Mage Quest - Wizard of Yurt 3 (26 page)

“I’m sure if the mage pursues us,” said the king, “our wizard wil be able to protect us, but it would be better not to give him the trouble.”

“Of course, of course, good thinking,” I said, sliding the onyx ring onto my finger and glancing back toward the city. I very much doubted I could protect anyone from Kaz-alrhun.

Part Six. C\T\\ Atib Emir’s

I

“Hie Church of the Sepulchre is the most holy spot in Christendom,” read Joachim from his guidebook. “Every year on Good Friday al the lamps and candles here and, indeed, in al the Christian churches of the Holy City are extinguished. On Easter morning fire from heaven kindles the lamps. Then al the bels in the churches of the city are rung, and the holy flame is used to relight the lamps in al those churches.” I looked around, impressed in spite of myself. Normaly I would have doubted a story of fire from heaven as a tale for the credulous or else the work of an unacknowledged wizard. But in this smal circular church, whose porter had waited to let our group in until the previous group of pilgrims had gone, it was impossible to doubt. Between the columns that ringed the church were mosaic depictions of the crucifixion and resurrection; written al the way around at the top of the wal, in the old imperial language, was the message, “GRAVE, WHERE IS THY VICTORY? DEATH, WHERE IS THY STING? FOR AS IN

ADAM ALL SHALL THE, EVEN SO IN CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE.”

The church with its mosaics, altars dedicated by the various eastern and western groups of Christians, and silken hangings was not the rough cave I had expected. In the center there was no roof, only a wide, circular opening through which the chaplain told us the fire from heaven descended. The hot air from the opening made the flames of the silver lamps sway, their light dancing on the precious stones of the altars.

“This way,” said Joachim quietly. He led us out not the way we had come but to a door on the opposite side which opened onto a dark, cramped stairway cut into the rock. Dominic and Ascelin kept their heads wel down as we eased ourselves around the spiral. We emerged into the cave I had expected to find in the church above, the Sepulchre itself.

Candles burned at either end of a stone slab, two feet across and as long as a man. The slab, of course, was empty. It struck us, or at least me, even more powerfuly than the decorations and the lamps of the church above. We did not speak but knelt by the slab until another porter came over and told Joachim in a low voice that the next group of pilgrims was waiting to enter.

We left by a narrow door at the far end, not quite looking at each other. But I, at any rate, and I thought the rest, felt that we had truly reached the goal of our pilgrimage.

The duchess and I should try to be here at Easter,” said Ascelin a little louder than necessary as we came up a flight of steps into bright daylight.

“We haven’t been to the Mount of Olives yet,” said Joachim, his solemnity faling away in the sunshine. For the last week or more he had been as eager and enthusiastic as a boy, as al the towns we passed began to be places mentioned in the Bible.

On the long overland trip from Xantium to the Holy Land, in spite of watching constantly for mages, Ifriti, and bandits, we had seen very little except an increasingly dense number of pilgrimage churches, al of which the chaplain insisted on visiting. Once we had entered David’s Kingdom, and especialy the last few days here in the Holy City, we had done little besides visit churches.

“And we stil need to see Solomon’s Temple,” said King Haimeric, “although I understand it is not actualy the temple Solomon built himself but one rebuilt after the return of the Children of Abraham from the captivity in Babylon.”

“Of course,” said the chaplain. “It was to the Temple that the child Jesus was brought by his parents on the fortieth day after his birth.”

“And while you’ve been looking at al these churches,” said Maffi unexpectedly, “you stil haven’t gone to look at the Rock.”

“The Rock?” asked the chaplain.

“Of course. The rock on which God told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.”

Maffi stood next to Ascelin, the tal prince’s hand resting on his shoulder. Even though, in the month since he had joined us, the boy had shown no sign of trying to escape, Ascelin, Dominic, and Hugo had tacitly agreed to take turns in keeping close to him. Ascelin seemed to be growing oddly fond of him.

