Authors: Aidan Harte
‘Yes,’ the nasi of the Gad agreed, ‘why should I submit to some nameless beggar who claims to be the Old Man? Most likely he is just another pious idiot.’
Mik la Nan nodded. ‘There are many of those.’
Roe de Nail took any slur on the Old Man as a slur on him. ‘God’s beard, you Southerners are an irreligious brood.’
‘In desperate times people cling to desperate hopes. My whole life I have had ragged prophets telling me my duty is to overthrow the Oltremarines. But my duty is to the Napthtali. We are strong because we travel with the wind and not against it.’
‘Are you afraid of a fight?’
‘Do you take me for a man who flees from trifles? Once the Napthtali called the Empty Quarter home, but a generation ago something barren was born in the heart of it, something inimical to man. The Sands are hungry and they creep further north each year. Graveyards are left along the Plain of Sharon where rich towns were once scattered, and as we fled like panicked kine the dead came claiming their inheritance: cannibal ghouls clawing up graves; Jinn in the pleasing form of girls tempting shepherds into the darkness. Nature’s hand turned against us. We were no longer welcome, and so we came here.’
Bakhbukh cleared his throat mildly and the old nasi said more equably, ‘That has created tensions. Let us resolve them. I did not come north to fight. I came here to live, and similarly I have come here to your tent, Roe de Nail, to make the peace, not to be dragged into a foolish war. What would be the point of raising an army to throw against the walls of Akka?’
When none of the nesi’im spoke, Mik la Nan stood. ‘Come then, and let us see what this Old Man of yours has to say.’
*
While the nesi’im went up to the Old Man’s cave, their men waited. There would be war; that was certain. The question was with whom. Yūsuf stomped off in a sulk again. Sofia stayed and watched Jabari as the children of the various tribes played with each other. They had yet to inherit their fathers’ quarrels.
After a few hours, the children drifted back to their mothers’ tents and Sofia began to get anxious. She took Iscanno from Jabari and went for a walk, though she kept one eye on the cave overhead. She caught occasional glimpses of the Benjaminite women, shadowy creatures whose long veils reminded her of the buio. The gulf between them and her was wider than the Sands.
She jumped when a voice from nowhere whispered, ‘You have wrought wonders, Contessa!’
She looked about and found Yūsuf, lying on his back beside one of the Benjaminites’ plundered carriages. He was whirling a camel-stick in the air, trying to swat the swirling flies. Evidently Roe de Nail had been remiss in completely destroying the wine he’d captured, for Yūsuf had smelled it out.
‘I bog frogovness. I hop today can be a new bargaining for us.’
Sofia didn’t like the sound of that ‘us’, but perhaps, in his oafish way, Yūsuf was trying to be conciliatory.
‘We fought back to back,’ she said. ‘There’s nothing to forgive.’
‘We footed on the wrong start. I treated you monstrously. I failed as a host, a grave sin for an Ebionite. The trials of my youth, my struggles to hold together the Sicarii against impossible odds don’t excuse my behaviour.’
Sofia wasn’t interested in his maudlin justifications. ‘Victory will hold the Sicarii together now.’
‘No. It’s not just the successes you have given me. It’s you, Contessa. They
believe
now. You don’t know how hard I tried to hammer faith into their thick heads. Then you show up – suddenly the blind see and the lame walk.’
‘They just needed something better to fight for than silver.’
‘You are an enchantress sent by God to aid me.’ He jumped to his feet and grabbed her hand. ‘With your skill and my name, we shall do great deeds.’
She gently extricated her hand. ‘I think you’re a little tired.’
‘Sleep?’ He waved his stick defiantly like a scimitar. ‘While Jerusalem remains occupied by devils, while that carbuncle of Akka remains to be excised? Never! Don’t you see? God sent you to be my right hand in renewing the Radinate. Marry me, Contessa – your disgrace will vanish like the dew at morning.’
‘My disgrace?’
‘Come,’ he said with a wheedling smile, ‘your condition is shameful. Your son remains nameless.’ He laid his hand on Iscanno’s head. ‘Give him a father. Give yourself a husband with a proud lineage. After we push the interlopers into the sea, I will acclaim your son as my heir. I offer a name, and a crown to go with it!’
Sofia slapped his hand away. ‘I need no man to walk before me,
or
to fight my battles.’
‘Is there a problem?’
