Jerusalem Fire

by R. M. Meluch

  In their isolation—after the anarchy and struggle for bare survival was over—the colonies tried to piece together what they had lost. The old learning was reclaimed imperfectly and at different rates in different fields and in different places. Some worlds remained sunken in total savagery. One built to an atomic age and did not make it out. But most worlds progressed.

  And, finally, a few tentative starships traveled out again at the middle of the fifth millennium. The Dark Age was over. But the travelers were hardly Earthlings anymore. They had their own worlds, their own cultures. Earth was some faraway cradle of civilization, if remembered at all—

  Except on one colony which remembered well where it came from and why. The planet was Mat Tanatti—Land of Praise, Land of Glory.

  The colonists of Mat Tanatti had begun as a large group of discontented idealists on Earth in the third millennium. They had gone forth in self-exile to an uninhabited world to start a new culture on a base of equality undivided by artificial boundaries of nations and languages and antique faiths which the modern world had left behind and which turned brother against brother against sister.

  The pilgrims named themselves Na′id, which meant praiseworthy or alert in the dead Earth language they took for their tongue of naming names.

  And since they had already isolated themselves before the Collapse came, they weren’t drawn down into it. No lifeline was cut, and Mat Tanatti was the one world that never fell. The Na′id kept their civilization, their history, and their purpose.

  The end of the Dark Age found them successful beyond all prediction in creating a unified people. But the pessimists were justified in their insistence that Man must have his hatreds and prejudices. The Na′id stressed their humanity—as opposed to aliens.

  • • •

  The end of the Dark Age found the Na′id with the most advanced technology in the galaxy. They took it as a sign that their ideology was right and they were duty-bound to reunite their long-lost human brothers and sisters, and to free Earth from alien influence and wrong-thinking.

  There had been no peace ever since. There was always fighting somewhere, and the biggest battles were not with aliens but with their own kind, the humans who didn’t want to be united—not after two thousand years, and not under Na′id domination.

  In professing tolerance of all human creations and culture, the Na′id encountered a dilemma: Were they to tolerate intolerance? Most religions included more than one tenet which ran counter to Na′id thought. The Na′id couldn’t allow anyone’s provincial ideas to infringe on the rights of others.

  So they accepted all religions, with modifications, cutting out all portions that gave one segment of humanity superiority over another.

  But the Word of God would not be picked apart so easily, and the Na′id movement met its major obstacle in the power of religion and the vehemence that met any attempted change.

  Race was another sensitive point to the Na′id, but more quickly, if superficially, solved. The Na′id had never actually learned to live with and enjoy mankind’s natural variations. There were always vague suspicions that one race was smarter, stronger, healthier, better than another, and a vague terror that the suspicions might be right. So their method of eliminating prejudice against racial differences was to eliminate the racial differences—to mix all the races and make humankind into one homogeneous mass. Ethnic purity became equated with elitism, and the Na′id would not tolerate it.

  The Na′id fought their own kind to absorb them into the fold. They raped the pure races and stole the children to save them from narrow teachings. Brotherhood became assimilation, and supremacy leached in besides. Forbidden to hate one another, the Na′id channeled their hatred toward aliens. Humankind needed someone to dominate, someone on whom to blame the bloodshed, someone to be the common enemy against whom all humans could unite.

  So began and continued the great crusade to save humanity and to liberate the homeworld, Earth. The fighting had gone on for well over a hundred years.

  “Does Jerusalem stand?” Serra asked.

  That was an old question. For a long time it had been the first question asked of any space traveler upon arriving anywhere.

  The seat of the three major monotheistic religions, Jerusalem became the most important city on Earth. To the resistance it was a symbol of freedom that must never fall. The Na′id knew the value of symbols, and they were determined to have Jerusalem—for its impact on rebel morale and for its place in human history. The Mother City of Humankind, they called it.

