“Oh, Rana,” Marul said. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”
Caleb grunted. “Sentiment is the path of fools. While you weep, the Cosmos teeters.”
“Says the one who was weeping minutes ago.”
Caleb took a deep breath. “We are all broken, in one way or another,” he said.
“Some more than others,” said Marul.
“All I ever wanted was to make us whole again,” said Caleb.
“At whose expense?” Marul said. “Because it’s always at someone else’s expense, isn’t it, Caleb?”
“Would you believe me if I said that this time it’s just not true?”
“I would sooner believe a goat doesn’t shit.”.
Elyam shouted, “Stand tall! Lord Elizel approaches.” And the soldiers parted for him.
Lord Elizel’s shadow flickered as the last vestiges of cloud whisked before the sun. Suddenly the crystal dome blinked out of existence. The lurking winds, still gusting and strong, tore through the camp, stirring up tornadoes of sand. Banners and tents shuddered in the breeze. Rana grimaced as sand worried more deeply into her wounds.
Elizel’s long white hair was tossed about as he said, “Leave us.”
“But, my Lord,” Avra said. “There is evil among—”
“Leave us!” he said.
Avra and Elyam bowed. “Yes, my lord.”
“And take the soldiers with you.”
Avra was about to speak when Elyam grabbed his arm.
“Yes, my lord,” Avra said, frowning.
As their guard departed, Lord Elizel squinted at Rana, as if he were trying to glimpse the person underneath her shredded skin. He sighed, a sound like a dry wind blowing over ruins. “What a ragged, motley lot you are.”
Marul was about to speak, but Elizel raised his hand to stop her.
He ran a hand through his beard, closed his eyes, and sighed. “Prudence says I should slay all of you and cast your ashes into the desert. This is the overwhelming vote of the Synedrium. But I have a niggling doubt. It’s crawled into my brain like a sandworm. I can override the Synedrium in times of dire need. And I believe this is such a time.
“One of our far-seers has conveyed to me that a mammoth army approaches from the south. An army of grotesque creatures, odd lights, gargantuan beasts. A demon army, on its way north, to us. General Otto says this is the Legion of First, the army of Sheol.
“I’ve asked myself, why do they send so great a number for five pathetic souls? The only conclusion is that you are much more than you appear. Perhaps you, Daniel Fisher, are a Pillar. And you, Caleb, are the King of Demonkind. Though how you have all fallen so low is a mystery to me. I was never clever with riddles. So what to do?
“I could cast you into the desert like our scapegoat and let the Legion have you. But that might aid this demon army, which I cannot abide. But neither can I shelter demons, nor put this tribe at risk. So I am forced down the narrow path.
“The shift begins soon. The sands will carry us northeast. If we make haste, catch the right currents, by dusk we will reach the Jeen. We will take you to the edge of the desert of death and forgetting. There you can make your way to Dudael, may the Goddess protect your souls. No sane army would follow you across the Jeen, though I cannot vouch for your own safety once you enter the place where even demons fear to tread.”
“The Legion,” Caleb said, “is farthest from sane. Lord Elizel, who else but your priests, learned in magic, can perform the spell to bring Daniel and me to the Earth? Without your help, all is lost.”
“Yes,” Elizel said. “Uriel has told me this may be true. So I’ve offered my people a choice. Those who wish to follow you into the Jeen to help you may do so. The rest will continue on our way. My message is being conveyed to the houses as we speak. I don’t think your chances are good.”
“We need ten priests!” Caleb said. “Ten learned magicians! Can you promise us that?”
“I’ve already given you too much. My people are frightened, and the Bedu do not scare easily. Their trust in me has . . . wavered. I cannot ask them for more.”
“Perhaps your time with them has ended,” Caleb said. “Come with us and make yourself a new history.”
Elizel took a deep breath. “My place is here, among my people,” he said. “Even if they despise me.”
“You’re an honorable man, Lord Elizel,” Caleb said. “They do not know what kind of leader they have.”
