Ahmet eyed the coins on the tabletop as if they were asps. His vows with the order urged poverty and a simple, even rustic, life upon the priests.
You’ve already broken those vows once, said a little voice in his head, coming here, looking for the boy.,
He reached out and turned one of the Roman coins over. It was newly minted. On the face, the stern visage of the Emperor Heraclius, on the obverse, the sigil of the mint of Palmyra and a smaller inset of a woman in a crown. He picked up four of the coins and pushed the others back.
“I will accompany you as far as Gerasa-I am looking for a missing friend, and I do not know if they have gone as far as Damascus.”
“Good enough for me,” the merchant said. The Southerner pushed his chair back and gathered up the other coins. “You’re tired, I think, so sleep in. We won’t leave until late afternoon tomorrow at the earliest. I have a cargo of myrrh to load and pottery to sell. Ask the innkeeper where I am, he’ll know.”
Ahmet nodded his thanks and put the heavy coins in his wallet. The merchant gathered up some things from the other table, one of them a heavy papyrus scroll. Ahmet raised an eyebrow at the sight.
“What are you reading?” he asked as the merchant finished gathering his things.
Mohammed looked down and laughed softly. “A gift from a friend. You will find that I am a questioning man- always wondering about this thing or another. I was pes tering him with questions about the way of things in the world and he gave me this. To my thinking, he hopes that I will read it and bother him no more. He calls it the torah. It is a holy book of his people.“
“He is a priest, then,” Ahmet said.
Mohammed nodded. “He calls himself a teacher, but I think that you are right.” He looked down at the scroll case. “It was a princely gift. I will have to find something as good, or better, to give back to him when I return to the south.”
Ahmet rose as well, his supper done.
“Good night, Mohammed,” he said. “Perhaps on the road to Gerasa, we can discuss the way of things.”
The merchant nodded, smiling, and went up to his room.
Morning came and with it a great racket in the street. Ahmet dragged himself from the soft bed with great reluctance. After four days of sleeping on stones in the wilderness, the comforts of the caravansary were welcome indeed. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin and pushed the shutter on the deep window embrasure open. In the street below, hundreds of men and horses were milling about.
Soldiers, he thought. A cavalry regiment.
They were dressed in desert garb and light armor, with lances and bows. Eventually order was imposed on the unruly lot and they trotted away up the narrow canyon that the stream came out of.
When he had reached Alexandria on the trail of the boy, Dwyrin, Ahmet had found the Greek city in an equal uproar. The canals and harbor were clogged with barges, dhows, and great triremes. The Roman Legion that was stationed in Egypt was being withdrawn to fight against the Persians, and tens of thousands of men were on the move. It had taken almost three days to find and see the quartermaster in charge of the levy of new troops. Then Ahmet, to his dismay, had learned that the boy had not reported in at all.
Much of his small store of coin was expended in getting the chief scribe at the prefect’s offices in the New Palace to find out where Dwyrin’s unit was heading; the Third Ars Magica, a component of the Third Cyrenaicea Legion, was being loaded aboard ship to sail to Sidon on the coast of Phoenicia. If the boy was not on the rolls in Alexandria, perhaps he had met with his unit already and was well away from the city. Non-Imperial shipping to the embattled coast of Syria was nonexistent, and he could not well take passage on a troop transport. He had made his way back to the inn on the southern canal. Several sailors had been in the common room, and discussions with them had led Ahmet to take a ship back down the Nile to Heliopolis and then go by camel to the burgeoning port of Clysma on the Sinus Arabicus. Everywhere he had traveled in the lower delta, the Roman army and its auxillia was on the move.
So too here, in Petra. After shaving and performing his morning rituals, Ahmet went downstairs and found that the cavalrymen had eaten all of the breakfast save a few day-old rolls and a little porridge. He sat in the corner, where the Arab merchant had sat the night before, and ate the spare meal. After he was done, the innkeeper stopped by his table.
“Master Mohammed left a message for you. He is busy all day but will return in the evening and hopes to depart at first light tomorrow.”
“Thank you,” Ahmet said. “If it is not impolite to ask, where are the soldiers going?”
The innkeeper grimaced. His son was among the regiment that had finally marched away after leaving the common room and the grounds littered with debris. The worry the departure caused was doing him and his nervous stomach no good at all. “There is fighting in the north, in Syria Coele. The Persians are going to try to take Damascus. So all of the ‘allies’ of the Eastern Empire are sending men to fight at Damascus and stop them.”
Ahmet cocked his head to one side; the townsman seemed displeased by this. “Stopping the Eastern devils would protect all of Arabia and Petra, would it not?”
The innkeeper snorted derisively. “You mean keep it safe for Roman taxation and Roman law! There is a Roman peace, true, but it is a cruel peace if you ask me. We are an ‘ally’ of the Empire, yet their tax collectors pinch us as fiercely as any Imperial province. Their gods are placed over ours, their language at the expense of our own. The young people-they think of themselves as Romans, not Nabateans.”
Ahmet nodded politely. It would be the same if Persia conquered the Arabian provinces, save that with the Persians rode darkness. He shuddered in the cool, dim room. The priests of Hermes Trismegistus hewed to a moral code-one fiercely enforced by the masters of each school-and were very careful in their exercise of the powers of the unseen world. But the stories out of the East, from the Persian capital at Ctesiphon and beyond, did not relate any such restraint. The mobehedan of the Sassanid Empire consorted with demons and devils; they indulged in the necromantic defilement of the dead, they sought power at the expense of their own souls. Even in the placid sun of upper Egypt, the masters of the order would often wake, trembling, at the dark of the moon as the distant echoes of horrific practices in the East troubled the ether.
No matter; he would find the boy and return to the school. Though Ahmet thought that he understood his own purposes well, in truth his mind was a whirl of conflicting desires and intents. He really did not know why he had fled the school, simply that it was no longer the place for him.
It was three days before Mohammed completed his business in the city. All that time, more men, horses, and supplies continued to flow out of the Nabatean capital and up the Wadi Musa to the road to Jerash and the north. Ahmet continued to sit in the caravansary, watching columns of light archers and more horsemen pass by. Long trains of wagons, laden with barrels and crates, followed. On the afternoon of the third day, the priest considered what he had seen-close to fifteen thousand men had headed north. Given the thin population of the Nabatean hinterland, all desert plain and rocky mountains, nearly every able man and animal in the principality had been committed. If this same effort was repeated in the other cities of the Empire, the coming war would be great indeed.
There was something odd, too, about the citizens of the city of stone. To the unaware eye, they were a common-looking people-worn thin by the desert, browned by the sun, with dark hair and eyes. To the Egyptian, though, they seemed furtive. They talked little to strangers, or even among themselves. The nightly ceremonies on the moun-taintop, on the Ad’deir-the high place-were closed to outsiders, and the chanting was indistinct to his ears in the valley below. There was an undercurrent of power in the city as well, something that constantly tickled at the back of his mind, though there was nothing to be perceived if he put his mind to searching it out.