Heart of Flame

by Janine Ashbless

  “Stay sat upright, if you can,” he told Taqla, as they drew the thick, rank-smelling cloth over their heads. “Create an air pocket for yourself—but keep your eyes shut.”

  Then the storm was upon them, at first with angry gusts and a rattle of sand, and then with a continuous pressure. Rafiq hunched his shoulders and cradled his head in his hands as the light under the cloth dimmed. He’d wrapped his headscarf tightly about his mouth and nose but couldn’t bring himself to swathe his eyes, so he just screwed them shut. He could feel the wind pounding against his shoulders and taste dust on his tongue. Sliding lower into the shelter offered by the Horse’s body, he clenched his teeth against the waves of inner rebellion as their tent collapsed slowly over their heads, cocooning them in darkness, leaving them no choice but to endure the hours of misery.

  He could hear Taqla, he realized. Even over the continuous roar of the wind her voice was audible. At first he thought—rather surprised—that she was praying, but listening more closely, he worked out that she was muttering in a language he’d never heard, repeating the same three nonsense phrases over and over again. It was a spell, he supposed. A spell for their safety or to calm the winds or something. The repetitions were hypnotic. Only occasionally would she pause to huff out sand or clear her throat.

  The thought of her being smothered inexorably an arm’s length from his own corpse burned in his mind. In the darkness he groped toward her, finding her shoulder first. She was lying on her side with her arms over her head, the tent pressed against her neck by the weight of drifted sand behind it. Rafiq pulled her into the downwind lee of his own body and she didn’t protest, hardly even skipping a beat of her chant as he settled her against the bulk of his torso, her head nested against his chest. It was probably illusory, the notion that he could shelter her, but it gave him some comfort.

  After that, listening to her murmuring voice, his cheek pressed to the crown of her head, he fell into a kind of stupor while over their heads the sandstorm raced on. When, late into the night, the wind slackened at last and Taqla’s tired murmur dwindled to nothing, he even dozed off.

  But when dawn came he was first on his feet, throwing back the goathair flap and its burden of sand to crawl out into the open. Blinking, he took one stupefied look at the landscape before him then called, “Taqla! Come and see this!”

  Because there, unmistakably, was the Temple of Yaghuth.

  Standing before the glass surface of a pillar, Ahleme stared at the reflection of herself in its blue-green depths.

  When she’d woken that morning, she’d found no clothing awaiting her but these—a skirt made up of strings of pearls, and a top barely long enough to cover her breasts, made of strung pearls too, worked in an open mesh. She’d put them on because she’d had no choice—unless it was to drape herself in the furs of the bed. She’d put them on because nothing had happened for hours and she was curious to see what she looked like. Now she stared. The white beads showed up well in the mirror, shining against her warm flesh, and against her skin they felt cool and heavy. From a distance, the ensemble might even appear decent. Only when one looked closely was it clear that there was nothing between these jewels of the sea to protect her modesty, that her nipples peeked out like two dark pearls among the pale ones, that the secret split of her velvety sex could be glimpsed whenever the strings shifted.

  Ahleme swung a little on her toes, watching the way the heavy beads swung and then fell back against her legs. She couldn’t help feeling shocked by how tempting she looked in this costume, and guiltily pleased. Of course she knew she shouldn’t be vain, but…

  But she looked beautiful. There was no denying the pleasure she felt at that. A woman ought to dress modestly and this was anything but, yet oh how it suited her. Every time she turned away from the mirror, she turned back, fascinated. She ran her hand over the bare span of her narrow waist then stroked the pearls over her breasts, whose own points stood up nearly as hard.

  Her eyes in the reflection were troubled, fearful, and bright with a potential that might be terror, or just as easily might be anticipation.

  He has not sullied me, she told her reflection. I am still a virgin.

  The trouble was that she didn’t look like one.

  Chapter Thirteen

  In which a very old voice is heard.

