“I can drop it,” Tariq said.
“Let me tell you a story,” Raakin said, unperturbed. “A learned teacher spends a lifetime rising into favor, only to fall from it again and again. He is not to blame, of course. The Pashas change every year like the clicking gears of a clock, and a man can find himself beloved one moment and despised the next. This teacher, however, eventually angers the madrassas themselves. He claims that the City of Brass, Ubar of the Giants, was not cursed by Allah as the Koran says. The journal of ‘Abd-Es-Samad proves that it was a city well ahead of its years. A city built by madcaps, inventors. Naturally, this enrages the madrassas who drive this teacher from Damascus.”
Raakin stared at Tariq a moment, and then continued. “I admire your father, standing by his convictions in the face of exile.”
“He should have known better than to speak of such things.” Tariq shouted. “Instead, he cost us everything!”
“You paid nothing! He paid with everything HE earned, but you? You are a vulture of his legacy. Your accomplishments are his. You have none of your own. So drop the book. It will be the only act of courage you have ever committed, the only thing you sacrifice that is truly your own.”
“You’ll kill me!” Tariq shouted.
“Did you think the sacrifice I mention is the book?” Raakin’s lips pursed in disapproval and he watched as Tariq’s hand dropped to his side. “It is time you made yourself useful,” he said, turning away. “It is time you reread the book with more of your father’s conviction.”
* * *
Howling winds buffeted the dhow and the world settled into an orange storm that licked the top of the ridges into eddies and whorls. The pilot skated along the troughs between the monolithic dunes, the stabilizer fin set deeper into the sand to anchor her flight. Below deck, however, the sand turned the air murky, the lantern struggling to light the cabin.
Tariq sat on the floor, his legs crossed and the book cradled in his lap. Yet he found himself staring absently at the Persian carpet under him, at its ornate scroll of floral shapes encased in repeating geometric patterns. He remembered his father, the way he smiled by squinting, his voice gentle—never demanding or impatient, always scholarly. His father’s voice came clearly to him now, telling him how rug makers always wove imperfections into the pattern, because only Allah could create something perfect.
There was, there was not.
Tariq stroked his forehead, the memory testing him like a wound that thought it was fresh again. How had he come to hate his father so? His father, who only showed charity. A man who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and instead accepted his fate with a frustrating sort of nobility. He gave up everything, and Tariq didn’t know whether he wanted to cry or rage at the man.
Tariq focused on the book again, the faded Kufic scrawl still legible, the lines of artwork clear and knife sharp. Tariq remembered the book by touch, sitting with his father as he pulled tales from its pages, his fingers brushing across the rough texture of the old paper.
There was, there was not.
The words brought a twinkle to the old man’s eyes matched only by the dance in his voice. It was the same exhilaration, a poet had once told Tariq, as when a blank page faced him and the poem had the potential to be anything.
Abd-Es-Samad wrote this on his travels to find the City of Brass. Much of what is taught in Shahrazad’s stories have forgotten the true details of that journey. It is more allegory than fact. His father’s voice filtered through clearly, undiluted by the vagaries of memory.
He was wisest among the most learned sheikhs, and he traveled further than Islam itself knew of the world. He spoke its many languages and nothing of the Levant or Northern Africa remained hidden from him.
“But he is only remembered by the tales of Shahrazad?” Tariq the boy asked. His father nodded enthusiastically, and Tariq could only flush in shame of the memory. Tariq flipped through Abd-Es-Samad’s account of Ubar itself.
It was said that Allah cursed the city, a city of giants brought low for their hubris, but this is not true, my son, and in these pages you and I will find that truth and set right a mistake.
Tariq absently flipped the page, falling upon one of the more elaborate drawings: Ubar itself, half submerged in the sands of the Rhub al Khali, the dunes as high as the city’s many statues and minarets. Ubar… a ship in a frozen sea whose masts barely touched the crest of the towering waves. He turned the page.
Before the archangel Gabriel gave Muhammad the wisdom of Allah, there were other Gods. Among them were the three daughters of the moon, Goddesses later cast down by Muhammad as the devil’s making. They were Allāt, Al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt. To her, the last, there was a temple in Ubar.
