Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

Odenathus took his mother's hands and clasped them to his chest. "Mater, the city is our life, our home, the reason we are here. If we go away-if we took the gold and jewels that are hidden and passed on to some other town, some other city, we would be strangers. Outsiders, never feeling at ease. If we are to survive as a people, if our tribe will sustain, we must remain here."

"Perhaps," Ara said, freeing her hands from her son's strong grip. "But what thinks the Queen of this?"

– |Zoe ran her hand over a smooth surface; granite hewn from the mountains of Syria and carried sixty or seventy leagues to this hidden canyon, polished smooth and graven with long lines of the old script of the city. A door stood in the hidden space under the twin boulders, sheltered by their vast red sandstone bulk. Statues emerged from the rock face, flanking the door, statues of the first kings of the city. Their empty eyes stared out at the desert, watching the wasteland. Zoe was a tiny figure between them, crouching at the door of stone. Her fingers traced the worn lines of script, racking her brain in an attempt to decipher the words.

Crows circled high above, cawing listlessly in the hot, still air.

Zoe stood; at the bottom of the stone door the thirty-fifth line was freshly carved, and not in the old tongue. Instead, in the common Latin, it said ZENOBIA V SEPTIMA, QUEEN OF PALMYRA. Zoe's face blanched, becoming almost white. Until this moment, seeing her aunt's grave marker, she had not truly believed that the fiery, dark-haired woman of her memory was dead. But even here, in the hot air, feeling the ruin of her city at her back, Zoe did not cry. Indeed, no tear escaped her eyes, though they looked upon an abyss of pain. She staggered, and fell against the door. The stone, cool to the touch, pressed against her cheek, and her own voice cried out in her mind: While the Queen stands, so stands the city.

Face grim, she pushed herself away from the slab and stood back. She folded her hands, closed her eyes, and sought a calming meditation. The craftsmen who had laid the door of stone had wrought it cunningly. It sat in a groove cut from the living rock, a slot a foot or more deep that held the weight of the stone and fixed it closed. Around the edges were splintered markings where grave robbers had tried to penetrate the slab, but they had failed.

It weighed a ton or more. It was impossible for one young woman, no matter the depth of her pain, to lever it out. Twenty men, working under the eye of a master half insane with grief, had taken five days to move it before. Two had died in the effort, but the scarred chieftain had counted that good luck, that servants would join the dead queen in her journey into the afterlife. Their bodies, wrapped in grave cloths, had gone into the tomb with her.

The craftsmen and tomb architects had commissioned spells, too, to be laid upon the door, to keep away the unwary and ensure the long, peaceful sleep of the inhabitants of the royal tomb. Those wizards who had laid them had done passable work, but they had not put their heart in it.

Zoe raised her left hand, and thunder muttered in the clear blue sky. She raised her right hand, and fire spilled from her eyes and swirled around her feet. The slab creaked and moved, rattling with a delicate sound in its frame of polished sandstone. Sweat seeped from her brow, and Zoe lifted, raising up her hands, gripping an image of the door of stone. A ton and a half of granite rose, inch by inch, grinding out of its frame, and then, as Zoe cried out in anger and rage, flew over her head.

In the canyon below, the old man, sitting on the stone at the base of the cliff, leapt up at the dreadful shout, and then stared in awe as the granite door sailed across the width of the canyon to smash in unrestrained fury against the opposite cliff. Dust vomited out, making a great cloud that drifted across the canyon, and then the cracking boom of the impact reverberated from the walls. Out of the dust cloud, the door, broken into three great pieces, plummeted to the canyon floor, bouncing once and then shattering into a million fragments. The stricken cliff, cracked by the blow, suddenly shaled away from the ridge at its back, and-with a thunderous roar-plunged down into the streambed. Dust billowed up, and tiny fragments of stone ricocheted off the cliff behind the old man. He ducked down and cowered at the base of the waterfall, hiding his head under his robe.

On the lip of the cliff, Zoe turned, a glad, light feeling growing in her chest, and entered the tomb of her ancestors.

– |Odenathus sat, dressed in a coat of scale mail the scavengers had dragged from the wreck of one of the great houses, a spear across his legs, at the gate of the city. The twin towers, once faced with slabs of granite, lay scattered behind him. Only the arch of the gate remained, though the doors themselves had not been found. Two of the men who had been working with him to reopen the cistern sat nearby. They stood their watch at sunset, watching the sun fall beyond the hills, turning the sky a brilliant orange gold. All three were exhausted from a long day of hauling stone and clearing the stairs. They would do the same the next day as well, and the one after that. Even repairing the cistern and the pipes to the underground baths near the old library would take weeks of unremitting effort.

The young man sat with his back to a remaining fragment of the old wall of the city, feeling the chill of evening grow, even while the stone still yielded up the warmth it had trapped throughout the day. When first he and Zoe had come to the city, a tablet of black stone had stood above the gate, driven into the remaining wall with iron pins. Old writing, predating even that which had been used by the founders of the city, had covered it. Odenathus did not know that tongue-it was lost to all but a few-but the evil chill that radiated from that tablet had told him all he needed to know.

He had cast it down, wrenching it from the wall with his power, and smashing it into dust.

Now he sat, his eyes closed against the slanting last rays of the sun, and thought upon the ruin of his city.

Something moved, out on the western plain. Two tiny figures trudging along the Damascus road, passing now between two of the ancient tower tombs that dotted the rocky valley. One was bent under a great weight. Odenathus stood up and ground the butt of the spear against the rock of the gateway.

"The Queen approaches," he said quietly, for he discerned the flicker-bright aura of Zoe even at this distance. "You men go into the city and inform my mother. I will bring the Queen to her house as soon as she arrives."

The two men, a stonemason and a carpenter by trade, stood, yawning, and went through the gate, their spears over their shoulders. Odenathus sat again, his legs were too tired to waste time standing around if he could sit instead.

The figures drew closer, step by step, even as night fell.

– |"My son? Who is here?" Ara struggled to rise from the chair that had been set for her in the tent. This place had once been the garden at the rear of her noble house; a place of refined parties and long afternoon conversations with close friends. Now, with the house itself in ruin, a jagged forest of pillars and cracked walls, it was the only safe place to set a bedu tent. The old matriarch, now wearing a strip of salvaged cotton across her eyes, groped by the side of the chair for the javelin that served as her cane and finding-stick.

"I am here," Odenathus answered in a hollow voice, ducking under the flap of the tent. "Zoe is with me."

The young woman, now Queen of the dead city, followed, grunting, as she turned sideways to enter the tent. Reverently she settled to the ground and shrugged the burden off her back. Ara settled back in her chair, turning her face to one side. Odenathus sat heavily in one of the other chairs and held his head in his hands.