  The Holy City lay under siege for a hundred years, and humans everywhere, who had never seen Earth and never would, whether they belonged to one of the three faiths or not, asked of anyone who might know, “Does Jerusalem stand?”

  The question was seldom heard anymore. Everyone knew the answer.

  “You do not know?” Alihahd asked Serra.

  “I had heard,” Serra said. “Layla told me. I thought it was propaganda. Is it true, then?”

  “Thirteen Earth years ago,” Alihahd said.

  The fall of Jerusalem had been a turning point in the war. The Bel had all but declared total dominion of the known galaxy in his Jerusalem Address, expecting the rest of the resistance to shrivel up and for holdouts to fall in quick succession to his unstoppable general, Shad Iliya, the White Na′id.

  Shad Iliya’s army had never lost a battle—though most of the battles Shad Iliya ever fought had been on backwater alien worlds. The general had been long kept a half-hidden embarrassment because of his un-Na′id coloring. He’d only been brought into the open as a desperate attempt to end the hundred-year siege of Jerusalem.

  Easy victory in the Holy City had made Shad Iliya’s name and assured his infamy for a good part of forever. Instantly, Shad Iliya was the greatest hero/villain in the universe next to the Bel himself. No one doubted that the rest of humanity would fall to the man who had taken Jerusalem. Na′id morale had never been higher, nor rebel prospects lower.

  Then Shad Iliya died. It was very soon after the historic victory. God/Jehovah/Allah consumed him in a pillar of fire, said the believers. The Na′id accused rebel agents of assassination. Rebels not of the faiths claimed that the Na′id got rid of the White Na′id themselves. The general’s first lieutenant suggested it had been suicide, but no one listened to him.

  The timing of his death made Shad Iliya a convenient demon by whom rebels could summon curses and frighten children. His was the face seen in the mirror in the dark. Being white helped to make him eerie. It also made his name a good insult for rebels to hurl at people who looked like Alihahd did now with his ghostly pale skin and white-golden fuzz of hair growing back on his shorn head.

  But even with the death of the great general, the fall of Jerusalem remained a devastating blow to resistance. The mere speaking of it dampened the spirit of all in Serra’s cave.

  Amerika turned on Hall and Alihahd as if they were negligent gods. “Could you not save it?” She beat the shoulder of the nearest one—Alihahd—with her little fists.

  Alihahd rested his chin on his hand and looked forlornly heavenward with his large expressive blue eyes. He was very thin from his illness. He drew in a breath as if to speak, then exhaled without saying anything. He changed expression and finally spoke one word, hard. “No.”

  “How was it taken?” Layla demanded, crouching on her hassock like a hunting animal, her hair braided back with leather thongs. Layla was the combat soldier of the group. “What strategy?”

  Alihahd answered in a dull, reciting voice, “Hand-to-hand. On the ground.”

  Amerika was confused. Hand-to-hand was the only kind of battle she had ever known. “Are not all battles so?”

  “No battles are fought hand-to-hand these days,” Harrison Hall told her. “We have much more efficient ways of doing each other in.”

  Yet superior weapons and modern techn
ology couldn’t win the war, as the Na′id discovered. Shad Iliya had revolutionized modern warfare by taking it backward—to people with guns.

  “Infantry will always win the war,” Alihahd said quietly as if thinking aloud. “But it’s a lost skill. The only way to beat a good infantry is to destroy their entire planet. Or come in with a better infantry.”

  There was a somber pause.

  The distant eerie sound of the wind brass on the eagle ridge intruded into the quiet. The arrhythmic tapping of the whip ends kept the humans inside, warning them that the winds were fast.

  “How goes the conflict now?” Layla asked.

  There had been no news at the Aerie in a long time. Even old information would be news here.

  “Not well,” Alihahd said. “But we’ve had no crushing reverses since Jerusalem.”

  “The Na′id lost several of their best leaders,” Hall added. “Besides Shad Iliya.”

  “Did you kill him?” Layla asked.

