Steampunk World

Forty Pieces Lucien Soulban

There was, there was not…. the older man read, his finger tracing the black stitching of ink on the yellowed page. “That is to say that this story is only true if Allah wills it. All tales begin this way.”

The young boy next to him fidgeted in the squeaking caned chair, his body given to the fits and hesitations of all five-year olds. The creaking of the chair betrayed his impatience; his delicate fingers touched the corners of the thick pages, eager for the adventure promised within the book. He did not care for the words, just the story. To Allah and five-year olds, all stories were true.

The student had left, and Tariq’s modest earnings for today’s lesson sat on the table in a stump of silver coins. Enough for some lamb from that Egyptian butcher, and green olives, tomatoes, and pita from the Palestinian grocer. Maybe with the remaining akçes, a glass of Greek Retsina wine from a Sherbet House where the Europeans drank.

The akçes provided nowhere near enough for anything else. Barely enough for a few days of oil or wood to warm those nights when Russia’s winter swept in from across the Black Sea. To think he’d arrived from Damascus with enough literature to wallpaper his Constantinople apartment with book spines. Tonight, he’d see far more of the water-stained walls than he cared to.

Tariq flung open the window and welcomed in the acrid smell of burning coal and the wash of brine from the Marmara. Noise flooded in as well, the shopkeepers and stall owners fought in decibels for clients while above the awning-covered streets and alleys of the Grand Bazaar puttered the air dhows. Their cypress wood prows and pine decks spoke of their fishing days, but their air bladders promised more of this new era, their flanks festooned in draping silks, or painted with oriental tigers and long-legged cranes, or finned with colorful side-sails like giant fish.

“Aziz,” Tariq cried to the shop beneath his apartment, the one with blue cloth for awning.

A man with a face dotted by ash-raised scars of the Nubian tribes and a berry-stained fez waved up at him. “More books? I’ll send the boy up,” the Nubian said, laughing. “But no more sciences, ah? People want adventure and poetry, my friend.”

Tariq frowned, but nodded before closing the window and turning back to his shelves. He was in short supply of those already. Perhaps the local madrassas would take his science books for their students, he thought, and then dispelled the notion. If they realized who he was, who his father had been, he’d be driven out of Constantinople the way they’d driven his father from Damascus.

There was a knock at the door. Tariq knew Aziz, knew he’d only offer a couple of silver kuruŞ for rare volumes at best. That would be enough to continue treading water for a few weeks more. He opened the door.

The man waiting there did not work for the Nubian. He reached no higher than five-and-a-half-feet in height, his frame wiry and corded with muscles, a fact that not even his double-breasted frock coat and striped morning pants could hide. He removed his top hat, dislodging not one strand of black hair. His equally black eyes glittered over the gold frame of his spectacles. The spectacles had come from a madcap’s mind, the red lenses flipped up on a pivot near the arms, revealing the black lenses beneath… like the glass wings of a butterfly.

Tariq instantly distrusted the man. Never mind he felt underdressed in his homespun white cotton shirt and baggy trousers, it was the Steamkraft that unsettled him. Steamkraft, the Prussian’s marriage of the assembly line to madcap inventions, had become more than fashionable within the Ottoman Empire. As Prussia’s closest allies, the sultans turned what had been an evolution of assembly line warfare towards the Islamic arts of engineering and architecture. The Ottoman twilight became a new golden age, with Constantinople its brass pearl. Her newest minarets glittered with metal lace shells and copper inlay, the gears beneath turning under cascading water that transformed the towers into gigantic water clocks.

“Are you the bookseller?” the visitor asked in the perfect Arabic of the Koran in a region still muddied with regional dialects.

“Who asks?”

The man smiled deeply with white teeth. “Raakin, a humble servant.”

“You dress like no servant I know,” Tariq responded, glancing at the man’s expensive tastes in clothes. The silk shirt and bowtie alone was worth a year of Tariq’s time.

“My master is generous,” Raakin replied, the smile never wavering, “to anyone who demonstrates purpose.” He pulled a purse of coins from his breast pocket and tossed it up once to catch it. It jingled dully with a heavy weight, heavier than silver, heavy with the weight of fortune’s promises. “My master wishes to buy all your books.”

Why did I let him in? Tariq wondered, a self-admonishing thought that refused to let go, but he knew why. With the gold lira in Raakin’s purse, Tariq could live very extravagantly for a few short years or in modest comfort for decades.

