and perceptions ran clear—seemed to. The world was incandescent, the late sun bright upon the water.
Waves rolled in, lifted him, and he rode up with them. The bigger ones swelled over his head and made him sputter and blink.
He saw where the waves were flattened, and he made his way there to the darker water.
Next the world was dark and gritty without sun as he was drawn with a wave that sucked him down and under.
Strengthless against the current, he tumbled like a rag doll in the murky water. He saw himself, as if outside himself, in a dream-vision: his bloodless, pasty, blue-white body flopping backward heels over head, slack limbs floating and twining, doughy-fleshed and dead.
He blundered into a mass of weeds at the bottom, pushed feebly against their slimy leaves, and found his arms tangled in a woven rope net that was pulling him up.
His head broke the surface next to a wooden boat, and he inhaled with a huge gasp.
A voice sounded above him, female and perturbed. “You have torn my net.”
“I am sorry.” He wiped seaweed from his face. There was no wind. The small fishing boat’s single pointed sail hung slack in the still air.
“Hold on to the side of the boat,” said the woman. “I will row you ashore.”
He grasped the wooden gunwale slick with a thin film of green algae, and let himself be towed. It was marvelous to be breathing and to see the setting sun.
The woman put up her oars, several meters out from shore. “Can you make it from here?” she asked.
“Yes.”
He let go the side of the boat and swam in toward the beach.
He gained footing in the shallows and dragged himself out of the water, then dropped to his knees in the deep sand, exhausted.
Suddenly his aides were swarming around him in alarm—in sheer panic—helping him to his feet, staring into his face, and lifting his eyelids with their thumbs.
What is wrong with them?
“Where were you?” they cried. “We thought you were gone for good!”
“Just a swim,” he slurred. Jushaschwim, he’d actually said, belched, apologized thickly.
And they told him he had gone down and did not come up.
“The woman in the boat,” Shad Iliya said, turning back to the water.
There was no woman. No boat. Just red sun on water. He blinked. He turned back to his aides, concerned now. “Did you not see her? Sinikar?”
The young orderly shook his head. Someone else said, “He’s drunk.”
“I am not drunk!” he bellowed, staggered back, retreating from them. Their faces were full of doubt.
“I am drunk,” he admitted in a lower voice. “I am not that drunk.”
A dry blanket was placed over his shoulders. A condescending voice said, “Come with us, sir.”
A groan rose in his closed throat and opened to a roar. “No!” He threw off the blanket and stumbled in the sinking sand to the water’s edge. He raised his puckered hands to his brow and scanned the empty horizon. Where is she?
He kept tripping along the waterline in search, only to be cut off and surrounded by coaxing, patronizing voices and reaching hands that closed in on him.
Like wild game cornered by hounds, he roared and snapped to keep his aides away from him. He drew himself up in drunken magnificence and proclaimed himself lucid and them all idiots.
They were embarrassed for him. They wanted to clean him off, get dry clothes on him, and put him to bed. He was weak and drunk and tired, and eventually they managed to take him back to his pleasant-scented, airy room in the spacious villa and coerce him, babbling and objecting, in between the crisp fresh sheets.
Pony brought him some tea with honey, lemon, and whiskey.
A lieutenant slapped Pony’s golden hands. “No whiskey!”
Shad Iliya sat up in the bed. “Don’t hit my slave!”
An aide pushed him back down.
“Where is the woman?” he said. “A Jew. I bet she was a Jew.” He ordered she be brought to him.
“We’ll look for her, sir.”
They were lying to him. He knew they wouldn’t look.
“Pony, find her.”
Pony was crying. Why was Pony crying? Stupid alien.
In supreme frustration, he closed his eyes and slept for a while, simply to escape the jackasses around him.
He woke in the middle of the night, alone, still drunk. His aides were sleeping in another part of the villa. Pony was out on the beach, looking.
Shad Iliya rose from bed and gazed out the window. The moon was bright. It cast a cold, eerie light on the landscape.
Out on the sand dunes a flock of hooded crows stood, all facing one direction. They were Muslim crows. Facing Mecca.
Shad Iliya turned inside the room. He found a knife and slashed his wrists. He was going to slash more but lost courage.
That was asinine.