“Who was she, father?”
The Goddess of Fate.
The new picture showed the Temple of Manāt itself, stairs emerging from sand, walls marked with some mural that could only be hinted at, the statues of winged women with their arms extended as they held a bird in each hand. At the heart of the wall, flanked by the statues stood a great square archway, open to the desert.
The pages following had been torn out, the stubs yellowed and ragged. Tariq’s father thought it’d been Abd-Es-Samad who had done it, to protect something he’d discovered. Or perhaps it was someone who’d taken offense with the words that followed.
Somewhere above him, the cabin door opened and steps sounded. Raakin appeared; he studied him, a moment in cold consideration. “We approach the city.”
* * *
The sirocco raged, great banners of sand that scoured the desert with their tiger tongues. The dhow lay anchored between the dunes, the sails pulled tight against the bladder. The storm whipped about Tariq, stinging and blinding him despite his white keffiyeh.
Dunes loomed above them, to the left a sharp slope and the right a curved wall. He had no sense of direction, only that lights ahead glowed dimly as hanging orbs. Within moments, he stood among the tents and pavilions on the site. Some bore the black goat-hair walls of the Bedouin, their fabric flapping but bearing the winds. Tariq suspected these belonged to the famed local tribes of the al-Murrah or Ar-Raswashid, paid to “help” so they did not raid the expedition.
The army camp, however, was a different matter. The field grey tents bore the black eagle and iron cross of the Prussian Army, at least where winds hadn’t collapsed them. Soldiers in khaki jackets with hooded capes drawn tight around leather gas masks ran about trying to repair the damage in a losing battle against the elements.
Tariq waited for Raakin’s soft jab to remind him he was there, a shadow guarding a shadow of a man, he thought bitterly. None came. He turned to face Raakin, and instead found drawn curtains of sand. He was alone, separated from the assassin by the desert. Tariq hesitated, wondering where he should run. He didn’t move, however. He’d come to hate his father, blame him for abandoning their life for the sake of a folly. Only, here he stood in its heart, faced with the knowledge, the shame, that it may all be real.
He waited until Raakin reappeared, a curious cock of his head asking the question hidden behind the tinted goggles. Why?
“I owe it to my father to be proven wrong,” Tariq said, shouting above the storm.
Raakin’s hand fell on Tariq’s shoulder, but instead of pushing him forward, he pointed past the tents. Shadowed against the dark orange sky, shapes filtered in and out of the gloom. Broken towers that ended in brick-jagged points, pillars mounted by Sphinx-like creatures, block-like buildings… all half-entombed in sand.
“My God,” Tariq said.
“Yes,” Raakin replied, “but in your defense, the prophet Muhammad only submitted after Gabriel squeezed him three times.”
* * *
A Prussian Driedger-Bok F-11 Aerostat hovered over the sands, the sails pulled down like a massive skirt and pinned using sandbags. The grey sails formed weather breakers for the huddled soldiers sat hunched together, their masks hiding their features. Somewhere in the darkness beneath the umbrella, camels
groaned in complaint and voices thick with the guttural Arabic of the bedu barked to calm them.
Overhead, the aerostat rumbled loudly, the F-11 shouldering the storm and maintaining its position. The command pavilion, tan with peaked roof and a short skirt of blue trim, sat at the center of the maze of slumped bodies and weighted mooring ropes. A pair of St. Elmo lamps framed the entry flap, the light a fluid miasma of phosphorescent white gas that cast a ghostly pallor over the men nearest them. Raakin swept open the tent flap.
Five men stood there, three in the stripes and frills of Prussian officers, their tall and spike-mounted tropical helmets resting on the map covered table. The two other men wore the black suits and red fez of Ottoman men.
The men watched with dispassionate coolness as Raakim removed his goggles and dusted himself off. Tariq fixed his gaze on the heavy-set man who stared at him; the older Arab had the half-lidded eyes of a digesting snake. Tariq almost didn’t recognize him under the added weight and the tufts of white that had crept into his hair and beard.