  The question startled Hall into a smile. He tilted his head and played at the two gold earrings in his one lobe. “Not I.”

  “I tried,” Alihahd said.

  Hall turned to Alihahd, his smile broader. “Did you really? I tried to kill the Bel.”

  “How is it you failed?” Layla demanded.

  Alihahd leaned his head back against the wall. “Diverse reasons. None of them good.” He put his long knobby fingers to the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes. “It is in the nature of our side to be inefficient. When the ultimate goal is disunity, you cannot have an efficient organization. Our side has a seedy lot of heroes. Myself. The Marauder.” He cracked his eyelids and stole a peek at Hall, who gave no reaction to the name. Not a lash flickered out of place. Alihahd dropped his hand from his brow and sighed. “Decisive action is rather difficult when all factions of the Resistance are at cross-purposes. For my part, I am not trying to overthrow the Na′id empire, only loosen its grip on the unwilling. I haven’t the right to decide how humankind shall or shall not be governed simply because it might be within my power to do so.”

  Hall laughed.

  Alihahd frowned. “Did I say something funny?”

  “Your flights of eloquence are precious, Captain.”

  “I am glad I keep you amused, Mr. Hall,” Alihahd said. He was, he thought, not good for much else at the moment.

  Talk of the past had made him introspective—something he tried to avoid—thinking of who he was, what he had become, and what was left to him now. He wanted to get back into space and do his work as Alihahd, the rebel runner.

  Or, now that he thought of it, did he really want to return to that life—ever? The possibility of not wanting to do so shocked him. He was conscience-bound to want it. But it was out of reach. Running from responsibility was one thing. Being thrown from it was new. He got to his feet and walked to the doorway, where he leaned against the rock jamb to gaze across to Aerieside. The rock walls shone pink in the sunset.

  He couldn’t leave. The old way of life was far away.

  A shadow fell across him. Hall had come to his side. Alihahd breathed, “Can I possibly be free at last? Can the albatross have fallen from my neck and I be truly allowed to forget?”

  Hall took his pipe from between his teeth. “You can’t hide from the past, and there’s no permanent haven. The past will come looking.”

  Alihahd turned from the door. Hall’s words were ominous.

  The opal eyes of the fox-head pipe glittered unevenly. One was cracked.

  Alihahd should have known Hall would champion the past. Those who lived for revenge never forgot.

  “What are you thinking of?” Hall asked.

  Alihahd leaned back against the rock, his eyes wide, his hands gently, too gently, tracing the grooves in the wall behind him. “My death,” he said darkly.

  Then he looked up. His face changed. His eyes became clear and his voice blithe. “I was to have been taken alive by the Na′id. I was imagining General Atta″id explaining my death to the Bel. That is all.”

  Hall gave a wicked smile that was not a smile. “I fear the honored general Atta″id will explain nothing. The honored general is recently deceased.”

  “Ah,” Alihahd said, a lament. He scowled at Hall. Marauder. That was never spoken between them. “I regret. He was a good man.”

  “You mourn your enemies, Captain?”

  “I would mourn any good human.”

  “You’ve been impersonating the Na′id so long you’re beginning to smell like one,” Hall said.

  “Not everything the Na′id believe in is wrong,” Alihahd said. “Part evil isn’t necessarily all evil. People who hate cannot see that.” He was looking squarely at Hall.

  Hall smiled and appealed to the others as his jury. “What is one to make of this? One of the Na′id’s most devastating adversaries does not hate them.”

  “Make of it what you wish,” Alihahd said wearily, fingertips to his forehead. “I don’t hate anyone. I am so very tired. . . .”

  • • •

  In the muted light before sunrise, in the hour of the eagles, a warrior-priest wearing a yellow robe stepped outside and swept away the debris that had collected in the windpockets on the path overnight. The dawn was the last of the Red Geese. The sun would move into the house of the Twins at the solstice later in the day.

