The Flaming Sword

by Breck England

  Not a word more. Nothing to explain why he had held her at the point of his gun for an hour while he tried to drive the twisting road. Nothing to account for this sudden, insane change in him. Was he angry at her for revealing to the old priest and to Fatima that he was a Jew? Impossible—he had revealed it himself, just by speaking. Had she become his hostage in case the authorities came looking for him as the accused assassin of a diplomat? Or worse…

  She tried to remember what had happened at the Sanctuary the night before. The man shooting at them—according to the radio, he had been a Palestinian diplomat, not a criminal. Not a terrorist. Was it possible that the man had been trying to stop Ari? From doing what? Was Ari now “the Unknown?” Had she unwittingly carried an enemy along with her, unpacking to him every detail she had uncovered, every idea she had?

  Of course, she hadn’t told him everything. She hadn’t because she had given her word not to, and now she was glad of it. Jean-Baptiste had been right, as always.

  She wished she could tell time by the stars. She had no idea how long she had lain asleep there on the ground—had it been hours or only minutes? Deep cold was inching up her legs, a rigor that reminded her of Eagle’s dead body in the Roman morgue.

  Soft light outlined what must be a cliff in the distance, and she realized that the moon was coming up. To keep the panic down, she focused keenly on the light, on the ring of light—on the slow revelation of the moon, on the blunted horns of the past-quarter moon, on the hypnotizing moon, willing herself into a trance, into sleep that would banish the cold and the pain.

  It was no use. Again, panic struck like a convulsion: her entire body buckled with it. She kicked and kicked at the cords, ripping the skin of her ankles but not caring about that, wrenching madly at her own wrists, choking on the gag until the fear of suffocating in her own vomit deepened the panic.

  Just then she saw a light flickering through the woods toward her.

  It was Ari. He stumbled nearer, using his GeM as a torch, weirdly illuminating the entire clearing with its blue light. He knelt and stripped the cords from her feet and then detached her hands from the tree, pulling her up and gathering her things into her bag. But her hands stayed tied. He still held the gun in one hand.

  “I’m sorry that was necessary. It’s past midnight now; a few hours’ sleep will have to do. Let’s go.”

  He nudged her up the slope toward the road. Blood poured back into her arms and legs and heated her brain. She could run now, she thought. Run into the woods where he wouldn’t find her, and when it got light break for the town. But Ari had the gun to her back.

  Strapped down in the car once again, hands tied, she stared at him and at the gun on his lap. Now that the road was all downhill and straightening, he seemed almost imperceptibly to relax. They passed a road sign indicating the direction to Baalbek. Having studied a map earlier in the day, she now knew they were going southeast through the Beqaa Valley.

  She turned to him. “Why?” she asked simply. There was no answer.

  Again, “Why?”

  Ari was silent, studying the road ahead with straining eyes. He was obviously heading for the border with Israel, which she estimated to be 150 kilometers away. Lebanon was a little country; by two or three in the morning they would be at the frontier. What was waiting for him there? A few hours before she had felt anxious for him, worried that he might be arrested, that his agency might cut him off—or schedule an accident for him. Now she didn’t even know who he was. He was alien to her, opaque, racing forward insensibly like one of the insects that weaved into the headlights of the car.

  Despite the gun, the straps around her wrists, the quiet menace seated next to her, Maryse couldn’t fight off sleep any longer. She didn’t want to sleep. She wanted to stay awake, staring at Ari until her gaze eroded him into speaking. She tried to focus on his face and saw instead through the windscreen the occasional light in the distance signifying that there was a world outside this abrupt nightmare. It was no use. Ahead of them, the headlights of the car defined a small, stifling universe of weeds and cracked road evolving into blind darkness that would not end.

  She awoke once at the sound of a passing lorry. She glimpsed signs for towns she had never heard of: Rayak, Marjayoun. But mostly she hung between sleep and anxiety, willing the night to end. At last Ari stopped the car.

