The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 13

by Gardner Dozois

  HERE I AM AT LAST, Horatius, in far-off Arabia, amongst the Greeks and the camels and the swarthy Saracen tribesmen and all the other unpleasant creatures that infest this dreary desert. For my sins. My grievous sins. “Get you to Arabia, serpent!” cried the furious Emperor Julian, and here I am. Serpent. Me. How could he have been so unkind?

  But I tell you, O friend of my bosom, I will employ this time of exile to win my way back into Caesar’s good graces somehow. I will do something while I am here, something, I know not what just yet, that will remind him of what a shrewd and enterprising and altogether valuable man I am; and sooner or later he will recall me to Roma and restore me to my place at court. Before many years have passed you and I will stroll together along Tiber’s sweet banks again. Of this much I am certain, that the gods did not have it in mind for me that I should spin out all my remaining days in so miserable a sandy wasteland as this.

  A bleak forlorn place, it is, this Arabia. A bleak disheartening journey it was to get here, too.

  There are, as perhaps you are aware, several Arabias within the vast territory that we know by that general name. In the north lies Arabia Petraea, a prosperous mercantile region bordering on Syria Palaestina. Arabia Petraea has been an Imperial province since the reign of Augustus Caesar, six hundred years ago. Then comes a great deal of emptiness – Arabia Deserta, it is called, a grim, harsh, barren district inhabited mainly by quarrelsome nomads. And on the far side of that lies Arabia Felix, a populous land every bit as happy as its name implies, a place of luxurious climate and easy circumstances, famed for its fertile and productive fields and for the abundance of fine goods that it pours forth into the world’s markets, gold and pearls, frankincense and myrrh, balsams and aromatic oils and perfumes.

  Which of these places Caesar intended as my place of exile, I did not know. I was told that I would learn that during the course of my journey east. I have an ancient family connection to the eastern part of the world, for in the time of the first Claudius my great ancestor Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo was proconsul of Asia with his seat at Ephesus, and then governor of Syria under Nero, and various other Corbulos since his time have dwelled in those distant regions. It seemed almost agreeable to be renewing the tradition, however involuntary the renewal. Gladly would I have settled for Arabia Petraea if I had to go to Arabia at all: it is a reasonable destination for a highly placed Roman gentleman temporarily out of favour with his monarch. But of course my hopes were centred on Arabia Felix, which by all accounts was the more congenial land.

  The voyage from Roma to Syria Palaestina – pfaugh, Horatius! Nightmare. Torture. Seasick every day. Beloved friend, I am no seafaring man. Then came a brief respite in Caesarea Maritima, the one good part, lovely cosmopolitan city, wine flowing freely, complacent pretty girls everywhere, and, yes, Horatius, I must confess it, some pretty boys too. I stayed there as long as I could. But eventually I received word that the caravan that was to take me down into Arabia was ready to depart, and I had to go.

  Let no one beguile you with romantic tales of desert travel. For a civilized man it is nothing but torment and agony.

  Three steps to the inland side of Jerusalem and you find yourself in the hottest, driest country this side of Hades; and things only get worse from there. Every breath you take hits your lungs like a blast from an oven. Your nostrils, your ears, your lips become coated with windborne particles of grit. The sun is like a fiery iron platter in the sky. You go for miles without seeing a single tree or shrub, nothing but rock and red sand. Mocking phantoms dance before you in the shimmering air. At night if you are lucky enough or weary enough to be able to drop off to sleep for a little while, you dream longingly of lakes and gardens and green lawns, but then you are awakened by the scrabbling sound of a scorpion in the sand beside your cheek, and you lie there sobbing in the stifling heat, praying that you will die before the coming of the fiery dawn.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this dead wilderness the traveller leaves the province of Syria Palaestina and enters Arabia, though no one can say precisely where the boundary lies. The first thing you come to, once across that invisible line, is the handsome city of Petra of the Nabataeans, an impregnable rock-fortress that stands athwart all the caravan routes. It is a rich city and, aside from the eternal parching heat, quite a livable one. I would not have greatly minded serving out my time of exile there.