It would serve his father right for burdening him like this. The books served only to provide his walls with color and remind him what his father had sacrificed—thrown away. They were all that remained of his family’s exodus from Damascus when they’d left behind a fortune in jade statues from China, ivory tusk-carvings from India, Mother-of-Pearl covered tables from Cairo, Persian rugs from Baghdad. All for a fortune in words, hardly worth a handful of akçes.

Now, however, Raakin stared at the walls of Tariq’s apartment, his face creased in displeasure and the uncertainty growing in Tariq’s breast.

“Where are all the books?” Raakin asked. “I heard you possessed a formidable library.” He motioned around him. “Old men have more teeth than this.”

Tariq tried not to bristle at the comment. “I make little money teaching,” he explained. The man nodded and smiled in a way that made Tariq feel as though he’d been trapped in the cage with a tiger.

“Where is the Book of ‘Abd-Es-Samad?”

Tariq’s voice hitched in his chest. “Leave.”

“You did not sell it, did you?” Raakin asked. “That would be unfortunate.”

“Leave!” Tariq managed more forcefully, which seemed to amuse the visitor.

“Do you know that my employer told me to get the book by any means necessary?” he said, slowly walking past a row of books, his fingers tapping their edges. “I convinced him that gold silences tongues more easily than a knife across the throat. Will you make a liar out of me?”

Tariq darted toward the door, but a click of a hammer and a soft voice that said “No,” stopped him. The man held a large tri-barreled flintlock pistol, the sides adorned with etched silver plaques, the barrel wrought iron. He motioned Tariq to step away from the door.

“Dog,” Tariq muttered, obeying.

The visitor laughed sharply. “The book,” he said.

“The Gunpowder Alchemists leave no survivors, yes?” Tariq said.

“True,” Raakin said, “but we can be merciful. A tincture of Belladonna and other plants to give you a peaceful death, or I leave you in agony for days with corrosive shot until you beg me to end your life.” He raised his flintlock.

Tariq swallowed once, trying to whet his throat, but to no avail. He stepped to a row of books and pushed them aside. He reached into the gap between the shelf and the wall, and pulled out a bundle wrapped in dusty wool. A string wrapped it neatly together.

“Will you kill me now?” Tariq asked, ready for the retort of the flintlock.

A chuckle came in response.

A sea of Fez-topped heads crowded the street’s length. The stranger walked arm-in-arm with Tariq, like they were the oldest of friends, but the flintlock pressed into Tariq’s ribs said otherwise. Raakin smiled with no warmth to the act, just a fence of teeth.

They passed a row of steps where men sat and argued, newspapers in hand, their gestures made in emphatic motions. The debates followed orbits as familiar as the constellations themselves, the renaissance of the Ottoman Empire, the growing influence of Prussia in the region, the rapid Westernization of Constantinople.

“Why not just destroy the book?” Tariq asked. His family’s enemies certainly would have thrown it on the pyre along with his father had they captured either. They’d been driven out of Damascus for that book, escaping their sanctioned murder.

“Destroy?” Raakin said, pulling Tariq to a stop. “No no, my friend. The Book of ‘Abd-Es-Samad is too valuable to destroy.”

“But—” Tariq hesitated.

“My employer found the City of Brass,” Raakin whispered with a look of delight.

“No,” Tariq said, his voice as distant as the horizon. His father was a fool for believing the legends. They’d lost everything for the mad dreams of ‘Abd-Es-Samad and his city. He had to be wrong—Tariq needed a reason to blame him.

“It is real. We need the book, and you to translate it. Now come,” he said, pulling Tariq along and motioning ahead. Tariq followed the gesture, his eyes resting on Imperial Aerotower, a massive four-walled edifice of marble blocks, windows covered in brass filigree, and hanging platforms from which three airships sat moored. It stood among the bramble of streets of the Galata business district, the cargo hauled up on iron cranes and creaking chains and groaning ropes. “We have a ship to catch.”

Tariq stood upon at the stub-nosed prow of the air dhow, sheltered by the air bladder and the fin sails that peeled away from the flanks. One hand shielded his eyes from the fine grit that peppered his face and hands. With the other, he gripped a thickly braided mooring rope securing the dhow to the balloon, distantly aware of the clash of ages. Steamkraft was fast changing the West’s identity, but in pockets like the Levant, Persia, India, and Africa, the new served only to validate the old… it did not replace it. The old fishing dhows that plied the Nile and the Arabian Gulf and Red Sea had a history as venerable as the book that Tariq held.