“Or perhaps they know all too well,” he said. And with those words, he walked away from them, and their guards returned.
“Give us water!” Marul shouted after Elizel. “And a healer for Rana!”
But Elizel kept on walking, until he was just another speck in a thousand moving shapes.
——
This was not Rana’s battle, Daniel thought. She didn’t ask to be part of this. She looked like Gram after the fire, her body ruined forever. Another casualty, because of him. He hung his head, ashamed. Too many people had been hurt because of him.
The sun approached the horizon. It would set soon, thankfully. His skin was on fire. And as he hung in his chains, he noticed the Bedu weren’t packing camp yet. If the Legion was coming, what were they waiting for?
The dead man hung lifeless in his chains, and in the sun his body had begun to bloat. Daniel tried not to pay attention to the rotten smell, because even though it disgusted him, under his revulsion was something else.
Hunger.
He shivered. I’ll never allow myself to eat human flesh! he thought. Never.
Twice, he begged the priests and soldiers to find Rana a doctor or healer or get her some water, but they responded only with mockery or the pointed tip of a sword.
Across the camp a loud horn blew. Like the shofar on Yom Kippur, the note was long and piercing, a call to attention. On that most solemn of Jewish holidays the shofar blast was—in its original intention—meant to ward off the demon Azazel. Yet if all went according to plan, they were going to meet the very same demon! Two more horns joined in, and the soldiers with their padded ears stirred. One tried to remove his cotton, but Avra stopped him.
A few hundred feet away from the log, several white-robed priests carried out two hefty brass bowls. The bowls glimmered in the sun. The priests filled the bowls with different powders in some sacred order, pausing to pray after each new ingredient. They brought torches to the mixture, and it flared up with tall green flames. Columns of black smoke corkscrewed into the sky, and winds brought the scent of molasses, cinnamon, ginger, and a mélange of other spices.
Avra and Elyam fell to their knees, made a triangle with their fingers, and pressed this symbol to their chests and their foreheads. The soldiers kneeled and bowed toward the smoke.
The priests by the censers raised their hands skyward. A colorful bejeweled palanquin skate sparkled as it drifted over the sands. Its doors sprung open, and eight priests emerged from it hefting a large gilded container. The container was even more reflective than the palanquin, second only in brilliance to the sun. The gilded container, rectangular, was mounted on long poles, and as the men turned, squares of reflected light moved across the camp. They spun it several times, as if to dazzle all with its glare. Golden birds adorned its top, wings touching, their chests puffed outward, eyes gazing upward.
Like the cherubim on the Ark of the Covenant, Daniel thought. He felt surreal, as if he were watching a ritual of the ancient Jews as they crossed the desert from Egypt to Israel.
White-robed boys pulled two stubborn goats over to the priests. The priests laid one goat on a wooden block, and with a quick knife blow and a gurgling bleat, it was slaughtered. Blood flowed down the block into two smaller bowls. The priests sprinkled the blood droplets about the sacrificial altar while chanting more prayers.
The slain goat was quickly disemboweled into sections, its entrails placed into one of the censers. The air grew thick with its pleasing odor, not because Daniel hungered for meat, but because of some uncanny r
eaction in the mixture that made the smoke smell like lilac. The entire camp seemed to grow sleepy and dreamy as they inhaled.
A priest poured goat’s blood over the living animal, then screamed as he kicked it. The horns blew a hundred staccato notes as the goat bleated and darted across the camp, terrified. The Bedu leapt out of its way, shouting imprecations, spitting at it, until they forced the animal out of the camp. It sped off into the desert, bloody and free.
“May our sins be upon it,” Elyam and Avra said in a language neither Bedu-Besk nor Wul.
In the same language, the whole Bedu throng chanted, “May her great name be exalted and sanctified in the world which she hath created according to her will. May she bring rain to the faithful, succor to the sick, abundant blessings to the righteous. May her great house shelter the weak and homeless . . .”
There was so much similarity between their rituals and Judaism, past and present. Who influenced whom? he thought. And if the Ark of the Covenant held the Ten Commandments, what was inside the Bedu’s holy box?
