Stealing Sacred Fire (19 page)

Yazid parked up and left his
companions in the truck, while he went to speak with a group of men
who’d watched their arrival with interest. Presently, he returned
and led the group into one of the ruined buildings where men and
women were clustered around a fire. They were all clearly
peshmergas, dressed in military clothing and surrounded by weapons.
The walls of the room were pocked with bullet-holes, and the
windows were broken, with rough sacking taped over them. A broken
child’s toy lay in the corner of the room. Daniel had to shut his
mind down in order to prevent any stray memory of whatever tragedy
had taken place there intruding into his consciousness. Lowering
his guard even for a moment meant he was swamped with a sensation
of terror; screams of pain reverberating through his brain.

When Shem and the others
entered the room, its occupants all began to speak at once,
gesticulating wildly. Yazid answered back, with equally expressive
gestures. Eventually, he turned to Shem. ‘I have explained your
situation and these people are happy to let you stay here.’

Shem frowned. ‘Are they Yarasadi?’

‘They are friends of the
Yarasadi,’ Yazid replied enigmatically.

‘When will we meet with
Gadreel?’

‘Soon, soon. You must wait
here.’

One of the group, an attractive
woman in her thirties, bade Shem and his companions be seated. She
told them in clear English that her name was Fatime and offered
them the hospitality of her hearth. This last comment was
accompanied by a wry grin to indicate she was aware she didn’t have
much hospitality to give. Her skin was as pale as Yazid’s, although
her hair was a dark reddish-brown, complemented by green eyes. She
told them that as well as being a freedom-fighter for her people,
she was a doctor, who over ten years ago had trained in France. She
was in charge of this small settlement, caring for the injured
refugees and soldiers who sought sanctuary there. Shemyaza told her
they had brought supplies with them from Istanbul, so Yazid went
back to the truck and unloaded what remained of the luxuries they’d
purchased. While the assembled company passed round raki and beer,
and distributed packets of cigarettes, Fatime initiated
conversation with her guests. She admitted she was sceptical that
Gadreel would meet with them.

‘Few have met him,’ she said.
‘He is the mountain goat, the eagle, resting rarely. Some say he is
not human at all.’

Shem raised his eyebrows.
‘Really? Why?’

She shrugged. ‘He never shows
his face. Perhaps it is hideous.’

‘Or the face of an angel,’
Salamiel suggested.

Fatime narrowed her eyes at
him. ‘Some might say you have the face of an angel.’

He grinned, shrugged.

‘You are not Yarasadi,’ Shem
said. ‘Are there any here?’

Fatime shook her head. ‘No, they are in
the mountains, further south. You have to remember that Yarasadism
is not like the other beliefs of our people. For thousands of years
there have been the Alevi, the Yezidi and the Yaresan, but
Yarasadism is new. Gadreel tells us it is very old, and perhaps it
is, or perhaps it is just a new banner from which to draw strength.
People of all faiths are drawn to it. They say they have woken up
from the sleep of centuries.’

‘But not you?’ Shem asked.

Fatime pulled an expressive
face. ‘By birth, I am Alevi, but my beliefs now are political
rather than religious. If Yarasadism can help my people to win
their eternal fight, I have no argument with it.’

The next morning, after an
uncomfortable night spent on a concrete floor wrapped in blankets,
Shem and his companions discovered that Yazid had disappeared
during the night, along with his truck. Salamiel and Daniel were
suspicious of this, but Shem thought that Yazid must have gone to
seek his people and tell them about the strange Westerners who were
asking for their prophet.

Over a sparse breakfast of
bread and goat-cheese, washed down by sweet tea, Shem asked Fatime
how long they should expect to wait for Gadreel’s people.

She smiled. ‘I have no idea.
You will just have to be patient.’

Daniel watched Shem covertly.
He sensed the mounting anxiety within him, and a sense of
confusion. They should speak — he knew they should — but how could
he break down the invisible wall that had come to separate
them?