As the steam dhow caught the winds, it soared over the desert, the sands below bright with sun and shimmering with heat. The steering rudder, a long dagger of wood banded by iron, split the dunes, allowing the vessel to slalom through the desert with precision. Raakin leaned over and whispered something to the old bedu pilot who cackled at Tariq with tooth-starved gums, his eyes hidden behind a pair of leather goggles.

Tariq had been a hostage since Constantinople; they’d landed in the silk city of Beyrouth along the cedar slopes of the Lebanon Mountains. From there, they boarded the dhow, Raakin ever-smiling, his blade and flintlock within reach. He sensed Tariq’s every intention with almost preternatural skill, always there with a knowing smile when Tariq contemplated escape. So Tariq had given up on flight, especially now that they flew well above the desert, a desert unlike any Tariq had ever seen.

The Syrian expanse of sand felt hard under one’s sandals and stretched out to the horizon with cypress trees and yellow wildflowers, cacti and thorny shrubs to break the plain. This desert, however, was an ocean storm petrified in time and turned to dust. Sand crested the sky and swept outward to flood the horizon. It gave the sense of being motionless and unceasing at the same time, and unknowable.

“It is why the bedu call it the Empty Quarter,” Raakin said, joining Tariq at the prow of the ship.

“My father was obsessed with the delusions of a madman,” Tariq said. “Now you follow one folly with another.”

“Iram of the Pillars, it is there.”

“Impossible,” Tariq said.

“You will see.” From the satchel hanging across his shoulder, Raakin took out his prize. Unadorned beige camel leather protected the Book of ‘Abd-Es-Samad and sweat stains and the brown of dried blood spoke of its long history and longer travels. Tariq might have cursed its pages once, but now he wasn’t so sure. To hold something that at one time was nothing more than a collection of mad fables, and to discover that those words possibly hid the truth left Tariq numb.

Raakin handed the book to Tariq. The teacher hesitated and then took it, the rough camel hide smoothed by the centuries. Tariq ran his fingers across the simple cover, and then suspended the book over the dhow’s low wood gunwales and the racing desert below.

“I can drop it,” Tariq said.

“Let me tell you a story,” Raakin said, unperturbed. “A learned teacher spends a lifetime rising into favor, only to fall from it again and again. He is not to blame, of course. The Pashas change every year like the clicking gears of a clock, and a man can find himself beloved one moment and despised the next. This teacher, however, eventually angers the madrassas themselves. He claims that the City of Brass, Ubar of the Giants, was not cursed by Allah as the Koran says. The journal of ‘Abd-Es-Samad proves that it was a city well ahead of its years. A city built by madcaps, inventors. Naturally, this enrages the madrassas who drive this teacher from Damascus.”

Raakin stared at Tariq a moment, and then continued. “I admire your father, standing by his convictions in the face of exile.”

“He should have known better than to speak of such things.” Tariq shouted. “Instead, he cost us everything!”

“You paid nothing! He paid with everything HE earned, but you? You are a vulture of his legacy. Your accomplishments are his. You have none of your own. So drop the book. It will be the only act of courage you have ever committed, the only thing you sacrifice that is truly your own.”

“You’ll kill me!” Tariq shouted.

“Did you think the sacrifice I mention is the book?” Raakin’s lips pursed in disapproval and he watched as Tariq’s hand dropped to his side. “It is time you made yourself useful,” he said, turning away. “It is time you reread the book with more of your father’s conviction.”

Howling winds buffeted the dhow and the world settled into an orange storm that licked the top of the ridges into eddies and whorls. The pilot skated along the troughs between the monolithic dunes, the stabilizer fin set deeper into the sand to anchor her flight. Below deck, however, the sand turned the air murky, the lantern struggling to light the cabin.

Tariq sat on the floor, his legs crossed and the book cradled in his lap. Yet he found himself staring absently at the Persian carpet under him, at its ornate scroll of floral shapes encased in repeating geometric patterns. He remembered his father, the way he smiled by squinting, his voice gentle—never demanding or impatient, always scholarly. His father’s voice came clearly to him now, telling him how rug makers always wove imperfections into the pattern, because only Allah could create something perfect.

There was, there was not.

Tariq stroked his forehead, the memory testing him like a wound that thought it was fresh again. How had he come to hate his father so? His father, who only showed charity. A man who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and instead accepted his fate with a frustrating sort of nobility. He gave up everything, and Tariq didn’t know whether he wanted to cry or rage at the man.