  The clock on the dash read 03:04. Maryse looked around; there was nothing outside the car but black night, and she swallowed uneasily. What now?

  Ari switched on the overhead lamp and examined her face closely; his own face was hard, bleak, fearful. The fear in it startled her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked; the question startled her again. What did he mean, was she all right? She was not all right. Nothing was right.

  “Oh, I’m well enough. I’ve been held at gunpoint for hours, tied up like an animal in the woods, driven all night who knows where by a madman. Yes, I’m holding up fine.”

  He studied her face again for a moment and then closed his eyes and slumped into his seat.

  “We’re at the border,” he said. “Over that hill is the security zone. I don’t know what will happen to us there.”

  “Ari, what on earth is going on? Why are you treating me this way?

  Silence.

  “Who are you, anyway?” she cried.

  Eyes still shut, he spoke again. “I could ask you the same question.”

  “What do you mean? You know who I am.”

  “I do?” He sat up and looked squarely at her. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

  “One of whom?”

  He breathed in deeply and squeezed at his forehead with his free hand. “Do you know what it is to be surrounded by hatred all your life? To be truly despised? Spat on? To see your people murdered with enthusiasm? To live in constant fear that somebody is going to drop an atom bomb on you?

  “The Rome police—our respected colleagues—put out my death warrant today. Why?

  “The old priest tonight—that story—the lady with her tea parties who ran away from being Jewish just so she could live and have her family. Murdered in the street.

  “Our neighbors want to vaporize us and are just looking for the right excuse. And Eleni…” He broke off.

  “Eleni?” Maryse asked, more gently than she intended.

  “My wife. Dead. An Arab let fly a rock on the windscreen of her car. He was just a kid, they said.” Ari slumped again into his seat and added, quietly, “Just a kid, out for a lark, murdering Jews for sport.”

  Maryse was silent for a while, then quietly replied, “Israel has been pitiless with them.”

  At that Ari sat up, staring ahead. “Before the security zone, I need to know what’s going on. It’ll go better for you and me if I know.”

  “Know what?”

  Ari reached into his vest pocket and held up to the lamplight a small, delicate golden ring.

  His voice was dry, cracking. “It’s a woman’s ring. It’s engraved with the letters DVCEI. I found it tonight—on a ledge—where it fell from your bag.”

  Salah-ed-Din Street, Jerusalem, 0545h

  “Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar…”

  Hafiz sat up in the bed as best he could for the dawn prayer. He rested against the wall, his head pitched back so he could breathe. He gasped the words of the prayer.

  “I witness that Allah alone… is worthy of worship.

  “Hasten to the prayer…hasten to the prayer.”

  At this point prayer was survival. He saw nothing in the darkness around him, wanted to see nothing, dreaded the dawn. He longed for the pure black emptiness of night to go on forever.

  “Hasten to the triumph…hasten to the triumph.”

  He tried reasoning. Nasir had hastened to the triumph, had gone ahead to Heaven as a martyr, killed in defense of the sanctuary of Allah, blessed among th
e gardens and streams of Allah with all the martyrs. This quieted the bleeding in his soul, but still he could not get breath.

  All the sleights of hand with which Reason tricks us here

  Were tried before Moses, to no avail

  “Nasir,” he murmured in the midst of the prayer. “Nasir…”

  And then, struggling for air, struggling for dignity, “I complain of my grief and my sorrow to Allah.”

  The words brought him no release. He murmured his complaint again and again and again until the gray pallor of dawn finally suffocated him.

  He had heard of the panic of grief.

  Now it overtook him.

  It shattered his mind, choking him, the debris sprouting in his lungs, into his heart, into his fists. He struck at his chest with feral energy, willing the death of the Jews who had killed his son, his family, his people. “O faithful one,” the walls of his house cried to him, “there is a Jew behind me. Come and kill him!”

