The Gate of fire ooe-2

by Thomas Harlan

  The young woman snarled unconsciously, her narrow, elegant face transformed by pure unadulterated hatred. Rome will pay, she vowed in her heart, Pay for each murder they committed. Pay for each child's skull that lines the city streets. Then I will find this dark man, and he, too, will pay…

  Weeks of unceasing labor had not even recovered all of the bodies from the ruin of the city. Even burying them in a series of mass graves would be fruitless. The sand would cover the city soon enough, and bury everything.

  Zoe stood, brushing dust and grit from her bare legs. She bent down and picked up the waterskin, tying it back to her leather harness. There was something barely visible in the deep shadow under the two monoliths; some edge of worked stone. It bore investigation.

  – |"All together, now, heave!" Odenathus, stripped to the waist, his muscular frame glistening with sweat, put his shoulder into the pulley rope. Around him, a dozen men did the same, pulling with all their might. Others crowded around the sides of the obelisk, hands on guide ropes. Once it had stood in the square that backed onto the theater and the edge of the spring. Now it had fallen, its base cracked open by the Persians with chisels and wooden splitting stakes, and lay across the old stairway that led down into the cisterns. "Heave!"

  The ropes pulled tight, and Odenathus and his men dug in, pulling with all their might. Slowly the obelisk began to turn, and the men beside it were quick to slide rollers hewn from the few unburned logs found in the city underneath the massive sandstone cylinder. The obelisk groaned and threatened to roll back, but others had jammed stakes in behind it.

  "Heave!"

  The cylinder turned over, slow and ponderous, but it caught on the rollers and suddenly jumped ahead. Men scattered in all directions, and Odenathus felt the rope over his shoulder go slack. He turned, eyes wide. The pillar was rolling toward him, a massive, suddenly mobile block of stone weighing a dozen tons. Scattered bricks and broken statuary shattered to pale dust under it. Odenathus leapt aside, his blood afire with shock, and threw himself into a side street. The cylinder bounced past and slammed into the side of a half-burned storefront. The facing of the building collapsed with a loud boom and showered the street with dust and fragments of travertine facing and ground brick.

  Odenathus rolled up, coughing in the thick haze of rock dust, and looked around. "Anyone hurt? Hello?"

  The others called back, their voices harsh with grit. Everyone seemed to have survived.

  "Well," a querulous voice came from behind him, "you seem to have cleared the stairwell."

  Odenathus made a half smile-half grimace and stood up, brushing debris from his pantaloons. He had added a fine new scrape and a thin cut along his arm to the pale scars that already ornamented his chest. "That we did, mater. How go things in the kitchens?"

  "Poorly," his mother said, taking him by the arm. She led him a little bit away, where the workers marveling at the destruction caused by the runaway obelisk could not hear her. Her old face, tired and framed by white curls, was solemn. He looked away from her blind eyes, unable to bear the sight.

  "We're fast running out of food, my son. There just isn't enough left in the stores we've excavated to feed everyone for more than a few weeks. The gardens outside the city were all stripped bare by the Persians, and no caravans will come soon. Every merchant from Edessa to Aelana knows that the city has been destroyed."

  Odenathus frowned, considering the options. They did not seem good. He wanted, in his heart, to start anew here-to raise up a whole new city from the ashes of the old-but so many things stood against them. The matter of water was almost resolved. During the siege Persian engineers had cut the aqueducts that ran into the city from the hills in the west, but those catchments had been added to support a city of fifty thousand people. Now there were perhaps six hundred in the city. A few more arrived each week, travelers who had been away during the siege, or expatriates who had forced themselves to return one last time to their homes. In the beginning, he knew, the city had risen from less-no more than a wandering band of desert tribesmen had laid the first stone-but they had flocks of sheep and goats and camels and were used to living on very little.

  He looked around; seeing the scarred faces of the men at his command, the thin, pinched look on the few children who were watching the business of the day from the shoulders of a nearby colossus, now fallen into the street with every other statue or idol in the city. These people were born and bred to live in a modern Roman city, with running water and a market and specialized crafts that allowed one man to purchase bread from another. All of those things were gone. If they were to remain, they would have to become nomads again, if only to gather the food they needed to live.