Tariq focused on the book again, the faded Kufic scrawl still legible, the lines of artwork clear and knife sharp. Tariq remembered the book by touch, sitting with his father as he pulled tales from its pages, his fingers brushing across the rough texture of the old paper.

There was, there was not.

The words brought a twinkle to the old man’s eyes matched only by the dance in his voice. It was the same exhilaration, a poet had once told Tariq, as when a blank page faced him and the poem had the potential to be anything.

Abd-Es-Samad wrote this on his travels to find the City of Brass. Much of what is taught in Shahrazad’s stories have forgotten the true details of that journey. It is more allegory than fact. His father’s voice filtered through clearly, undiluted by the vagaries of memory.

He was wisest among the most learned sheikhs, and he traveled further than Islam itself knew of the world. He spoke its many languages and nothing of the Levant or Northern Africa remained hidden from him.

“But he is only remembered by the tales of Shahrazad?” Tariq the boy asked. His father nodded enthusiastically, and Tariq could only flush in shame of the memory. Tariq flipped through Abd-Es-Samad’s account of Ubar itself.

It was said that Allah cursed the city, a city of giants brought low for their hubris, but this is not true, my son, and in these pages you and I will find that truth and set right a mistake.

Tariq absently flipped the page, falling upon one of the more elaborate drawings: Ubar itself, half submerged in the sands of the Rhub al Khali, the dunes as high as the city’s many statues and minarets. Ubar… a ship in a frozen sea whose masts barely touched the crest of the towering waves. He turned the page.

Before the archangel Gabriel gave Muhammad the wisdom of Allah, there were other Gods. Among them were the three daughters of the moon, Goddesses later cast down by Muhammad as the devil’s making. They were Allāt, Al-‘Uzzá, and Manāt. To her, the last, there was a temple in Ubar.

“Who was she, father?”

The Goddess of Fate.

The new picture showed the Temple of Manāt itself, stairs emerging from sand, walls marked with some mural that could only be hinted at, the statues of winged women with their arms extended as they held a bird in each hand. At the heart of the wall, flanked by the statues stood a great square archway, open to the desert.

The pages following had been torn out, the stubs yellowed and ragged. Tariq’s father thought it’d been Abd-Es-Samad who had done it, to protect something he’d discovered. Or perhaps it was someone who’d taken offense with the words that followed.

Somewhere above him, the cabin door opened and steps sounded. Raakin appeared; he studied him, a moment in cold consideration. “We approach the city.”

The sirocco raged, great banners of sand that scoured the desert with their tiger tongues. The dhow lay anchored between the dunes, the sails pulled tight against the bladder. The storm whipped about Tariq, stinging and blinding him despite his white keffiyeh.

Dunes loomed above them, to the left a sharp slope and the right a curved wall. He had no sense of direction, only that lights ahead glowed dimly as hanging orbs. Within moments, he stood among the tents and pavilions on the site. Some bore the black goat-hair walls of the Bedouin, their fabric flapping but bearing the winds. Tariq suspected these belonged to the famed local tribes of the al-Murrah or Ar-Raswashid, paid to “help” so they did not raid the expedition.

The army camp, however, was a different matter. The field grey tents bore the black eagle and iron cross of the Prussian Army, at least where winds hadn’t collapsed them. Soldiers in khaki jackets with hooded capes drawn tight around leather gas masks ran about trying to repair the damage in a losing battle against the elements.

Tariq waited for Raakin’s soft jab to remind him he was there, a shadow guarding a shadow of a man, he thought bitterly. None came. He turned to face Raakin, and instead found drawn curtains of sand. He was alone, separated from the assassin by the desert. Tariq hesitated, wondering where he should run. He didn’t move, however. He’d come to hate his father, blame him for abandoning their life for the sake of a folly. Only, here he stood in its heart, faced with the knowledge, the shame, that it may all be real.

He waited until Raakin reappeared, a curious cock of his head asking the question hidden behind the tinted goggles. Why?

“I owe it to my father to be proven wrong,” Tariq said, shouting above the storm.

Raakin’s hand fell on Tariq’s shoulder, but instead of pushing him forward, he pointed past the tents. Shadowed against the dark orange sky, shapes filtered in and out of the gloom. Broken towers that ended in brick-jagged points, pillars mounted by Sphinx-like creatures, block-like buildings… all half-entombed in sand.

