Spears of God

by Howard V. Hendrix

  Brescoll exhaled, puffing out his cheeks.

  “Mecca.”

  That was not what he’d particularly wanted to say or hear, but there it was. The child survivors of a terrible massacre, children possibly possessed of unknowable powers, maybe bent on revenge—and headed toward the very place on earth most sacred to over a billion of the world’s people, with the season of the Hajj at hand.

  Time and past time to really push on his friends in the State Department, even to the secretary herself.

  Time to get the whole departmental apparatus impressing upon the Saudis the desperate need for heightened security precautions—and at least covert Western aid—during this year’s Hajj.

  A dangerous gambit, of course. If the world learned that the Saudis had accepted an offer of covert security assistance from the West after publicly rejecting the offer of a pan-Islamic security force, it would not look good.

  “Ever worn smart armor before?” Brescoll asked them, getting only questioning looks in return. “Where you’re going, you’re probably going to need it.”

  “Where are we going?” Darla asked.

  “The Wabar craters research encampment,” he said. “Or its environs in the Empty Quarter. As scientific participant-observers, not soldiers.”

  “You won’t be joining us, Director?” Susan asked.

  “No, I’m afraid not,” he said unhappily. “Since the episode at the MAXX in California, our director of national intelligence has restricted me from any further, um, fieldwork. Don’t worry, though. I still have a few tricks up my sleeve that might be helpful to you, even from here.”

  As they filed out, he stopped Amaral.

  “Dan, you’ve been working on the whereabouts of that meteorite scientist, Zaragosa…”

  “Avram Zaragosa, yes. What about it?”

  “Get a description of him to the CSS troops before they go into Wabar, would you?”

  “A hunch, Jim?”

  “Let’s just say I hate loose ends—and this particular one’s been running around loose for too long.”

  DESERT HISTORY LESSON

  Avram Zaragosa thanked heaven that he and Mahmoud Ankawi were not traveling by camel. The all-terrain quad-cycles on which they rode were not the most comfortable transport in the world, but he was certain they were better than camels.

  He did wonder, however, if he would ever again experience a time of day both calm and cool. During the blinding heat of the day, while the quad ATVs charged up their solar power units, he and Mahmoud tried to sleep, despite the lack of any coolness to be found when the sun beat the landscape to brass. The chameleon-fabric tent was of little help. Although the material was fine camouflage and provided adequate shade, it didn’t breathe well enough to keep the enclosure from quickly becoming stifling. What little sleep Avram managed to get was haunted by dreams of the world breaking apart under his feet as he walked, with magma hot as molten iron showing through the cracks as he leapt from dark stone to dark stone.

  Through the evening, through the night, and into the dawn of each day following, he and Mahmoud could not escape the tense alertness required for picking their slow, careful way through the desert. Goggled for night vision, they stayed vigilant for any onset of blowing sand. So far, however, the weather had held for them—monotonously clear and hot.

  Even without sandstorms, the going was not easy. The traffic arteries he and Mahmoud traveled, such as they were, lay between what the Bedu called uruqin, or “veins”—orderly and persistent formations of dunes and sand mountains. Yet even in such vein-valleys they could not avoid encountering the occasional sebkhas, salt-encrusted silt plains that were firm driving surfaces one moment and sinking sands the next.

  When they hit the soft spots they had to adjust speed and steer their way out of them, knowing that to stop would be to get stuck, and that would mean the backbreaking and time-consuming task of digging out. The small supply trailer each quad ATV towed along behind it also didn’t make this speeding up, and slowing down, and steering out any easier.

  Through predawn twilight after their fourth night of travel, they moved across a wadi under a sky of lambent Bunsen-burner blue. Still several days between the all-too-infrequent (and too frequently undrinkable) water holes, Avram asked his traveling companion the question that had been bothering him for the last several nights.

  “Mahmoud, has anyone tried this before?”

  “Tried what?”

  “Traveling the seven hundred miles from Wabar to Mecca, in summer and by night, on all-terrain vehicles.”

  Mahmoud said nothing, apparently pondering his answer.

