Death in Damascus {EXCERPT}

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Amidst the unkempt city of many names and empires, the thud of the mount’s hooves on the cobblestone echoed in dismal proclamation of the robed rider. Drizzling clouds choked the glimmer of the stars. Silhouettes of the city’s clustered edifices stood darker and more ominous than even the black sky, looming over the rider as if in observance. Sprinkled throughout the earthly structures of shadow were windows that flickered with thin, distant warmth and maybe life but they were of no concern or relevance to the rider.

In damp alleyways, he found some heaped where fortunate citizens were less likely to encounter and reproach them. The rider always pitied those tossed indifferently amongst others, unsettled from their disparate locations of departure. Yet, he may have admitted, this lessened the effort of his task.

Once the great city of Constantine and Suleiman had been purged, the rider went on, leading the pallid steed south through lands of brush and briar. The road took him first east along the shore of the Black Sea. Here were quiet towns not abnormal to foreign eyes despite the absence of a people no longer permitted in this ancestral land. Scribbled black letters on wooden road signs pointed him on from Trabzon to Erzurum to Sivas to Smyrna and even the most paltry town in between. In this land of Gomer and Togarmah, the rider proceeded until the trail was festooned with bodies on either side, kicked just beyond the straight course of flattened earth so as to save feet and wheels the trouble of navigation between them. What was few became many, then a multitude piled up on both sides of the road like the great banks of a river. The sand prints told of the thousands who had walked this path under that jeering sun which withered many, hastening their most human voyage from dust to dust again. Here and there, a few ephemeral guardians of golden light hovered close to those they had failed to save, but they fluttered off like fretful birds at the rider’s approach. Just so, the rider performed his duty.

Upon the Euphrates, he found many more collected, appearing at first no more than logs, damming the spate and diverting the waters of Eden across grayed fields of asphodel. But they were not logs. The rider descended from his horse and approached a thin wooden boat with a single lantern and oar that rocked in waiting. Silently, he stepped aboard, and pushed the boat into the current with slow, disciplined strokes. In the crannies of near stagnant water, he picked up each sodden body, drying them carefully in eternally parched robes. The lantern swayed and creaked, casting flakes of golden light over the dark river. Once the River Euphrates had been freed of its pollution, he dipped the oar into that obsidian surface, and pulled the wooden hull back to shore.

        Then came the rider to the city of Damascus, whose doom at the hand of idolaters was prophesied in days long past...