“This is it?” Alexios said, walking alongside Rakhsh.
Miriai nodded. She was his guide, at this point, since Amina was too busy tending to her family.
“Ach, I haven’t been here in years,” Miriai said. “But I could never forget it.”
“Do you actually know where Hermes Trismegistos is? Or where the Sabians are?”
“Give me a break! It’ll come back to me soon enough, dear. Now it’s late, and we should have a rest. If these Sabians are around, we’ll find them sooner or later.”
Alexios tensed up, but he kept silent, afraid of offending the woman who had called down the heavenly river. All he could think about was learning how to defeat the Latins so he could get back to Trebizond, but Miriai was insisting that they settle in and have dinner first!
To hell with these annoying side-quests! I’ve been gone long enough!
The poor folk living here shared a well, and none objected to the travelers using it, though that may have been due to the fact that Alexios and most of his twenty-nine friends were armed. Some cave dwellers parted the colorful patterned curtains overhanging the cave entrances and watched them silently. Beyond the ruins of a distant broken wall and a dead tree hung with blue hamza amulets, Basil and Kassia and some of their Domari friends approached a graveyard of leaning tombstones which looked older than the flood.
“Keep away, dears, keep away!” Miriai rushed over and herded the children back to the well. “Ach, there are ghūl about! These are their favored places, and you are their favored food! We must be cautious.” She hugged Kassia and Basil close. “We wouldn’t want to lose you.”
Most of the children were terrified, however. Though it seemed none knew what the ghūl was—except some sort of monster meant to frighten them into shutting up and going to sleep—several ran screaming back to their parents when they heard Miriai’s warning. Alexios looked at Miriai as if to complain, thinking of how simple this trick was. Was it really necessary to frighten children in order to control them? He also noticed that a nearby inscription was carved with letters in an unfamiliar language, a kind of blockier-looking Arabic.
“It’s Syriac, dear,” Miriai told him. “The ancient tongue of Osroené.”
“Can you read it?” Alexios asked.
“Only a little.” She narrowed her eyes. “It says something about the Lord of the Gods, the Blessed Mountain, someone called Sin, and someone else called Arab. Much of what you see here was built by someone named Sila, undertaken in name of Tiridates, son of Adona.”
“There’s nothing about Hermes.”
“Don’t worry, dear, we’ll find him when the time is right.”
Alexios clutched his head. “You keep telling me that, but the time’s never going to be right! My friends could be dead, God knows what could have happened to—”
Miriai took his arm. “You told me you lost the last battle against your friends’ assailants, is that not so? The enemy, then, is strong. You must learn new ways in order to defeat them. Otherwise this entire journey of yours will have been for nothing.”
Alexios pulled his arm away. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you were me, if you’d been through what I’ve been—”
“We will do what we can for you and your friends. But now we must rest. What’s the point of being too tired to enjoy what you’ve got?” She chuckled. “Besides, if Hermes Trismegistos is here now, he’ll still be here in the morning, won’t he?”
“If,” Alexios scoffed as he walked away.
Miriai watched him leave. Eventually she joined Kassia and Basil, who were feeding Rakhsh as the Domari unloaded pack animals, set up tents, lit cooking fires, and drew water from the well.
Alexios explored, in the mean time. Though he was exhausted by the day’s march, it was impossible to stop himself. He was so close! One way or the other, this was the end of the journey which had begun all those weeks ago during the Trebizond snowstorm when Dionysios told him in a dream to travel here—to Harran.
“I made it, Dionysios,” Alexios whispered to the dusk. “I just wish you could be with us.”
Miriai had taught Alexios how to ask where the Sabians were in Arabic. But whenever he uttered this question to the people in the caves, they would shrug, shake their heads, tell him they didn’t know. If they were children, they would laugh and run away.
The evening grew cold and dark. Some empty caves he found were burned and empty; tunnel entrances were filled with stone debris which would take a team of laborers months to dislodge.
Nothing’s here, he thought. Is this why we came all this way? Just to look at ruins? What if the dream of Dionysios was just a dream?
Soon it was so dark that Alexios worried about getting lost, even with Gedara lit. Frustrated, he made his way back to the Domari camp. His friends gave him mana, meat, fruit, and water, but they were all so tired that none sang or danced. Such was their fatigue that even the young children had wrapped themselves in cloaks in their tents and put themselves to sleep, all without being told.
Isato volunteered to keep watch. At first Jafer El-Hadi objected on the grounds that a woman could not keep them safe, but Alexios told him not to worry. Isato was a fearsome fighter, and none need fear while she was on watch.