  But no, no, the letter of instruction from His Imperial Majesty that awaited me in Petra informed me that I needs must go onward, farther south. Arabia Petraea was not the part of Arabia that he had in mind for me. I enjoyed three days of civilized urban amusement there and then I was in the desert again, travelling by camel this time. I will spare you the horrors of that experience. We were heading, they let me know, for the Nabataean port of Leuke Kome on the Red Sea.

  Excellent, I thought. This Leuke Kome is the chief port of embarkation for travellers sailing on to Arabia Felix. So they must be sending me to that fertile land of soft breezes and sweet-smelling blossoms, of spices and precious stones. I imagined myself waiting out my seasons of banishment in a cosy little villa beside the sea, nibbling tender dates and studying the fine brandies of the place. Perhaps I would dabble a bit in the frankincense trade or do a little lucrative business in cinnamon and cassia to pass the time.

  At Leuke Kome I presented myself to the Imperial legate, a sleek and self-important young popinjay named Florentius Victor, and asked him how long it would be before my ship was to leave. He looked at me blankly. “Ship? What ship? Your route lies overland, my dear Leontius Corbulo.” He handed me the last of my letters of instruction, by which I was informed that my final destination was a place by the name of Macoraba, where I was to serve as commercial representative of His Imperial Majesty’s government, with the special responsibility of resolving any trade conflicts that might arise with such representatives of the Eastern Empire as might be stationed there.

  “Macoraba? And just where is that?”

  “Why, in Arabia Deserta,” said Florentius Victor blandly.

  “Arabia Deserta?” I repeated, with a sinking heart.

  “Exactly. A very important city, as cities in that part of the world go. Every caravan crossing Arabia has to stop there. Perhaps you’ve heard of it under its Saracen name. Mecca is what the Saracens call it.”

  Arabia Deserta, Horatius! Arabia Deserta! For the trifling crime of tampering with the innocence of his unimportant little British cup-boy, the heartless vindictive Emperor has buried me in this brutal netherworld of remorseless heat and drifting dunes.

  I have been in Macoraba – Mecca, I should say – just three or four days, now. It seems like a lifetime already.

  What do we have in this land of Arabia Deserta? Why, nothing but a desolate torrid sandy plain intersected by sharp and naked hills. There are no rivers and rain scarcely ever falls. The sun is merciless. The wind is unrelenting. The dunes shift and heave like ocean waves in a storm: whole legions could be buried and lost by a single day’s gusts. For trees they have only scrubby little tamarinds and acacias, that take their nourishment from the nightly dews. Here and there one finds pools of brackish water rising from the bowels of the earth, and these afford a bit of green pasture and sometimes some moist ground on which the date-palm and the grapevine can take root, but it is a sparse life indeed for those who have elected to settle in such places.

  In the main the Saracens are a wandering race who endlessly guide their flocks of horses and sheep and camels back and forth across this hard arid land, seeking out herbage for their beasts where they can. All the year long they follow the seasons about, moving from seacoast to mountains to plains, so that they can take advantage of such little rainfall as there is, falling as it does in different months in these different regions. From time to time they venture farther afield – to the banks of the Nile or the farming villages of Syria or the valley of the Euphrates – to descend as brigands upon the placid farmers of those places and extort their harvests from them.<
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  The harshness of the land makes it a place of danger and distress, of rapine and fear. In their own self-interest the Saracens form themselves into little tribal bands under the absolute government of fierce and ruthless elders; warfare between these tribes is constant; and so vehement is each man’s sense of personal honour that offence is all too easily given and private blood-feuds persist down through generation after generation, yet ancient offences never seem to be wiped out.

