Word Fulfilled, The (11 page)

Fifteen

The Arabian Desert, Near Tadmor

Third Day of Simanu

nother day passed, indistinguishable from—how many days before it? Jonah lost track. The road ahead still looked the same as the road behind. Even their footprints disappeared in the dust swirls that erased any sign they had been there. The land to the right remained barren and parched. The land to the left had become the same. Everything was the same, the same, the same. Except his joints. They got worse. Ankles, knees, hip. They’d never recover from this ordeal, if, indeed, he ever completed it. The thought of going lame halfway to Nineveh popped into his mind. What would he do then? Just lie down in the dust and shrivel up? That would hardly be fair.
How irritating
.

Whatever possessed him to think he could walk the entire distance to Nineveh? Well, how was he supposed to know how far it was? He’d never traveled outside Israel before, save his short jaunt aboard the
Ba’al Hayam
—and he needed no reminder as to how well that turned out. Once, when he probed Akhyeshah how much further beyond Tadmor that Nineveh lay, all he got was a grunt. A grunt! That was it.
How irritating.

Perhaps
Adonai
thought His prophet might have enough sense to procure a camel, or a donkey, or something to ease the road before he set off. Jonah stared ahead and grumbled to himself. It wasn’t his fault. How was he to know? He could picture the angel’s face looking down, sighing, shaking his head. The next time the voice decided to speak—if ever again—it would probably chastise him for not thinking ahead. Were prophets supposed to think ahead? Wasn’t it the job of their angels-in-charge to tell them what was ahead? Of course it was. It was the angel’s fault. Jonah gritted his teeth.
Great, I got a defective angel.
How irritating.

And this heat! It wasn’t just hot; it was sweltering. Even his trusty travel cloak—a cloak that worked just fine back in Israel, thank you very much—turned against him. He yanked at his collar and sucked in a deep breath of hot, dusty, gritty, filthy, stifling, Assyrian air. He gagged.
How irrit
—

Jonah slammed into Akhyeshah and staggered back. The giant had stopped in the middle of the road and was surveying the sky from horizon to horizon. Finally, he turned, looked at Jonah, and sniffed.

Jonah bristled. “What?”

“We stop here. If we cannot find shelter, we build it.” Akhyeshah pivoted and strode off the path.

Jonah hurried to catch up. “Already? It’s only midday.”

“We stop here.”

“But there’s plenty of daylight left. We could get much closer to Tadmor if we keep—”

Akhyeshah swept his hand from left to right. “There are ridges in the earth not far. We find shelter.”

“But—”

“No ‘but.’ Follow me.”

With that, the big man set off at a pace that forced Jonah to a trot.

They had only traveled a short time when they came upon a cleft in the terrain. It caught Jonah by surprise. The ground that appeared so flat from the road suddenly dropped off into a series of crevices similar to that in which he’d encountered the scorpion the day before. But these breaks in the earth were much deeper. Just beyond the crevices, more low rocky ridges jutted from the ground. He hadn’t seen them through the waves of heat that shimmered from the desert floor.

Jonah came to the lip of the first crevice and began to loosen his travel pouch from his belt.

“Not here. Keep going.” Akhyeshah plunged down the slope. He crossed the narrow floor and began to scale the other side.

Jonah creased his brow. “This should be fine. We slept in one the other—”

“Keep going,” Akhyeshah barked over his shoulder.

Jonah heaved a sigh of frustration and stumbled down the side of the ravine. He scrambled up the far slope, the loose soil and rocks shifting so quickly beneath his feet that he had to pump his legs to make headway. When he finally topped the incline, Akhyeshah was already fifty paces ahead.

“Wait!” Jonah yelled after the big man as he disappeared over the edge of the next rift.

He jogged to the crevice and peeked over the edge. The gully was deeper than the last, its slopes steeper. Jonah scanned the bottom. Akhyeshah was nowhere in sight.

Jonah cupped his hands around his mouth. “Ayesh . . . Akhash . . . oh, why can’t I remember that name?”

He huffed and lurched over the edge, half sliding, half falling down the slope until he crashed onto the floor of the fissure. His ankles wailed at the sudden stop, and he grimaced at a sharp catch that stabbed his lower back. He bent over and fought to catch his breath.

“More to go.”

He snapped his eyes up to see Akhyeshah’s head loom over the top of the far slope. Jonah squinted at him. “How did you—”

“Keep moving.” The head disappeared.

Jonah limped across the ravine floor and began the arduous climb up the rock-strewn grade. When he gained the top, as he’d suspected, Akhyeshah was nowhere to be seen. The first of the toothy ridges rose only thirty paces ahead. He assumed that’s where his guide had gone, so he trudged to the nearest cleft in the ridge and slipped through.

The valley between the first ridge and the next was flat and smooth, its surface blanketed with fine sand. He glanced to the left and spotted deep prints in the soft earth. Only Akhyeshah could have left the tracks, so Jonah followed them along the ridgeline.

After another twenty paces, he rounded a boulder and nearly tripped over Akhyeshah’s legs. The giant had settled against the back of a rock outcropping and nestled between two boulders that framed a shallow niche in the low ridge.

Jonah stumbled to a halt. “Will you please explain what we’re doing? Why are we stopping so soon, and what’s the big hurry?”

Akhyeshah looked up at Jonah. “There is room here. Lie down.”

