The Gate of Fire (59 page)

Maxian put his head in his hands and concentrated. Blue fire seeped from between his fingers and washed over his face for a moment. When he stood up, his stubble was gone and the hangover was a memory. He smiled at the old Roman, his great, good humor of the day before restored. There was a great deal of work to be done, and he was eager to be about it.

"I have an excellent place to put the Engine, my friend."

Deep in discussion with Gaius Julius, the Prince bustled out of the room and clattered down the stairs. A scrap of scraped parchment that had been laid on the pillow by his head was lost in the tangle of blankets.

A
carruca
with white-painted sides and a cover of faded blue cloth rolled slowly north along the Imperial road that followed the line of the coast. Four oxen plodded along in front of it, their driver nodding in the midday heat on the high seat at the front of the vehicle. He was a grizzled fellow, a slave with a white beard and a balding pate. A conical hat of straw was perched on his head, but his shoulders were bare and burned red by the sun. Beside him, exhausted from the long hike down the western slope of the mountain, dozed a young woman with a red wicker basket in her lap. With the steady, even pace of the oxen, they would reach the coastal town of Herculaneum by lunch time. The slave was in no hurry. His cargo of wine tuns wasn't going to spoil if he was a little late, and bouncing it over the graveled road might even ruin the vintage. The patricians who thronged the streets of the port during the summer liked their wine, and it meant a pretty sesterces to his master for the grape to be delivered in full flavor.

Krista clutched the basket to her chest, her eyes slitted against the sun off the ocean. It was bright and muggy. The headache that had nearly driven her to the ground during her nighttime journey down the mountain had begun to ease, receding slowly like the tide on a shallow shore. The amulet burned against her chest, a hot point on her skin. She dared not take it off yet.
I will kill the Prince and his servants
, she chanted to herself in the safety of her mind.
I will ruin his plan.

With each recitation, the headache eased and the flickering black glow that came and went at the edge of her vision faded a little more. She shivered, feeling cold creeping along her bones. Even the hot sun did not drive it out. Only one thing would.

I will kill the Prince. He will fail. He will be destroyed.

The wagon rolled north, great wooden wheels rattling on the road.

I will kill him.

Black smoke crawled into the upper air, a curling pillar rising slowly over the town. Mohammed strode down a narrow street, the gravel and stones crunching under his boots. The sun was high, and he was feeling the weariness of the day. The port lay ahead, near the burning buildings that fueled the smoke cloud. The Quraysh chieftain turned as the street ended in a dusty plaza. One and two-story buildings built of pale tan lime-and-sandstone blocks surrounded the square. White plaster covered most of the walls. No one was in evidence, though by this hour the streets should have seen some traffic. A squad of the Sahaba trotted along after him, the iron rings of their armor jingling as they moved. Like all the men in his army, they had put aside the colored braid of their tribes, choosing instead the green and white of the Tanukh. About half of the men carried round shields of wood with iron bosses, adorned with a cheap russet paint. The others bore bows and quivers fashioned of boiled leather, packed with black-fletched arrows, on their backs.

A sloping street led off of the plaza, leading down to the harbor. Mohammed walked stiffly—he had spent too much time on a horse in the past week—and the descent made his thighs and ankles complain. From the vantage of the little hill, he could make out the ships tied up to the stone quays in the harbor and the bulk of the warehouses that lined the bay. Leuke Kome stood on a barren shore, a dozen leagues from anything that bore green leaves or a hint of water. The town existed only because it owned the sole harborage along this long stretch of desolate coastline. Despite that, there were still a dozen ships in the harbor. A hundred and eighty miles to the north, along a long, narrow valley, stood the Nabatean capital of Petra and the road to the great cities along Strata Triana.

Leuke Kome had served as an
entrepot
for the Petran trade in silk, cotton, perfume, rare spices, steel ingots, poppy paste, and gems for eight hundred years. Its wealth, its whole reason for being, lay in the safe harbor and the stone warehouses that rose two and three stories tall behind the road that ran along the piers. Most of the black smoke was billowing from the windows of one of those warehouses.

