Stealing Sacred Fire

by Storm Constantine

  Yazid eyed him speculatively as he spoke, but did not comment. Daniel was sure the young Kurd was privately surprised and intrigued by what he heard. Shem made no attempt to hide the fact that he was directly connected with the ancient race. Daniel wondered whether Shem was dropping these clues into the conversation deliberately, in the hope that Yazid would report them back to Gadreel’s followers.

  In Van, the group booked into a comfortable hotel, where Yazid told them he would take them into the mountains the following morning. Yazid disappeared before dinner, presumably to contact the people they had come to meet.

  In the morning, their journey resumed, taking them higher into the mountains, heading south towards Babylonia. Here, the landscape seemed so vast; it was as if they were exploring a new world. Rolling grassy slopes reached up to distant peaks that were capped with glowing snow. After a day or so of slow travelling along less-frequented and therefore nearly impassable routes, they passed the invisible boundary between the countries. There was a check-point, but Yazid bribed the Babylonian guards effortlessly with the money and cigarettes that Shem gave to him for that purpose. The guards seemed bored and swallowed without question the story that Shem and the others were archaeologists, intent on exploring the ancient tombs and wall-painted caves that were hidden amid the rolling landscape.

  They drove slowly now, under cover of darkness, resting during the day. Often, when the gradient of the treacherous road permitted it, Yazid turned off the truck’s engine and they rolled and bumped along in silence. Yazid never used the headlights, seemingly navigating by instinct alone. Overhead, the sinister throb of helicopters trailed them like powerful predators. Salamiel made jokes that at any moment they might drive into a Babylonian patrol that would be more officious than the Turkish border guards. Daniel suspected that in some ways Salamiel relished the idea of conflict. Yazid, however, seemed to know the mountains tracks so well they managed to avoid any horrifying confrontations. Perhaps it was down to luck rather than strategy.

  Now, they travelled through more abandoned villages, where the buildings looked as if they’d been clawed by frenzied monsters. Yazid wept openly as he described the atrocities that had been committed against innocent people. Entire communities had been gassed or shot; he also spoke vaguely of other, less tangible attacks.

  ‘The weapons are evil and cruel,’ he said, ‘but those from the fire are worse.’

  ‘Those from the fire?’ Daniel said.

  ‘Djinn!’ Yazid replied, in a defensive tone as if his passengers would not believe him.

  ‘Djinn are used in attacks?’ Salamiel said from the back of the truck. He glanced at Shem who was sitting beside Yazid up front, his arm along the back of the seat.

  ‘I have heard of that,’ Shem said. ‘More precisely, the rumour is that Nimnezzar’s Magians invoke djinn into the Babylonian soldiers. I’m not convinced of this. It could just be an exaggerated story.’

  ‘You have not seen it,’ Yazid said.

  ‘Is he one of ours, Shem?’ Salamiel said. ‘This new king?’

  Shem shrugged. ‘I don’t know. We’ll have to find out.’

  Early one evening, Yazid announced they were only a few kilometres away from the village where they would meet with Gadreel. This news heightened everyone’s spirits.

  Daniel felt now as if the weight of history, the history of Shem’s people, was pressing like a crowd of ghosts upon his mind. The setting sun brought out the hectic colours of the mountains; copper lichened with verdigris; rocks of poison-green malachite, and blood-streaked porphyry. The air was almost narcotic with the scents of greenery and summer flowers crushed by the delicate hooves of goats. The sheer rocks, veined with their ophidian colours, reminded Daniel of the serpentine cliffs at the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall, where Shemyaza had reclaimed his divine kingship. Perhaps the last thing the exiled Grigori had seen when they’d left these lands were the splendid colours of the mountains. The serpentine cliffs would have been their first sight of England too, when they made landfall at the Lizard. Was that part of what had drawn the giant race to those shores?

  The village was half-ruined and many people appeared to be living in tents among the rubble. Smoke rose from cooking fires into the evening air, along with the cries of playing children. Women and men were dressed alike in army fatigues; the garb of modern warriors.

