Fifth Mountain: A Novel Page 5

  Before Elijah could respond, the widow took the boy in her arms and began kissing him, weeping.

  "What did they do to you, Mother? Why are you so sad?"

  "I'm not sad, my son," she answered, drying her tears. "Never in my life have I been so happy."

  Saying this, the widow threw herself on her knees and said in a loud voice:

  "By this act I know that you are a man of God! The truth of the Lord comes from your words!"

  Elijah embraced her, asking her to rise.

  "Let this man go!" she told the soldiers. "He has overcome the evil that had descended upon my house!"

  The people gathered there could not believe what they saw. A young woman of twenty, who worked as a painter, kneeled beside the widow. One by one, others imitated her gesture, including the soldiers charged with taking Elijah into captivity.

  "Rise," he told them, "and worship the Lord. I am merely one of His servants, perhaps the least prepared."

  But they all remained on their knees, their heads bowed.

  "You spoke with the gods of the Fifth Mountain," he heard a voice say. "And now you can do miracles."

  "There are no gods there. I saw an angel of the Lord, who commanded me to do this."

  "You were with Baal and his brothers," said another person.

  Elijah opened a path, pushing aside the kneeling people, and went out into the street. His heart was still racing, as if he had erred and failed to carry out the task that the angel had taught him. "To what avail is it to restore the dead to life if none believe the source of such power?" The angel had asked him to call out the name of the Lord three times but had told him nothing about how to explain the miracle to the multitude in the room below. "Can it be, as with the prophets of old, that all I desired was to show my own vanity?" he wondered.

  He heard the voice of his guardian angel, with whom he had spoken since childhood.

  "Thou hast been today with an angel of the Lord."

  "Yes," replied Elijah. "But the angels of the Lord do not converse with men; they only transmit the orders that come from God."

  "Use thy power," said the guardian angel.

  Elijah did not understand what was meant by that. "I have no power but that which comes from the Lord," he said.

  "Nor hath anyone. But all have the power of the Lord, and use it not."

  And the angel said moreover:

  "From this day forward, and until the moment thou returnest to the land thou hast abandoned, no other miracle will be granted thee."

  "And when will that be?"

  "The Lord needeth thee to rebuild Israel," said the angel. "Thou wilt tread thy land when thou hast learned to rebuild."

  And he said nothing more.

  PART II

  THE HIGH PRIEST SAID THE PRAYERS TO THE RISING sun and asked the god of the storm and the goddess of animals to have mercy on the foolish. He had been told, that morning, that Elijah had brought the widow's son back from the kingdom of the dead.

  The city was both frightened and excited. Everyone believed the Israelite had received his powers from the gods of the Fifth Mountain, and now it would be much more difficult to be rid of him. "But the right moment will come," he told himself.

  The gods would bring about an opportunity to do away with him. But divine wrath had another purpose, and the Assyrians' presence in the valley was a sign. Why were hundreds of years of peace about to end? He had the answer: the invention of Byblos. His country had developed a form of writing accessible to all, even to those who were unprepared to use it. Anyone could learn it in a short time, and that would mean the end of civilization.

  The high priest knew that, of all the weapons of destruction that man could invent, the most terrible--and the most powerful--was the word. Daggers and spears left traces of blood; arrows could be seen at a distance. Poisons were detected in the end and avoided.

  But the word managed to destroy without leaving clues. If the sacred rituals became widely known, many would be able to use them to attempt to change the Universe, and the gods would become confused. Till that moment, only the priestly caste knew the memory of the ancestors, which was transmitted orally, under oath that the information would be kept in secret. Or else years of study were needed to be able to decipher the characters that the Egyptians had spread throughout the world; thus only those who were highly trained--scribes and priests--could exchange written information.

  Other peoples had their rudimentary forms of recording history, but these were so complicated that no one outside the regions where they were used would bother to learn them. The invention of Byblos, however, had one explosive aspect: it could be used in any country, independent of the language spoken. Even the Greeks, who generally rejected anything not born in their cities, had adopted the writing of Byblos as a common practice in their commercial transactions. As they were specialists in appropriating all that was novel, they had already baptized the invention of Byblos with a Greek name: alphabet.

  Secrets guarded through centuries of civilization were at risk of being exposed to the light. Compared to this, Elijah's sacrilege in bringing someone back from the other bank of the river of death, as was the practice of the Egyptians, meant nothing.

  "We are being punished because we are no longer able to safeguard that which is sacred," he thought. "The Assyrians are at our gates, they will cross the valley, and they will destroy the civilization of our ancestors."

  And they would do away with writing. The high priest knew the enemy's presence was not mere happenstance.

  It was the price to be paid. The gods had planned everything with great care so that none would perceive that they were responsible; they had placed in power a governor who was more concerned with trade than with the army, they had aroused the Assyrians' greed, had made rainfall ever more infrequent, and had brought an infidel to divide the city. Soon the final battle would be waged.