Jonah stared at him. Then he surveyed the narrow space between Akhyeshah’s bulk and the boulder. He looked back at the Assyrian and raised an eyebrow. “That’s all right. I can find my own—”

“You will want to lie down.” Akhyeshah squinted at him against the glare of the sky.

“Why would—”

A low rumble shook the earth beneath his feet and cut Jonah’s words short. He slogged through the deep sand to a small cleft that slit the ridge a few paces away and peered through it.

A massive wall of sand rushed across the desert toward him. Earth and sky disappeared behind the monstrous brown cloud that obliterated everything in its path. It seemed to grow taller and darker with each moment. He stood mesmerized, until he realized the sand had just swallowed the road they had walked only moments ago.

Jonah scurried back to Akhyeshah’s niche. His chest heaved. “What, in the name of—”

“You will want to lie down.” Akhyeshah nodded to the space beside him, his voice barely audible above the roar of the sandstorm.

Jonah dove into the narrow gap beside the Assyrian. Akhyeshah shifted onto his stomach and covered his head with his robe. Jonah followed his cue.

When the leading edge of the storm hit the rocky abutment, Jonah thought the world had come to an end. Daylight disappeared and the ground shuddered under the onslaught. Sand, dust, and debris filled the air. The wind screamed over and through the rocks with such force it threatened to rip the cloak off his back. He stuffed his collar against his mouth and nose to filter air and clamped his eyes shut.

For what seemed an eternity, the maelstrom battered the earth around him. Rocks loosened above his head cascaded down and caromed off his huddled form. A heavy blanket of sand accumulated on his back and legs, and pinned him to the ground. Breathable air disappeared, and the relentless pressure of debris on his back squeezed his lungs.

Akhyeshah’s voice came strangely clear through the chaos. “Tadmor is near. Over the next rise.”

Jonah tried to reply but choked on the grit that invaded his throat. He buried his head into his cloak, shuddered, and blacked out.

Something tapped Jonah’s forehead and jarred him awake. His right eyelid flickered open to see a pebble roll to a rest beside his nose. He clamped the eyelid shut against a grain of sand that slipped in and lodged itself against his eye. He tried to shift his body but couldn’t move. Slowly, he lifted his head and shook it. A shower of fine sand flowed down the sides of his head. He pushed against the ground with his forearms and managed to free his shoulders. He shrugged off the thick blanket of sand with a twist of his torso.

Jonah sat up and brushed the grit from his face before he attempted to open his eyes again. When he did, the bright blue afternoon sky nearly blinded him. The air was still, the earth quiet. He squinted around himself. The events leading him here slowly reassembled themselves in his mind. The scramble for cover, the storm, Akhyeshah.

Akhyeshah.

Jonah swiveled and stared at the ground beside him. There was only sand.

Lll

The evening sun kissed the western horizon, stretching Tadmor’s craggy shadow further across the sand dunes toward the eastern horizon. Twilight had painted the landscape a dull taupe by the time Jonah reached the city gate. He turned to look back along the road that led him here.

There was no evidence of the sandstorm. The sky had cleared, and the sun that had resumed its onslaught with renewed vigor now settled toward its nighttime rest. The road lay undisturbed—rutted and rock-strewn, as it had been for days. It was as though nothing had happened.

Most of his recollection after he lifted himself from the sand was fuzzy. He remembered little of the trudge back toward the road. He recalled the torturous climb through the ravines he had stumbled through in his haste to reach shelter from a storm he had no inkling was coming. The fierce blast of desert air sculpted elongated deposits of sand in the leeward walls of the rifts and left them treacherous to climb. The sandstorm left a different signature on the flatland, where the gale-force wind sandblasted the windward surfaces clean. Jonah shook his head. He wondered if such sandstorms were common in the desert, fearful he might be caught up in another without Akhyeshah’s savvy to forewarn him.

Jonah was exhausted by the time he reached the roadway. He stopped and shaded his eyes to scan the path for any sign of his guide. There was none. No footprints. No movement.

“Tadmor is near. Over the next rise.”

The husky words echoed through Jonah’s mind, all that was left of his enigmatic, often annoying companion. The road ahead seemed impossible by himself, and Jonah longed for just one more clipped interruption, one more grunt that would mean he wasn’t alone. Akhyeshah must have gone ahead, but why? Why would he suffer Jonah’s belabored pace, when he could have made Tadmor at least a day faster on his own, only to abandon him almost within sight of the city? Akhyesha said he was from Tadmor. Perhaps Jonah could seek him out and ask why the intrigue.

With a sigh, he turned and stepped through the entrance to the city. What met his eyes fell far short of his expectations. The ancient oasis town was a shadow of its former glory. For hundreds of years, the city had enjoyed celebrity as an enabler of east-west trade. King Solomon had built up the outpost when he recognized its strategic importance, but the splendor he bestowed upon Tadmor was no longer evident. The settlement was now little more than a scattering of sun-baked mud huts. Sickly palm trees dotted the landscape with their pale fronds drooped against the yellow sky. Vegetation once flourished along a broad river that gave life to Tadmor, but now its decrepit trees scarcely survived over the parched remains of a river swallowed long ago by the desert sands. Stone rings lined the tops of wells dug along the ancient waterway and pockmarked the landscape like ulcers.