  Taqla, crawling out from beneath their collapsed shelter, noticed first that the green sand had got everywhere during the storm, into every layer of clothing and every fold of skin. Everywhere. She shook it out of her hair and beat weakly at her clothes as she stood, blinking in the new sunlight. Around her the landscape had been resculpted, dunes replaced by valleys and low places turned to hills. The dune she remembered to their left had been partially swept away, and revealed in its place was the great pale dome of a building.

  Rafiq turned to her with a huge grin as he shook out his headscarf and it fluttered like a flag from his hand. “That’s it! You were right!”

  Taqla grinned too, behind the safety of her veil. “Yes. By the will of God.”

  “Come on.”

  “Just a moment.” She turned back to the Horse Most Swift, which lay almost buried. Its hollow body had filled with sand and would have been impossible to lift upright, so Taqla ravelled it up into its ball of silver wire. Then she followed Rafiq toward the temple.

  The closer she got, the uneasier she felt. Whatever pale stone the building had been hewn from—and there were no joint lines visible in the dome, nor had it been split by the weight of sand—it had the color and texture of worn bone, and even in a place as strange as the Abu Bahr it struck the eye uncomfortably. Sand was still heaped about the walls, but at one point it ebbed low enough to show a porchlike structure jutting from the circular main building, and in that the lintel of a doorway, level with their feet. Most of the building must still be buried.

  “We’re going to have to dig,” Rafiq said, kneeling to scoop sand away with his hands from that straight edge of stone.

  “Wait.” Taqla dropped the silver wire at her feet. “Lion Most Strong,” she commanded.

  The wire rose as it usually did, flying back and forth to create a mesh of strands, but this time it wove the form of a maned Lion, not the Horse. It was lower built than the steed but broader. Rafiq said nothing but his eyebrows went up and his eyes spoke volumes.

  Why should I tell you everything? Taqla wanted to ask, nettled, but she said only, “It’ll do the digging for us.”

  “Feel free.”

  They stood aside while the silver beast dug, front paws scooping the sand untiringly and much faster than any human being could. By the time Taqla let it fall still a large double door had been revealed—two leaves of corroded bronze. They looked like they opened inward, and stood slightly ajar, a handswidth of complete darkness gaping between them. Rafiq slid down the slope and took a grip on one of the doors.

  “Wait,” said Taqla. “I should go first.”

  He cast her a hard look. “Why?”

  “It might be dangerous.”

  Heat shimmered in his gaze but he kept his voice calm. “What on earth do you think might still able to threaten us, after all these centuries? Do you imagine the priests are still alive?”

  “No. But there’s the god.”

  He blinked. “There is no god but God,” he reminded her.

  “Mm. That’s… You might find that’s more a doctrinal statement than a factual one,” she said uncomfortably.

  He gave her a long, thoughtful stare. “Then I had definitely better go in first,” he concluded. “And if I get into trouble it’ll be easier for you to rescue me than the other way round.”

  She didn’t argue. In all honesty she felt a little bit relieved to let him take the lead into that uncanny black space. He put his shoulder to it and eased the door open, the hinges protesting and showering dust. Then he slipped inside and she, clenching her jaw, followed.

  There were no windows inside, of course. If there had been then the interior w
ould have filled with sand long ago, she supposed, so they had to wait just within the threshold for their eyes to adjust to the gloom. There was no sand beyond the small antechamber; a lightly dusted flight of steps led down into the great circular space within.

  She felt an almost overpowering desire to rush out and wash herself—or scratch off her skin—anything to escape the feeling of uncleanliness that crept over her skin in cold waves. It wasn’t a sensation she normally associated with sorcery, in fact she’d never felt anything like it before. Putting her palms together, she made a tiny light between them, a cool blue glow, and then looked questioningly at Rafiq. He nodded, so she let the light drift away from her cupped hands, a wisp like a night insect that floated down the steps and illuminated their way.

  One tread at a time, Rafiq descended into that space, looking about him carefully. He waited once he reached the last step, and Taqla, her senses straining, crept down to join him. Her little sorcerous glow hung in midair, casting the faintest of lights, the faintest of shadows. There was no scent but slightly dusty air, no sound but the small ones they were making themselves, yet every fibre of her body was taut with the conviction that they were not alone. Across the domed chamber, the pale bulk of an enormous statue loomed and she stared toward it.