  Armed peshmergas halted the truck and spoke to Yazid in Kurmanji, the local Kurdish dialect. Yazid answered their questions, constantly pointing at his passengers as if to illustrate a point. Eventually, they were allowed to pass on.

  Yazid parked up and left his companions in the truck, while he went to speak with a group of men who’d watched their arrival with interest. Presently, he returned and led the group into one of the ruined buildings where men and women were clustered around a fire. They were all clearly peshmergas, dressed in military clothing and surrounded by weapons. The walls of the room were pocked with bullet-holes, and the windows were broken, with rough sacking taped over them. A broken child’s toy lay in the corner of the room. Daniel had to shut his mind down in order to prevent any stray memory of whatever tragedy had taken place there intruding into his consciousness. Lowering his guard even for a moment meant he was swamped with a sensation of terror; screams of pain reverberating through his brain.

  When Shem and the others entered the room, its occupants all began to speak at once, gesticulating wildly. Yazid answered back, with equally expressive gestures. Eventually, he turned to Shem. ‘I have explained your situation and these people are happy to let you stay here.’

  Shem frowned. ‘Are they Yarasadi?’

  ‘They are friends of the Yarasadi,’ Yazid replied enigmatically.

  ‘When will we meet with Gadreel?’

  ‘Soon, soon. You must wait here.’

  One of the group, an attractive woman in her thirties, bade Shem and his companions be seated. She told them in clear English that her name was Fatime and offered them the hospitality of her hearth. This last comment was accompanied by a wry grin to indicate she was aware she didn’t have much hospitality to give. Her skin was as pale as Yazid’s, although her hair was a dark reddish-brown, complemented by green eyes. She told them that as well as being a freedom-fighter for her people, she was a doctor, who over ten years ago had trained in France. She was in charge of this small settlement, caring for the injured refugees and soldiers who sought sanctuary there. Shemyaza told her they had brought supplies with them from Istanbul, so Yazid went back to the truck and unloaded what remained of the luxuries they’d purchased. While the assembled company passed round raki and beer, and distributed packets of cigarettes, Fatime initiated conversation with her guests. She admitted she was sceptical that Gadreel would meet with them.

  ‘Few have met him,’ she said. ‘He is the mountain goat, the eagle, resting rarely. Some say he is not human at all.’

  Shem raised his eyebrows. ‘Really? Why?’

  She shrugged. ‘He never shows his face. Perhaps it is hideous.’

  ‘Or the face of an angel,’ Salamiel suggested.

  Fatime narrowed her eyes at him. ‘Some might say you have the face of an angel.’

  He grinned, shrugged.

  ‘You are not Yarasadi,’ Shem said. ‘Are there any here?’

  Fatime shook her head. ‘No, they are in the mountains, further south. You have to remember that Yarasadism is not like the other beliefs of our people. For thousands of years there have been the Alevi, the Yezidi and the Yaresan, but Yarasadism is new. Gadreel tells us it is very old, and perhaps it is, or perhaps it is just a new banner from which to draw strength. People of all faiths are drawn to it. They say they have woken up from the sleep of centuries.’

  ‘But not you?’ Shem asked.

  Fatime pulled an expressive face. ‘By birth, I am Alevi, but my beliefs now are political rather than religious. If Yarasadism can help my people to win their eternal fight, I have no argument with it.’

  The next morni
ng, after an uncomfortable night spent on a concrete floor wrapped in blankets, Shem and his companions discovered that Yazid had disappeared during the night, along with his truck. Salamiel and Daniel were suspicious of this, but Shem thought that Yazid must have gone to seek his people and tell them about the strange Westerners who were asking for their prophet.

  Over a sparse breakfast of bread and goat-cheese, washed down by sweet tea, Shem asked Fatime how long they should expect to wait for Gadreel’s people.

  She smiled. ‘I have no idea. You will just have to be patient.’

  Daniel watched Shem covertly. He sensed the mounting anxiety within him, and a sense of confusion. They should speak — he knew they should — but how could he break down the invisible wall that had come to separate them?