“My God,” Tariq said.

“Yes,” Raakin replied, “but in your defense, the prophet Muhammad only submitted after Gabriel squeezed him three times.”

A Prussian Driedger-Bok F-11 Aerostat hovered over the sands, the sails pulled down like a massive skirt and pinned using sandbags. The grey sails formed weather breakers for the huddled soldiers sat hunched together, their masks hiding their features. Somewhere in the darkness beneath the umbrella, camels groaned in complaint and voices thick with the guttural Arabic of the bedu barked to calm them.

Overhead, the aerostat rumbled loudly, the F-11 shouldering the storm and maintaining its position. The command pavilion, tan with peaked roof and a short skirt of blue trim, sat at the center of the maze of slumped bodies and weighted mooring ropes. A pair of St. Elmo lamps framed the entry flap, the light a fluid miasma of phosphorescent white gas that cast a ghostly pallor over the men nearest them. Raakin swept open the tent flap.

Five men stood there, three in the stripes and frills of Prussian officers, their tall and spike-mounted tropical helmets resting on the map covered table. The two other men wore the black suits and red fez of Ottoman men.

The men watched with dispassionate coolness as Raakim removed his goggles and dusted himself off. Tariq fixed his gaze on the heavy-set man who stared at him; the older Arab had the half-lidded eyes of a digesting snake. Tariq almost didn’t recognize him under the added weight and the tufts of white that had crept into his hair and beard.

“Ibn Hannah,” the man said, calling him ‘son of Hannah’ as if they were old friends.

“Farouk,” Tariq said, pulling his keffiyeh down. “I’m pleased to see that you have grown fat and old.”

Farouk’s eyes narrowed. The men straightened and looked to one another, obviously unfamiliar with Arabic. Farouk said something to the men in Prussian. The men nodded, their postures stiff. One man with a thin mustache tucked his riding crop under his arm and replied, motioning to Tariq. A smile spread across Farouk’s lips, but it was Raakin who answered.

“Our patrons are impatient,” Raakin said. “They want answers.”

“Show them the book,” Farouk said.

“If I’d known you wanted it, I would have thrown it off the dhow,” Tariq replied, not budging.

“Raakin, why did you bring him?” Farouk asked. “I told you what I wanted done with him.”

“And on whose head would the sword fall if I delivered you a book and nobody to translate it?”

“I can read it,” Farouk said.

“Better than his father?”

“His father is dead.”

“His son is not,” Raakin said.

Farouk sighed and then nodded. He turned to Tariq. “How do we enter the Temple of Manāt?”

“You turned the madrassas against my father and now here you are, begging for my help?” Tariq said.

Farouk laughed. “Your father did not understand that to survive the weather, you had to dress accordingly. He angered the madrassas when it was their time.”

Tariq shook his head. “And now that the Prussians are in season?”

“I dress accordingly.”

One of the Prussians, a white-haired man with a barrel upper-body and mustache that curtained over his lips, barked something in Prussian. Farouk turned a pleasant smile on the man, replying in a conciliatory tone.

Raakin stepped in and grabbed Tariq by the bicep. He reached into the satchel strung over Tariq’s shoulder and pulled out the book, showing it to the men. The thin Prussian took it and the assembled studied the book, flipping through its pages.

“I will not help you,” Tariq said.

Raakin’s grip tightened. “Shut up,” he said, softly. “Before you rob me of all excuses to keep you alive.”

Tariq glanced at Raakin, surprised, but the assassin didn’t bother glancing back. After a few minutes of examining the book, the barrel-chested Prussian said something to Tariq, something that sounded like a demand. It was Raakin who replied in Prussian. The man nodded and returned the book to the assassin.

“Raakin,” Farouk said. “Encourage him.”

“Why are you helping me?” Tariq said over the drone of the F-11. The reek of oil was stifling.

Raakin pulled him through the darkness, past the soldiers who couldn’t bother looking up. “Am I?”

He brought Tariq to a bedu tent on the edge of the aerostat’s skirt and pushed him through gently. The women in the tent stared back with hardened nomad’s eyes that were at once black and unblinking. It was the only thing Tariq could see of them in the narrow slit of their heavy burkas. Medallions of bronze and copper hung from their black cloth, while silver chains dangled from the medallions and chimed softly as they shifted. They sat on faded carpets, a pungent dung fire bringing tears to Tariq’s eyes. Among them sat children, but no men. They watched, as though expecting him.