On the evening of their second
day at the village, Daniel wandered off alone into the nearby
crags, although he was tailed by several children and a
three-legged dog. He emerged from a narrow pathway between high
rocks to a natural look-out that hung high above a mountain valley
of tough grass. Mountains rolled away into the distance. It was a
dreaming landscape, seemingly oblivious of the human conflict
taking place within it. Daniel put his hands against the ancient
rocks, trying to project his mind back to when Shem’s people had
made their mark in this land, but he could not extend his senses
beyond the mundane. He knew that in some way he was deliberately
‘shutting down’. Perhaps he had been too affected by reality
recently. He realised how different he was to the gauche youth whom
Shemyaza had taken away from Little Moor. Never then could he have
imagined being where he was now. For the first time in months, he
thought of his sister, Verity, and had an urge to contact her. Was
their father still alive? Homesickness swamped him. He yearned for
the mellow glow of an English summer evening and the smallness of
life in his old home. Kurdistan was stark and terrible and
unremittingly honest in revealing humanity’s failings. These
mountains were washed in blood, and had been for millennia. The
ambitions Shem had had in England seemed irrelevant here. What
significance could the mythical conflict of angels have to people
who daily had to fight for their lives? Daniel shuddered in the
breeze that came down from the mountains. He felt like an impostor
here.

A small hand tugged at his
t-shirt. ‘Danee-ell, Danee-ell.’ He looked down and saw a
grubby-faced girl smiling up at him; gaps in her teeth which he
hoped were the result of growing rather than some obscene injury.
She was dressed in a tattered, colourless dress, which was too big
for her, and a brightly-embroidered purple jacket. Daniel
recognised her as one of the children who had followed him from the
village; he could see her companions giggling and shy, hiding among
the rocks behind him.

He ruffled the girl’s hair.
‘Hi.’

She held out a bunch of wilting, tiny
flowers to him and chattered to him in Kurmanji. Despite the
language barrier, he could tell she sensed his sadness and sought
to cheer him. Tears came to his eyes and he pressed the fingers of
one hand against them.

After five days, there was no
sign of Gadreel or any of his immediate followers. Shem and
Salamiel questioned Fatime every day until she became impatient
with their demands. She did not know where the Yarasadi were.
Perhaps they were too far away to receive the messages, or else
engaged in combat. Daniel could sense she was really quite
exasperated by Shem’s constant questions. Daily, she had to deal
with the influx of refugees that trailed in from routed villages in
the mountains. Her scant medical staff was over-worked with too few
supplies. Sometimes, gunfire could be heard echoing from peak to
peak.

One day, her natural courtesy
deserted her. ‘What is so important about one man?’ she snapped.
‘If you are here to report on our troubles, look around you. This
is what should be taken back to the West!’ All around her, the
injured lay on make-shift beds among the ruins, or sat before
meagre fires, staring into the smoke with blank eyes.

‘We will take it back!’ Shem
answered. ‘We shall do more than that.’

Fatime shook her head and
walked away from him. Watching, Daniel could tell she thought Shem
cared nothing for her troubles.

Daniel offered to help wherever
he could, although he found it difficult to deal with the human
pain of mutilated orphans and grieving women disfigured by
appalling chemical burns. It was not the physical injuries that
affected him, but the strong psychic effluvia of defeated despair
and overwhelming grief.

On one occasion, he assisted Fatime to
clean up the wounds of a young boy who had been brought in with a
group of peshmergas. They had found him in the ruins of a smoking
village. The boy’s legs were hideously mangled, although Fatime
told Daniel that she would use a poultice of local herbs on the
injuries, which might prevent the need to amputate the limbs.
Daniel doubted that the boy would ever walk again.

As they knelt together, mixing
the poultice, Fatime said to Daniel, ‘Your friends have some
business with Gadreel they are not speaking of.’

And Daniel had to answer, ‘Yes,
they have.’

‘They know him already.’

Daniel looked into her eyes.
‘They know of him, Fatime. It is an old business. Very old.’

‘They are different from
you.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. They are like
Gadreel, or rather they hope Gadreel is like them.’

‘What are they?’

Daniel was silent for a while.
‘Long ago, their people came from these mountains.’

Fatime stared at him for a few
moments, then changed the subject. ‘Here, open that jar for me. I
need a handful of the leaves.’ Daniel realised she did not really
want to know the truth, perhaps because she already suspected
it.

