Jerusalem Fire

by R. M. Meluch

  Alihahd ran away.

  • • •

  He was alone on the windy mountainside, off any track, away from the noise, when finally he stopped.

  He hung over a boulder, panting. He groped along the rocks to a rising bank to hold himself on his feet. He’d taken a gash on his shin through his trousers. He’d run away in the dark as if pursued by wolves.

  The predator that appeared in his tracks was Harrison Hall, stepping long in leisurely pursuit over the rising ground. Layla trotted after him, two steps to Hall’s every one. Layla’s impish face was soft in concern and genuine confusion. “What happened? Did it make you sick?”

  Alihahd took a few stumbling steps along the embankment, still trying to get away, but they followed him. Hall was grinning. Other people admired Alihahd’s horror of violence.

  But was it violence that horrified?

  Hall moved in. He leaned his hand on the rocks by Alihahd’s head. Alihahd turned his face away, one hand holding onto the rocks for balance, one arm circling his stomach.

  “No,” Hall said slowly and smiled. “That kind of moralistic outrage doesn’t come from one who’s never known carnage.”

  Alihahd turned completely around, hugging the rocks, his forehead against stone. Hall leaned in closer, so Alihahd felt his breath on his cheek as Hall spoke. “Captain, you are much too civilized.”

  Alihahd moaned.

  Hall seized his arms and forced him around to face him.

  “Leave him alone!” Layla cried.

  “Everyone knows that gentleness is the mark of a five-star sadist.”

  Alihahd lunged free and fled over the rocks, cross-cutting all the twisting paths, making straight for the Aerie. Hall’s heavy steps behind him made him run faster.

  He came over the last rise to the Aerie’s amphitheater, and ran along the Ledge Path to the bridge. Even in his panic he had to stop and begin his traversal carefully with his right foot. He needed to measure and count in shaking breaths twelve steps across—with Hall hounding his tracks, sounding a false count in his ear.

  “One, two, three, four—”

  “Thirteen, fourteen, five, six, seven—”

  Was that ten or eleven? Alihahd became jittery because he wasn’t sure now. Or was that twelve? It had to be an even number. Had to be, because he was on his left foot, but he hadn’t reached the end of the bridge. He was really too close for it to be ten. This was wrong. It was all wrong. There was a galloping in his stomach. His hands trembled on the guide ropes.

  He ran to the other side. “Eleven, twelve.”

  Hall pursued him into the blackness of his orderly cave.

  Hall paused just inside, fists on his hips. He was in no hurry. He towered, a menacing blot in the doorway, until his eyes adjusted. Enough starshine spilled through the opening to allow him to see the quarry he’d run to ground cowering within. He could hear the ragged breathing.

  “You’ve had blood in your mouth, Captain. And the horror is that it did not horrify.”

  A sound like a swallowed sob choked from the dark. Alihahd tried to rush past Hall to the door, but Hall was everywhere in his path. “Tell me not. Tell me not. Look me in the eyes and tell me not.” He backed Alihahd up against the wall, making a cage of his arms around Alihahd’s head so Alihahd could look nowhere but at Hall. Silver-blue light from the glowing Milky Way washed all color from his face and paled his eyes, which were wide with echoes of horror.

  It hadn’t even been true savagery he’d run from. In the Itiri’s barbaric celebration there was no pain, no fear, not even terror of a stupid animal. Nothing was tortured, nothing killed. The expression of viciousness was all without true pain. Alihahd ran from phantoms—the mere illusion of savagery. Brutality was not what was actually there. It was what Alihahd saw. He had brought it with him.

  Hall had seen a woman splitting a melon. Wide, glassy blue eyes saw something else.

  Hall touched his chin lest he look away. “Tell me not.”

  The eyes lowered and closed. Thin blond lashes quivered, then lifted again as Alihahd’s face relaxed and left off its tense trembling. The face smoothed, iced over hard, and the eyes fully opened cold, cold, cold. His demeanor was controlled, unnatural, terrifying. For a moment, even Hall was touched by dread of what he had uncovered.