“Is there no limit to their stupidity?” Caleb said in English, so that only Daniel would understand. “With all this smoke, they might as well draw a map for the Legion and mark our position with a cross.”
“Shut your mouth!” Avra snarled. “The splendor of her Holy Corpus is revealed! Be quiet or I’ll sever your tongue!”
Avra and Elyam bowed and said more prayers. And when they seemed suitably engrossed, Daniel whispered to Caleb in English, “What’s inside their golden ark?”
“Their goddess,” Caleb whispered. “Mollai sheds her bodies as a snake sheds skin. Inside that box is one of her discarded vessels.”
“Her skin is in the box?”
“A dead body. The Quog Bedu worship a corpse, Daniel. Es per shemp Bedu.”
The Bedu bowed and recited their prayers in an inflectionless chant, as if the notion of harmony was anathema to them.
“Look at them,” Caleb whispered. “A dead man hangs in chains beside us, and here they pray for succor for the weak. The real curse of humanity is its willful blindness.”
Daniel paused. Surely Caleb could see his own irony? “And how are you different?” he whispered. “You’ve been blind to others’ suffering since we began.”
“I make no pretense,” Caleb said. “I do not say, ‘I am holy,’ with my left hand while my right murders. Humans claim to be morally superior to demons and all living creatures. But in their hearts, all men are demons.”
“Every one has the capacity to do evil,” Daniel said. “But also for good. That is the beginning of morality: choosing to do good against one’s instincts.”
“Morality is a human concept that has no analog in the Cosmos. What does a lion know of morality? A scorpion? If you repress your nature, it resurfaces as perversions. Look how the so-called ‘righteous’ faiths of Earth have perpetrated so much evil in their attempt to quash it. These Bedu, they profess to be righteous, yet they worship a corpse, slaughter the innocent, and leave the weak to die. And where is their Goddess now as their doom approaches? Mollai cares nothing for the ways of these desert roamers, except when they stop worshipping her.”
The horns sounded an overlapping, interminable note. The shining Holy Corpus was carefully returned to the hovering palanquin. The prayers ended with the horns’ cessation, and six thousand kneeling Bedu rose. The censers had burned out. The charred goat remains were carefully buried in sand. And in the south, just over the horizon where the air rippled with waves of heat, a small cloud of dust appeared.
The horns sounded seven sharp notes. A pause, then repeated. The camp stirred. The soldiers glanced at each other. A messenger approached and ordered half the soldiers to the southern perimeter, and the two priests whispered concernedly.
“It’s the Legion,” Daniel said. “Isn’t it?”
“Their stupidity has caught up with them,” Caleb said.
But it wasn’t them, Daniel thought. It was me. I told Rebekah where I was, in my dream. “They just want me,” Daniel shouted. “Send me out to them! I won’t let another person die on account of me.”
“If it were my wish alone,” Avra said, “you’d already be gone. But we have orders.”
With three bracing horn blasts the tribe readied to move. They lifted bags, tightened straps, kicked camels to standing. Goats brayed as shepherds stirred them to wakefulness.
Elyam tightened the belt of his robe and said, “Prepare yourselves for the shift.”
“How are we supposed to walk bound to this log?” Marul said.
“You drag it, witch!” Elyam said.
“And drag a dead man with us?”
Avra and Elyam considered this. “I suppose he will only slow you down.” He ordered a soldier to release the body. Avoiding the corpse’s shredded skin, the soldier carefully unlocked the chains, and the man fell to the sands.
Rana shuddered.
“He needs to be buried,” Marul said. “And rites spoken over his grave.”
“No time,” Elyam said, sipping water.
“Can’t you spare him one small prayer?”
With the ram’s horn, the Bedu, arrayed in their houses, jerked suddenly forward. “If he was a man of the Goddess, she will see to him.”
Rana, kneeling beside the man’s body, put a hand to his forehead. Her lips moved soundlessly and she closed her eyes.