  “I don’t believe so. When you consider that our route has inevitable detours, it’s more like a thousand miles, actually. But then again, no one has had ATV quads like these before, either. Don’t worry, my friend. We have plenty of time, plenty of water, plenty of food, and plenty of spare parts. GPS, too—no navigating by the position of Jupiter, like in the old days!”

  Remembering how Yuri Semenov had also so proudly relied on GPS, Avram groaned inwardly.

  “Enjoy the night stars of God’s heaven!” Mahmoud continued. “By the time we hit the checkpoints for Makkah, you’ll be able to pass for a surly old man of the desert! All we have to do in our travels is avoid human company, and human detection, as much as possible.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because the only people who are likely to be out here are smugglers or the Saudi army. The former have too little respect for law, and the latter too much.”

  Avram nodded. Avoid human company and detection. Not so very different, really, from the cover story Avram left behind him at Wabar—that his ex-wife had died, and that he was returning home to Argentina to mourn her passing and go into seclusion, at least for a time. Ankawi, much more simply, only claimed he was going on Hajj.

  As their night journeys continued, Mahmoud seemed to feel compelled to talk over the quiet low hum of their ATVs. Maybe he was trying to keep Avram’s mind off the difficulties of their travels across this greatest of sand seas. Maybe he talked to keep them both awake. Or maybe because they spent too much time awake already—too many hours wired on too much coffee—and loquacity was how he responded to their being always sleep-deprived, overtired, and overwrought by this endless nightly sojourning.

  Avram was willing enough to listen. Anything he learned about Islam and its history helped soothe his “Fraud Complex,” the continuing sense that he was not only an imposter but an impersonator playing an imposter. In brief, practical conversation, Mahmoud spoke Arabic with him, but was kind enough, when he launched into longer topics, to speak the second language they both shared—English.

  From Mahmoud’s night-visioned travel lectures, too, Avram learned much about his guide’s deeper reasons for assisting him in what he understood to be Avram’s “enterprise.”

  “I think the Black Stone is at the heart of a greater mystery,” Ankawi told him as they made their way through desert night. “Not just whether it’s a meteorite or not. A man clothed in white is said to have removed a black stone from the Prophet’s body when he was a child, and the Prophet had an interesting relationship to the Black Stone all his life.”

  “So it was already part of the Kaaba, even then?”

  Mahmoud nodded.

  “As tent people,” he said, “the Bedu did not go in for elaborate architecture, in the early days. When they built, they built simply. Kaaba just means ‘cube,’ right? There were many Kaabas, many cubic houses or temples of god, in pre-Islamic times.”

  Avram nodded, which he supposed was visible enough to prompt Mahmoud to continue.

  “During the first several decades of the Prophet Muhammad’s life, Makkah was a remarkably tolerant and ecumenical place. The city was a trading center on the caravan route, with ready access to the camel herds of the nearby Bedu. Its Kaaba was surrounded by three hundred and sixty gods of various religions, including images of Jesus and Mary.

  “Each Arab tr
ibe already had their protecting star from among the Houses of the Moon. They also revered the subtle beings known as djinn, so having a sort of pantheon of the Arabian Peninsula in their city…this wasn’t a big stretch for the local people. The sacred rule of the city was that the faithful of all religions should have access to the sanctuary without discrimination and there should be no conflict within ten miles of it, which made for a more peaceful place overall.

  “Basically, that was good for business. The chief citizens of Makkah could say to foreign traders, ‘Look, you’re going to be here for three months, but feel free to worship your homeland’s gods while in Makkah.

  We have them already set up in our Kaaba, see?’”

  “Were there any ‘main gods’ worshipped there?” Avram asked, suspecting that not all gods would have been created equal.

  “Before the Prophet’s eventual capture of the city, the most important divinities worshipped in Makkah’s Kaaba were the male god al-Lah and his daughters or sisters, the goddesses al-Lat, al-Uzzah, and Manat. Al-Lat was worshipped in the shape of a square stone. Al-Uzzah was identified with the morning star and worshipped as a thigh-bone-shaped slab in the desert between al Talf and Makkah. Manat was worshipped as a black stone on the road between Makkah and Medina—”

  “And that was the source of the Black Stone of the Kaaba?” Avram asked.