  He pounded at the plasma in his lungs, felt it bubbling like lava, felt the blood welling up in his stomach, sickening him. Then it came up in a shining stream across his bed.

  “Father, Father!” Amal had wakened and was holding him; in one hand he was grasping at a GeMphone. “I’ll call the doctor. Please don’t die. Please don’t die.”

  Abruptly, in the plea of his son, Hafiz found his soul again. The panic ebbed and he began to cry. They both cried. As Amal held him, Hafiz murmured poetry:

  Has anyone seen the boy who used to come here?

  Round-faced troublemaker…

  A photo of Nasir came slowly into sight on the wall as the dawn progressed. Hafiz found it and gazed at it, at the handsome dark face collared in a white robe, imagining Nasir in a heaven of cool springs and blue enamel domes.

  Have you heard stories about him?

  Pharaoh and the whole Egyptian world collapsed for such a Joseph.

  Father and son were silent for a long time, holding one another, eyes fixed on the portrait of Nasir, while another day started to scorch the world outside. But it was dim in this upper room of the house with the shutters closed.

  “You should sleep, Father,” Amal said.

  Hafiz shook his head and slowly raised himself back into the ritual position. The horror of loss had exhausted him. “Prayer is better than sleep,” he whispered. “Prayer is better than sleep.”

  The boy sat respectfully on the bed, almost hypnotized as the old man muttered the salat again and again. Hafiz was soon lost in prayer, eyes black-lidded, while Amal continued to gaze at his brother’s portrait in a trance of plotting and preparation. At length, when his father had finished his prayers and was breathing quietly, he spoke.

  “I cannot pray, Father.”

  “Why not?” Hafiz asked.

  “I’m so angry,” he said softly. “To think that God would allow the Jew to kill my brother.”

  Hafiz was silent for so long that Amal thought he had fallen asleep again. But then he said, “If you knew what was in the prayer, you would run to it.”

  But Amal did not reply. Hafiz listened to the boy’s mind and knew what was going on there. It was the space of silence in Heaven before the Day of Requital that was to fall upon the world. At last the boy sighed and stood up.

  “I’ll clean your bed, so you can rest a while longer.”

  Hafiz watched his son pulling the soiled sheet away, watched him moving around the dusky chamber, a thin dark boy all in white like a ghost, and saw himself making a death journey across the desert long before. The same hard fire burned in Amal that had burned in himself; only in Amal it burned hotter.

  “You should eat something,” he said at last to the boy. “And then we will go bury him.”

  “I don’t want to eat.”

  All that mattered now was this boy, Hafiz thought. Everything Nasir had prepared for, Amal must now do. From his shattered heart he would have to piece together a new design for the boy—but first he would have to save him.

  “You loved Nasir.”

  Amal looked startled at his father. “I loved him, yes.”

  The old man touched the holy book he kept by his bed. “Even in love, the devil does not lack for ideas,” he murmured. “But you must listen…listen with your heart to the message of the angel.”

  But the boy stared back at him, his eyes constricted, his lips narrowing.

  En Gedi, Israel, 0730h

  The electric bus rattled slowly to a stop, and Rachel Halevy climbed into her seat. She nodded to the driver.

  “You might have to find your own way home tonight,” he said to her. “We’re being requisitioned. They’re wanting to evacuate the coast.”

  “But not Jerusalem?”

  “No. I guess not.”

  She held her weaving bag tight between herself and the window of the bus and was lost in the landscape outside. Even this early in the morning, the sky was hot. To the east the earth lay under a glaze of salt where a flock of honey buzzards rested before resuming their annual southerly dash toward the Sinai—Rachel knew their departure was more than a month late. She searched the sky for any sign of a cloud, but there was nothing. The forces of Baal reigned.

  “No knitting today?” the driver asked, watching her in his mirror.

  “Not today,” she muttered, and grasped the bag more tightly under her arm.

