194: Vanished things
"The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of the things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place."
Down from the sun, through the sky white with heat, shimmer-haze rising off this bleached stretch of sand between the water and the rocks. When I touch down, wings folding behind me with a rustle of cloth, the sand beneath my boots is hard, salt-crust, breaks with my weight. A harsh wind from the ocean drives the sand before it, the sand and the salt and the smell of decay from the things that wash up on the barren shore. At first I think I am mistaken, that I have remembered the location wrongly, for there is nothing here but vague mounds in the earth, eroded and mute. Nothing nothing again nothing...
There was... a city here. Not so long, hasn't been so very... two hundred years? ...three. Maybe. Hard to keep track of things as small as years.
There was a city here...
This place is a nothingness now, a desolation. The air tells me the story with its sharp salt-tang, unbroken by the smell of clear water that once flowed here. This city grew around a spring, the palm trees sweet in the desert, the figs ripe and the fishermen with loaded tables. Three centuries before anyone had ever heard of Starbucks, there was strong dark qahwa in clay mugs in the bazaar, and the strong dark hands of men wrapped around the mugs, and gold flowed in the marketplace. A city of white walls and blue tile under the sun, in this place between the water and the rocks, and five times a day the muezzin called the faithful to turn towards Makkah al-Mukarramah. I remember this. I remember it as it was the last time I walked here.
There was a city here, once.
But the white traders brought disease, and the raiders from inland brought the sword (these things the bones tell me, the bones buried here under the shifting sands) and these could have been borne but then the spring ran dry, and the palm trees died, and the figs died, and the trade routes shifted, and the people packed onto camels or boats and left this place, and the wind took the rest. And now only the wind moves here, only the wind and the flies; even birds do not come for the bloated bodies of the fish. It is too far away from the rest of the world, and there is no water.
It is nothing new; I should not be so taken aback. Places die just as people, if a little slower. Cities spring up and cities perish and the nations rise and fall and become once more earth. There is no new thing under the sun. Babylon is gone, where I once walked with roses in my hair, and Assur, and Akkad and Sumer and all the others, Ur of the Chaldees... all gone now, vanished in the wake of millennia. They leave traces, and then even the traces vanish, and no one remembers. It happens.
But I had thought this place would still be here. Only a few hundred years...
I spoke here with Simon. The last time. The last time we spoke, the last time before what really was the last time, when I ripped his heart beating and bloody from his chest. But the last time we spoke, and did not fight, it was here, in the streets of this place. Eid ul Fitr, a time for making amends and of seeking forgiveness, and so Simon had sought me out, to apologize for things he had not done and was not guilty of.
Here. It was here, this spot, though three hundred years have changed the place beyond all recognition, but I remember, my feet remember the earth. Here, where Simon said I do not want anger between us in soft Arabic, and where I answered him that As long as you betray me for Michael we will have nothing but. Here...
I crouch down, touch the earth, the white caked sand that crumbles under my fingers. There should be something to survive. A fragment of blue tile or a piece of clay coffee mug worn smooth, something, something that has lasted the centuries, something that was here then and can bear witness to his attempt at conciliation, if not my refusal.
Dig in. Work my hand down through this lifeless earth, salt-sterile, the powder dust of the long dead.
Nothing, nothing, again nothing.
I listen for the call of the muezzin, the sound that interrupted our conversation the first time, and I do not hear it either, not even an echo down the years to this dry salt place.
There is only the wind....
______
gabriel * the prophecy series (movie) * word count: 775
Down from the sun, through the sky white with heat, shimmer-haze rising off this bleached stretch of sand between the water and the rocks. When I touch down, wings folding behind me with a rustle of cloth, the sand beneath my boots is hard, salt-crust, breaks with my weight. A harsh wind from the ocean drives the sand before it, the sand and the salt and the smell of decay from the things that wash up on the barren shore. At first I think I am mistaken, that I have remembered the location wrongly, for there is nothing here but vague mounds in the earth, eroded and mute. Nothing nothing again nothing...
There was... a city here. Not so long, hasn't been so very... two hundred years? ...three. Maybe. Hard to keep track of things as small as years.
There was a city here...
This place is a nothingness now, a desolation. The air tells me the story with its sharp salt-tang, unbroken by the smell of clear water that once flowed here. This city grew around a spring, the palm trees sweet in the desert, the figs ripe and the fishermen with loaded tables. Three centuries before anyone had ever heard of Starbucks, there was strong dark qahwa in clay mugs in the bazaar, and the strong dark hands of men wrapped around the mugs, and gold flowed in the marketplace. A city of white walls and blue tile under the sun, in this place between the water and the rocks, and five times a day the muezzin called the faithful to turn towards Makkah al-Mukarramah. I remember this. I remember it as it was the last time I walked here.
There was a city here, once.
But the white traders brought disease, and the raiders from inland brought the sword (these things the bones tell me, the bones buried here under the shifting sands) and these could have been borne but then the spring ran dry, and the palm trees died, and the figs died, and the trade routes shifted, and the people packed onto camels or boats and left this place, and the wind took the rest. And now only the wind moves here, only the wind and the flies; even birds do not come for the bloated bodies of the fish. It is too far away from the rest of the world, and there is no water.
It is nothing new; I should not be so taken aback. Places die just as people, if a little slower. Cities spring up and cities perish and the nations rise and fall and become once more earth. There is no new thing under the sun. Babylon is gone, where I once walked with roses in my hair, and Assur, and Akkad and Sumer and all the others, Ur of the Chaldees... all gone now, vanished in the wake of millennia. They leave traces, and then even the traces vanish, and no one remembers. It happens.
But I had thought this place would still be here. Only a few hundred years...
I spoke here with Simon. The last time. The last time we spoke, the last time before what really was the last time, when I ripped his heart beating and bloody from his chest. But the last time we spoke, and did not fight, it was here, in the streets of this place. Eid ul Fitr, a time for making amends and of seeking forgiveness, and so Simon had sought me out, to apologize for things he had not done and was not guilty of.
Here. It was here, this spot, though three hundred years have changed the place beyond all recognition, but I remember, my feet remember the earth. Here, where Simon said I do not want anger between us in soft Arabic, and where I answered him that As long as you betray me for Michael we will have nothing but. Here...
I crouch down, touch the earth, the white caked sand that crumbles under my fingers. There should be something to survive. A fragment of blue tile or a piece of clay coffee mug worn smooth, something, something that has lasted the centuries, something that was here then and can bear witness to his attempt at conciliation, if not my refusal.
Dig in. Work my hand down through this lifeless earth, salt-sterile, the powder dust of the long dead.
Nothing, nothing, again nothing.
I listen for the call of the muezzin, the sound that interrupted our conversation the first time, and I do not hear it either, not even an echo down the years to this dry salt place.
There is only the wind....
______
gabriel * the prophecy series (movie) * word count: 775