  “That’s not certain. The Black Stone revered today is one of those worshipped long before Prophet Muhammad’s time. As to which deity was worshipped in the Black Stone of the Kaaba, that’s another question. Some say the Black Stone was originally al-Lah in the form of the moon god, Hubal. Others say it was dedicated to one or the other of the goddesses, usually al-Uzzah or Manat. The Hulama, the rationalist school of Islam, recognizes that the Black Stone was identified with both the Great Goddess in her triple form, and with the moon god. In all cases, the stones associated with Hubal, with Manat, with Uzzah, and with Lat—each was said to have fallen from the sky.”

  “So the whole place was dedicated to meteorite worship?”

  “More than that. The entire structure of worship in Makkah is related to the skies. The Kaaba itself is aligned for lunar and stellar observation. The seven circumambulations, performed in a sort of labyrinth walk around the Kaaba, were originally associated with the worship of the seven planets of the Babylonian system and their orbits.”

  “Seems like a long stretch from being that sort of astronomical temple to being the center of Islam,” Avram said. They were passing over a long stretch of largely featureless silt plain, flanked by high sand hills on either side.

  “A long stretch indeed,” Mahmoud agreed. “Only much later did the spiritual tolerance found at Makkah come to be damned as ‘blasphemous polytheism’ and ‘the worshipping of idols.’ The Prophet Muhammad’s overriding goal, you see, was to unite all the Arabian tribes into a single political force held together by a common religious faith. Yet even when the Prophet abolished the idols of the old religion at Makkah, he still could not bring himself to destroy that old religion’s holiest object, namely the Black Stone in the Kaaba itself.”

  “Why not?”

  “Ah, that’s a difficult one. That’s where the whole ancient controversy of the satanic verses comes into play.”

  “I thought that was only a story.”

  “No, no. It’s a fact or at least historical. According to the historian Tabari, the Prophet was meditating near the Black Stone in the Kaaba one day. He had a revelation that allowed the Triple Goddesses of Makkah, the three female aspects of the divine, to have a place in his theology…without compromising his monotheism. In the Koran, Sura fifty-three nineteen says, ‘Have you then considered al-Lat and al-Uzza, And Manat, the third, the last? These are the exalted birds / whose intercession is approved.’

  “The Quraysh—the tribe that ruled Makkah, Muhammad’s own people—thought the Prophet’s new revelation was wonderful. It echoed the invocation the Quraysh themselves chanted to the goddesses as they circumambulated the Kaaba and its Black Stone. The exalted birds, or gharaniq, were like the angels and djinn that many Arab people had long believed in. In the eyes of the Quraysh, by referring to the triple goddesses as ‘the exalted birds whose intercession is approved,’ the Prophet had given his stamp of approval to them and to their worship.”

  “So what happened, then?”

  “During the great Night Journey, the angel Gabriel told the Prophet that those verses were inspired by Satan, so Muhammad removed them.”

  Avram nodded. He knew about the Prophet’s journey, which took him by winged creature along the axis mundi as far as Jerusalem and back in a single night—supposedly under the influence of a sacred plant, according to some scientists, though they could never quite agree which sacred plant.

  “The Prophet’s latter rejection of the goddesses—and also his rejecting the possibility of female angels—led to his conflict with the Quraysh,” Mahmoud continued. “Their persecution of the Prophet and his followers eventually resulted in his flight to Medina. Yet despite its being identified to some degree with the discredited goddesses, the Prophet never rejected the Black Stone. If anything, he showed exceeding fondness for it.”

  “How so?”

  “Under the treaty at Hudaybiyah, the Prophet was permitted to return to the Kaaba during his Lesser Pilgrimage. The histories say that the Prophet, riding his steed Qaswa, led a great crowd of white-garbed pilgrims into the holy city, all of them crying out, ‘Here I am at your service, O God!’ When he reached the Kaaba, Muhammad dismounted and kissed the Black Stone, embraced it and stroked it, before making the circumambulations followed by the entire crowd of pilgrims.”