  "Do we have any money?"

  Ara laughed, putting a wizened hand to her mouth. "Oh, my son, we have plenty of good red gold. The Persians were in haste when they left, and more than one hoard of coin was left unmolested. Our own fortune, that won by your father with his caravans and ships and kegs of spices, is untouched. If there was anyone to buy from, we could buy aplenty. But no one comes here anymore-all that is dead and gone now."

  "We could," he said in his stubborn way, "send a party to Damascus to buy food, livestock, tools. All the things we need here. It will be very difficult, but we can remain. The city will rise again, bit by bit."

  Ara took her son's face in her hands, her fingers light, feeling the noble nose and the high cheekbones. She felt the close-cropped shape of his hair and the firm muscle along his jaw.

  "In this darkness," she said, her voice sad, "you sound so much like your father. If you will it, all these people of the city will remain, but it will be very hard for them. It will be harder for the children; so many of them cannot sleep even now, thinking that the dark one will return. This place is haunted, my son, but perhaps you can make it live again."

  Odenathus took his mother's hands and clasped them to his chest. "Mater, the city is our life, our home, the reason we are here. If we go away-if we took the gold and jewels that are hidden and passed on to some other town, some other city, we would be strangers. Outsiders, never feeling at ease. If we are to survive as a people, if our tribe will sustain, we must remain here."

  "Perhaps," Ara said, freeing her hands from her son's strong grip. "But what thinks the Queen of this?"

  – |Zoe ran her hand over a smooth surface; granite hewn from the mountains of Syria and carried sixty or seventy leagues to this hidden canyon, polished smooth and graven with long lines of the old script of the city. A door stood in the hidden space under the twin boulders, sheltered by their vast red sandstone bulk. Statues emerged from the rock face, flanking the door, statues of the first kings of the city. Their empty eyes stared out at the desert, watching the wasteland. Zoe was a tiny figure between them, crouching at the door of stone. Her fingers traced the worn lines of script, racking her brain in an attempt to decipher the words.

  Crows circled high above, cawing listlessly in the hot, still air.

  Zoe stood; at the bottom of the stone door the thirty-fifth line was freshly carved, and not in the old tongue. Instead, in the common Latin, it said ZENOBIA V SEPTIMA, QUEEN OF PALMYRA. Zoe's face blanched, becoming almost white. Until this moment, seeing her aunt's grave marker, she had not truly believed that the fiery, dark-haired woman of her memory was dead. But even here, in the hot air, feeling the ruin of her city at her back, Zoe did not cry. Indeed, no tear escaped her eyes, though they looked upon an abyss of pain. She staggered, and fell against the door. The stone, cool to the touch, pressed against her cheek, and her own voice cried out in her mind: While the Queen stands, so stands the city.

  Face grim, she pushed herself away from the slab and stood back. She folded her hands, closed her eyes, and sought a calming meditation. The craftsmen who had laid the door of stone had wrought it cunningly. It sat in a groove cut from the living rock, a slot a foot or more deep that held the weight of the stone and fixed it closed. Around the edges were splintered markings where grave robbers
had tried to penetrate the slab, but they had failed.

  It weighed a ton or more. It was impossible for one young woman, no matter the depth of her pain, to lever it out. Twenty men, working under the eye of a master half insane with grief, had taken five days to move it before. Two had died in the effort, but the scarred chieftain had counted that good luck, that servants would join the dead queen in her journey into the afterlife. Their bodies, wrapped in grave cloths, had gone into the tomb with her.

  The craftsmen and tomb architects had commissioned spells, too, to be laid upon the door, to keep away the unwary and ensure the long, peaceful sleep of the inhabitants of the royal tomb. Those wizards who had laid them had done passable work, but they had not put their heart in it.