Another week passed by, then
another. Daniel and Salamiel occupied themselves by helping Fatime
around the settlement. Salamiel spoke to Fatime often about the
struggles of her people. Daniel detected a sub-text. Did Salamiel
feel that Shem’s task was to become involved in the conflict?
Daniel couldn’t dispel the impression this was so. He finished off
the last of the films they had brought with them, tempering
heart-rending shots of human misery with compositions of ragamuffin
children grinning against the soaring landscape. The gap-toothed
girl, Adina, who had once offered him flowers for his hurts, had
become his shadow, having developed a strong crush on him. He knew
that when the time came for them to leave, he would find it very
hard to leave her behind in this place.

Each morning, Shem wandered off
alone into the mountains, returning at sunset. He barely spoke to
his companions. Salamiel confided to Daniel that he thought Shem
was a maelstrom of doubts. ‘We are wasting time here. Why is he
stalling?’

Daniel answered carefully,
aware that Salamiel was liable to turn on him very quickly. ‘But we
can’t really do anything until we’ve made contact with the
Yarasadi. We have to wait here.’

‘Nonsense!’ Salamiel said. ‘He
could show them his power instead of hiding it. Gadreel and the
Yarasadi would no doubt appear with miraculous speed if Shem would
only take control of the situation.’ He paused, then said, ‘Speak
to him, Daniel. Only Anu knows what’s going on in his head.’

Daniel shrugged. ‘I can’t, Sal.
He won’t let me.’

‘Then what are you here
for?’

As the days passed, Salamiel’s
comments became more waspish. This did not help to restore Daniel’s
confidence in his unreliable psychic sight.

Daniel knew that Shem was
becoming increasingly impatient about Gadreel’s failure to appear,
which was reflected in the terse manner with which he interrogated
Fatime. Salamiel was convinced that Yazid had simply dumped them
and had perhaps had not even contacted the Yarasadi. ‘Perhaps we
should be looking upon ourselves as hostages now,’ he said.

Shem could not even articulate
his feelings to himself. He was continually drawn to the mountains,
almost as if, should he sit in solitude long enough, something
would be revealed to him. He watched Daniel develop friendships
with the Kurds, and recognised the barbs of jealousy in his heart.
When the child Adina put her arms around Daniel and nestled against
him, Shem yearned to be in her place. Daniel was his strength, his
psychic eye. But it had been plucked out.

In the past, this area had been
where Shem’s Nephilim sons had fought the might of the High Lord
Anu. If he sat down and closed his eyes, he could almost hear the
echoes of war still reverberating among the soaring crags. It was
in mountains like these that he had made his final stronghold,
where he’d taken Ishtahar in the last days of their life together.
If he stared at any sheer cliff, he could almost see the fortress;
a stark outline of cyclopean blocks; flat towers crowned with
spreading spikes that were the rafters of the rooftops. Ishtahar
had betrayed him there, by fleeing to Kharsag, where she’d revealed
the whereabouts of Shemyaza’s stronghold to Anu. She had condemned
him to a horrifying death, and yet some part of him still loved
her. He knew her actions had been the result of seeing the monster
of hate and anger that he’d become. He could not blame her for her
treachery. These mountains were full of her fragrance, her
presence. He remembered that in lulls between the fighting, when
his mood had swayed back to something like his former self, he and
Ishtahar had strolled together among the valleys, gathered flowers
and made love in the lush grass. The memories were too painful.

One day, Salamiel trailed Shem
from the village and came upon him in his silent meditations.
Saying nothing, Salamiel sat down beside him on the rock, staring
out over a narrow gorge, where far below water spumed and crashed.
Eventually, Salamiel broke the silence. ‘Shem, we can always go
back.’

Shem glanced at him, his
expression unreadable. ‘I can’t. I wish I could.’

‘Tell me what you’re
thinking.’

Shem shook his head. ‘Nothing.
Just remembering.’

Salamiel was silent for a moment, then
said, ‘I’ve been thinking about what we should do. It’s obviously a
waste of time hanging around here. I think we should take some
action.’