  Resonant voice came from great depth and grew in power. “And so, Mr. Hall, what if you are right?”

  “I am,” Hall said, absolutely certain. When one set out to corner the devil, one had best be prepared for when he turns around. “You tell me what of it.”

  Alihahd’s face transformed again to a third, unexpected guise, one that was inaccessible, unruffled, and sly. Hall was surprised. Alihahd was many things, but of all traits glimpsed, hinted at, or suspected, cunning was nowhere among them. Alihahd gave a very cool approximation of a smile as if to say this game was over and all that had happened up till this moment was a charade. “I think you are mistaken this time.” He ducked under Hall’s arm and walked away.

  The perplexed hunter pulled in his carefully laid snares and looked for tears that were not there, and he wondered how his prey could possibly have slipped out. Hall sat on the balustrade of the arcade, one foot up, his back against a pillar, and tugged at his mustache.

  Ranga with flowers in their red hair were dancing to a gentler music here on Havenside. Simpleminded beings, they had no demons to purge this new year. A ranga woman running through the arcade paused to hug Hall, and ran on. She was hugging everyone.

  Across the abyss, Hall spied the lonely figure of Arilla dressed in brown. The fire clan of the carnelian serpent had nothing to celebrate.

  A flying bug buzzed at Hall’s face, and he snatched at it. He felt nothing in his closed fist, though he could have sworn he’d caught it. Slowly he uncurled his fingers to look. The bug flew out.

  I had him. Hall clicked his tongue against his teeth. Then realization dawned, and he slammed one fist into his opposite palm. I had him.

  He’d been made to believe his hand was empty, and he’d let his quarry go.

  I’ll be damned.

  Hall swung his leg down from the balustrade and stood up. He’d been right. He had glimpsed Alihahd’s true face, the one that belonged to his name.

  So mild, so civilized, compassionate to a fault, Alihahd could be nothing but a savage, sickened and afraid of his own soul.

  The Itiri warrior-priests were not above recognizing themselves and acting out their own barbaric roots. No species sprang perfect from the head of a god. The Itiri unleashed their barbarism on melons. They could face their baser nature. They had to. They knew what could happen when nature was refused. Locked inside, it could only be held for a time. And then the breaking was unspeakable.

  So where had Alihahd met his secret soul and begun to run from it? Had it been something seen or something done? It must be that he’d done something. Alihahd was too contrite to have been a mere witness to horror.

  But Alihahd said he’d never fought Na′id. He said he’d run from Jerusalem.

  It was Jerusalem, then, that turned him. Sacred duty uncovered what was unholy in him and he ran.

  Then which of the three Gods had he deserted? He didn’t seem overly attached to any one of them. At first, Hall had been convinced he was a Jew. He was circumcised at least, and he had the attitude of a martyr. But now Hall was thinking Alihahd had to be a Christian. He was too forgiving to be a Jew, too indefinite to be a Muslim. And he had the self-destructive, ox-in-yoke, virtuous servitude of a repentant Christian sinner. He had to be a Christian.

  Hall wanted him to be a Christian.

  Because there was something else at Jerusalem he could be.

  17. Enemies

  ALIHAHD WALKED THE LEDGE PATH. Thawing rocks popped and snapped around him. Anything above freezing felt mild now, and Alihahd was back to wearing his tunic
again. He could see white, pink, and lavender blossoms on the trees in the valley, and a green-yellow haze of new leaves on all the branches. Spring had come.

  He viewed it darkly. His universe was closing in.

  Something nudged at his heels. He glanced down. His heart skipped in the momentary shock of the unexpected—a big dark shape, furry and alive. In the following instant, he realized what it was and he relaxed into disgust. It was a marlq.

  The marlqai had been living on the mountain since before Alihahd had come. They were alien guests of the Itiri, like Alihahd himself. But he and the marlqai had never crossed paths before this. They had conspicuously avoided each other. Alihahd didn’t care to be near the marlqai, and the marlqai had good reason to keep their distance from humans.