“Ibn Hannah,” the man said, calling him ‘son of Hannah’ as if they were old friends.
“Farouk,” Tariq said, pulling his keffiyeh down. “I’m pleased to see that you have grown fat and old.”
Farouk’s eyes narrowed. The men straightened and looked to one another, obviously unfamiliar with Arabic. Farouk said something to the men in Prussian. The men nodded, their postures stiff. One man with a thin mustache tucked his riding crop under his arm and replied, motioning to Tariq. A smile spread across Farouk’s lips, but it was Raakin who answered.
“Our patrons are impatient,” Raakin said. “They want answers.”
“Show them the book,” Farouk said.
“If I’d known you wanted it, I would have thrown it off the dhow,” Tariq replied, not budging.
“Raakin, why did you bring him?” Farouk asked. “I told you what I wanted done with him.”
“And on whose head would the sword fall if I delivered you a book and nobody to translate it?”
“I can read it,” Farouk said.
“Better than his father?”
“His father is dead.”
“His son is not,” Raakin said.
Farouk sighed and then nodded. He turned to Tariq. “How do we enter the Temple of Manāt?”
“You turned the madrassas against my father and now here you are, begging for my help?” Tariq said.
Farouk laughed. “Your father did not understand that to survive the weather, you had to dress accordingly. He angered the madrassas when it was their time.”
Tariq shook his head. “And now that the Prussians are in season?”
“I dress accordingly.”
One of the Prussians, a white-haired man with a barrel upper-body and mustache that curtained over his lips, barked something in Prussian. Farouk turned a pleasant smile on the man, replying in a conciliatory tone.
Raakin stepped in and grabbed Tariq by the bicep. He reached into the satchel strung over Tariq’s shoulder and pulled out the book, showing it to the men. The thin Prussian took it and the assembled studied the book, flipping through its pages.
“I will not help you,” Tariq said.
Raakin’s grip tightened. “Shut up,” he said, softly. “Before you rob me of all excuses to keep you alive.”
Tariq glanced at Raakin, surprised, but the assassin didn’t bother glancing back. After a few minutes of examining the book, the barrel-chested Prussian said something to Tariq, something that sounded like a demand. It was Raakin who replied in Prussian. The man nodded and returned the book to the assassin.
“Raakin,” Farouk said. “Encourage him.”
* * *
“Why are you helping me?” Tariq said over the drone of the F-11. The reek of oil was stifling.
Raakin pulled him through the darkness, past the soldiers who couldn’t bother looking up. “Am I?”
He brought Tariq to a bedu tent on the edge of the aerostat’s skirt and pushed him through gently. The women in the tent stared back with hardened nomad’s eyes that were at once black and unblinking. It was the only thing Tariq could see of them in the narrow slit of their heavy burkas. Medallions of bronze and copper hung from their black cloth, while silver chains dangled from the medallions and chimed softly as they shifted. They sat on faded carpets, a pungent dung fire bringing tears to Tariq’s eyes. Among them sat children, but no men. They watched, as though expecting him.
Raakin nodded to the empty carpet on the ground and shoved the book into Tariq’s chest. “Hurry,” he said. “Before the desert swallows the city again.” And with that, he left.
Tariq stared at the women, and they stared back, waiting. They looked at the book and they looked at him. Did they want this? Taking the bait, he opened the book and several women inhaled and held their breaths. They knew what it was, Tariq realized in a way that sent tingles through his fingertips.
Of course… The bedu women were the ones who shared tales, who safeguarded the magic of the tribe, who dared speak of dark things when night came. Only one woman alone held Tariq’s gaze, a pair of soupy brown eyes set in a cradle of wrinkles.
“Kan,” she said in Arabic. There was…. She exposed her forearms, the brown skin leathery and thin with age, the henna tattoo red and powdery. On each forearm was a wing, the wings of birds, the wings of Manāt, the female angel forgotten by Islam. “There was,” she insisted.