“The Rock isn’t in my guidebook,” said Joachim, leafing through, “but it certainly sounds as though we should visit it. Maybe after we see the Mount of Olives.” I had already noticed this. For three days he had led us through the Holy City, a bustling, modern capital, much cleaner and better laid out than Xantium although also much smaler. The entire time it appeared that to him nothing built in the last fifteen hundred years, since the later days of the Empire when Christianity had become fuly established, even existed. The city was sacred to three religions, but the chaplain had looked only glancingly at the sites holy to the Children of Abraham, taking us by the spired castle of the royal Son of David without a real look, and had not even slowed down when passing those sites holy to the People of the Prophet.

I wondered briefly if Maffl, too, considered this a pilgrimage, then remembered Arnulfs agents teling me that the true pilgrimage goal for those who folowed the Prophet was somewhere deep in the desert, very far to the south. I was afraid I had not paid very close attention.

“I realize what struck me as strange about this place,” said Hugo to me as we stood on the Mount of Olives, looking across the Valey of Josaphat at the tangle of city roofs on the steep slopes across from us. We had already seen the little church on the Mount which sheltered the stone from which Christ had ascended into heaven. “This city isn’t built on the water.” He was right. The City back home and Xantium were both major ports; even the smal cities that dotted the western kingdoms tended to be built on rivers. “It’s probably because it’s never been a trading center,” I suggested. “It’s been a place for kings and priests, but never for merchants.”

“It also seems,” continued Hugo in a low voice, “too, wel, wholesome a city for you to expect someone to disappear. If there realy were rumors here last year about Noah’s Ark—and no one seems to have heard anything about it—then that, too, should be exciting but not perilous. Yet the last message my mother had from my father was the one he sent from here back to the City by another pilgrim, that he would go south a little way and then start for home.”

“Then we’l go south as wel,” I said, squinting into the distance. “The Wadi that Dominic’s looking for should be off in that direction somewhere.”

“I’ve tried drawing that boy out,” added Hugo, “and he won’t say anything definite, but I keep getting the impression he met my father’s party when they came through Xantium last year.”

“The mage Kaz-alrhun had also met Evrard,” I said, glancing toward Maffi. He stood beside Dominic now, quietly listening as the chaplain pointed out al the churches one could see from here, churches built on the sites of important events in the life of Christ and the apostles or of the martyrdoms of early saints, most of which we had already visited. “I don’t know about you, Hugo, but I keep feeling there are too many coincidences here. Everyone, except of course us, seems to know what’s been happening and what it has to do with Dominic’s ring and with your father.”

“Are you ready for the Temple of Solomon?” caled the chaplain to us happily.

But that evening when we went to the room we shared in the pilgrims’ hospice, he seemed oddly subdued. The white-painted hals were ful of other travelers with crosses sewn to their shoulders. The hospice itself was very austere, the rooms smal and undecorated, the beds hard, and the dining room serving only flat bread stuffed with lentils and cucumbers.

I tried to read more of Melecherius on Eastern Magic, but in the dim light of a single candle it was difficult to folow. More and more I had the feeling Melecherius had profoundly misunderstood what the mages had tried to teach him. I closed the book and glanced over at the chaplain. He sat on the opposite bed, leafing through his guidebook with even less light than I had, but then he did not seem to be reading.

“So have we seen al the pilgrimage sites, Joachim?” I asked, kicking off my shoes and stretching out, hands behind my head. There were no chairs.

“I’m not sure,” he said slowly. “I don’t like to admit this, but there are two or three churches in here, which I myself marked that we visited yesterday, but which I now have trouble remembering.” They do al tend to run together afterawhile,” Iagreed.

“But they shouldn’t!” he said with a flash of his dark eyes. “I’ve longed to visit the Holy Land al my life, to walk with living feet on the streets where Christ trod. Now that I’m here at last I can’t have the holy sites al ‘run together’!”

I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked at him. “Read the descriptions again,” I suggested. “I know you won’t have forgotten the Holy Sepulchre, so just concentrate on the smaler churches. Think about each one individualy. It must say in your guidebook which ones have monks and that wil help differentiate them. You should be able to pick out the one where the porter didn’t want to admit Maffi and the one where Dominic banged his head. If you can picture al of us standing inside and think about whatever we saw first—mosaics, altar, candelabra—you’l then be able to get the rest of the details.” Joachim closed the book and flopped down. “I’m not an overly ambitious tourist,” he replied gloomily, “getting different picturesque sites confused. I’m a priest who has visited the places where Christ lived and died to bring us salvation, yet who stil finds himself thinking about supper at the end of the day, gets sore feet from walking and standing, and needs to consult a guidebook when the experience should be burned into my soul.”