  Zoe raised her left hand, and thunder muttered in the clear blue sky. She raised her right hand, and fire spilled from her eyes and swirled around her feet. The slab creaked and moved, rattling with a delicate sound in its frame of polished sandstone. Sweat seeped from her brow, and Zoe lifted, raising up her hands, gripping an image of the door of stone. A ton and a half of granite rose, inch by inch, grinding out of its frame, and then, as Zoe cried out in anger and rage, flew over her head.

  In the canyon below, the old man, sitting on the stone at the base of the cliff, leapt up at the dreadful shout, and then stared in awe as the granite door sailed across the width of the canyon to smash in unrestrained fury against the opposite cliff. Dust vomited out, making a great cloud that drifted across the canyon, and then the cracking boom of the impact reverberated from the walls. Out of the dust cloud, the door, broken into three great pieces, plummeted to the canyon floor, bouncing once and then shattering into a million fragments. The stricken cliff, cracked by the blow, suddenly shaled away from the ridge at its back, and-with a thunderous roar-plunged down into the streambed. Dust billowed up, and tiny fragments of stone ricocheted off the cliff behind the old man. He ducked down and cowered at the base of the waterfall, hiding his head under his robe.

  On the lip of the cliff, Zoe turned, a glad, light feeling growing in her chest, and entered the tomb of her ancestors.

  – |Odenathus sat, dressed in a coat of scale mail the scavengers had dragged from the wreck of one of the great houses, a spear across his legs, at the gate of the city. The twin towers, once faced with slabs of granite, lay scattered behind him. Only the arch of the gate remained, though the doors themselves had not been found. Two of the men who had been working with him to reopen the cistern sat nearby. They stood their watch at sunset, watching the sun fall beyond the hills, turning the sky a brilliant orange gold. All three were exhausted from a long day of hauling stone and clearing the stairs. They would do the same the next day as well, and the one after that. Even repairing the cistern and the pipes to the underground baths near the old library would take weeks of unremitting effort.

  The young man sat with his back to a remaining fragment of the old wall of the city, feeling the chill of evening grow, even while the stone still yielded up the warmth it had trapped throughout the day. When first he and Zoe had come to the city, a tablet of black stone had stood above the gate, driven into the remaining wall with iron pins. Old writing, predating even that which had been used by the founders of the city, had covered it. Odenathus did not know that tongue-it was lost to all but a few-but the evil chill that radiated from that tablet had told him all he needed to know.

  He had cast it down, wrenching it from the wall with his power, and smashing it into dust.

  Now he sat, his eyes closed against the slanting last rays of the sun, and thought upon the ruin of his city.

  Something moved, out on the western plain. Two tiny figures trudging along the Damascus road, passing now between two of the ancient tower tombs that dotted the rocky valley. One was bent under a great weight. Odenathus stood up and ground the butt of the spear against the rock of the gateway.

  "The Queen approaches," he said quietly, for he discerned the flicker-bright aura of Zoe even at this distance. "You men go into the city and inform my mother. I will bring the Queen to her house as soon as she arrives."

  The two men, a stonemason and a carpenter by trade, stood, yawning, and went through the gate, their spears over their shoulders. Odenathus sat again, his legs were too tired to waste time standing around if he could sit instead.

  The figures drew closer, step by step, even as night fell.

  – |"My son? Who is here?" Ara struggled to rise from the chair that had been set for her in the tent. This place had once been the garden at the rear of her noble house; a place of refined parties and long afternoon conversations with close friends. Now, with the house itself in ruin, a jagged forest of pillars and cracked walls, it was the only safe place to set a bedu tent. The old matriarch, now wearing a strip of salvaged cotton across her eyes, groped by the side of the chair for the javelin that served as her cane and finding-stick.

  "I am here," Odenathus answered in a hollow voice, ducking under the flap of the tent. "Zoe is with me."

  The young woman, now Queen of the dead city, followed, grunting, as she turned sideways to enter the tent. Reverently she settled to the ground and shrugged the burden off her back. Ara settled back in her chair, turning her face to one side. Odenathus sat heavily in one of the other chairs and held his head in his hands.

  "My lady," Ara ventured after a moment of silence had stretched in the tent, "what have you brought with you, such a heavy thing to make your breath so harsh?"