Raakin nodded to the empty carpet on the ground and shoved the book into Tariq’s chest. “Hurry,” he said. “Before the desert swallows the city again.” And with that, he left.

Tariq stared at the women, and they stared back, waiting. They looked at the book and they looked at him. Did they want this? Taking the bait, he opened the book and several women inhaled and held their breaths. They knew what it was, Tariq realized in a way that sent tingles through his fingertips.

Of course… The bedu women were the ones who shared tales, who safeguarded the magic of the tribe, who dared speak of dark things when night came. Only one woman alone held Tariq’s gaze, a pair of soupy brown eyes set in a cradle of wrinkles.

“Kan,” she said in Arabic. There was…. She exposed her forearms, the brown skin leathery and thin with age, the henna tattoo red and powdery. On each forearm was a wing, the wings of birds, the wings of Manāt, the female angel forgotten by Islam. “There was,” she insisted.

The words came flooding back, his father smiling kindly as young Tariq asked, “What happened to Manāt, father?”

A Goddess does not die so easily, not when she is adored for thousands of years. Just as there are still Christian and Hebrew bedu who roam Sheba’s deserts, so too is it said, there are tribes who remember the older ways… before the words of Abraham and Jesus and Muhammad.

The old woman motioned to Tariq, or the book. He wasn’t sure it wasn’t both, and he opened the journal of Abd-Es-Samad to the picture of the temple to indulge a curiosity that had gnawed at him since he first spoke with Farouk.

“How do we enter the Temple of Manāt?” Farouk had asked, and yet in the journal, the door was already open. Did Abd-Es-Samad seal the doors after he’d uncovered it? Is that why the remaining pages had been ripped out?

He needed to see for himself.

“Manāt,” he said simply as he stood. He did not expect them to stop him, and neither was Raakin standing guard outside….

The storm, a dervish of pinprick stings, swirled around Tariq and cajoled him through the half-buried streets of the lost city. He should not have been here; he was fellahin to the desert and it knew more ways to kill him than he knew to survive, but he shouldered over drifts and exposed layers of glazed macadam with their evenly polished stone.

The tan and bronze buildings towered over him, some block-like and Roman in appearance, some thin and fluted like the minarets of places he called home. Constantinople was a city adapting to the invention of Steamkraft, but Ubar had been built from a foundation of it. The roots of the towers and the marble obelisks were sheathed in a metallic base etched with intricate angled patterns. Why did it feel to Tariq that those structures could turn in their sockets like a shaft inside a gear? Statues of metal angels, men and women, adorned the tiered and terraced fountains that had run dry, and their copper feathers creaked and swung on articulated joints. What could only be lampposts lined the wide avenue, their thin polished wood stems branching into a sprout of glass bulbs. Those bulbs that hadn’t been smashed and cracked glowed with wane strength, a firefly prick of light at the center of some liquid.

In the distance, the silhouette of giant metallic statues in shield-like plate filtered in and out of view from the storm. They measured the size of buildings and poked out at odd angles from the dunes; an arm here, a bent knee there, one statue on its knees crawling forward, as though the statues were moving when the desert claimed the city.

Tariq knew the answer. Ubar was a madcap’s city, a city built by dreamers and men and women of unbridled faith.

From somewhere behind him he thought he heard shouting, perhaps the wail of a cranked siren. Then a piercing bellow of the aerostat’s horn followed, the echo absorbed by the pitched storm. They knew he was missing. They’d started searching for him.

Tariq plowed straight and true to the heart of the city, to the Temple of Manāt itself according to the book. His hips and thighs ached to numb fatigue from the heavy sand. His shoulders throbbed with effort as he hugged the book tightly to his chest. Ahead, ghostly white lights appeared, first as wisps, then as burning torches in their glass housing. St. Elmo lanterns on poles lay planted outside the temple, some askance, some toppled. Up the stairs, winged statues stood vigil, ten on either side of a great metal door measuring a story high. As Tariq approached, he saw no handle, no seam to the door, just a mosaic of metal shards in the form of a… phoenix? No, the face was feminine. It was the Persian Simorgh.

The temple’s door and its solid frame were battered and scored from cannon fire but intact. Picks and shovels poked out from the drifts against the wall, and a tent between two statues flapped on its last two pegs, exposing its wood crates.

