Diana Pho - Steampunk World

“Well?” a voice asked, shouting over the winds.

Tariq started and looked back at Raakin, who watched patiently from the steps. The searchlights in the distance swept through the gloom to touch the temple, but couldn’t reach. The soldiers would, undoubtedly.

“I need more time,” he said.

Raakin, his expression inscrutable behind his goggles and keffiyah, pulled two tri-barrel flintlocks from under his jacket. He turned and vanished into the storm.

Tariq turned his attention to the statues and the question of the birds. Twenty statues, and a bird apiece in each hand. That was forty birds, the number of all myths. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the forty days and nights of Noah’s flood, Moses alone with God on Mount Sinai, the years the Isrealites spent wandering the desert, the days Jesus spent in seclusion. Forty is not a number, his father told him. Forty simply means: A great many.

“And the Simorgh? I remember, father,” he said, the five year old in him touching the edges of the book, eager for adventure. As Tariq searched the frieze of metal birds and flowers, the poem came to him, again his father guiding him through the elegant verses of the great Sufi poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, and his seminal epic The Conference of Birds .

A council of birds set out to find the Simorgh to unite them, only to discover in their journey that Simorgh was a reflection of them all. “Could the inspiration for the poem be older? As old as this place?” Tariq wondered, his fingers touching upon golden larks and copper hawks and bronze sparrows. Then he saw a parrot inlaid with polished silver and his father spoke to him again. The birds stared into the pool where Simorgh lay and instead found their own reflection:

Silver was the most reflective of ancient metals, the mirror. Tariq pressed the bird and it shifted slightly in its groove. He pressed harder and it finally clicked down. Somewhere in the storm a flintlock roared, Raakin buying him time.

Tariq raced along the temple’s front facing, searching for the next silver bird and found a silver peacock, and then a nightingale, a falcon, a hummingbird. Each clicked with some effort until finally, he found the silver hoopoe. He pressed it, and the heavy metal door with the Simorgh mosaic rattled upward.

The storm curled at the mouth of the temple where its howls turned to chambered echoes inside. Sand poured from the ceiling in trickles, leaving drifts along the stairs, but any semblance to the Nabatean ruins in Petra and in Beyrouth ended there. Tendrils of snaking copper fluted the columns, the temple a shell for the wide stairs that descended deep underground. Brass pipes inset into the stone walls lay partially hidden behind a lacework of wood grates. They still fed the balconies overflowing with leafy Emerald Falls vines and peppered with white hibiscus and urn-shaped clusters of blue Muscari. If these northern plants grew here, then Ubar and the Empty Quarter must have indeed have been a paradise once.

Outside, gunfire continued, sounding closer, but Tariq felt drawn down the steps. He took the path between the sloping sand, the interior dimly lit by tear-shaped bulbs set into wall sconces and column brackets. The liquid within the bulbs glowed silvery-blue like algae-filled water alight at night in the wake of fish and swimmer alike. The same blue came from the murals, where etched figures glowed with inset glass eyes.

The stairs opened onto a large platform overlooking a massive cavern covered in vegetation and whose edges vanished in darkness. Wide stairs wended down either wall, following rock carved with alcoves and ledges, half-columns and statues, like the Temple of Jupiter in the cliff of Petra. An oasis sparkled a hundred feet below, fed by glowing blue water with the viscosity of mercury that cascaded down the swept supplicant wings of a giant statue of Manāt. They’d built her from gleaming metal, each texture a different polish. Behind her stood her giant Fedayeen guards, each ten feet high. Each wore an iron-plated cuirass embossed gold with the Goddesses’ wings, their spaulders and skirt-like cuisses covering their major joints.

Articulated joints, Tariq corrected. They could move, likely powered by the strange dynamos on their backs, their engines coiled with tubes and lit by glass capsules of the blue liquid. The same glow issued forth from the slits on their demonic faceplates. In their gauntlets they held a variety of swords and staves, axes and guns with a reservoir.

“The giants of Ubar,” a voice said.

Raakin leaned against one of the columns on the stairs, looking down into the cavern.

“You’re wounded.”

Blood flowed down Raakin’s limp arm and pattered on the floor. A blotch of mud matted the dark fabric at his shoulder, but he waved it off with the flintlock. “If they find this place, the Prussians will gain a considerable advantage, if not an insurmountable one,” he said. “I gave them pause and us time, but… the desert is reclaiming this place. Can you seal the doors?”

Tariq nodded.

“Then go, quickly.” Raakin handed him the flintlock. Tariq was about to refuse, but Raakin pushed it into his hands.

“I have never shot anyone.”

“The gun has.” Raakin shoved him up the stairs.

Tariq had a million questions that he wanted to ask, chief among them ‘why?’ but he understood as he raced upstairs and came upon the two-dozen bedu descending. They led their sheep and goats, their camels braying and protesting loudly at the steps, their clopping hoofs echoing sharply. Some of the injured bedu supported themselves on their flintlock rifles. A cluster of three guards protected the old woman from the tent; like the fabled Taureg tribe of North Africa, Tariq realized, they were matriarchal and trapped among enemies who did not understand their ways. The worshippers of the old gods did not die so easily out here.

The old woman nodded at him and Tariq continued to the door. A handful of bedu fired out into the storm, the sands a hornet’s nest that swallowed the city. The hillocks had already drowned the lower stairs and it felt as though the dunes themselves had begun to dwarf the buildings and columns… the frozen waves high above the doomed ship. Sand streamed and curled in through the door, and Tariq shielded his eyes.

Shapes moved in the storm at the base of the temple, and shots rang out as well as in. Something hot whined past Tariq’s ear. He sank to his knee, out of sight of the soldiers as one of the bedu stumbled back, his hand clutching at his breast.

Tariq’s heart raced. More shots whinged above his head, the shouting voices growing louder. He looked around him, trying to find the door mechanism, but his eyes refused to focus on any one thing. Was this how his father felt as they fled Damascus, the Pasha’s men on their heels?

No. I am not alone.

From the corner of his eye, he caught the movement of pages. On a ledge nearby, the corners of ragged papers fluttered under the rock that held them in place. They were torn frail things, harrowed by the ages outside the protection of the book. Next to them sat a great gear embedded in the wall, a lever next to it, raised and waiting.

Silhouettes against the storm appeared at the top of the stairs. Tariq fired his flintlock, the gun flaring and jumping in his grip. A gout of flame roared out like a dragon’s breath, and the figures jumped clear of the burst of fire, but not all. The bedu cheered, but if Tariq moved now, he thought the enemy might shoot him, kill him. That would be a mercy compared to losing everything, but after all he’d seen and come to know, letting these men take this place would be worse.