Tim Powers - Declare

“Do you know about another kingdom of your father’s tribe,” Hale asked as he obediently pretended to pick a bit of meat out of an imaginary dish over the parrot’s head, “on Mount Ararat-in what you would know as the land of Urartu, a peak called Agri Dag, the Painful Mountain? I believe the tribe survived the great flood because their kingdom was at the top of the mountain.”

A’ad bin Kin’ad scowled, and Hale actually rocked back away from the rage that burned in the golden eyes.

“Great flood?” the king roared. “I am crippled, and my lands are dry desert, because of my denial of your one god. I evaded his wrath, half of me at least evaded the full killing and damning extent of his wrath, but the rivers of my kingdom are parched valleys now, my vineyards and pastures are dust under the sand! You are a man, but the ghosts of my people could see that you have not the black drop in the human heart. You talk to me about floods! In what flood did you wash out the black drop, as I, being half-human, never could?”

Hale just stared expressionlessly at the king of Wabar, ready to swing the rifle butt up very hard indeed under the man’s chin if he should spring at him. He was to doubt it later, but in that moment Hale was bleakly sure that the man was referring to Original Sin, from the consequences of which Hale had supposedly been saved by baptism.

Abruptly the king relaxed and smiled. “But you need food. Taste that meat-the animals were fattened on pistachios.”

Hale remembered the taste of bad old bread in his mouth, and irrationally he dreaded putting into his mouth the handful of air he held.

He hesitated. “What animals?” he asked.

“Eat. Would you dishonor my table?”

Hale looked over his shoulder when he heard boots chuffing in sand, and relaxed to see bin Jalawi just stepping up to the tumbled stones below the ledge, holding his rifle casually since Hale appeared to be at ease.

When he had clambered up onto the wide ledge, bin Jalawi swiveled his impassive gaze from the black-bearded king of Wabar to the parrot to the miscellaneous fowls in the cave. “Salam ’alaikum,” the Bedu said, formally, cutting a quick, questioning glance toward Hale.

“Indeed peace is on me,” said the king of Wabar, “because of who my father was. I am A’ad bin Kin’ad.”

Bin Jalawi’s eyes widened; clearly he believed it. “There is no might nor majesty except in God the most high and wonderful!” he exclaimed, using a common Arab phrase to express awed surprise.

“Yahweh, Allah, Elohim,” spat the king. To Hale he said, strongly, “Eat the flesh, damn you. Be a man, and nothing more.”

Hale shuddered and flicked his right hand as though throwing something away, resolving to wash that hand soon, in water, or whiskey, or gasoline.

“This place is a ruin, my lord,” said bin Jalawi to the king. “Will you come away with us, on one of our camels?”

“O calamity!” shrilled the parrot, spreading its orange-spotted green wings and fluttering up into the air.

“To where?” asked the king in a voice as deep as rumbling in a desert well. “‘To the house no one leaves, where the mute crownless kings sit forever in deepest shadow and have dust for bread and clay for meat, and are clothed like birds in robes of feathers; and over the bolted gate lie dust and silence’?”

Hale recognized the man’s words as the text of a Babylonian description of the afterworld, preserved in the Assyrian Gilgamesh clay tablets. He straightened his legs and slowly stood up, without taking his eyes off of the king of Wabar.

“Shall I walk?” demanded the king, opening the front of his embroidered red robe and flinging it back over his shoulders, scattering the clamoring chickens behind him. “Shall I ride a camel?”

Hale had flinched back with a smothered cry. The king’s naked body from the waist down was made of rough black stone, with no seam or crack visible where white skin bordered black petrification-and millennia of sandstorms had grotesquely eroded the contours of the stone. The genitals were gone, and the projecting stone knees and thighs had been weathered flat, so that they looked more like frail flippers than a man’s legs.

The robe must have been heavily padded, for the king’s chest was just white skin sagging over ribs and collar-bones and prominent shoulder sockets; and the king’s beard was patchy and white now. Hale could not see the robe on the cave floor, and he was suddenly sure that it had never been real.

“Stay,” whispered the king through a toothless mouth. “Die. Learn to relish our food.” One grimy, stringy white hand reached behind himself, and then he was holding a steel dagger by the point and nimbly cocking it back over his shoulder to throw.

Hale’s brown hand snapped to the trigger guard of his rifle beside his hip, and in one motion he levered the short barrel up horizontal and pulled the trigger.

The ringing crack of the rifle shot was stunning in the cave mouth, and Hale couldn’t hear anything as he instantly worked the bolt, ejecting the old shell and chambering a fresh cartridge.

By sheer luck the unaimed shot had punched a hole through the king’s upraised forearm; and in an instant the wrist and hand had turned black, and the knuckles clanked when the suddenly heavy arm hit the stone floor.

“Jesus,” said Hale blankly.

Tendons stood out in the king’s shoulder and elbow as he tried to lift his stone hand; and the knuckles dragged on the ledge surface a little way, but did not rise. Behind him the dagger clattered to a halt on the cave floor.

“I am still secure from judgment,” whispered the king, probably to himself. “I am still secure.”

“We,” said Hale, “are not.” Thank God , he added mentally. He took a deep breath and let it out, and he found that he had to step back and flex his hand away from the gunstock to keep himself from firing an aimed slug through the king’s heart, or through his head, out of sheer horror at the fact of him. “And we must leave you.”

Then Hale and bin Jalawi were hopping down over the tumbled stones and sprinting across the sand toward bin Jalawi’s camel, and beyond that Hale’s camel beside the meteorite; and all Hale could think of was the coming effort of digging a trench up to the mass of iron, and winching it down onto the sled, and then hitching all eight camels to the sled for the laborious march south out of the accursed basin of Wabar. The radio case was in his saddlebag, and he had to tell himself forcefully that he must wait until they had found a gravel plain wide enough for an RAF Dakota to land on, before he dared use the agreed-on frequency to talk to a human being in the rational outside world.

Hale and bin Jalawi had ankhs and rifles ready to hand as they flailed their shovels and secured the winches, but the ghosts of Wabar had been effectively knocked down, and the king was an inert figure in the portico of the black mirage-castle.

Between the two of them they managed to get the camels to drag the meteorite four miles south, out of the Wabar basin to a broad gravel plain at the edge of the Al-Hibakah region; and after they had freed the ropes from the heavily encumbered sled and tied a conspicuous long red flag to it, Hale used the radio at last, briefly, to give the RAF bases in Bahrain and Abu Dhabi a triangulation on the meteorite’s new location.

He and bin Jalawi led the camels away to the northeast then, to arrive after five blessedly uneventful days at Abu Dhabi on the gulf coast. Here they sold the camels and got themselves on the ship’s manifest of a lateen-rigged Iraqi boom; the old ship changed its name at every port, and stayed well clear of the steamer lanes, and safely landed its cargo of mangrove poles in Kuwait after only three days at sea.