The Gate of Fire (56 page)

A hundred yards away, across a leveled field that usually served as a farmer's market for the city, the other Palmyrene horsemen had turned as well and were exchanging arrows with the city. Two huge brick towers rose at either side of the Jerash gate. Covered walkways crowned them and were filled with
militia
. An arrow, its flight almost spent, wobbled through the air past Odenathus and clattered on the roadway. He turned his horse and urged it up the road. Behind him, the rest of Zoë's little army was trotting across the bridge.

The gates of the city, set well back within an overhanging archway, were already closed. From previous visits to the metropolis, Odenathus knew that a long tunnel led through the walls, guarded by three heavy gates of iron and wood. All three would be closed now, though the young Palmyrene almost laughed aloud at the thought of the city cowering before his pitiful band. More arrows whickered past him and he raised a hand, sketching a glowing sign. A flutter grew in the air between him and the city ramparts. Arrows staggered in flight and dropped from the sky, sticking up in the dirt like a bed of new saplings.

"How strong is the gate?" Zoë rode up, her long hair tucked up into a braid and coiled behind her head. Like Odenathus, she wore an open-faced Legion helmet and a shirt of linked mail under a tan robe. A horse-bow jutted from her forward saddle holder, and a sheaf of arrows matched it on the other side of the four-cornered saddle. Her face was flushed, and her eyes were dark with anger.

Odenathus sighed and gestured toward the huge square towers. "Look," he said, keeping an eye out on the flanks of the three hundred-odd riders who were now regrouping at the head of the bridge. "Look and see the labor of a thousand years of the art."

Zoë glared at him, her eyes flashing. They had gone over this matter for days while they had sat in the hills above the city, watching the comings and goings of the citizens. She tossed her head and turned away, guiding her glossy black stallion with her knees. Bending her head for a moment, she leaned toward the massive gate, seemingly listening.

"Tiris, Gadama!" he shouted, his voice well used to the carrying volume that being the war leader of this band of ruffians required. "Take ten men each and circle the walls. Stay alert—they may sortie from another gate. If they do, don't forget to come back and tell me!"

Damascus was a city of a dozen gates; some small, some large. Odenathus knew that their effort here was fruitless. Zoë cried out in rage, drawing his attention. He turned in time to see her stab an angry fist at the looming gate.

The air twisted and buckled between the young woman and the gate and Odenathus flinched back, feeling the rage and hatred that howled around her. Stones in the field at her feet shattered, crumbling to dust, and the sky darkened. A wind rose up, whipping grit against the horses.

The main gate, a thirty-foot-wide expanse of iron and wood, shuddered, booming like a bass drum. For an instant, Odenathus could see the gate and the surrounding towers flare up with a tracery of dark red light. Ancient spells and wards, bound into the rock and wood and iron of the gate from the days of the first men, flickered and refracted. Zoë's stroke spattered on the ancient inter-locking vertices. Odenathus blinked, calling up the sight he had set aside, and saw the fading echo of the bolt draining away in a hundred traps and guides, flowing across the front of the gate like water spilling on a stone. "It is too strong, my Queen." His voice was quiet and soft, so that no one else could hear.

Zoë spun, her face a mask of rage. Smoky power burned behind her eyes, only barely restrained. "We will break this city." Her voice was still soft, too, but he could hear a scream building in it.

"We will not."
He urged his horse up to hers, wither to wither. He leaned close, his gray eyes matching her dark brown ones. "This is a city of almost five hundred thousand souls—we have but three hundred men, and there are only two of us with the power. Listen, you can hear the citizens jeering us."

Zoë looked over her shoulder, and it was true. On the ramparts, thousands of Syrians—men and women alike—were shouting and screaming. Stones and refuse and offal rained from the wall, though none of the Palmyrenes were close enough to strike. The young woman shuddered, leaning against the high cantle of her saddle. "Rome has betrayed them, too." Zoë's voice was thick with emotion. "Will they not rise up? Will they not stand with us against the Empire that uses us and then discards us?"

Odenathus caught her shoulder and turned her around, gently. "My Queen, it is not
their
city that Rome offered up as a sacrifice. They do not care what happens to us. Come, let us go."

