Mohammed licked his lips, overcome by a sensation of nervousness. She is speaking the truth.
"O Man, observe," Raha said, spreading her hands wide. A glittering circle opened in the air, through which Mohammed saw a thicket of pine and thistle. A stag crashed through the brush, followed by a swift, golden bolt of fur. The lion struck hard, massive jaws crunching into the stippled brown neck of the deer. Both animals went down in a cloud of dust and branches, the stag kicking, the lion's rear claws tearing bloody streaks across a heavy tan pelt. "Here is the engine of the world, of all creation! There is no permanence-only change-and in this world, men die. Women die. Everything passes with the turning of the wheel. New life springs from the old." Raha looked up, her lambent dark eyes blazing. Mohammed felt a void open before him, saw scattered stars glitter on a field of sable. They grew, swelling enormous and dark, a doorway opening in the air before him. "Your time has come. Accept this."
A faint, ethereal wailing trembled in the air and Mohammed knew the dead were pleading with him, shouting in their faint voices, bending their will upon him for release. He felt the weariness of his bones, the fatigue settling in what muscle and sinew remained. Even his thoughts were slow, attenuated, stretched to the utmost. He heard temple bells and the chant for the dead, a slow, mournful dirge on a thousand voices. Drums rolled, echoing the tramp of sandals on a dusty plain. A funeral procession, he recognized. It must be mine.
"No," Mohammed managed to gasp. He was on his knees again, barely able to stand. "I will not abandon my purpose. The judge of judges will account the deeds of my life, when I stand before him. Until that day, when the lord of the world commands me lay down my purpose, I will not surrender."
"Are you the maker of all things?" Raha knelt beside him, a pale hand on his shoulder. "Are you the judge of good and evil?"
"No!" Mohammed drew away from her. "I am only a man."
"How can you know your purpose continues? This is the end of your time. You must pass on!" A tone of urgent pleading crept into her voice.
"No-I will not! I will not be driven by thirst, by fear, by temptation, by the blandishments of the spirits here. I will endure. A great evil has entered the world-a serpent with countless heads, arms, bodies-I have seen the dark power walking under the sun, cloaked in the shape of a man. The voice from the clear air has spoken, setting me to strive against shaitan and all his spawn."
Raha shook her head in despair. "Still you seek to name evil. I ask again, are you the judge of judges?"
"I am not," Mohammed snapped, "yet the voice of the empty places guides me to a righteous life! My heart sings to hear him, showing me a certain path. I will not let the whole world die, consumed by the serpent, crushed in leviathan coils! I will not step aside, while there is work yet undone!"
The woman rose, lips pursed. She cupped her hands and a spark appeared, fluttering like a butterfly. The flickering glow lit her face with warm light. "You are not listening. Certainty is oblivion. Immutability disaster. Only in the motion of change-in birth and death-is there life. The voice speaking to you is only one of many, only part of a great chorus. Everything, even what you name evil has a place in that choir."
"No-" Mohammed recoiled. "Not the abomination! The Lord of Serpents is a stain on the perfection of creation!"
A beneficent smile spread across Raha's features. "Creation is imperfect. In all things a flaw-even in the wisdom of your guide, this voice from the clear air." She closed her hands over the light sputtering between her fingers. Darkness flooded the air around them, drowning sight of the grass, the city, even the swaying branches of the fig. "You claim the power in the desert as your patron, saying he raised the race of men from clay, from blood, from the very soil. So he did."
A vision burst over Mohammed, stunning his mind. A vast city rose up around him, cyclopean towers piercing leaden clouds, titanic shapes moving in the chill air. In the distance, mountains of ice encroached upon the city, glittering blue-white walls looming over soapstone colored buildings. Abandoned doorways yawned on streets tenanted solely by cold whirlwinds. A singular slate-gray tower swelled into view, colossal, every surface covered with deeply incised glyphs and signs. A window filled his vision and he looked down upon a great chamber, filled with shining, dark machines. Glimmering lightning flared in the shadows and something huge bent over a slab of mirrored black stone. Glossy rust-colored wings shifted, one pair, then four rising and falling around a ridged circumference. A tiny creature squirmed and writhed on the gleaming table, screaming endlessly. Bright red blood smeared silky fur. Stubby-fingered hands groped mindlessly at the air. Delicate white cilia descended, adjusting minute jewel-like tools.
Mohammed jerked back, horrified. Raha was watching him from the darkness. The vision faded, the vast city falling away into dimness, buried by the relentless ice. The terrible cold lingered, pricking his skin as the tiny knives had worked in the living body of the furred creature.
"Did you think the birth of the race of men was pure? No-even in the beginning there was imperfection." Raha drew close, her hands radiating a faint heat. The light between her palms glowed through her skin and Mohammed could see the outline of delicate finger bones. "From base flaw rose wonders unlooked for. The power, which presses the Sun and the Moon into its service, encompasses all things, men not least of all. Do not seek certainty, my lord. How can love grow, among such cold geometries?"
"Was-" Mohammed's horror choked the words in his throat. "Was this the face of the Wise One, who created men from dust, from a little germ…" He could not continue, stunned.
"Is the face of a newborn the face of a grown man?" The woman's voice was faint in the darkness. "Is the face of the grandson, the face of the grandfather? As the wheel turns, even the foulest act may plant a seed of joy. All things transform…"
Raha opened her hands, letting stuttering, flaring light spill forth. Mohammed staggered back-in the flashing light, in the dark spaces between the warm golden flare, Raha filled the world; enormous, blue-black arms like wheel spokes, reaching from earth to sky, myriad faces looking upon all directions and compasses. A thousand hands moved as one, a bending forest pressed by hurricane winds and delicate feet danced on the crown of the world, ringed with whirling, blazing suns. The man became aware of a tone, a singing single note, vibrating in the void. His eyes widened, and the last of his body cracked and crumbled into ash, rushing away in the wind from the abyss.
The woman closed her hands and the vision collapsed into a burning fire-encircled mote, then a shimmering cruciform letter, then into nothing. The golden light faded and the trembling tone faded away into the sighing branches of the fig tree. Even the sky snapped back into focus, a flat curtain of blue arcing overhead.
"Do you see?" Raha said. "You must let go of this shell. You must go onward."
Mohammed could only feel the thud-thud of his heart. Even the woman's voice was very faint and far away. Glorious visions blinded him, and most of all, he heard a familiar, beloved sound, echoing in the spaces between his heartbeat, in the spaces between Raha's words.
It is the sound of the morning of the world, he wondered, overcome with fierce emotion. The wind blowing in empty spaces. The tide. The moon. The roar of the surf on a barren shore. It is the voice from the clear air.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Above the Harbor of Phospherion, Constantinople