  Superficially, the marlqai looked like big rabbits. The size of a small sow, they had long ears, round, soft eyes, and brown fur. Their ungainly paws were for locomotion only. A cluster of slender, hairless, prehensile tentacles were usually kept hidden in a furry protective pouch in their chests. Those emerged in a wormy mass to perform delicate work, such as writing or navigating starships. The marlqai had a starship on world, but they didn’t use it to leave. They preferred to remain as guests of the Aerie. Freeloaders, some would call them.

  The marlq at Alihahd’s heels sniffed him, muttering to itself in the marlqine speech of clicks and whirrs.

  Scents were important to the creatures. They had a highly developed sense of smell and could impart the sensation to other marlqai through their tentacles with perfect accuracy, bypassing the inadequate medium of speech.

  The rabbity nose quivered and snuffled over Alihahd’s leg. Alihahd ignored it, hoping it would go away.

  Alihahd had never liked the marlqai—had, in fact, hated them. He felt nothing now but distaste and mistrust. They were belligerent, parasitic beasts, repulsive to him for their incongruous size and their unsightly tentacles. There was some obscenity in a rabbit that size, and in the naked tentacles coming out of a furred thing so that it looked to be infested with alien worms eating out its chest.

  The sapient beings were fellow refugees from Na′id persecution. The human rebel runner Alihahd felt no kinship with them. He regarded the Na′id aggression against the marlqai the same way the Na′id did: as rodent control.

  The marlqai had no homeworld anymore. The Na′id had eradicated them from the marlqine homeworld and driven them to near extinction during another of the undefeated General Shad Iliya’s campaigns. The marlqai who managed to escape the purge of their native planet had quickly replenished their numbers in their spaceships—like rats—and spread like a plague to other worlds. There were at least two dozen of them now on the mountain, most of those born here.

  Suddenly, an angry drumming in quick tattoo came, along with pressure like a vise closing around Alihahd’s leg, the clacking of tooth on bone and a stab of pain. Alihahd looked down, nauseated more by the sight than the pain, which hadn’t yet fully penetrated through his shock. The beast had wound its tentacles around his leg and was shredding his flesh with its teeth, sounding its loud, furious rattle, red froth foaming from its mouth.

  All that blood was his.

  Alihahd tried to shake the marlq off, but its mass was at least half his own, and everything weighed heavily on this planet. The monster held fast.

  Alihahd bent over and pulled, hopped, staggered to the very edge of the Ledge Path, using his hands on the ground to help him, dragging the marlq with him. At the brink, he dropped to his left knee, gripped a granite outcrop with both hands—distantly aware of boundless depth and the far-below rush of wind in a great space—and with a grunt, he heaved his right leg and the grotesque thing over the edge.

  Granite bit his palms, his hold slipping with the downward yank of the marlq’s weight. The creature held on, dangling into the chasm, still whirring and drumming and chewing. It coughed red bubbles.

  Alihahd clawed the rock for a better grip, and he jerked his leg to kick the marlq loose. The tentacles tightened.

  Rediscovering the strength of an old fury, Alihahd held tight to the rock spur, swung his leg out, and brought it back in hard. He heard the dull, sick crack of the creature’s skull on stone, and he swung out again, his muscles searing, sweat streaming down his sides and beading on his contorted face, his lips pulled back into an agonized snarl, and he beat the thing’s head on the stone, again and again.

  Finally the drumming stopped. The tentacles loosened. The creature slipped from his bloody leg and dropped into the abyss.

  Alihahd collapsed, hugging the granite boulder. His tunic stuck to his sides. Sweat trickled down his scalp under his hair. His leg was an unfocused mass of pain. Then came other marlqai galloping over the summit of Havenside in answer to their comrade’s drumming. They stopped at the crest and looked for their relative. They found only blood and Alihahd. They charged down the path, their eyes all arage, seeing murder.

  Alihahd lifted himself onto his left leg, staggered, stumbled, then finally crawled to the bridge in swimming pain.