The words came flooding back, his father smiling kindly as young Tariq asked, “What happened to Manāt, father?”
A Goddess does not die so easily, not when she is adored for thousands of years. Just as there are still Christian and Hebrew bedu who roam Sheba’s deserts, so too is it said, there are tribes who remember the older ways… before the words of Abraham and Jesus and Muhammad.
The old woman motioned to Tariq, or the book. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t both, and he opened the journal of Abd-Es-Samad to the picture of the temple to indulge a curiosity that had gnawed at him since he first spoke with Farouk.
“How do we enter the Temple of Manāt?” Farouk had asked, and yet in the journal, the door was already open. Did Abd-Es-Samad seal the doors after he’d uncovered it? Is that why the remaining pages had been ripped out?
He needed to see for himself.
“Manāt,”he said simply as he stood. He did not expect them to stop him, and neither was Raakin standing guard outside….
* * *
The storm, a dervish of pinprick stings, swirled around Tariq and cajoled him through the half-buried streets of the lost city. He should not have been here; he was fellahin to the desert and it knew more ways to kill him than he knew to survive, but he shouldered over drifts and exposed layers of glazed macadam with their evenly polished stone.
The tan and bronze buildings towered over him, some block-like and Roman in appearance, some thin and fluted like the minarets of places he called home. Constantinople was a city adapting to the invention of Steamkraft, but Ubar had been built from a foundation of it. The roots of the towers and the marble obelisks were sheathed in a metallic base etched with intricate angled patterns. Why did it feel to Tariq that those structures could turn in their sockets like a shaft inside a gear? Statues of metal angels, men and women, adorned the tiered and terraced fountains that had run dry, and their copper feathers creaked and swung on articulated joints. What could only be lampposts lined the wide avenue, their thin polished wood stems branching into a sprout of glass bulbs. Those bulbs that hadn’t been smashed and cracked glowed with wane strength, a firefly prick of light at the center of some liquid.
In the distance, the silhouette of giant metallic statues in shield-like plate filtered in and out of view from the storm. They measured the size of buildings and poked out at odd angles from the dunes; an arm here, a bent knee there, one statue on its knees crawling forward, as though the statues were moving when the desert claimed the city.
Tariq knew the answer. Ubar was a madcap’s city, a city built by
dreamers and men and women of unbridled faith.
From somewhere behind him he thought he heard shouting, perhaps the wail of a cranked siren. Then a piercing bellow of the aerostat’s horn followed, the echo absorbed by the pitched storm. They knew he was missing. They’d started searching for him.
Tariq plowed straight and true to the heart of the city, to the Temple of Manāt itself according to the book. His hips and thighs ached to numb fatigue from the heavy sand. His shoulders throbbed with effort as he hugged the book tightly to his chest. Ahead, ghostly white lights appeared, first as wisps, then as burning torches in their glass housing. St. Elmo lanterns on poles lay planted outside the temple, some askance, some toppled. Up the stairs, winged statues stood vigil, ten on either side of a great metal door measuring a story high. As Tariq approached, he saw no handle, no seam to the door, just a mosaic of metal shards in the form of a… phoenix? No, the face was feminine. It was the Persian Simorgh.
The temple’s door and its solid frame were battered and scored from cannon fire but intact. Picks and shovels poked out from the drifts against the wall, and a tent between two statues flapped on its last two pegs, exposing its wood crates.
Tariq ran up the exposed granite steps, grateful for the solid ground beneath his feet again. Along the wall, between the statues, was a frieze in bas-relief of birds and flowers, each made from a different metal, but he had little time to admire the artistry. A glance backwards showed the spotlights from the F-11’s carbon arc lamps sweeping the desert, likely ahead of the soldiers. He had little time to lose.
Putting his back to the whipping winds, Tariq cracked open the book and glanced at the picture. It was hard to see, but he needed only a nudge to remember what his father had engrained in him: The door open, the statues holding two birds apiece in their outstretched hands. Tariq looked up at the statues, then down at the picture. The ten-foot high statues of the angels held no birds. Their arms were wings that swept forward into a cupping pose.
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