Mohammed's face was storm-cloud dark with anger. A faint breeze was blowing up from the sea, carrying a sharp smell and bending the pillars of smoke inland. Ten years spent in the trade, traveling the length and breadth of Arabia and beyond, even to India and the glorious, decadent cities of the Empire, had not been lost on him. He knew many spices, fabrics, and woods by taste and smell.

The Quraysh chieftain and his bodyguards reached the bayside road and turned. Other bands of Sahaba soldiers were beginning to gather as they finished their sweep through the town. When the sun had risen, hours ago, the port had still been in Imperial hands. Now it was Mohammed's possession, and he was furious that a quarter or more of its worth to him was being consumed as he watched. One of the Sahaba guardsmen coughed, catching a whiff of the sting in the air. Mohammed raised his riding scarf over his mouth and nose. Burning pepper let off a dangerous humor.

Mohammed had thought to leave Mekkah in secret, accompanied by only a few of his companions. The Tanukh, he knew, had sworn themselves to his service. Those bonds, forged in the battle furnace of Palmyra, would endure until his death or theirs. The men of the city, even his kinsmen, he had not expected to follow. Even after the capture of Yathrib and the extirpation of the Bani-Hashim and their allies, it had not occurred to the Quraysh chieftain that he had become the ruler of a people.

The Mekkan clans had fought and feuded and spilt each other's blood for centuries, and Mohammed had not thought to change them. He had sought to take the blood-price from the murderers who had left his child dead in his arms. He had hoped to crush the resistance to his adopted house and secure the patrimony of his children. In that, the promulgation of a common law for the people of both cities had been his aim. The friendship of the Ben-Sarid and the obedience of the Quraysh had been a welcome surprise. He had not told Jalal or Shadin about his dreams or the full truth of what the voice had said on the mountaintop, but they had followed him forth from the city nonetheless.

They had ridden out before dawn, in full darkness, finding the road only by the faint light of a crescent moon. Even then Mohammed had been wrapped in thought, listening to the echoes of the voice from the air. He had not noticed that the ranks of the Tanukh had swollen as they had ridden north. The appearance of Uri and his Ben-Sarid horsemen had seemed natural, for the Sarid had fought at their side at Yathrib.

Then dawn was almost upon them, and Mohammed had stopped. He knew that the Lord of the Seven Heavens had chosen him to undertake a dreadful task in the world. That thought filled his heart with a sense of rightness that had always eluded him. That emptiness in his soul, that yearning to find something to set his shoulder to, some task worthy of his full devotion, had driven him out from his house and across the face of the world. Now it was filled, and he knew that thanks were owed.

So, with the sun preparing to crawl over the jagged peaks and desolate mountains to the east of Mekkah, he had reined in his horse and dismounted. Without looking up, he had unrolled a blanket from the saddle of his mare and knelt on the gritty sand. Even though the white fire that had filled him that day before Ka'ba was gone, there was never a moment when he did not feel the distant voice of the stone. He knelt on the blanket and bowed toward the southeast, toward the sacred precincts.

Make your place of worship free of ornament and distraction
, the voice had said from the clear air.
How can you come to know the mind of the merciful and compassionate god if your eye is assailed by graven images and your ear by the importuning of priests?

Mohammed did not bow down before the Black Stone or the ancient house; he knelt before the Lord of the Wasteland that was in everything he could see or touch. The priests of the temples that his men had torn down had not understood that. In time they would.

When he stood he brushed the sand from the blanket and rolled it up. As he did so there was a susurration in the cool morning air, a rustling and a muted, clinking sound. He looked about, puzzled, and stopped in surprise, the blanket half folded.

Ten thousand men were rising as well all around him. The road behind the clot of Tanukh was clogged with horses and camels and pack mules. Tribal banners and flags fluttered in the air, lending the army a festive air. Men of every tribe in the city, and some he had never seen before, were rolling up their own blankets or swinging back into the saddle. Mohammed raised an eyebrow and turned to find Jalal standing at his side, fists resting on the top of his curved bow. Shadin and Khalid were already seated on their horses, long
kaffiyeh
trailing in the dawn breeze.

