Angels at the Gate (27 page)

“We have all of the night,” he chuckles at my newfound boldness.

And we take every moment of it.

A
T LAST, HE
rolls over to kiss the top of my head and sighs, brushing aside a damp curl of hair. “It is time to seek heaven.”

“I thought we were already there,” I mumble.

He laughs and sits up. I grab for his hip, not wanting to lose the warmth of his body next to mine, and let my hand slide lower. With a long look at the sky, he sighs again and rolls over onto me. “Perhaps heaven can hold a few moments more.”

I
AM ASLEEP
when he wakes me, helping me to sit up. Groggily, I take the cup he puts in my hands. “Drink this,” he says.

I looked at his empty cup. “Have you already?”

“Yes.”

It is bitter. I wonder what he has mixed into it, and if I will wake from it. While I drink, he kneels before the cedar box and opens it.

My breath catches. Finally, I am to see the secret treasure Mika and Raph have guarded so closely.

Still naked, Mika reaches into the darkness of the box's interior with both hands and lifts something. The muscles cord across his arms and back.

What he takes out is about the size of a newborn child and the color of milk in the starlight. He sets it with reverence at the top of our pallet where it makes a deep indention into the pillows. I touch the cool, flat surface. “A rock?”

Mika strokes it. “Not just a rock,” he says.

I lay my hand flat against it and look a question at him.

He presses his hand on top of mine. “In the land of my forefathers, the green land across the sea, it was a dreaming stone in the heart of the most important time-keeper temple.”

“The temple with the portals for the stars?” I ask, remembering our conversations in the desert.

“Yes. On a certain night, the goddess, the Morning Star, shines into the temple.”

He says more, but dizziness rises up like a fountain in me, and reality seems to split asunder. In one world, our hands remain pressed on the hard surface. In the other, they sink into the stone's heart. As Mika describes it, I see the circular building gleaming white, with long portals cut into the stones. Starlight streams through a precise opening above the lintel stones and down a dark shaft to touch a stone slab.

My mouth has grown thick, as has my mind.

“Lie down,” he instructs, pulling me until I settle with my head beside his on the stone. Again, our breaths entwine, and I feel my cheek against the stone while I ascend into a place of mist.

The next morning Jacob got up very early. He took the stone he had rested his head against, and he set it upright as a memorial pillar. Then he poured olive oil over it.

—Book of Genesis 28:18

I
AM WITHOUT A BODY OR
memories of who I am. Darkness surrounds me, but somehow I know the space is narrow, a tunnel. A circular opening of pure white light lies at the tunnel's end. The light beckons. I must reach it. I do not question why. This is not a place of answers.

With all my being, I strive toward the light, moving by sheer will, because I have no body, no limbs. Closer and closer I come, each minuscule distance hard won, until—if I could find my arm—I could reach out and touch it.

Abruptly, I am snatched away. My eyes open, disappointment flooding me.
I was so close!

Mika's face hovers above me, lined with concern.

“Come back,” he is saying over and over. I remember now hearing him faintly in the tunnel. Did he drag me back? I want to ask him why he kept me from the light when I had worked so hard to reach it, but I have forgotten where my mouth is.

Something cool passes over my face, orienting me to my body.

“It is all right, Adira,” he says gently. “You can sleep now.”

With a sigh, I fall back into darkness, but there is no tunnel and no light … and no dreams.

T
HE NEXT DAY—OR
so I am told—I stand on wobbly legs before the King of Babylonia. Chiram stands beside me, his hand on my arm to steady me. I do not have the strength to shake him off. Crowded along the room's walls are men and women of influence and Samsu-iluna's counselors. On the king's right, grim-faced, stands the High Priest of Marduk, city-god of Babylon. The priest's fingers knead the rich fabric of his robe, which is adorned with Marduk's symbols—a triangular spade and a dragon. To the king's left is Tabni, Ishtar's High Priestess. For a moment, my gaze flickers between the golden, eight-pointed stars entwined on her robe and the memory of stars spun overhead and framed by the four torches atop Ishtar's temple. I waver, and Chiram's arm stiffens, steady as a pole, keeping me upright.