  “Is that the journey where he smashed all the idols?”

  “No. That was during his triumphal return to Makkah, at the head of ten thousand soldiers. While the Quraysh watched, he called out ‘The truth has come, and falsehood has vanished!’ as he smashed each idol. He ordered all pictures of the pagan deities obliterated except, according to tradition, for some frescoes of Jesus and Mary. And, of course, the Black Stone was not to be harmed.

  “It was strange, really. Initially, the Prophet called for ‘No compulsion of religion.’ There was no ban on human symbols of the divine, as happened later. A great part of the holiness of Makkah was originally its religious tolerance, but that all changed.

  “Later, even the Black Stone the Prophet himself so honored became suspect. Pilgrims began to recite Caliph Omar’s warning about it: ‘I know well you are a stone that can neither do good nor evil, and I would not kiss you had I not seen the Prophet kiss you, on whom be prayer and the blessings of God.’”

  Avram shook his head.

  “Wouldn’t knowing that history tend to weaken one’s faith?”

  He saw Mahmoud smile into the darkness.

  “Does knowing that Jacob’s dream-pillow stone, or that the Ark of the Covenant, too, might well have been meteoritic…does that weaken the faith of Jews? Does knowing that the Star of Bethlehem might have been a double meteor, or Jesus’ ‘stone rejected by the builders which has become the cornerstone,’ or even the darkening of the sky and shaking of the earth at his death…does knowing that those may trace back to meteors and meteorites weaken the faith of Christians?”

  “Probably not,” Avram agreed. “I suppose you’re familiar with the work of researchers like Darla Pittman and Michael Miskulin?”

  “Of course,” Mahmoud said. “Very interesting ideas, though I think the former is too focused on the biochemical, the latter too much on the extraterrestrial. For all that their ideas may enrage some people, does it really shake the faith of those same people?”

  “I suppose not, if they’re still enraged.”

  “Well then, the same is always true when it comes to what people believe versus how they act. Don’t assume that Arabs or Muslims are any more fully explained by Islam than the Irish are by Catholicism.

  Not all the Irish are Catholic, nor all the Arabs Muslim, n
or all the Muslims Arabs. Islam itself is not monolithic, nor is it hermetically sealed off from the rest of world culture. The Muslim world and the West have been in a strong feedback relationship with each other for well over a thousand years. Politics and religion have long since gotten all mixed together on both sides of the spyglass.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Salvation politics and liberation theology. Wahab and Saud and Reagan. The cold war and the Afghanistan jihad. Neoconservatives and radical Islamists. Muslim Brotherhood and quietist Salafism and the Internet. Governmental and nongovernmental terrorisms. The state under socialism, the corporation under capitalism, the umma under Islam. Distributing the wealth or, more accurately, apportioning the scarcity. All are flip sides of the same coin. Objects in the mirror, or through the wrong end of the telescope, are closer than they appear.”

  Mahmoud broke off as they steered out of a patch of soft sand on the sebkha, moving on to the minutely higher ground closer to the right-hand sand hill.

  “Every way we know the world—but especially religious faith—is like a camera obscura,” Mahmoud continued. “A chamber of secret darkness, a black box, with a lens or peephole to let the light of a greater world shine an image into the dark chamber. I saw a wonderful one at the Greenwich Observatory, in England, where I went to university. I told you I went to school there, didn’t I?”

  Avram nodded, and refrained from saying “About half a dozen times,” although he did think it.

  “The sciences, arts, humanities—they’re black boxes with peepholes, too. Philosophy, say, or comparative religion—my discipline—is a box whose peephole looks out at other boxes.”

  Avram laughed. Then, with an abrupt pang, he remembered Vida talking about continents of knowledge, shorelines of mystery, oceans of ignorance. When he took his too-sudden leave of her, she had hinted that she might decide to go to Mecca on Hajj after all, since she was already in Arabia—that is, if she could find a male family member to accompany her. That aspect of Islamic law irked her, but she was not (and probably could not pass for) a woman over forty-five years of age who, according to those same laws, could be sponsored in travel by others than the males in her family.