  Two settlements here have come to be dignified with the name of “cities”. Cities, Horatius! Mudholes with walls about them, rather. In the northern part of this desert one finds Iatrippa, which in the Saracens’ own tongue is named Medina. It has a population of 15,000 or so, and as Arabian villages go is fairly well provided with water, so that it possesses abundant date-groves, and its people live comfortable lives, as comfort is understood in this land.

  Then, a ten-day caravan journey to the south, through sombre thorny land broken now and then by jutting crags of dark stone, is the town our geographers know as Macoraba, the Mecca of the locals. This Mecca is a bigger place, perhaps 25,000 people, and it is of such ineffable ugliness that Virgil himself would not have been able to conceive of it. Imagine, if you will, a “city” whose buildings are drab hovels of mud and brick, strung out along a rocky plain a mile wide and two miles long that lies at the foot of three stark mountains void of all vegetation. The flinty soil is useless for agriculture. The one sizable well yields bitter water. The nearest pasture land is fifty miles away. I have never seen so unprepossessing a site for human habitation.

  You can readily guess, I think, which of the two cities of Arabia Deserta our gracious Emperor chose as my place of exile.

  “Why,” said I to Nicomedes the Paphlagonian, who was kind enough to invite me to be his dinner guest on my second depressing night in Mecca, “would anyone in his right mind have chosen to found a city in a location of this sort?”

  Nicomedes, as his name will have indicated, is a Greek. He is the legate in Arabia Deserta of our Emperor’s royal colleague, the Eastern Emperor Maurice Tiberius, and he is, I suspect, the real reason why I have been sent here, as I will explain shortly.

  “It’s in the middle of nowhere,” I said. “We’re forty miles from the sea and on the other side there’s hundreds of miles of empty desert. Nothing will grow here. The climate is appalling and the ground is mostly rock. I can’t see the slightest reason why any person, even a Saracen, would want to live here.”

  Nicomedes the Paphlagonian, who is a handsome man of about fifty with thick white hair and affable blue eyes, smiled and nodded. “I’ll give you two, my friend. One is that nearly all commerce in Arabia is handled by caravan. The Red Sea is a place of tricky currents and treacherous reefs. Sailors abhor it. Therefore in Arabia goods travel mainly by land, and all the caravans have to pass this way, because Mecca is situated precisely at the mid-point between Damascus up north and the thriving cities of Arabia Felix down below us, and it also commands the one passable east-west route across the remarkably dreadful desert that lies between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The caravans that come here are richly laden indeed, and the merchants and hostelkeepers and tax-collectors of Mecca do the kind of lively business that middlemen always do. You should know, my dear Leontius Corbulo, that there are a great many very wealthy men in this town.”

  He paused and poured more wine for us: some wonderful sweet stuff from Rhodes, hardly what I would have expected anyone in this remote outpost to keep on hand for casual guests.

  “You said there were two reasons,” I reminded him, after a time.

  “Oh, yes. Yes.” He had not forgotten. He is an unhurried man. “This is also a sacred city, do you see? There is a shrine in Mecca, a sanctuary, which they call the Kaaba. You should visit it tomorrow. It’ll be good for you to get out and about town: it will make the time pass more cheerfully. Look for a squat little cubical building of black stone in the centre of a great plaza. It’s quite unsightly, but unimaginably holy in Saracen eyes. It contains some sort of lump of rock that fell from heaven, which they think of as a god. The Saracen tribesmen from all over the country make pilgrimages here to worship at the Kaaba. They march round and round it, bowing to the stone, kissing it, sacrificing sheep and camels to it, and afterwards they gather in the taverns and hold recitations of war poetry and amorous verses. Very beautiful poetry, in its own barbarous fashion, I think. These pilgrims come here by the thousands. There’s money in having the national shrine in your town, Corbulo: big money.”

  His eyes were gleaming. How the Greeks love moneymaking!