Tariq ran up the exposed granite steps, grateful for the solid ground beneath his feet again. Along the wall, between the statues, was a frieze in bas-relief of birds and flowers, each made from a different metal, but he had little time to admire the artistry. A glance backwards showed the spotlights from the F-11’s carbon arc lamps sweeping the desert, likely ahead of the soldiers. He had little time to lose.

Putting his back to the whipping winds, Tariq cracked open the book and glanced at the picture. It was hard to see, but he needed only a nudge to remember what his father had engrained in him: The door open, the statues holding two birds apiece in their outstretched hands. Tariq looked up at the statues, then down at the picture. The ten-foot high statues of the angels held no birds. Their arms were wings that swept forward into a cupping pose.

A mistake? Tariq wondered. No, a clue from Abd-Es-Samad.

“Well?” a voice asked, shouting over the winds.

Tariq started and looked back at Raakin, who watched patiently from the steps. The searchlights in the distance swept through the gloom to touch the temple, but couldn’t reach. The soldiers would, undoubtedly.

“I need more time,” he said.

Raakin, his expression inscrutable behind his goggles and keffiyah, pulled two tri-barrel flintlocks from under his jacket. He turned and vanished into the storm.

Tariq turned his attention to the statues and the question of the birds. Twenty statues, and a bird apiece in each hand. That was forty birds, the number of all myths. Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, the forty days and nights of Noah’s flood, Moses alone with God on Mount Sinai, the years the Isrealites spent wandering the desert, the days Jesus spent in seclusion. Forty is not a number, his father told him. Forty simply means: A great many.

“And the Simorgh? I remember, father,” he said, the five year old in him touching the edges of the book, eager for adventure. As Tariq searched the frieze of metal birds and flowers, the poem came to him, again his father guiding him through the elegant verses of the great Sufi poet, Farid ud-Din Attar, and his seminal epic The Conference of Birds.

A council of birds set out to find the Simorgh to unite them, only to discover in their journey that Simorgh was a reflection of them all. “Could the inspiration for the poem be older? As old as this place?” Tariq wondered, his fingers touching upon golden larks and copper hawks and bronze sparrows. Then he saw a parrot inlaid with polished silver and his father spoke to him again. The birds stared into the pool where Simorgh lay and instead found their own reflection:

Silver was the most reflective of ancient metals, the mirror. Tariq pressed the bird and it shifted slightly in its groove. He pressed harder and it finally clicked down. Somewhere in the storm a flintlock roared, Raakin buying him time.

Tariq raced along the temple’s front facing, searching for the next silver bird and found a silver peacock, and then a nightingale, a falcon, a hummingbird. Each clicked with some effort until finally, he found the silver hoopoe. He pressed it, and the heavy metal door with the Simorgh mosaic rattled upward.

The storm curled at the mouth of the temple where its howls turned to chambered echoes inside. Sand poured from the ceiling in trickles, leaving drifts along the stairs, but any semblance to the Nabatean ruins in Petra and in Beyrouth ended there. Tendrils of snaking copper fluted the columns, the temple a shell for the wide stairs that descended deep underground. Brass pipes inset into the stone walls lay partially hidden behind a lacework of wood grates. They still fed the balconies overflowing with leafy Emerald Falls vines and peppered with white hibiscus and urn-shaped clusters of blue Muscari. If these northern plants grew here, then Ubar and the Empty Quarter must have indeed have been a paradise once.

Outside, gunfire continued, sounding closer, but Tariq felt drawn down the steps. He took the path between the sloping sand, the interior dimly lit by tear-shaped bulbs set into wall sconces and column brackets. The liquid within the bulbs glowed silvery-blue like algae-filled water alight at night in the wake of fish and swimmer alike. The same blue came from the murals, where etched figures glowed with inset glass eyes.

The stairs opened onto a large platform overlooking a massive cavern covered in vegetation and whose edges vanished in darkness. Wide stairs wended down either wall, following rock carved with alcoves and ledges, half-columns and statues, like the Temple of Jupiter in the cliff of Petra. An oasis sparkled a hundred feet below, fed by glowing blue water with the viscosity of mercury that cascaded down the swept supplicant wings of a giant statue of Manāt. They’d built her from gleaming metal, each texture a different polish. Behind her stood her giant Fedayeen guards, each ten feet high. Each wore an iron-plated cuirass embossed gold with the Goddesses’ wings, their spaulders and skirt-like cuisses covering their major joints.