  Guilt had nearly overwhelmed her. She ought to be sitting shiva now, instead of riding on the bus, but at least she did not intend to do any work. The work of this day had to be pure—nothing worldly—the simple work of calling fire from Heaven. Jules was in prison, Nathan with him. There was now no man to step forward and do it. And it needed to be done today, a day earlier than the goyim expected, the day of Israel’s redemption.

  She calculated to get off the bus at the Jaffa Gate and walk through the Old City to the Temple Mount. No one would think to stop her. She was known; her weavings were sold in the suqs, her face common at the prayer wall. Although she had never been to the Mount and it was closed because of the emergency, she had no doubt that the Lord would lead her to the top. It was time. After all, he had saved Israel by opening the door for Esther.

  Nathan had given her the device. She comprehended little about the mechanism, but knew that it could turn into gold or silver. But today it would become lightning—a flaming, consuming pillar of fire. Just speak to it, just a word and a number. Nathan had whispered it to her as he dropped the tiny box into her bag when the police came. She had understood immediately and wrapped it unobtrusively with one hand into a skein of sandalwood linen yarn.

  Now she put her hand in the bag and touched it, and began to pray silently. Speak to the Holy Spark that languishes inside it, speak to the steel and stone, speak to the Holy Spark, see it rising up to its source.

  Loosened from the yarn, it was cool in her fingers, wrapped in its small sack of icy gel, refreshingly cool. The thought of the heat and the pain seemed distant now. As she held the cold box in her palm and rubbed it against her wrist, a welcome chill trickled through her veins and comforted her. Death would come in an instant of heat, but the vapor of it would go up and spread into the blue and then come down like water on a thirsty land. And the mountain would be clear and clean of the desecration.

  Then the people of Israel, like the Maccabees, would come up and build the Lord’s house, and the sacred oil would burn again and the land be purified at last. She had thought her contribution, her tikkun olam, would be the long, finger-wrenching weaving of the priestly garments—now that she realized so much more was required of her, it seemed strangely easy. With one word, one flash of light, the destroyers of her people destroyed. The killers of her Casha. How are they become a desolation in a moment! They are wholly consumed by terrors. That her own life would also be consumed—it was so little.

  She would go to the Wall and say a prayer, the t�
��khine for death. And perhaps the t’khine for new birth as well. It was odd how she looked forward to it. The devout old people at the Wall, the ones she admired so, would be stunned. She knew the Lord would take them too, entwine them with white light and unite them with their fathers and mothers, just as the vapor of her own life would twist effortlessly up toward Him as well.

  The city was in sight now. The bus was dipping into the eastern suburbs and the brazen Dome of the Rock came into sight.

  She held herself back from spitting at the image in the window.

  A restless quiet filled her mind as the Dome grew closer. The words of Isaiah beat a rhythm in her thoughts.

  And it shall come to pass in the end of days, that the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established as the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills.

  Mizpe Ha-Yamim, Israel, 0745h

  Far below, the heat of the early morning was already raising a mantle of mist from the Sea of Galilee. Mountains, usually green but now withered white, cupped the shrinking lake. As Ari jogged, protected from the abrasive heat by the overhanging tamarisks, he caught sight of the lake. The shade wouldn’t last; the trees along the path were dying.

  He had slept only two hours but had to get out of his stifling room into the air, to breathe the coolness of the departing night. Now he needed a swim; there was no one in the pavilion, so he pulled off his clothes covered with stone dust and dropped headfirst into the clean, blue pool. After a couple of laps, he climbed out and put on one of the white terry robes that always hung on the tiled wall.

  How many times had he come here with Eleni? Once after the wedding, then many times as he began to earn some money. It was his favorite place—the spa of Mitzpe Yamim, the “many waters” where he could swim and run and climb like a boy. The man at the desk had known him when he slipped in at four in the morning. Of course, there were rooms; the tourists had canceled because of the war scare. It happened all the time. The timorous tour groups from America, he said—they thought of Israel as a holy Disneyland and didn’t like the attractions disrupted.