I thought about this in silence for a moment, knowing better than to offer any more of the memory tricks that had alowed me to squeak through the wizards’ school without ever being properly studious. I had, just barely, managed to save the chaplain’s life, but it was going to be difficult if he now expected me to save his soul as wel.

“Maybe it’s the overal experience that’s important,” I offered, “not the details of the individual pilgrimage churches.” He turned to look toward me, a long, intense stare that suddenly turned into a smile. “Thank you, Daimbert,” he said, stretching out again. “You’re absolutely right.”

“Right about what?’ I said, startled.

“I should have realized this from the beginning,” he said with surprisingly good humor. “Now I know why

I’ve been having to fight against spiritual dissatisfaction this entire journey. I’d assumed it was only the temptings of the devil and, of course, in part it was, but I now realize it also came from my own misdirected attentions.”

It was no use asking him to explain what he meant. I wouldn’t understand even if he did.

“I had thought that to come on pilgrimage to the Holy Land would be the culminating experience of my life, the opportunity for my soul to rise above mundane concerns at last and reach toward God. In part it certainly has been, but I was constantly irritated in finding myself stil on and of the earth, worried by earthly things.

“Now you’ve made it evident, with your clear insight, that I’d been missing the point al along. The kingdom of God cometh not with observation, neither shal they say, Lo here! or, lo there! For behold, the kingdom of God is within you.’ It is not my body that needed to go where Jesus lived nearly two milennia ago, but my spirit that needed to rise to meet the living Christ.” He gave me a quick glance. “God can use even a wizard for His purposes.”

“Glad to be of service,” I mumbled.

Ascelin and Dominic found the Wadi Harhammi on an old, yelowed map they came across in the bottom of the map drawer of a dark bookstore in the oldest part of the city. None of the newer maps, even the most detailed, included it.

It seemed, from the rather confused symbols the mapmaker had used, to be up in the stony hils a few days’ journey south of the emirate of Bahdroc. But the map showed no road leading to the Wadi.

“Do you stil want to go there?” asked Ascelin. We al sat on the floor, crowded into the kings room in the pilgrims’ hospice. “That mage certainly knew about the Wadi. I’m afraid we don’t have much hope of being the first there—even if no one else had reached there already in the last fifty years.”

“We may have to face the mage wherever we go,” said Dominic. Tm beginning to wonder if he’s been toying with us, to let us travel al the way unmolested from Xantium to the Holy City.”

“And don’t forget King Warm,” said Hugo. “He stole Arnulfs onyx ring from us on purpose to buy the flying horse, which by now has certainly taken him to the Wadi if that’s where he was going.”

“That is,” I put in, “unless Arnulfs agents somehow managed to get the horse away from Kaz-alrhun first—after al, when I last saw them they seemed to think the horse was now legaly Arnulfs.”

“We should go south in any event,” said the king, “because that is the direction Sir Hugo’s party took. As the mage mentioned the Wadi Harhammi to us, he may also have mentioned it to them. We can ask after them in the oases along the way and, if we reach the emir’s city without word, perhaps we can enlist his aid.” Maffi sat in the corner, folowing the discussion with bright eyes but saying nothing. I wondered uneasily if he was acting as Kaz-alrhun s agent. If so, I couldn’t see how even a mage could get information from him while he stayed as close to us as Ascelin made sure he did

Dominic looked at his hands, where the ruby of his ring shone in the candle light “I shal travel to the Wadi whether the rest of you wish to accompany me past the emir’s city or not. My father died with it in his thoughts. We were too foolish for fifty years to realize there was a message hidden in this ring, but even if I’m far too late I must get there at last.” Dominic glanced toward the king for confirmation as he finished, but the rest of us were already slowly nodding. This had been King Haimeric’s pilgrimage, but we had now completed that aspect of the journey. Somewhere between Dominic’s father’s grave and the