Articulated joints, Tariq corrected. They could move, likely powered by the strange dynamos on their backs, their engines coiled with tubes and lit by glass capsules of the blue liquid. The same glow issued forth from the slits on their demonic faceplates. In their gauntlets they held a variety of swords and staves, axes and guns with a reservoir.

“The giants of Ubar,” a voice said.

Raakin leaned against one of the columns on the stairs, looking down into the cavern.

“You’re wounded.”

Blood flowed down Raakin’s limp arm and pattered on the floor. A blotch of mud matted the dark fabric at his shoulder, but he waved it off with the flintlock. “If they find this place, the Prussians will gain a considerable advantage, if not an insurmountable one,” he said. “I gave them pause and us time, but… the desert is reclaiming this place. Can you seal the doors?”

Tariq nodded.

“Then go, quickly.” Raakin handed him the flintlock. Tariq was about to refuse, but Raakin pushed it into his hands.

“I have never shot anyone.”

“The gun has.” Raakin shoved him up the stairs.

Tariq had a million questions that he wanted to ask, chief among them ‘why?’ but he understood as he raced upstairs and came upon the two-dozen bedu descending. They led their sheep and goats, their camels braying and protesting loudly at the steps, their clopping hoofs echoing sharply. Some of the injured bedu supported themselves on their flintlock rifles. A cluster of three guards protected the old woman from the tent; like the fabled Taureg tribe of North Africa, Tariq realized, they were matriarchal and trapped among enemies who did not understand their ways. The worshippers of the old gods did not die so easily out here.

The old woman nodded at him and Tariq continued to the door. A handful of bedu fired out into the storm, the sands a hornet’s nest that swallowed the city. The hillocks had already drowned the lower stairs and it felt as though the dunes themselves had begun to dwarf the buildings and columns… the frozen waves high above the doomed ship. Sand streamed and curled in through the door, and Tariq shielded his eyes.

Shapes moved in the storm at the base of the temple, and shots rang out as well as in. Something hot whined past Tariq’s ear. He sank to his knee, out of sight of the soldiers as one of the bedu stumbled back, his hand clutching at his breast.

Tariq’s heart raced. More shots whinged above his head, the shouting voices growing louder. He looked around him, trying to find the door mechanism, but his eyes refused to focus on any one thing. Was this how his father felt as they fled Damascus, the Pasha’s men on their heels?

No. I am not alone.

From the corner of his eye, he caught the movement of pages. On a ledge nearby, the corners of ragged papers fluttered under the rock that held them in place. They were torn frail things, harrowed by the ages outside the protection of the book. Next to them sat a great gear embedded in the wall, a lever next to it, raised and waiting.

Silhouettes against the storm appeared at the top of the stairs. Tariq fired his flintlock, the gun flaring and jumping in his grip. A gout of flame roared out like a dragon’s breath, and the figures jumped clear of the burst of fire, but not all. The bedu cheered, but if Tariq moved now, he thought the enemy might shoot him, kill him. That would be a mercy compared to losing everything, but after all he’d seen and come to know, letting these men take this place would be worse.

They’d chased his father from his truth once, and Tariq had done so again with his own heart. He would not let them triumph a third time. He ran for the lever, ran against the bullets that sang out for him. He lunged, dragging the lever down with the weight of his body, the hot blade of a round flashing across his back. Another bedu joined him, adding his weight to the teacher’s. The gear rumbled and spun, almost cutting into his shoulder as it tore his shirt. The heavy door slammed shut, drowning out all but silence.

They all stared quietly at the Garden of Manāt below them. The bedu marveled and muttered soft prayers, some already descending to explore the cavern. There were trees and vegetation lit by the strange blue light that had powered this city; and beyond it? Tariq didn’t know but the sleeping giants could not have come up by these stairs. There was more to discover deeper inside. Perhaps, even a way out.

A bandage covered Raakin’s arm, and one of the women tended to the graze across Tariq’s back. Tariq added the missing pages back to the tome and wondered what tales they would tell now.

How this place would have troubled the Muslims for its blatant iconography and delighted his father for its history. He could see the man now, his eyes narrowed in a smile, his voice delighted as he murmured:

Kan, ma kan.

There was, there was not.

Tariq finally understood why now—that what his father had sacrificed in the moment was nothing compared to what he was protecting. He’d left Damascus with the shirt on his back and his son’s hand in his. What more did he need? Tariq understood, now, that not having everything was not the same as having nothing.

Tariq smiled. “There is, father,” he said, and joined the others as they descended into the chamber.