She was staring at him when he remembered it is his hand. He brought out Jael’s sword from beneath his cloak, held it out to her, spoke, “I suppose we’ll have to tell the captain about this.”
Twenty-First Verse
Adnihilo squinted over the red, dead earth so unlike Eemah’s golden sands, writhing and undulating. Mirages, he realized—tricks of the heat, of the light—yet still he struggled discerning truth from lies. He was the Traitor’s son, the harbinger, the fall of the Walls of Barzakh—the beginning and the end; though it never ended, the whispers in his ears: Ba’al then Lilum then Lilum and Ba’al again, so many times that Adnihilo decided it better to believe the apparitions of the malignant sun. Adam, however, had been taken in—chiefly by she who wore Jezebel’s skin. They road double on their camel, her body flush with his, his head resting against her breasts. Adnihilo—stuck with the bishop—sat envious as Lilum enveloped his friend in her arms.
It began in the heart of ruined Iisah. The Temple of the Father: a part of the river set apart from the world; sandstone brick polished bright as amber; limestone columns, some cut in human form, others smooth with glyphs painted over painstaking reliefs. Five thousand years of tribal history chiseled into pillars, walls, and cyclopean arches. Adam and Adnihilo were to learn them all under the guidance of Lilum, beginning with the exodus and the Traitor’s raising of the Father’s prison—or was it the legate building the Walls of Barzakh, a bulwark against false gods and prophets? From the outset, the bishop and priestess told it differently, and the half-blood struggled making sense of out of their conflicting stories.
Adnihilo’s father, who in Eemah they called the Old One, was once the great legate of the King’s deep legion—at least, he was before mixing his blood with a human witch. Perhaps it was this which turned him against his sovereign, if truly his coat had turned. Ba’al was not so sure, but it didn’t matter to Adnihilo. His father was dead, just as he’d always been—less than a memory—but to Adam the tale was a revelation. To him, the Father was the King that was his Lord God in Heaven, and his friend an unexpected saviour born of the demon during the first Purge of Babylon. Lilum had seen it all in prophecy, so she said, the messiah and his Messah companion—the lion and the lamb. That’s what she called the pastor’s son when she promised him the resurrection of David and Magdalynn and every faithful soul. “After we bring down the walls,” she never failed to mention.
Her tongue was slippery as Ba’al’s. That’s how the witch’s son decided what not to trust—whenever her words matched the bishop’s. Since their departure from the temple in Iisah, such agreement occurred more often than not, save for talk of the Black Beast of Tsaazaar.
“This too, I have seen,” promised the priestess those days spent learning Iisah’s history, “that the son must be blooded with the ichor of the Beast. Do not doubt this. We will not pass through the Tsaazaari wastes without meeting the Traitor’s hound.” It set them all on edge, her forewarning, resounding with the strength of religious certainty; yet even she seemed worried when the first evening came and they were far away from the safety of her Father’s house. Then the second day came and went, and they—a little less afraid—passed through the night and into next morning without an attack. By the third eve of their journey, they felt as though they could finally relax. That’s when it appeared on the horizon to the west, a thin column of smoke from behind a dune in the distance.
“Hold up,” the bishop hissed, and their camels trod to a halt. “Everyone, quiet. Looks like we’re not alone.”
The priestess smirked. “Fire and fresh manna. Our oasis, no doubt.”
“Maybe they’ll share their camp?” Adam added.
Ba’al spat, “Or maybe they’ll slit our throats, or turn us in at Najmah Janoob. For all we know, there’s bounty on our heads. We’ll turn north until sundown and cut west at dawn. Hopefully they won’t spot our tracks in the morning—What are you doing?”
Lilum spurred her camel toward the signs of civilization. “I’m going to our oasis. It is as I said. Our fates are foretold; there is nothing to fear.”
The bishop did not agree, muttering curses as he and Adnihilo watched her and Adam climb the high dune, disappear behind it.
“We better catch up,” said the half-blood.
Interlude
It was at the opposite base of the towering Tsaazaari mound that our audience first heard the profound voice of the Messianic orator. They listened tentatively, rapturously—split between marvel and disbelief as he, the Messiah truly—one Jordan, son of Joseph—spoke in bardic verse the first parable of his story to me and his three apostles. With a prayer to his Holy Patron, he began:
“Lord of Lord and King of Kings, I beg your blessing of the Jasper Throne—Mine own—For I am Thine and You are We—made flesh—despite my humble beginnings. For whom could guess God of a whore-born bastard risen from within the Valley of Darkness? Yet one man did foolishly hearken his wife’s pleas—surely dishonesty—she promised he was God’s seed. He couldn’t be. Could I? One so distant from the high seat of Messai be anything more than salt of the earth? Awfully blessed, divinely cursed. To be birthed and forsaken at the stake for three days, waiting in torture and pain, begging eternal sleep, that the pagan river ‘d take me. And so seems it had. For I awoke on the bank of my watery tomb to mortal wounds, a buzzard’s feast, yet walking and breathing. Least was I to believe