‘It’s none of your business, Bakhbukh,’ Yūsuf hissed. ‘Go and attend to your new masters.’
‘No. Stay and hear,’ Sofia said. ‘Know this, Yūsuf ben Sinan. If I let you call yourself nasi of the Sicarii another day, it is because it suits my purposes. Your men are mine now. I bring what you never did, never could: I bring victory. But were it otherwise, were I a poor widow, or that fallen woman you took me for when I first entered your caves, I’d sooner die than marry a worm like you.’
Yūsuf raised his stick in fury, but Bakhbukh yanked it from his hand and snapped it in two. ‘Do not disgrace yourself.’
‘It’s you who are disgraced, turning lapdog to this Jezebel!’ Yūsuf strode into the darkness, away from the humiliating laughter.
‘I think the wedding’s off, Bakhbukh.’
‘Thank goodness. I haven’t a thing to wear. By the way, the Old Man has made the peace.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. And he wishes to bless your child.’
*
As Sofia made her way up the path to the cave, she wondered what to expect: some exotic warlord, an Ebionite John Acuto with a rusted scimitar? The last thing she expected was the wizened old face smiling at her.
It was Ezra. Alive.
‘I thought you were drowned!’
‘No such luck.’ He set down the book he was leafing through, but did not approach. Sofia wanted to embrace him but was stayed by a feeling of foreboding, and her anger. She had grown up in the tower of a man who always knew what was best for her, and who manipulated her accordingly. Now Ezra had deceived her, let her believe he was dead, let her—
‘I would have come for you in Akka, Sofia,’ he said softly, as if tracking her thoughts, ‘but I had to prepare your path.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said lightly, ‘whatever tall tale you told the nesi’im, they believed it. Thank you.’
‘I told them naught but the truth.’ He looked at Iscanno, his eyes wide. ‘I told them that your child was the crucible of all our hopes. May I?’
‘Of course.’
He took Iscanno with trembling hands, whispered a blessing and kissed him. ‘To be Handmaid is a strange calling.’
‘I’m mother to a child older than the world – strange hardly covers it. Who are you, Ezra? Really? The Old Man, or just an old sailor who talks too much?’
He handed Iscanno back, grinning. ‘I can’t be both?’
‘Don’t get cute. Our meeting in Ariminum wasn’t accidental, was it?’
‘No. I had to save you from Bernoulli.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Such a trifle will not stop the likes of him. Like a good philosopher, I see you are sceptical. I shall be a good philosopher too, and start at first principles.’
He stared at the fire a while, and then sighed. ‘An age ago, there were three brothers. They were the greatest astrologers in a city famous for astrology. Its name is now forgotten, but once its commandments were carved in granite. They worshipped fire, but their true idol was equilibrium. Though they made sacrifices to
Ohura Mazda
, they believed that
druj
– the Darkness – was necessary. When they imagined perfection, they imagined a balanced scale, a sand-clock resting on its side, a boat on becalmed waters, a desert where the wind does not stir the smallest grain. This arid philosophy pinned them like dried butterflies, but they were content. Then came a terrible day when they stumbled upon the music of the firmament—’
‘Why terrible?’ Sofia interrupted.
Ezra looked at her for a moment, and then said, ‘Perfection is most fragile when it cannot admit new ideas. The universe was
pulsing
. They expected an endless stability, but in fact it was a great wave; its millennial passage washes exhaustion from the land and animates all things. All was change! There were ages when the all-pervading Darkness encroached on one last flickering candle, followed by ages of luminance when the Darkness was reduced to a maggot lurking beside the hot vents of the deep. Perfection? This was
chaos
. It could not be so.’
Words are small things, but Sofia had heard snatches of this wild song before. ‘And yet it is.’
‘They recoiled from it. If God made this song, then He could not be God. The brothers resolved to compose a harmony congenial to their own conception: three wise men, reforming an irrational world. They suffered fire to make their flesh incorruptible
– and that was their fall, Sofia, though they knew it not then. For another worm had conquered them, and it persuaded them, with praise and promises, that their vocation was to stand immortal watch until God’s progeny next arrived …’ His voice trailed off, then he whispered, ‘and then to hasten to the court of a king – a mortal potentate who could do what must be done—’
Before he had finished, Sofia had leaped up to interpose her body – and a dagger – between him and Iscanno.