  “Then, too,” he went on, “the chieftains of Mecca have very shrewdly proclaimed that in the holy city all feuds and tribal wars are strictly forbidden during these great religious festivals. You know about the Saracens and their feuds? Well, you’ll learn. At any rate, it’s very useful to everybody in this country for one city to be set aside as a place where you don’t have to be afraid of getting a scimitar in your gut if you chance to meet the wrong person while crossing the street. A lot of business gets done here during the times of truce between people from tribes that hate each other the rest of the year. And the Meccans take their cut, do you follow me? That is the life of the city: collecting percentages on everything. Oh, this may be a dismal hideous town, Corbulo, but there are men living here who could buy the likes of you and me in lots of two dozen.”

  “I see.” I paused just a moment. “And the Eastern Empire, I take it, must be developing significant business interests in this part of Arabia, or else why would the Eastern Emperor have stationed a high official like you here?”

  “We’re beginning to have a little trade with the Saracens; yes,” the Greek said. “Just a little.” And he filled my glass yet again.

  The next day – hot, dry, dusty, like every day here – I did go to look at this Kaaba of theirs. Not at all hard to find: right in the centre of town, in fact, standing by itself in the midst of an empty square of enormous size. The holy building itself was unimposing, perhaps fifty feet high at best, covered completely by a thick veil of black cloth. I think you could have put the thing down in the courtyard of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus or any of Roma’s other great temples and it would utterly disappear from view.

  This did not seem to be pilgrimage season. There was no one around the Kaaba but a dozen or so Saracen guards. They were armed with such formidable swords, and looked so generally unfriendly, that I chose not to make a closer inspection of the shrine.

  My early wanderings through the town showed me very little that indicated the presence of the prosperity that Nicomedes the Paphlagonian had claimed was to be found here. But in the course of the next few days I came gradually to understand that the Saracens are not a people to flaunt their wealth, but prefer instead to conceal it behind unadorned facades. Now and again I would have a peek through a momentarily opened gate into a briefly visible courtyard and got the sense of a palatial building hidden back there, or I would see some merchant and his wife, richly robed and laden with jewels and gold chains, climbing into a shrouded sedan-chair, and I knew from such fitful glimpses that this must indeed be a wealthier city than it looked. Which explains, no doubt, why our Greek cousins have started to find it so appealing.

  These Saracens are a handsome people, lean and finely made, very dark of skin, dark hair and eyes as well, with sharp features and prominent brows. They wear airy white robes and the women go veiled, I suppose to protect their skins against the blowing sand. Thus far I have seen more than a few young men who might be of interest to me, and they gave me quick flashing looks, too, that indicated response, though it was far too soon to take any such risks here. The maidens also are lovely. But they are very well guarded.

  My own situation here is more pleasing, or at least less displeasing, than I had feared. I feel the pain of my isolation, of course. There are no other Westerners. Greek is widely understood by the better class of Saracens, but I yearn already for the soun
d of good honest Latin. Still, it has been arranged for me to have a walled villa, of modest size but decent enough, at the edge of town nearest the mountains. If only it had proper baths, it would be perfect; but in a land without water there is no understanding of baths. A great pity, that. The villa belongs to a merchant of Syrian origin who will be spending the next two or three years travelling abroad. I have inherited five of his servants as well. A wardrobe of clothing in the local style has been provided for me.

  It all might have been much worse, eh?

  But in truth they couldn’t simply have left me to shift for myself in this strange land. I am still an official of the Imperial court, after all, even though I happen currently to be in disfavour and exile. I am here on Imperial business, you know. It was not just out of mere pique that Julian shipped me here, even though I had angered him mightily by getting to his cup-boy before him. I realize now that he must have been looking for an excuse to send someone to this place who could serve unofficially as an observer for him, and I inadvertently gave him the pretext he needed.

  Do you understand? He is worried about the Greeks, who evidently have set about the process of extending their authority into this part of the world, which has always been more or less independent of the Empire. My formal assignment, as I have said, is to investigate the possibilities of expanding Roman business interests in Arabia Deserta – Western Roman, that is. But I have a covert assignment as well, one so covert that not even I have been informed of its nature, that has to do with the growing power of Romans of the other sort in that region.