Zoë shook her head, a track of tears on one cheek. "I will not slink away like a whipped cur," she snarled. "She is watching. She would find a way to bring down those gates in ruin and fire."

Odenathus' face closed up, and he forced himself to keep from turning to look back across the bridge. There, on the far side of the river, another cluster of riders guarded a wagon. In the back of the wagon, carefully tied to a chair of gold and ivory that had once graced the Garden Room in the palace, was the body of Zenobia, once Queen of Palmyra. The body was ancient and withered, horribly scarred and disfigured, but it rode in the wagon in state, clothed in gold and samite and silk. Zoë had insisted, once she had returned from her long days in the hills above the city, that the dead Queen still ruled the city. Hidden wires and rods of copper held the body together and kept it upright. Odenathus felt a chill whenever he looked upon it.

"She," Odenathus said, his mind working furiously, "would have come with a great army and a plan to get through that gate and friends within the city, waiting for her word to rise up."

Zoë looked up, her eyes bleak. She opened her mouth, a hot retort on her lips, but a cry came from the west. Odenathus turned, raising his head. Tiris and the horsemen he had sent that way were riding back in a great hurry. The last men in the column were turned in their saddles, firing their bows at something behind the curve of the city wall. Odenathus wheeled his horse and raised his voice in a shout.

"Fall back over the bridge! Lycius, send a rider to get Gadama and his men. Move!"

Without regard for the black look that Zoë gave him, Odenathus turned again and galloped over the bridge. The crowd of Palmyrene horses followed, flowing across the span in a brown, red, and black stream. Tiris and his scouts thundered after them. Zoë was last, walking her horse back, as she watched the walls in fury. No sooner had she reached the far side of the bridge than a strong troop of cavalry in Imperial red came trotting around the corner of the wall. She ground her fist into the saddle in disgust. Her quick eye counted at least a cohort of Imperial armored knights in scale and lamellar armor. If they were here, then a Legion or a goodly part of it must be hard on their heels.

The first rank of
clibanari
reined up at the other end of the bridge and drew long, shafted arrows to their curved horse-bows. Zoë turned her horse and slashed her hand down before she kicked the stallion and it bolted away to the east in a cloud of dust.

Behind her the Imperials swerved aside from the end of the bridge. The span suddenly trembled, sending dust spurting from the sides, and the roadbed jumped as the entire structure gave voice in a tremulous groan. At the top of the slope, from the river, Zoë turned, watching with angry eyes. The structure settled again, sending down a rain of rock chips and dust into the river that rolled slowly between the piers. Her face contorted in anger, and she chopped her hand down again, her will sending a shockwave of power lashing out at the stone and brick. It shook again, quivering along its full hundred-foot length, and part of the facing on the stone pier nearest the city suddenly peeled away and toppled into the river. A white spray of water roared up as the marble and travertine crashed into the stream.

But the bridge held. More Imperials were arriving every second at the far end. Some of them lifted their bows, and Zoë could see the flicker of arrows reaching high into the air. Their thaumaturges had to be close by. She goosed the stallion again, and it blew its nostrils and then sprinted away, its mane streaming in the wind.

"I will not allow it." Zoë and Odenathus were crouched near the back of the wagon that carried the throne of gold and ivory. Their faces were in shadow. Sunset was only minutes away. The rear axle had cracked, spilling the wagon into a ditch as they had attempted to cross one of the
wadi
that crisscrossed the Syrian highlands south of Damascus. It was rocky country and hard going away from the metaled Imperial roads. At first it had seemed that the Legion would not pursue them, but Odenathus was not willing to risk it. They had pressed hard for two days, seeing no pursuit, but then, at a crossroads sixty miles from the city, they had nearly blundered into an ambush. Only the fierce and sudden application of their combined power had extricated them alive from the trap.

Odenathus stood, brushing sand from his leggings. The wagon was a lost cause. "We cannot repair the axle. Those Hunnic light horse are closing hard on us. Even now they are making up ground while we argue. My Queen, we will have to leave it."

"And her?" Zoë stood, too, her thin frame trembling with anger. "Shall we cast the Queen aside, leaving her to lie in a ditch while we slink away into the night? She is our honor!"