“Move!” a soldier said, shoving his sword under Rana’s neck. “Or I kill you now.”
“Rana!” Marul said. “Stand up!”
Rana slowly climbed to her feet, and together they dragged the log forward. Daniel looked back at the body as they walked, feeling as if he were leaving behind something important. It was difficult to move, made worse by his thirst and the oppressive sun. He was already winded. Marul panted, and Rana could barely stand. How far could they go like this? The Bedu behind them gave the body a wide berth. Even the goats and camels would not approach it.
“One corpse revered,” Caleb said. “Another shunned.”
A wave of sand two hundred feet high rose behind them. Blood rushed to Daniel’s head as it rolled underneath their feet, lifting them skyward. And when it sank, the body lay a thousand feet away, a black speck on the sands. Another dune rolled under them, then a third. At each peak he looked back until he could not see the body anymore.
On the horizon, the dust cloud steadily grew.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
The sun stooped like an old woman as Caleb and the others dragged the log. Soon she would sleep, never to rise. Avra and Elyam tugged at their beards. Their fingers weaved through the air as they argued the finer points of some esoteric religious doctrine. The fools ponder the interpretation of a phrase from scripture, Caleb thought, while a sword hangs above their heads!
Soldiers walked beside them, grasping pommels, grinding teeth. Women, shepherds, camelry, children, all stole glances back at the cloud that pursued them furtively, like a hungry mountain cat, waiting for the right moment to pounce.
The Bedu tried to hide their fears. They raised their chins and hauled their cargo like the good, strong traders they presumed to be. They gave Caleb and the others water only when it seemed they would faint without it. And thus the waves thrusted them up and down, moving them toward the desert of black sands and drunken stars. Toward the mad desert, the Jeen.
Rana shuddered with every step. She was just like the power vats under Abbadon—in fact, the Gu were their inspiration. She captured the water of life falling from above in the well of her being. Because of this she healed faster than any normal human. But her wounds were still severe. She still might die.
Rana fell to her knees. They had dragged her a few paces before they stopped. A huge wave of sand approached from the south. They had to keep moving or risk falling behind. Soldiers pointed blades at Rana. “Get up!” they spat, and the tide of Bedu flowed around them as if they were a stone in a rushing river.
“The sands do not abide laggards!” one said.
“By the Goddess, heal her,” Marul said.
“Please,” said Daniel. “If there is a shred of humanity in you, heal her.”
“Our Goddess does not abide demons,” Avra said.
“If you fools only knew who your Goddess is,” said Caleb.
Elyam leaned to his partner and whispered, when Avra frowned and gave a reluctant nod. “Bind the shredded girl to the log. You three can haul her.”
It was better than leaving Rana to die. With hand signs Avra signaled the soldiers to bind Rana to the back of the log, and they rushed to obey. Rana’s eyes had lost their luster. They were glassy and gazed blindly at the sky. Her lips moved incoherently. When she was secure, Caleb and the others dragged her lacerated body forward again.
“Will you let a Gu die?” Caleb said. “Shall it be written that Avra and Elyam, the greatest fools to ever walk on Gehinnom, let a Gu die because of their own ignorance?”
“She is no Gu,” Elyam said over his shoulder, but his voice was small, skeptical. He had to have witnessed her quick healing by now. But even if he suspected he was wrong about her, Caleb realized, his pride would not allow the admission of error.
“Rana, my Little Plum,” Marul said, “why did you have to come for me?”
The knot in Caleb’s chest tightened. How was it that Rana had breached the walls of his heart? Perhaps this was only the feeling of his hopes fading, his dreams evaporating like smoke. If Rana died, it would be an unquestionable loss, yes, but he would survive. He always had. Yet the world would be such a poorer place without her.
Like a bead of sweat trickling down his back, his spine tingled with a familiar, long-forgotten feeling. How long had it been since he’d felt this sensation? He closed his eyes and remembered the caresses under silken sheets, the callused but gentle hands touching his neck, the soft fur pressed against his thighs. How long had it been since he’d felt a bed as warm?
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