"Who are these?" Mohammed gestured toward the columns of men and the thickets of lances, sparkling in the light of the rising sun. Jalal smiled, his grim, scarred features cracking like a stone splitting under the stroke of a chisel.

"Men who would follow you wherever you may lead them, my lord."

And so they had ridden forth from Mekkah with an army, and made their way into the wastelands of the north, into the barren desolation of the Hedjaz.

A timber, burned through by the inferno raging inside the pepper warehouse, cracked like a sling-bullet against a shield. Part of the roof of the building fell in with a roar, sending sparks and a plume of thick black smoke roiling up. Waves of heat beat against Mohammed's face, and he took a dozen steps back. That left him at the edge of the stone pier, his hand on a stumpy round piling. The inside of the warehouse was a raging red heart as the close-packed barrels of pepper and marjoram burned. Mohammed felt the heat like a blow to his heart—the contents of such a warehouse were worth a thousand times their weight in gold on the trading tables of Constantinople or Rome or Saguntum. Any kind of spice—pepper was most highly prized—was easy to ship and carry and in vast demand. The Roman fondness for hot spices was legendary across the length and breadth of the world. The craving had made Palmyra and Petra rich. It had made Khadijah and the House of Khuwaylid wealthy, too.

"How did this happen?" Mohammed's voice rasped with repressed anger. To him the contents of these warehouses meant even more than they had to his dead wife or the Palmyrenes. Every ounce of spice that whirled away into the sky or fell as a fine ash over the town meant fewer sheaves of arrows, fewer suits of armored mail, fewer swords and lances and spears for his army.

Jalal squared his shoulders and stepped forward from the company of Sahaba, who had deployed themselves as a cordon around the burning building. His face was carefully blank. The Tanukh captain knew what lost supplies and arms meant to an army on the move. It might be his life that the fire cost, a month from now or more. "We were a fraction late, lord. I tried to take the merchant down with a bow shot, but he managed to get an oil lamp cast inside before he went down."

Mohammed met the man's eyes, and they were steel hard for a moment. "Where is the merchant?"

"There, lord." Jalal pointed with his chin to a huddled form lying at the edge of the dock. A dark stain of dried blood pooled under the corpse.

"Are there others still alive?"

Jalal nodded and motioned to two of his men. The Sahaba spearmen disappeared into the ground level of one of the two-story brick buildings that lined the waterfront. This one had a balcony on the second floor with ornamental railings of crisscrossed wooden slats. Mohammed had seen the style before, in the Roman cities that ringed the Inner Sea. When he had been among the Imperials for a long time, it had seemed natural. Now it seemed wasteful to use wood carted down from the mountains of Syria when brick or stone would do. The guardsmen returned, escorting a thin, worried-looking man with close-cropped hair and a smooth-shaven face.

"What is your name and business?" Mohammed felt his Latin come with difficulty. It had been some time since he had needed it. The Palmyrenes and his friend Ahmet had spoken Aramaic, even as he had done since he was a child. The Roman merchant seemed relieved to hear his mother tongue, and shook his arms free of the Sahaba guardsmen.

"I am Marcus Licinus, factor for the House of Flavius. I trade in slaves, fine woods, timber, ivory, and salt."

Mohammed nodded to himself, gauging the truth of the man's words by the style of his tunic, the well-worn leather belt around the Roman's waist, and his scuffed boots. The fellow had callused hands, worn from pulling a sail-rope or handling a horse or camel. This was a working merchant, not someone who grew fat and slothful off of the work of others. The deep tan that marked the Roman was a good sign, too: He had been in Arabia for some time.

"I am Mohammed," the Quraysh chieftain said simply. "The warehouses are full here, and ships ride empty in the harbor. Why is that?"

Marcus Licinus' eyes narrowed, taking in the simple white robe that Mohammed had chosen to go over his scaled iron armor and the pearl-handled saber at his side. The Roman spared a glance for the Sahaba standing nearby, too, and Mohammed could see that he was puzzled by the absence of tribal markings. Too, the green banner of the Sahaba, marked only with a curved white sword and a simple crescent moon, was unfamiliar to him.

"Lord Mohammed," the Roman said carefully in precisely enunciated Aramaic, "is there a quarrel between your people and mine?"