“I trust you,” El-Hadi said, watching Alexios in a way which suggested that this was not actually the case.
Alexios put his hand over his heart. “I swear, she will protect us.”
El-Hadi looked at Isato with skepticism, then returned to his family’s tent. Isato, in turn, looked at Alexios as though to thank him, but said nothing.
Almost everyone was drowsing before long, as the stars emerged from the night. All was soon silent and dark save the flickering of a few campfires.
When Alexios was lying down on his cloak, he realized that he’d forgotten to check Kassia and Basil. At this point he was so weary that he almost needed to pry his eyelids open with his fingers. Yet in his memory he saw their mother Anna clad in armor back in Trebizond just before the first siege, when the Romans had attempted to blow the city apart with a gigantic basilik they had somehow dragged all the way across Anatolia from Konstantinopolis.
Anna the single working mom, Alexios thought.
She was so clear in his memory it seemed he was actually with her in Trebizond again. Sensing the approach of death, she had asked him to take care of Kassia and Basil.
“They have no one else,” she said. “I’m the last person in the world for them.”
Shutting his eyes for a moment and wishing he had dealt with this before lying down, he stood back up, drew Gedara, and illuminated it with one point of farr. 14/100 remained. In the green light blazing from the aerolithic metal he saw tents, figures wrapped in cloaks sleeping among jagged rocks, and drowsing donkeys, camels, and horses, all keeping close to one another to stay warm. The campfires were burning down to embers, and Isato was watching him with a mixture of curiosity and annoyance, her eyes glowing blue in the night. Rakhsh snored loudly enough to shake nearby pebbles, and Kassia had passed out beside him, but Basil was gone. After searching the camp, Alexios was forced to shake Kassia awake. This took several tries; she was so tired her eyes stayed shut even as she groaned out responses to his questions.
“Basil?” she said. “He went for a walk.”
“I can’t find him anywhere,” Alexios said.
“I don’t know where he is. Leave me alone. You lied to us.” She turned over and drifted back to sleep.
By this time Isato had joined Alexios. She asked what was wrong; he told her.
“Should we wake everyone up?” he said.
“I’m not sure we can,” she said. “They’re too tired. The last few days have caught up with them.”
“Will you help me find Basil?”
“I swore to protect them.” She jutted her chin to the sleeping travelers. “I must stay here. The boy is your responsibility. You find him.”
Some help you are. Alexios walked into the night. By accident he tripped over Za-Ilmaknun, who groaned and babbled in his sleep; Alexios apologized.
After just a few footsteps he was away from the camp with no companion save his sword, whose light was slowly draining his farr, now down to 13/100. He stopped for a moment, extinguished the blade, and allowed his eyes to adjust. The land was black, the hills were black, and only the sky was shining. Perhaps the outlines of the ancient architecture carved into the cliffs were visible; he was unsure. There was neither wind nor sound. Suddenly, in the distance, a pack of wild dogs—they must have been jackals—howled, laughed, and cried together. Alexios’s hackles rose, his fatigue vanished before an onrush of adrenaline in his blood, and he re-lit Gedara, raising it against the darkness that seemed to be devouring him. Then he continued walking around Sumatar in search of Basil.
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Worried about waking some of the more unsavory characters who might have been prowling the night or hiding in the caves, Alexios only whispered Basil’s name. No response. Where was he? Alexios grew more worried. Something must have happened to Basil.
I can’t find the Sabians, he thought, almost shaking with despair. I can’t save Trebizond. And now I’ve lost Basil. I’ve lost everything. Everything I cared for is destroyed. The movement is finished. The Romans beat us. I’m alone out here in the dark with nothing but my failures.
He ended up spending so much time walking in the night that he worried about running out of farr, and extinguished Gedara again. With the crescent moon rising, he could see a little better, and avoided breaking his ankles on all the rocks that were scattered everywhere.
Soon he came to the Syriac graveyard he had found earlier with Miriai. Hovering above a tombstone straight ahead were two eyes reflecting the moonlight. They might have been an owl’s. Then Alexios discerned the small figure of Basil standing before the eyes and staring at them.
“Basil!” Alexios said.
The eyes shifted toward him, and in the brightening moonlight Alexios saw that they belonged to a beautiful woman sitting on the tombstone. Dressed in a translucent burka which showed off her full figure, she reached out to him with both hands.
“Come with me.” Her voice was deep, rich, sonorous, like a singer’s.
Alexios sheathed Gedara and walked toward her. When he took her hands, she pulled him close, lifted the veil over her face, and kissed his lips, pressing herself against him. A tingling, electric sweetness poured across his body wherever she touched him.