  On the evening of their second day at the village, Daniel wandered off alone into the nearby crags, although he was tailed by several children and a three-legged dog. He emerged from a narrow pathway between high rocks to a natural look-out that hung high above a mountain valley of tough grass. Mountains rolled away into the distance. It was a dreaming landscape, seemingly oblivious of the human conflict taking place within it. Daniel put his hands against the ancient rocks, trying to project his mind back to when Shem’s people had made their mark in this land, but he could not extend his senses beyond the mundane. He knew that in some way he was deliberately ‘shutting down’. Perhaps he had been too affected by reality recently. He realised how different he was to the gauche youth whom Shemyaza had taken away from Little Moor. Never then could he have imagined being where he was now. For the first time in months, he thought of his sister, Verity, and had an urge to contact her. Was their father still alive? Homesickness swamped him. He yearned for the mellow glow of an English summer evening and the smallness of life in his old home. Kurdistan was stark and terrible and unremittingly honest in revealing humanity’s failings. These mountains were washed in blood, and had been for millennia. The ambitions Shem had had in England seemed irrelevant here. What significance could the mythical conflict of angels have to people who daily had to fight for their lives? Daniel shuddered in the breeze that came down from the mountains. He felt like an impostor here.

  A small hand tugged at his t-shirt. ‘Danee-ell, Danee-ell.’ He looked down and saw a grubby-faced girl smiling up at him; gaps in her teeth which he hoped were the result of growing rather than some obscene injury. She was dressed in a tattered, colourless dress, which was too big for her, and a brightly-embroidered purple jacket. Daniel recognised her as one of the children who had followed him from the village; he could see her companions giggling and shy, hiding among the rocks behind him.

  He ruffled the girl’s hair. ‘Hi.’

  She held out a bunch of wilting, tiny flowers to him and chattered to him in Kurmanji. Despite the language barrier, he could tell she sensed his sadness and sought to cheer him. Tears came to his eyes and he pressed the fingers of one hand against them.

  After five days, there was no sign of Gadreel or any of his immediate followers. Shem and Salamiel questioned Fatime every day until she became impatient with their demands. She did not know where the Yarasadi were. Perhaps they were too far away to receive the messages, or else engaged in combat. Daniel could sense she was really quite exasperated by Shem’s constant questions. Daily, she had to deal with the influx of refugees that trailed in from routed villages in the mountains. Her scant medical staff was over-worked with too few supplies. Sometimes, gunfire could be heard echoing from peak to peak.

  One day, her natural courtesy deserted her. ‘What is so important about one man?’ she snapped. ‘If you are here to report on our troubles, look around you. This is what should be taken back to the West!’ All around her, the injured lay on make-shift beds among the ruins, or sat before meagre fires, staring into the smoke with blank eyes.

  ‘We will take it back!’ Shem answered. ‘We shall do more than that.’

  Fatime shook her head and walked away from him. Watching, Daniel could tell she thought Shem cared nothing for her troubles.

  Daniel offered to help wherever he could, although he found it difficult to deal with the human pain of mutilated orphans and grieving women disfigured by appalling chemical burns. It was not the physical injuries that affected him, but the strong psychic effluvia of defeated despair and overwhelming grief.

  On one occasion, he assisted Fatime to clean up the wounds of a young boy who had been brought in with a group of peshmergas. They had found him in the ruins of a smoking village. The boy’s legs were hideously mangled, although Fatime told Daniel that she would use a poultice of local herbs on the injuries, which might prevent the need to amputate the limbs. Daniel doubted that the boy would ever walk again.

  As they knelt together, mixing the poultice, Fatime said to Daniel, ‘Your friends have some business with Gadreel they are not speaking of.’

  And Daniel had to answer, ‘Yes, they have.’

  ‘They know him already.’

  Daniel looked into her eyes. ‘They know of him, Fatime. It is an old business. Very old.’

  ‘They are different from you.’

  He nodded. ‘Yes. They are like Gadreel, or rather they hope Gadreel is like them.’

  ‘What are they?’