  Alihahd sat in a thicket of leatherferns. His eyes were shut, his nostrils catching faint scents of dark green alpine growth, dusty rock, and dry earth in the thin air.

  Earth?

  Soil, he corrected himself.

  The last of the fog had lifted from his mind, and his thoughts ran swift and clear. The heartsick weariness that had hung on him for so long was leaving him tentatively—as if he were afraid to give it up. It had so long been a part of him that it hardly seemed natural to be without it.

  When you are who I am, there is no such thing as a safe place. He needed to keep that in mind.

  A flutter of wings very close made him open his eyes. A bird lighted on his bent knee.

  Its heavy, seed-cracking beak parted. Cheep!

  Alihahd watched it without moving, not quite sure how he felt about being perched on. The bird cocked its scaled head sideways, robin-style, to see him out of the eye on the side of its head.

  Cheep.

  “Alien,” Alihahd croaked at it like an insult.

  Cheep.

  The bird refolded its wings and shrugged its little shoulders like a man adjusting his coat.

  Alihahd guessed he’d been judged an adequate perch.

  Chireet! The bird took flight with a flurry of wings and a rattling scolding trrrrr as Amerika came bounding up the path holding up her long skirts with one hand above the grass-stained knees of her wide trousers. An empty basket swung on her arm. Burrs clung to her woven cloak that was striped in wide bands of blue and violet. She gave Alihahd a radiant smile as he sighted her. Her cheeks and nose were rosily wind-bitten.

  She told him that Ben-Tairre was inviting him on a hunting expedition with his party today.

  She took Alihahd’s hard gnarled arm in hers and led him to where the hunters were gathering. Harrison White Fox Hall was there. He had words for Alihahd’s tunic as Alihahd strode down the slope.

  “If my knees were that bony I wouldn’t wear a dress.”

  Alihahd smiled wryly. “I do not wear it for you to admire my legs, Mr. Hall. Who invited you?”

  “I invited myself,” Hall said. He’d also invited Vaslav, who stood behind him like a small pale shadow. “Should be great sport.”

  Alihahd lowered his voice. “Though I am not sure of the game here.” It was folly to take up this challenge, like following a predator into its lair. Ben-Tairre didn’t carry himself like a man making peace.

  Ben equipped Alihahd with an Itiri weapon, a beam gun called a
taeben, “warrior’s eye.” Like the never-dull tungsten-plastic swords, the taebens were products of a technology far beyond Iry’s. The taeben Alihahd was given was a ronin’s. It could be triggered by any hand, whereas the warrior-priests’ weapons were keyed to their owners’ use alone. Alihahd was told about the animals of the mountain, what to watch for, what to watch out for.

  Alihahd was going to watch his back.

  The hunting party was Ben-Tairre’s fire clan of the carnelian serpent, and five young warrior-priests of the fire clan of the opal sword. They started out on foot down the green-cloaked north slope of the mountain and descended all the way to the timberline where wind-tortured half-trees grew along the ground. Far in the distance ahead loomed the next taller peak, the Guardian.

  Alihahd shot at nothing. It was all he could do to keep up and pretend it was easy. And when the hunters stopped to reorganize, Alihahd went apart to rest behind an escarpment. There he could hang his head, bending over, hands on his knees, breathing hard.

  Harrison Hall found him there. He leaned carefully against the glittering crag, crossed one leg over the other at the ankles, and regarded Alihahd curiously. “Captain?”

  Alihahd spoke very quietly. “I am not doing well, Harry.” It was the first and last time he spoke the man’s given name.

  Hall looked down at the bowed blond head. “Unhealthy posture,” he said. “Your lungs can’t expand.”

  “If I stand up, I shall pass out,” Alihahd said.

  His watery eyes focused on the contorted timberline trees. He began to feel like one of those stunted shapes twisted along the ground. He could see the direction of the prevailing winds from the trees’ eastward flagging, but anything actually broken broke southward. It would seem there was a violence that came out of the north.