He regarded her steadily, sadly. ‘Had I wished to kill you, Contessa, or the babe, I have had numerous opportunities. Even now, you couldn’t stop me.’
‘Try me!’
‘If you wish to use that knife, I won’t prevent you. It would be just. Just as Cain and Nimrod and Herod and Bernoulli are one, so all Handmaids are one. In trespassing against Her, I trespassed against you.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘I’m
old
.’ The strength had drained from his voice. ‘I am so old I scarcely know my part any more – and yet, old as I am, beside you I’m a child. The Handmaid’s burden is eternal, no less that God’s. Each Handmaid must go to Jerusalem – that much I knew – and so I brought you across the water. But nothing is as it should be: Jerusalem is lost, the Wind and Waters are disturbed and the Darkness is stronger now than ever it has been. The moment Iscanno was born, I felt it – and so did the Darkness. For the first time in centuries its tendrils recoiled – if only momentarily – from the world. O, it is anxious. It knows its time is short.’
Sofia dropped the dagger and sank to the ground, weeping for a child slain a thousand years ago. ‘Saints preserve me,’ she sobbed.
Ezra would have wept too, but having gone this far he quietly continued, turning the pages of the book mechanically as he spoke. ‘Herod’s soldiers carried out their work for me. It looked
like butchery, not justice, but I concealed my doubts from my brothers – as though my doubts could be more shameful than the slaughter we had instigated. We went our separate ways to wander the old paths and wait for the wheel to turn once more. One
falls
in love, but disenchantment comes as slowly as shedding skin. I roamed the darkening world, mile upon mile, year upon year, and strove to convince myself that all was as it should be. A hundred doubts became one certainty: that far from
creating
balance, we had destroyed it. I saw a world grow old. I saw winters that outstayed their course.’
He sighed again, a sound with decades of dust in it. ‘History shambled on. The Prophetess’ disciples forged a grand empire and I stumbled through battlefields that had consumed armies, through cities whose walls had been breached by plague and civil discord. The truth was undeniable: in the turmoil of history there is an equilibrium which we, like ants building a nest in the foundation of a great temple, had been too small to perceive. I took myself to the desert and found a cave that had been occupied, centuries ago, by one of the Prophetess’ disciples. After Her death, he had retreated from the world, to pray – or perhaps, like me, merely to hide. The tribes said he lived there still.’
Despite her anger, Sofia was curious. ‘Was he … like you and your brothers?’
‘No – there are others like us, but he was just a man. His dried-out corpse was covered in a thin blanket and he wore a hair shirt. I looked upon those bony fingers clasped in prayer with envy, then I fled my body in disgust, throwing my soul into the stars as of old. With the strokes of a drowning man, I swam beyond the several worlds belonging to our sun and – right out there! – I saw it: the Darkness, grown vast and powerful, a great cresting wave of filth about to drown the world and replace the song with one universal scream of pain. Before I could flee, my youngest brother found me. He called me apostate – an enemy of the Light
– and tried to bind me so that the Darkness could complete its work.’
Ezra stopped leafing through the book, pausing not to study the page, but his hands.
‘I awoke bloodied by fratricide as well as infanticide, and in that age in which I slept, the world had turned. The Radinate had waxed and, as all empires must, it had waned. I looked about and found my companion’s blanket and shirt and skin had quite rotted away. Since the saint had so obligingly let me sleep, I decided to bury what was left of him, but under his bones I found a book. The leather binding had rotted, but the pages were miraculously preserved. It was a compendium of the lore of that ancient people now called Ebionites. After the Temple fell, fortune-hunters sought the Covenant in vain, for
this
was the Covenant. I read it with humble heart and realised that God had been whispering to the Ebionites as he whispered to me – he whispered to all peoples, but only those few who hear are his Chosen Peoples. For many years, I stayed in the cave and pondered my crimes. In that time, the people – shepherds first, later nesi’im – came and sought my advice. They assumed I was the old saint and I did not contradict them. I liked pretending to be someone good. They told me of the warlike strangers who had come, as all men come eventually, seeking Jerusalem. The
franj
were bold and barbarous, simple tools for the Darkness to manipulate. The Handmaid’s return was nigh and, knowing that Jerusalem would call her as it had her predecessors, I taught the Ebionite nesi’im arts to repel the
franj
.’ The wind hooped through the hollows of the caves. Sofia fancied she saw faint pride on his face – but perhaps it was just an old scar, caught by the flickering fire.