Thomas Harlan - The Gate of fire

This place, this acre of shattered walls and gravel and splintered marble strewn across the hillside, felt empty. The sorcerer crawled among the rocks and poked down into dark recesses in the tumulus with a long iron staff. Dahak seemed filled with a bubbling joy, constantly talking to himself as he bent to pick up a broken bit of pottery.

"They thought that this fire would burn forever," Dahak said, smiling as he rummaged among the stones. "See? They were wrong. This fire will never be lit again."

Arad looked away at the sky. It was a pale blue. Mountains rose up in the west, high and dark with only a glimmer of ice crowning them. He ignored the sorcerer, who continued to talk to himself while he dug about in the ruins. Memories stirred in the man, something bright and shining with the sun, somewhere in the west. Was it beyond these mountains? he wondered. Something beyond this cold world?

"Their light has failed!" Lord Dahak screamed at the sky. The sound died quickly, swallowed by the empty air.

Ka'ba, Near Mekkah, Arabia Felix

The old house stood alone at the center of the plaza. After the fire had gutted the temple, workers had cleared away everything but the original, open-roofed building. Hundreds had labored for weeks under the guidance of the Ben-Sarid, carrying away the broken stone and brick. The ash had been swept up and carried out to fertilize the fields that lined the wadi. The old statues had been broken up with mallets and iron bars and used to repair the walls of the city. Only the oldest temple remained, as Ibrahim had raised it at the founding of the shrine. It was small and dark, its walls of fieldstone blackened by centuries of ceremonial fires. At one corner of the square building, a section of the old wall was still smooth. In some unimaginable past, men had carved a block of fine-grained sandstone and-by great labor-had carried it to the precincts of the well of Zam-Zam and placed it here.

Within that smooth facing, in a cavity worn by the hands of countless pilgrims, a stone gleamed. It was a stolid black, uncut, unmarked. Altogether unremarkable to the eye.

Mohammed stood before the stone and heard it singing.

Though he knew that no other person in all the great throng that filled the plaza to capacity and beyond could hear it, he knew it was the voice of his god, the great and compassionate one who had made the world. "And men," he whispered to himself, "from clots of blood."

– |Clad in enveloping robes of white and brown, a tall, thin young man edged his way through the throng of people standing in the square of Ka'ba. His face, half shrouded by a gauze scarf, was grim. He limped slightly, for he had taken a bad fall from a horse. Despite this, he wore heavy armor of iron lamellae bound with loops of wire to a tunic of cured leather under the robes. It was blasphemy to bear arms within the precincts of Zam-Zam, but the young man was well past caring.

Before the fall of Yathrib, he had been an acolyte in the Temple of Hubal. He had been a quiet, rather reserved young man. Like his father before him, he was named Maslama. Thoughts of his family brought fresh pain. They were all dead, murdered or killed in the fires that had raged through the city in the wake of the Mekkan capture of the eastern gate.

Under his robes, his fingers were firm on the hilts of a sword. He had found it-along with the armor-on a dead Mekkan soldier outside the city. It had taken a long time to crawl through the desert night and steal the body. But it was worth it. Ancient tradition drove him-his family had been killed-and he was due recompense in blood. His height let him see over the heads of the men and women pressed together. The old temple-house loomed up. The chieftains of the Mekkans would be nearby.

– |It was midday. The sun rode the meridian, a pale white disk of fire. The air was still.

Even among the tens of thousands of men and women and children that filled the square, there was silence. It was not complete-robes brushed against robes, children coughed, there was the quiet susurration of a multitude breathing-for there is always sound. Mohammed bowed and stepped back from the stone. He felt a great peace fall over him, even as it had upon the mountaintop once he had heard the voice speaking from the clear air.

The Tanukh that hovered nearby, their dark faces taut with worry, moved away and the crowd pressed back. Ka'ba was ringed by a thick crowd of those who had followed Mohammed to fight at Yathrib. Beyond them were the multitudes of the city and the surrounding districts. The word of the war among the Mekkans and its fierce end in the fall of Yathrib had traveled far and wide. Men and women alike had come on camel or horse or shank's mare to look upon the man who had ended a generation of strife.

Mohammed heard the stone singing, and he paced along the outside of the old building.

The Tanukh moved with him, hands on spears and bows. As the Tanukh moved, so did the crowd of veterans of the fighting against the Hashim and their allies. Mohammed circled the building, listening to the song, letting his heart fill with the word of the Lord who spoke from the air.

This place was raised by the first of men, he thought to himself. His eye sought out the careful placement of the stones in the foundations. He knew that the first man had raised up the black stone and had placed it in the wall. He knew that six hundred years later, the sons of that first man had carefully removed the stone from its crude mortar and placed it within the sandstone facing. He knew that those men, who could still hear the Lord of the World speaking in the dawn and in the dusk, did not bow down and worship the black rock.

How could they? The stone was not the merciful and compassionate one.

Mohammed completed his circuit of the house of the black stone. He looked up and saw the crowd standing in the hot sun. He was surprised to see the number of people who had gathered.

"Jalal?"

The burly mercenary came up, his eyes squinting and nervous. The soldier was watching the crowd, one hand close to his saber. Mohammed frowned, but then saw that all of his other men-the companions who stood with him in his struggle, these Sahaba-were equally wary.

"There are enemies?" Mohammed looked around in surprise.

Jalal almost laughed aloud in relief, seeing that his chieftain had roused himself from the waking dream. It had been weeks since Lord Mohammed had been alert. The Tanukh grinned and scratched his beard. "There are always enemies of the righteous, my lord."

Mohammed smiled back, feeling suddenly awake. There was an odd feeling in the air, like the bitter taste that comes when you ride into a steep-walled wadi, expecting an ambush. "Men who follow the straight path," Mohammed said, checking his own blade, "need not fear unrighteous men. The great and good Lord will provide."

Jalal nodded agreeably. "My father always said that a righteous man should not fear to look after his own business. He gave me my first bow and sheaf of arrows. My lord, there are many people here, and it crosses my mind that more than one of them might mean you ill. We should go, if you are finished with your devotions."

Mohammed's brow creased in puzzlement. "My devotions?"

Jalal indicated the old house and the stone. "It seemed that you prayed before the stone. I thought that you made obeisance to it."

Brief anger glittered in Mohammed's eyes, but then he remembered that Jalal had not heard the voice coming from the stone. How can these men understand me? he wondered, if they cannot hear… "Jalal-send a man to bring my horse."

– |Maslama turned sideways and pushed through the mob. Everyone was standing so quietly that it unnerved him. He gripped the hilt of the sword tighter, feeling the wires that wrapped it dig into his palm. It was unnatural for the air to be so still, for everyone to be so quiet, in a crowd this size. He reached the edge of the Tanukh line and stopped. He was scrupulous to avoid meeting the gaze of any of the northern mercenaries. Up close they seemed very grim and terrible. Their faces were scarred and pitted, showing the echoes of a lifetime of battles.