Together they returned with Basil to the Domari camp. The woman, who was named Gelu, told Alexios that she was the last of the Sabians.
“I can teach you all there is to know about gaining the power of the gods,” she said.
“You don’t want anything in return?” Alexios said.
“I’m happy to do it.”
Energized by her presence, Alexios spent the night training with her while everyone else—Basil included—slept. Within hours, Alexios had restored his farr to 100/100. He had also mastered control of the wind, and was propelling himself across the sky, flattening entire forests with the strength of the gales. Soon Gelu taught him how, by raising his arms, he could raise the dead from their graves, reunite their bones with the ligaments of spirit, and send millions of them marching north across the snowy wastes to Trebizond, their joints clattering. To this sound was added ringing chainmail and clanking armor and spears and swords as they plundered armories and routed the armies sent to stop them.
With Gelu’s help, Alexios screamed into the sky, and commanded the birds, who blacked out the sun as they fled the trees and cliffs of Romanía, Persia, Skythia, and Arabia, swarming in screeching storms toward his goal. Men, too, obeyed his summons. They abandoned their lives and took up weapons and armor and joined together, first in squads, then in battalions, soon in brigades and armies marching north to the city where his friends were chained.
For days, soldiers covered the old Roman roads. Demons climbed out of the underworld, clawing up through the sand and tearing it with their horns, the dirt puffing with fire as Hades shone beneath. Flickering candle flame djinn gathered across the desert like wavering mirages.
All marched and obeyed. As Alexios watched from the clouds, his armies converged on Trebizond. Here the Pontic mountains rumbled. First pebbles, then rocks, then boulders tumbled down their flanks as they spewed pillars of smoke into the sky, the black churning masses of acridity boiling with lava meteors and flashing jagged lightning. His armies marched in the gaps between the rivers of fire pouring down the mountains.
As this took place, the sea retreated from the shore, exposing the rotten hulks of wrecked triremes whose black and white painted eyes still marked their prows. Crabs snapped their claws, and fish flapped and gasped in the gleaming muck. Then the Euxine’s blue horizon rose to the clouds. At first Alexios was unsure of what he was even looking at—he was unable to understand his own power—but then he saw that this was a tidal wave, one swelling with thick arteries of surging foam as it rose above Trebizond and obscured the sun like a pane of glass. It smashed the city’s walls and gushed around them, and the Latins cowered within.
Alexios’s army consisted of millions of men on his left flank, millions of demons and djinn and skeletons on his right, and in the rear the birds and animals, the trees and mountains, even the stars which swarmed like fireflies. Soon the wind, fire, earth, and water carried the Latins into the canyons forming as rents split the land down to the red mantle that lay beneath the Earth’s crust. The enemies of humanity plunged inside, screaming as they waved their arms and kicked their legs before the land closed up around them.
Then Alexios’s armies stormed Trebizond, impaling or beheading or eviscerating or dismembering any Latins who stood in their way. This being done, the skeletons used swords of fire to burst the shackles that clasped enslaved wrists and ankles.
They burst the shackles of misery.
Alexios’s friends were free. Now his armies of men and birds and beasts and demons and djinn and skeletons marched on Konstantinopolis—
In Gelu’s eyes was an abyss, a void into which he had fallen. She groaned, and Alexios stumbled, dropping Gedara, which until then he had been gripping hard enough to make his hands bleed. He was still standing in the graveyard, trembling, transfixed by the two crescent moons blazing from her pupils and from the whites of her eyes, the green irises pulsating. She blinked. Za-Ilmaknun was chanting something behind them—Alexios caught the phrase “in the name of Christ Jesus, begone!” Za-Ilmaknun also held something in his hand. It looked like a wood chip, and yet the sunlight shining from it was blinding, the heat made Alexios’s skin redden and peel, and its luminous beam had transfixed a white dove slowly flapping through the murk, though Alexios could no longer tell reality from dreams.
Stumbling again, he fell to the cold dirt and rocks, and looked up to the tombstone just in time to see a dark figure lope away into the night, grunting and growling. All light save that of the stars and the crescent moon had faded. Za-Ilmaknun gasped with relief, then rushed over to somewhere out of sight, saying something Alexios was unable to make out.
In his confusion and exhaustion Alexios stared up at the stars, which wavered as though they were alive, or as though djinn were soaring past.
Za-Ilmaknun was still talking to himself. Now his shouting interrupted Alexios’s reverie.
“The boy!” Za-Ilmaknun said. “He has stopped breathing!”