With a rub at my eyes, the scene returns to the present, and I remember the foreseeing given by Marduk's priest contradicted Ishtar's, and for that reason, Samsu-iluna sought Mika and Raph and the magic of the white stone.

Tabni never told us what she had predicted. She is fierce in her loyalty to her king, or perhaps she knows an honest foretelling is all that stands between her land and Babylonia's enemies.

I admire her, and I hate her.

I am changed, forever.

Mika steps forward and inclines his head. Just behind him, Raph guards his left flank, scanning the room. He is no longer dressed as a slave, nor a merchant, as I have known him, but as a warrior, his true self. He is not allowed weapons before the king, but my gaze slides over the muscles of his arms and chest, and the way he stands with his weight balanced evenly between his feet, and I am certain he, himself, is a weapon.

On the other hand, Mika's eyes focus on the king.

“I have spent a good portion of my treasury seeking you,” Samsu-iluna says, leaning forward, his voice tight with hope and warning. “Was it worth it?”

“That is for you to judge,” Mika says. As always, he is the calm in the storm's heart.
The hands that cup the lightning
.

“Well then, what did your gods show you?”

“I will tell you, according to our bargain, but I ask your word these others with me are free to leave.”

A ridge appears in the muscles of Raph's shoulders. He is not happy with the decision to leave his brother.

Nor am I. We cannot leave him here.

Samsu-iluna frowns.

“The word of Babylonia's king,” Mika insists, “is known to be good from here to the sea, but I have not heard it from his mouth, only from those who serve him.” Mika glances at Tabni.

The king nods, the tension easing a bit from his countenance. “Very well. My word is that all those with you, including your brother may leave. In fact, I will send escort with them to Mari.”

“And the silver?” Mika asks.

A smile tugs at the corners of my mouth. Mika would make a good trader.

Samsu-iluna snorted. “And five bracelets of silver.”

“Each,” Mika insists.

Now the king is smiling. “Each.”

“And I am to be released after a year with the same and the chest with its contents.”

Despite the fog of my thoughts, I realize the king has been astute enough to keep the dreaming stone with the dreamer.

“You are not one to let a detail slip beneath the water,” the king says. “I give my word on it, here before my Council.”

Mika raises his hands, palms upward, as if to the heavens' witness. “This then is what the gods showed me.”

Silence fills the room, a silence that quivers like a harp string after the last sound has faded.

“There will be trouble from the south—”

My fists clench, my mind assaulted with vague images.

“—and the north.”

From what I have heard in the king's halls and the streets, this is not news, but the court leans forward in anticipation. My belly roils. What did Mika have me drink?

From a great distance, I hear Mika's voice continue. “But a mighty army will descend upon the land from the mountains.”

Samsu-iluna moves to the edge of his elaborately carved chair. “From which mountains?”

Mika pauses, meeting the king's intense stare. “They attack with the rising sun in their enemies' eyes.”

“From the east then,” the kings says, falling back in his chair as though released from a bow strung for a very long time.

Mika nods. “They come with horses.”

Exhaling a deep breath the king shouts, “The Kassites!” He turns to Tabni. “Priestess, you saw true.”

She does not appear happy in her rightness.

I, too, do not care what name he gives his enemies or which of the visions of terror will descend first on this land. Dreams accompanied the poison Mika gave me, but I can make no auguries from the jumble. Behind my closed eyes, the images still crawl over one another like bees on the comb. Where is my own self in this hive that is my mind?

My legs become air beneath me. The floor leaps toward my face, the king's floor of rounded stones, fitted together precisely in nested arcs, pleasing to the eye.

I feel nothing when it strikes me.

I
AWAKE ON
the road. My head throbs as if wrung and beaten on rocks to wash. For a while, it is clean of thought, dazzled with pain and the perfect blueness of sky that fills my senses. Only slowly do my losses rise in my mind with the stealth of an overflowing bank—my father, Mika, a future that is mine.

