Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

No sound of man or beast came from below, only the ripple of water on stone and the drip-drip-drip of some seeping spring. If he remembered aright, this canyon led down past two or three catchment dams to a bowl in the mountain where the passage of Siq ended and the city itself began. There would be guards there in plenty.

He shuttered his lantern and motioned for the men behind him, squatting on the ground, to do the same. Here they could descend behind the guards at that gate, taking them by surprise, but sound carried easily in these canyons and they would have to go slowly and carefully.

He stood, squinting back at the shadowed lumps of his men, and motioned for Shadin. Jalal and Khalid, along with the bulk of the army, were waiting in the swale of Wadi Musa, beyond sight of the first gate into Siq. They were waiting for a signal that the raiding party had seized the entrance to the city from behind.

A dark figure detached itself from the shadow under one of the great boulders and scuttled toward him.

Listen! Do you hear it? Do you hear the doom of men?

Mohammed started, surprised. But the voice had already faded. There was a sound, a whisper, carried on the night wind.

Mohammed stopped, listening. Then, faintly, he heard it: massed voices on the air. He looked up and saw, on the mountaintop that rose to the south of the city, the glare of a bonfire and the outline of hundreds of people standing in the High Place. The people of the city raised their voices in homage to some god that lived behind the sky. When Mohammed had passed through the red city before the furtive nature of the locals, their odd, secretive customs and the bitter aftertaste of the water had just set his nerves on edge. Now the sound of that chanting and the half-heard words ignited a cold anger in his breast. He stopped, feeling his arm trembling.

"My lord?" The Quraysh turned, his face grim. The bulky Tanukh was at his side, his helmet and armor wrapped in dark cloth to muffle the sound and prevent any betraying gleam of light. The man's eyes glinted in the darkness, catching a reflection from the lights of the city and the fire on the mountaintop. More Sahaba moved past, as quietly as they could, filtering down the stair with their weapons out.

"There is a ceremony underway, there on the High Place." Mohammed pointed up, indicating the red glare that lit the mountaintop. "I must stop it. I will take half of the men and go up the Long Stair. You take the rest and seize the guardpost at the end of Siq. With luck, Jalal will be waiting for you. Then follow the plan."

Shadin nodded his understanding and turned, catching the shoulder of one of his lieutenants. Mohammed hurried down the long flight of steps that wound down to the streambed, taking them two and three at a time. The memory of a voice echoed in his mind, urging him to hurry. The faces of the Sahaba flashed past as they turned in surprise. If Shadin could open the gates at Siq, then the army could pour into the city unopposed. The next good place to mount a defense would be on the steps of the palace. Taking away half of the men that were to accomplish that task would not make it easier, but Mohammed was sure that he had to get to the top of the High Place as fast as possible.

Fly, O man, fly! The voice was urgent, thundering in his mind.

– |Tradition said there were 999 steps from the red sand of the streambed at the base of the mountain to the twin obelisks that stood on the verge of the High Place. Mohammed had not bothered to count them tonight, but his thighs and the backs of his calves had marked each one and were ready to tell him all about it if he stopped for a moment. The fifty Sahaba at his back were winded, too, and they held their mouths open, gasping for air as silently as they could manage.

Beyond the great obelisks, each towering twenty feet into a dark and cloudless sky, a saddle opened out on the summit. To Mohammed's left, a jumble of slabs marked the head of another set of stairs that led down the far side of the mountain. To his right, where the peak of the High Place rose up, jutting out over the central valley of Petra, a redoubt of squared stones had been raised to bar passage into the sacred precincts.

A gate stood at the base of the tower, though it stood ajar, lit by two large iron sconces holding torches of pitch that guttered in the night wind. In their light, stairs could be made out, marching up the last ramp into the temple itself. The chanting was louder now, though broken by the wind, and the blaze of fires and torches could be seen in the darkness above the stone wall. Bats and nighjars swooped through the illumination, feasting on clouds of insects that had been drawn from the wasteland.

The High Place was a pinnacle of bare rock that rose at the southeastern corner of the valley of Petra like a helmet. Here, almost at the top, Mohammed could see a vast sweep of desert and mountain and valley lying about him under the moon. A cold wind ruffled his robes and plucked at his hair. It was odd to look out over the tumbled massif of the Ad'Deir hills, here in the heart of night, and see it illuminated by the moon almost as if by day. He tore his attention away from the vista and the knowledge of the three-hundred-foot drop that lay just at his right hand.

There did not seem to be any guards at the gate, but nothing prevented them from standing just within the entrance, hidden in shadows. Mohammed crept forward, his saber out, and held parallel to the ground. The first five men behind him were archers with long black arrows already fitted to the bow. Wind whipped the sound of the chanting away, but now Mohammed could feel it in the stones under his feet.

The tip of the saber passed through the gateway, and Mohammed felt it tremble, meeting some unseen resistance in the cold night air. He stopped, his hand raised in warning to the men behind. A sudden sense that she was with him made the hairs on his arms prickle up. The blade trembled, for it seemed that her cool touch was on the back of his hand. He remembered her, standing in the darkness of her chambers in the palace, her hand touching his wrist as he prepared to go out to die on the walls of the city. Her city. He remembered that she had given him this blade after his own had been chipped and nicked beyond use. He looked through the pillars of the gate.

The stairs were empty. There were no guards. Beckoning to his men, Mohammed sprinted up them, pushing the pain in his legs away. There would be time for groaning and lying about while dark-eyed servant girls rubbed his thighs with cool minty cream later. Unlike the plain stone steps in the canyon below, these were faced with marble and fitted into a brick support. He leapt up them, two and three at a time.

At the top of the stairs was a second gate in a wall of brick, marked by twin slim columns of marble. The summit of the High Place made a rough trapezoid, bounded by cliffs on three sides. On the western side, facing the setting sun, perched high above the center of the city, was a rectangular raised dais. Before it a deep pool had been cut into the rock of the mountain. On the dais, an altar of uncarved stone flowed up from the rock like a man's fist rising from the earth. As Mohammed came up to the top of the stairs, there was blood on the altar and the body of a young woman squirming under a stone knife.

Priests in long red robes crowded around the altar, their hands gripping her white flesh, holding her down. The girl was trying to scream, but only a bubbling red froth almost the color of the priests' raiment came out of her mouth. At the head of the altar, a figure had his hands raised to the sky and saffron-colored heat lightning flickered and flashed around him. Between the gate and the pool, hundreds of supplicants knelt, their voices raised in the long rolling chant that Mohammed had heard on the wind. The parishioners wore hoods of red laid over their workaday clothes, but even those were rich and finely detailed.