  "Auntie," Zoe said gravely, standing and making a formal bow, "I have returned the Queen to the city, as is right."

  "The Queen?" Ara was puzzled, and she settled her grip on the spear. "You are the Queen, my dear."

  "No," Zoe said in a grave voice. "I have brought the true Queen home. I carried her on my back from where she lay. Now that she is here, we may ride against our enemies. She will lead us."

  "Who is here?" Ara stood now, her face filled with fear. Her knuckles were white on the spear. "What have you done?"

  "Zenobia is here, Auntie." Zoe's voice was very calm. She leaned down and, grunting a little at the weight of the corpse, dragged it up into a chair. "Your cousin sits before you. Listen, you can hear her, if it is quiet and you empty your mind. Do you hear her? I do."

  Zenobia's corpse, horribly mutilated, her head stitched back to her withered body with crude leather straps, lay askew in the chair. The rags of a funeral sheet were still wound around her, but the cracked skin that still clung to her body had not yet yielded to corruption. Her long dark hair, once the glory of the city, was thin and patchy. Much of it had been gnawed away by something that crept with cold eyes in the tunnels under the mountain. The beautiful face was shrunken and creased with dreadful scars. The eyesockets were chipped where crows and ravens had pecked.

  Zoe stood over the body, her face seemingly lit by an inner light. Her voice was sure and clear. "She says-and I hear her oh so clearly-that we must ride against the betrayer, Rome. That old gray empire must be torn down in fire and storm, even as our dear city fell to its treachery. The Queen calls for her horse-where is Bucephalus? Odenathus!"

  Odenathus looked up, his face streaked with tears. His cousin stared back at him, her eyes hard as steel.

  "Odenathus, where is the Queen's horse? She must ride in the morning. We march upon Damascus as soon as light touches the hills."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Chalcedon, on the Asian Shore of Propontis

  Wind gusted out of the north, bringing the briny smell of the sea and ruffling Dwyrin's hair. He stopped at the side of the road, stepping off of the broad metaled surface, out of the way of the wagons and marching blocks of men who clogged it. He adjusted his right hand on the walking stick he had fashioned from an oak branch. That had been in Galatia, as the army had crossed the vast interior plain at the heart of the Empire. Now it was carved with interlocking dogs, their long tongues hanging out. It hadn't taken much, just a little time by the fire each night, before he fell asleep, exhaust
ed from the day's exertions.

  He did not mark it, but even the long days, marching thirty miles at a crack, no longer exhausted him. Like the twenty-year veterans, he had become used to the rhythm of the army. They rose, broke down the camp, digging up the palisade of stakes that had been erected the night before, filling in the latrine pits, and covering the cook's fires. Wagons were loaded, and the auxiliary infantry and the mercenaries rousted out of their unkempt sprawl. Then, with the full sun risen, they marched through the day. Luckily, from the Cilician gates to Propontis, it was all on good, hard-surfaced road. Towns and mountains and vast lakes passed by, making a slow-flowing montage of temples; barren, sheep-ravaged hillsides; and endless miles of orchard.

  It had gone faster than Dwyrin had expected, and the funk that had clung to him in Antioch had been burned away by the Anatolian sun and the relentlessness of the daily routine. Even the frigid reserve of the older thaumaturges had failed to hold back his spirits. The weather had been good, too, and those rains that had gusted out of the north and east had not turned the land to mud. Dwyrin missed the gray mist and rain of his homeland, but he did not miss mud! No, not after months of slogging through it in Mesopotamia!

  Crossing the old heartland of the Empire had been sobering, too, to see the marks of war that had come with the depredations of the Persian armies. Burned-out temples and ruined fortresses dotted the land, along with empty houses and abandoned villas. More than once the Legion outriders had flushed out bands of escaped slaves or other brigands in the hills as they had passed.

  Dwyrin had heard that the Emperor had planned to make a great procession out of the journey, but there were odd rumors in the camp that Heraclius had become ill. In any case, he had not been seen riding one of his matching bay stallions in a long time. Still, the standard of the Imperial House rode at the front of the army, glittering and gold in a special wagon.