I am back on the path my oath made for me.
If I live to fulfill it
.

When I can endure the pain, I turn my head to find I am lying in the bed of a wagon and must sit up to see over the edge. When I do, I promptly vomit over the side. What Mika had me drink has not killed me, but a part of me wishes it had. I want to lie back, but I grasp the wagon's edges to remain sitting and see where I am.

A gray donkey pulls my wagon. I recognize Raph's muscled back ahead leading a smaller black donkey, my Philot. An armed man I do not know walks behind, and two to either side. Chiram leads a camel laden with packs. My head spins again, but I do not lie back until I see Nami. Her bright eyes have caught mine, and her feathered tail sweeps the air. She
jumps into the wagon and shoves her nose into my face. Her tongue gives my face and neck the cleaning I'm sure they need, and her teeth gently grasp my chin to assure me of her love.

The ache of my losses eased, I fall back into oblivion, not as deep as before, but a hazy place where reality merges with dream.

T
HE NEXT TIME
I wake, Chiram is wiping my head with a wet cloth. Not gently.

I grab his brawny wrist. “That hurts!”

“Good. Means you are alive.”

Gritting my teeth, I sit up, determine to aim his way should my belly heave again. But it does not, the first time in my life I have been disappointed not to be sick. “Where are we?”

“North of Babylon, beside the Euphrates.”

Plowing a path through the river's dancing sparkles, a round boat passes by. Its hull is made of stretched hides sealed with pitch. Boats travel only with southbound current, so that orients me. We are traveling north. I note we have left the rich soil of the flatlands in exchange for a more rocky terrain, which gives me an idea of the distance we have traveled … and how long I have lain in a stupor.

“What has happened?”

He shrugs. “Mika babbled on to the king about a war and letting us go. You were out cold as a corpse. We set out the same night with this … escort.” He spits out the last word.

I rub my forehead and feel a tender bump where I assume it connected with the king's floor. Anger churns in my belly. Mika wanted us gone from his sight as soon as possible.

The guard at the forefront raises his hand, signaling a stop. To camp for the night, I presume. At that moment Raph joins us, leaning over the wagon. “Is he all right?”

“She,” I correct. I want to ball up a fist and hit him. “How can you just leave your brother?” I croak. “He crossed a desert for you!”

Raph flinches as though I truly did strike him. He stands, and I realize he is going to walk away.

Grabbing Chiram's shoulder for support, I haul myself to my feet. “Wait. Do not walk away from me as you walked away from Mika.”

With a grim face, Raph turns back. “Say then what you will.”

“I will.” I take a deep breath but, for a moment, cannot think. My head pounds, and my mouth tastes like sand.

Chiram clears his throat. “You were about to gnaw his ass.”

“Thank you.” This must be the first time those words have found their way from my mouth to Chiram's ears.

With a deep breath, I turn back to Raph. “Why?”

His deep blue eyes meet mine, but my heart does not stutter. Anger has given a blade's edge to my focus. I do not know why I thought I loved him. I was a foolish child struck by his beauty and charm.

“Mika,” he says flatly, “wanted us to be safe.”

“So you let
him
stay in danger? Do you understand what is going to happen there?” Mika had seen the future or perhaps only told a future we could all see. Regardless, war was coming to Babylonia.

Raph's face is without expression, the hard resolve of a warrior set to kill whoever stands in his path.

“Why?” I repeat, aware I am demanding an answer of one of my god's angels, but I would demand it of El himself … if he would speak to anyone other than Abram.

For long moments, Raph stands silent before me, and then he glances over his shoulder, checking the location of our guards. “Adira, you do not understand.”

“Then explain it,” I demand, crossing my arms, “or I will go to these men and tell them we must return.” I lean closer to him. “I saw the future too, Raph. I ascended to heaven with Mika. They will want to know what I have seen.” It is somewhat a lie, or a twisting of truth, but I am desperate.

A deep crimson suffuses Raph's face. “I swore to keep you safe and out of Babylon.”