Alexios struggled to his feet, searching the dark for Gedara. Finding it, he lit the blade with the last of his farr—only two points remained for some reason—and saw Za-Ilmaknun pulling bags and wooden boxes of medicinal herbs from his pack and waving them beneath Basil’s nose. Foul-smelling unguents were smeared there to no effect, for the boy lay still as Za-Ilmaknun felt his body, pressed his chest, raised his arms over his head and then brought them down again, listening in vain to his silent heart and lungs.
Za-Ilmaknun was praying and chanting in Axumite by the time Alexios staggered over to him, dropped Gedara—plunging them once more into darkness—and shoved Za-Ilmaknun aside. Then Alexios clasped his hands and knelt beside Basil, almost like he was going to pray, but he leaned over the boy and pushed down hard on his chest, repeating this motion thirty times (counting aloud the whole while) before pinching the boy’s nose and blowing air into his mouth.
“What are you doing?” said Za-Ilmaknun’s voice in the dark. “You’ll break his ribs!”
“CPR,” Alexios said.
“Seepar?” Za-Ilmaknun had turned away to smash sparks from his flint and iron so they could see. “I’ve never heard of it. Is it a Roman technique? It doesn’t sound Roman…”
“Can’t talk,” Alexios said.
“Are you a healer?” Za-Ilmaknun said. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
No answer came. Alexios was so focused now that in his mind, only two things existed: himself and Basil. This was his first time performing CPR, which he had briefly studied in health class. In films and TV shows, it was almost always portrayed as quick and effective, but he soon found himself drenched in sweat, feeling so tired that he was ready to ask Za-Ilmaknun for help. On top of that, the game voice told Alexios that his healing skill was only at initiate. It was unlikely he would succeed in saving Basil.
Soon a light was shining nearby; Za-Ilmaknun had managed to ignite a torch and jam it into the ground.
“This is spirit sickness,” he said. “Of a kind most severe, worse than Isato’s. The ghūl had enthralled you both with the power of her gorgon eyes! You should know better than to approach desert tombs at night! It was only thanks to the splinter of the true cross I carry with me that I was able to defend against—”
“I’ll lose count if you keep talking!” Alexios shouted.
“What does it matter? I don’t see how breaking the poor boy’s ribs is going to help.” Za-Ilmaknun placed his hand on Alexios’s shoulder. “It may be time, my son, to let him go—to commend him to Christ, who shall shepherd him into—”
“Shut up!” Alexios shoved his hand away.
Shrugging, Za-Ilmaknun fell to his knees, opened his hands to the sky, and resumed praying.
Basil was unresponsive. The CPR was having no effect. Alexios searched for Basil’s breath and pulse, but found neither.
“Jesus, I’m going to lose him.” Alexios’s stomach twisted. “There’s something I’m not doing right.”
“And I wonder, what is that something?” said a voice behind them in the dark.
So surprised he almost yelped with fright, Alexios turned to the shadow standing just beyond the light of Za-Ilmaknun’s flickering torch. Alexios picked up Gedara, and brightened the sword to its maximum luminosity. The shadow cried out and covered its face. It was just Miriai. Alexios sighed, and his shoulders fell. Just as he was kneeling to resume CPR, she hobbled toward them.
“You know how to take life, dear,” she said. “It’s time you learned how to give it.”
“What are you talking about—”
“We must be quick,” she said. “Soon the poor boy shall be truly lost to us. Easy is the path from life to death, but to return from death to life, ach, that’s a hard one. Give Basil your life, Alexios, the same way you gave him the farr—the same way you gave him hope, the same way you gave him love.”
Alexios was about to scoff again, thinking she was just a crazy old woman and that he must have hallucinated the invisible river she had drawn down from the stars.
“You still don’t listen,” she said. “Even after all we’ve been through. Well, do you have any better ideas?”
Alexios stared at her, unable to think of an answer.
She seized his wrist in her left hand while pressing her right to Basil’s chest. The sudden sensation coursing through Alexios was like when Barsúmes had touched him when he was tied up just outside the caravanserai. Alexios’s eyelids shut, his eyes rolled back in his head, and he swayed on his knees, losing his balance, barely hearing the game voice’s warnings about his health decreasing from 62/100 to 10/100. All thought narrowed to a point. He ceased to take any interest in life. Soon he would perish into nothingness, but what did that matter?
We come from nothing, he thought. To nothing we return.
Now he felt too weak to stand or even think. The breath caught in his throat as his heart slowed and his blood grew sluggish and stilled in his veins. Miriai was taking too much health. Soon Alexios’s heart would stop. The electricity glittering in his brain would fade.
Only when Basil’s eyes flashed open did she release Alexios, who then tumbled into the dirt, plunging into silence and darkness.