  Without a word, Rafiq touched her lightly on the arm and pointed up. Taqla switched her gaze to the dome overhead and shivered. The roof was unsupported by any pillars. Equally unsupported, in fact more so because they did not seem to be strung from any wires or rafters but just hung like needles from a lodestone, were the blades clustered all over the interior of the dome. They looked like spears of dark metal and they hung point down, their tips swaying ever so gently.

  Rafiq touched his index finger to her lips through the veil, an action that rattled Taqla at least as much as the implicit threat overhead, then stepped carefully across the bare rock floor. She forced herself to look up, keeping a watch on the lances, but they didn’t stir. When Rafiq had made it all the way across the chamber toward the idol, she gritted her teeth and followed.

  Any last hope she’d entertained that Yaghuth had been a beneficent heathen deity of healing died then. There was an altar stone, which had a groove for fluids about the rim and a channel for drawing them off. It stood within a great stone basin just before the idol, and that basin was full of crumbled human skulls. The statue itself was, she guessed, crafted of jade, a single unimaginably large block of the stone crudely but effectively carved. Yaghuth had a human torso with two vulture heads sprouting from the neck. These stared at each other beak to beak, giving him the strangest bifurcated countenance, and he had no legs but four snake tails upon which he stood upright. He had four arms too—one hand raised as a fist in threat, one stretching out as if to seize something, and two turned over holding objects in their cupped palms. It looked like one of those objects was another human skull—it was difficult to see clearly from below, so tall was the idol and so dim the light—but the other was a copper-colored egg as big as a watermelon.

  Rafiq indicated this last discovery with a flick of his eyes, pulled a rueful “wish me luck” face, and then stepped up onto the edge of the basin.

  Then the idol spoke.

  “Give to Yaghuth the red offering.”

  The voice was ancient, weary and distant, but it whispered across the chamber, stirring the dust on the skulls and making the blades overhead sway. Taqla had to clench her teeth against a wave of nausea. Rafiq dropped back from the basin lip to the floor, looking swiftly around.

  “Give to Yaghuth the bending of the knee. Give to Yaghuth the smiting of the breast. Give to Yaghuth the red offering.”

  “Go back to sleep, old one,” said Rafiq to the empty air.

  Taqla was shocked by his audacity. Possibly the god was too, because there was a marked pause before that poisonous whisper spoke again. “Give to Yaghuth—”

  “No,” said Rafiq. “Your time has long gone. Go back to sleep.”

  “Yaghuth gives victory. Yaghuth gives power.”

  “Not for thousands of years, old one. The world has changed.”

  “Yaghuth sleeps.”

  “That’s right.”

  It wasn’t overly bright, this god, she decided.

  “Yaghuth wakes. Yaghuth hears the steps of the little man. The little man wakes Yaghuth.”

  “Not intentionally,” said Rafiq with a wry flash of his teeth. He’s enjoying this, thought Taqla through her nausea. It’s like the chase across the rooftops. He likes to test his Fate. She shook her head.

  “The little man comes to the fane of Yaghuth. Tell Yaghuth why.”

  It was Rafiq’s turn to hesitate. “You have the Egg of the Senmurw,” he said at last. “You’ve hoarded it long enough.”

  “The little man wants the Egg.”

  Rafiq tilted his chin.

  “Yaghuth breaks the Egg.”

  To Taqla’s horror the statue moved, the great open hand beginning to curl into a fist around the Egg. Dust showered from the shifting stone. They both cried out in a single voice.

  The idol went still, blunt claws curved about the Senmurw’s Egg.

  “Give to Yaghuth the bending of the knee.”

  “Never,” he answered, eyes wide and teeth set.

  “Give to Yaghuth… Give to Yaghuth the feet and the words.”

  “What?”

  “The little man wants the Egg. The little man goes. Give to Yaghuth the going. Go to Banebshenan Banebshenan Adhur-Anahid for Yaghuth.”