Odenathus controlled himself, chanting a calming meditation in his mind. He had argued long and hard with his cousin. It was insane to take those few souls left to the city and launch a raid into the Imperial provinces. Better, he had argued, to rebuild the city and allow the scattered children of Palmyra to come home again. The city, he knew, was still rich with ships and warehouses and trading contacts throughout the whole of the world. If the center could be rebuilt, even enough to allow the lost to find their way home, they could—in time—restore the city. Zoë would not hear of it.

"Then," he said simply, "we will have to put her on a horse, wrapped in blankets and tied to the saddle."

Zoë had been sure that if they struck against Damascus, the Syrian populace would rise in their favor and throw out the Romans. Odenathus had simply not believed it, but Zoë's madness had infected the others, and nearly all of those who remained had pledged to follow her. His heart breaking, in the end he had agreed to follow her. They would have little chance without him and his power to back up Zoë's. Now, standing in the twilight, looking into the grief-stricken face of his cousin, he wondered if she had not bent her will and power to influence all of them. This was a mad thing.

"I will carry her," Zoë said, climbing into the wagon. "She is my burden."

Odenathus looked away, his heart sick, as the lithe figure of his cousin bent to undo the wires that held the corpse of the dead Queen to the chair. He climbed up out of the bottom of the
wadi
to his horse and swung into the saddle. The western sky was a riot of red and orange and purple. Night was coming, and the track they were following was climbing up the side of a long, rocky ridge. Somewhere beyond it, beyond this last vestige of cultivation and fertile land, rose the vast highland plain of Hauran. A bleak land, shattered by ancient agonies deep in the earth. Nothing grew there save endless fields of sharp-edged black rock. Hauran was a haunted place, a hundred-mile-wide wedge of devastation that thrust into the Syrian heartland like a spear flung from the wastelands of Arabia. It would be hard going, with little water and searing heat by day, chilling cold by night.

"But," Odenathus said to himself, motioning to the others to ride on into the night, "it has been the refuge of bandits and friendless men for centuries." He looked down into the
wadi
, his mage-sight showing his cousin struggling to pull a harness onto her back. The dead Queen had been strapped to it, the empty pits of her eyes staring up at the evening stars. Zoë shrugged the corpse onto her back and, with the help of her two guardsmen, managed to climb into her saddle.

"And we are friendless," he finished, gently nudging his mare to move. The horse flicked its ears and ambled back onto the road. Odenathus rubbed his chin, feeling the stubble growing in. He had not had a chance to shave in days. The Imperial pursuit was pressing them too hard for a proper camp. Tired men rode past him, squinting into the dark. After a moment, Zoë followed, avoiding his glance. The dead Queen bobbed at her back, withered hands crossed over her breasts, legs pulled up to her chest and bound in place with wire.

When the last man had passed, Odenathus turned in behind the column and muttered something under his breath. A tiny mote of light, no more than the gleam of a firefly, drifted away from him and skipped forward along the line of men and horses. When it reached the front of the column, it brightened and cast a pale glow over the desert before them.

Following the witch-light, the band of men pressed on into the night. Somewhere ahead the badlands of Hauran were waiting, and beyond them the jagged spirit-haunted peaks of Trachontis.

"Whoa!" Maxian stood from the seat of the big wagon and waved behind him at the others, signaling a stop. Sitting beside him on the high driver's seat of the
carruca
, Krista leaned forward and looked out from under the canopy she had rigged over the seats. The little caravan—three wagons filled with boxes and crates made of pine boards, their bedding, food in wicker hampers, bags of fruit, amphorae of wine in wooden carriers—had spent the afternoon in a long, slow climb up the side of the mountain. Now they had reached some kind of crossroads, and Krista shaded her eyes against the sun, making out a plinth of weatherworn gray stone. There were markings and arrows chiseled into its surface, showing the distances in miles to the nearest towns, to Rome, and to the provincial seat at Neapolis.

The Prince sat back down and flipped the reins. The four mules hitched to the front of the wagon flicked their ears irritably but then began clopping forward. With their grudging assistance, Maxian pulled the
carruca
off to the side of the road. Krista fanned herself with a cotton spring-fan dyed with small scenes of men and women picking grapes. She had purchased it for a copper from a vendor in the last town.