  Daniel was silent for a while. ‘Long ago, their people came from these mountains.’

  Fatime stared at him for a few moments, then changed the subject. ‘Here, open that jar for me. I need a handful of the leaves.’ Daniel realised she did not really want to know the truth, perhaps because she already suspected it.

  Another week passed by, then another. Daniel and Salamiel occupied themselves by helping Fatime around the settlement. Salamiel spoke to Fatime often about the struggles of her people. Daniel detected a sub-text. Did Salamiel feel that Shem’s task was to become involved in the conflict? Daniel couldn’t dispel the impression this was so. He finished off the last of the films they had brought with them, tempering heart-rending shots of human misery with compositions of ragamuffin children grinning against the soaring landscape. The gap-toothed girl, Adina, who had once offered him flowers for his hurts, had become his shadow, having developed a strong crush on him. He knew that when the time came for them to leave, he would find it very hard to leave her behind in this place.

  Each morning, Shem wandered off alone into the mountains, returning at sunset. He barely spoke to his companions. Salamiel confided to Daniel that he thought Shem was a maelstrom of doubts. ‘We are wasting time here. Why is he stalling?’

  Daniel answered carefully, aware that Salamiel was liable to turn on him very quickly. ‘But we can’t really do anything until we’ve made contact with the Yarasadi. We have to wait here.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Salamiel said. ‘He could show them his power instead of hiding it. Gadreel and the Yarasadi would no doubt appear with miraculous speed if Shem would only take control of the situation.’ He paused, then said, ‘Speak to him, Daniel. Only Anu knows what’s going on in his head.’

  Daniel shrugged. ‘I can’t, Sal. He won’t let me.’

  ‘Then what are you here for?’

  As the days passed, Salamiel’s comments became more waspish. This did not help to restore Daniel’s confidence in his unreliable psychic sight.

  Daniel knew that Shem was becoming increasingly impatient about Gadreel’s failure to appear, which was reflected in the terse manner with which he interrogated Fatime. Salamiel was convinced that Yazid had simply dumped them and had perhaps had not even contacted the Yarasadi. ‘Perhaps we should be looking upon ourselves as hostages now,’ he said.

  Shem could not even articulate his feelings to himself. He was continually drawn to the mountains, almost as if, should he sit in solitude long enough, something would be revealed to him. He watched Daniel develop friendships with the Kurds, and recognised the barbs of jealousy in his heart. When the child Adina put her arms around Daniel and nestled against him, Shem yearned to be in her place. Daniel was his strength,
his psychic eye. But it had been plucked out.

  In the past, this area had been where Shem’s Nephilim sons had fought the might of the High Lord Anu. If he sat down and closed his eyes, he could almost hear the echoes of war still reverberating among the soaring crags. It was in mountains like these that he had made his final stronghold, where he’d taken Ishtahar in the last days of their life together. If he stared at any sheer cliff, he could almost see the fortress; a stark outline of cyclopean blocks; flat towers crowned with spreading spikes that were the rafters of the rooftops. Ishtahar had betrayed him there, by fleeing to Kharsag, where she’d revealed the whereabouts of Shemyaza’s stronghold to Anu. She had condemned him to a horrifying death, and yet some part of him still loved her. He knew her actions had been the result of seeing the monster of hate and anger that he’d become. He could not blame her for her treachery. These mountains were full of her fragrance, her presence. He remembered that in lulls between the fighting, when his mood had swayed back to something like his former self, he and Ishtahar had strolled together among the valleys, gathered flowers and made love in the lush grass. The memories were too painful.

  One day, Salamiel trailed Shem from the village and came upon him in his silent meditations. Saying nothing, Salamiel sat down beside him on the rock, staring out over a narrow gorge, where far below water spumed and crashed. Eventually, Salamiel broke the silence. ‘Shem, we can always go back.’

  Shem glanced at him, his expression unreadable. ‘I can’t. I wish I could.’

  ‘Tell me what you’re thinking.’

  Shem shook his head. ‘Nothing. Just remembering.’