  As the angry marlqai reached the Ledge Path with bared teeth, Alihahd’s shuddery hands grasped the bridgehook, and he wheeled, rising, throwing his back against a pillar of the arcade, holding the metal barbs out toward the charging animals.

  The marlqai bunched to a halt five paces away, noses twitching, eyes wary and malevolent, watching Alihahd and the hook. Muscles beneath their soft brown pelts tensed, untensed. Paws inched forward. They looked as if they might rush him. They smelled weakness. The Earthman looked easy.

  Suddenly Alihahd brandished the hook. They flinched. Then they lowered their heads and inched their feet forward.

  They were going to try it anyway.

  In an instant, an Itiri warrior-priest was standing between them, having leaped down from the higher level to block the attack. The warrior waved the marlqai away with wide sweeps of both his arms. The marlqai shuffled back haltingly before him, furtively shifting their heads to either side, looking for a chance to get around him. One tried, and the warrior caught it by the ears and backed it up with the others, not roughly.

  Still gripping the hook in one hand, Alihahd bent down and tugged out a long splinter of bone from his shin. He swayed, dropped the hook, caught himself against the pillar, and slid down, fingers tripping over the stone, his eyes darkening.

  Then he was lifted atop firm shoulders—he smelled Hall.

  His head hanging upside down, Alihahd was carried across the bridge that swayed in the wind. The crevasse swirled askew in his wavering vision. A thin smear of blood on the rock where Alihahd had beaten the marlq’s head wove into view, swam out of view. The world was spinning, the mile-deep abyss at the vortex. He started to retch.

  A comfortingly familiar voice growled, and he felt its rumbling vibration beneath him. “You vomit on me, Captain, and I’ll drop you.” It was Hall.

  Alihahd spit up, gagged on it. Hall did not drop him.

  At the end of the endless, upside-down journey, Alihahd was laid down in the cave of the physician, who began to tap numbing needles into his pressure points to deaden the pain, but Alihahd saved him the trouble by losing consciousness.

  When Alihahd woke, he didn’t know where he was. He had seen this cave before, but he didn’t know it now. He heard Roniva’s voice somewhere outside, but he didn’t know her. He didn’t know what planet he was on. There was pain in his leg. He didn’t know what it was from.

  He rose to rest on his elbows, his head clearing. From the distance he heard marlqai drumming in response to something Roniva was saying. He remembered.

  He looked down at his throbbing leg. There were stitches in it. Stitches. They had sewn him shut.

  There are stitches in my leg!

  It had never occurred to him to wonder how primitives closed a wound without pseudo-skin and adhesives. The stitches struck him as absurd. Then funny. It was
the natural sequence to being attacked by a giant bunny-rabbit.

  His leg hurt to look at. It was discolored purple-red and splashed with the orange stain of a healing herb. Some flesh was missing from his calf, and his shinbone dipped in where pieces had splintered off. His ravaged skin, held shut with zipper-tracks of sutures, was puffed up with outrage but not infection.

  He still wore one boot. The other lay on the floor, shredded and caked with brown blood.

  Alihahd sat up, swung his legs over the side of the cot, and rose to stand on his left foot, the ball of his bare right foot resting on the cold stone floor without weight on it. The deepest wound in his calf oozed a little. His head throbbed—or perhaps it was only echoes from his leg. Everything felt veiled in a haze of pain.

  His mouth was dry and coated with a film. His throat burned acidic. He hopped to a clay storage jug filled with cool water and drank. Then he hobbled outside to the open terrace of the second level of Aerieside. The cold air cleared his senses and swept away some of the misty ache.

  He heard Roniva’s voice again.

  Moving along the narrow path of enameled cobbles at a painful hop, he followed the sound, steadying himself with both hands on the mountain’s south face.

  He came to where the path turned in to the natural amphitheater between the twin crests, and he saw the marlqai, across the fissure on the first level of Havenside, being asked to leave.

  Roniva was bedecked head to foot in gold, and she blazed in the meager sunlight. Her hair was twisted into an intricate crown. A cheela held her familiar, and two other warriors stood with her.