  “Uh,” said Rafiq with an expression of dawning alarm.

  “Say to Adhur-Anahid to give the bending of the knee to Yaghuth. Say to Adhur-Anahid to surrender that which she promised to Yaghuth. Say to Adhur-Anahid the time has come.”

  “All right. I understand.” He cast Taqla a worried look. “I think I do, anyway.”

  “Give to Yaghuth the going, and Yaghuth will give the little man the Egg.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see. Why not.”

  Taqla shook her head, but Rafiq wasn’t paying her attention any more. He started to back away from the idol, motioning her to move too, and that at least was a plan she wasn’t arguing with. They stumbled from the temple and scrambled on hands and knees up the slope of sand, not stopping until they were several hundred paces away from the building. There Taqla pitched onto her knees, pulled down her veil and dry-retched.

  “Are you all right?” she heard him demand.

  “Yes.” She wiped her hair from her lips. “I think. Oh…I don’t think you should have agreed to that.”

  “I’d have agreed to nearly anything to get us out of there.” He shuddered. “It moved, Taqla. The idol moved! I’d no idea it could do that!”

  “Nor me.” Taqla rammed her knuckles under her breastbone, swallowing her revulsion, and groaned.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Couldn’t you feel it in there? It was like breathing sewage.”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t smell anything.”

  Taqla didn’t bother to correct him. She covered her face again and sank her head in her hands. She’d be better in a few moments, she told herself.

  “You ever heard of this Adhur-Anahid woman?”

  She shook her head.

  “It sounds like a Persian name,” mused Rafiq.

  “It is. Banebshenan Banebshenan means ‘Queen of Queens’. She must have been the wife of one of their emperors, I imagine.”

  “Well that does it, doesn’t it? That thing in there has no idea how long it’s been buried under the sand—there’s no Persian Empire left.”

  “No.”

  “So we’re finished.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Where would we be finding a Persian queen these days?”

  “Oh, there’s one obvious place,” she said quietly.

  “Where?” Rafiq stepped round to stare her in the face.

  “Well, there must be imperial tombs somewhere, mustn’t there?”

  He laughed
, bitterly. “Ah. There’s the problem. You did notice that word ‘tomb’, Taqla? We’ve hit the cliff-face.”

  “I can talk to the dead.” She said it softly, unhappily.

  “What?”

  “I’ve never done it before,” she amended hastily. “But I know how.”

  “Oh no.” He turned and walked away, back and forth, shaking his head. “No, no, no.”

  Taqla watched him stomp up and down, and then turn back in her direction. His face was set in lines of consternation, his eyes full of dark eagerness. She thought that she would do anything for that face, that look.

  “Could you?” he asked.

  In a room without walls, Ahleme basked under the glimmering light of a hundred lamps, in a sea of furs, by the side of the djinni. A thousand flames were hazily reflected by the net of pearls across her breasts and in the ropes of pearls that lay across her thighs. Between the pearls her skin gleamed no less enticingly.

  It was not only her attire that had changed since first she came to this place, and not only the fact that she no longer recoiled from his presence. Her expression this night was one of fascinated concentration. She was reclining on her side. Yazid lay on his back, hands knotted safely out of the way behind his neck, his broad chest like a sea rock upon which she had been cast up. His breastbone rose and fell accompanied by the sigh of waves. Her cheek was propped in the palm of her hand. She had wondered about laying her head upon his chest, but thought not—that was too intimate an embrace. It might give him ideas he should not be having.

  She still guarded her family’s honor, whatever this scene might look like to anyone else. Whatever the mocking little voice inside her said. There were, she insisted, still boundaries of propriety.

  It was just…the boundaries had moved, as the desert’s edge moves, driven by the wind.

  Ahleme’s free hand was in motion, as unhurried as the wash of Yazid’s breath, as the caress of the waves on a beach. Back and forth, up the marble-smooth, marble-hard length of his virility. Every exploratory squeeze, every turn of her wrist, every rub of her thumb brought forth its response. His eyelids quivered to the rhythm of her touch, his breath gathered and released to the stroke of her hand.