  AKBAR WOULD GO ON EXISTING EVEN AFTER ALL THAT, but the threat from the characters of Byblos would be expunged from the face of the earth forever. The high priest carefully cleaned the stone that marked the spot where, many generations before, the foreign pilgrim had come upon the place appointed by heaven and had founded the city. "How beautiful it is," he thought. The stones were an image of the gods--hard, resistant, surviving under all conditions, and without the need to explain why they were there. The oral tradition held that the center of the world was marked by a stone, and in his childhood he had thought about searching out its location. He had nurtured the idea until this year. But when he saw the presence of the Assyrians in the depths of the valley, he understood he would never realize his dream.

  "It's not important. It fell to my generation to be offered in sacrifice for having offended the gods. There are unavoidable things in the history of the world, and we must accept them."

  He promised himself to obey the gods: he would make no attempt to forestall the war.

  "Perhaps we have come to the end of days. There is no way around the crises that grow with each passing moment."

  The high priest took up his staff and left the small temple; he had a meeting with the commander of Akbar's garrison.

  HE WAS NEARLY to the southern wall when he was approached by Elijah.

  "The Lord has brought a boy back from the dead," the Israelite said. "The city believes in my power."

  "The boy must not have been dead," replied the high priest. "It's happened before; the heart stops and then starts beating again. Today the entire city is talking about it; tomorrow, they will recall that the gods are close at hand and can hear what they say. Their mouths will fall silent once more. I must go; the Assyrians are preparing for battle."

  "Hear what I have to say: after the miracle last night, I slept outside the walls because I needed a measure of calm. Then the same angel that I saw on the Fifth Mountain appeared to me again. And he told me: Akbar will be destroyed by the war."

  "Cities cannot be destroyed," said the high priest. "They will be rebuilt seventy t
imes seven because the gods know where they have placed them, and they have need of them there."

  THE GOVERNOR APPROACHED, with a group of courtiers, and asked, "What are you saying?"

  "That you should seek peace," Elijah repeated.

  "If you are afraid, return to the place from which you came," the high priest replied coldly.

  "Jezebel and her king are waiting for fugitive prophets, to slay them," said the governor. "But I should like you to tell me how you were able to climb the Fifth Mountain without being destroyed by the fire from heaven."

  The high priest felt the need to interrupt that conversation. The governor was thinking about negotiating with the Assyrians and might want to use Elijah for his purposes.

  "Do not listen to him," he said. "Yesterday, when he was brought into my presence to be judged, I saw him weep with fear."

  "My tears were for the evil I felt I had caused you, for I fear but two things: the Lord, and myself. I did not flee from Israel, and I am ready to return as soon as the Lord permits. I will put an end to your beautiful princess, and the faith of Israel shall survive this threat too."

  "One's heart must be very hard to resist the charms of Jezebel," the high priest said ironically. "However, even should that happen, we would send another woman even more beautiful, as we did long before Jezebel."

  The high priest was telling the truth. Two hundred years before, a princess of Sidon had seduced the wisest of all Israel's rulers--King Solomon. She had bid him construct an altar to the goddess Astarte, and Solomon had obeyed. For that sacrilege, the Lord had raised up the neighboring armies and Solomon had nearly lost his throne.

  "The same will happen with Ahab, Jezebel's husband," thought Elijah. The Lord would bring him to complete his task when the time came. But what did it avail him to try to convince these men who stood facing him? They were like those he had seen the night before, kneeling on the floor of the widow's house, praising the gods of the Fifth Mountain. Custom would never allow them to think in any other way.

  "A PITY that we must honor the law of hospitality," said the governor, apparently already having forgotten Elijah's words about peace. "If not for that, we could assist Jezebel in her labor of putting an end to the prophets."

  "That is not the reason for sparing my life. You know that I am a valuable commodity, and you want to give Jezebel the pleasure of killing me with her own hands. However, since yesterday, the people attribute miraculous powers to me. They think I met the gods on the Fifth Mountain. For your part, it would not upset you to offend the gods, but you have no desire to vex the inhabitants of the city."

  The governor and the high priest left Elijah talking to himself and walked toward the city walls. At that moment the high priest decided that he would kill the Israelite prophet at the first opportunity; what had till now been only merchandise had been transformed into a menace.

  WHEN HE SAW them walk away, Elijah lost hope; what could he do to serve the Lord? He then began to shout in the middle of the square, "People of Akbar! Last night, I climbed the Fifth Mountain and spoke with the gods who dwell there. When I returned, I was able to reclaim a boy from the kingdom of the dead!"

  The people gathered about him; the story was already known throughout the city. The governor and the high priest stopped and retraced their steps to see what was happening. The Israelite prophet was saying that he had seen the gods of the Fifth Mountain worshiping a superior God.

  "I'll have him slain," said the high priest.

  "And the population will rise up against us," replied the governor, who had an interest in what the foreigner was saying. "It's better to wait for him to commit an error."

  "Before I descended from the mountain," continued Elijah, "the gods charged me with helping the governor against the threat from the Assyrians! I know he is an honorable man and wishes to hear me; but there are those whose interests lie with war and will not allow me to come near him."

  "The Israelite is a holy man," said an old man to the governor. "No one can climb the Fifth Mountain without being struck dead by the fire of heaven, but this man did so--and now he raises the dead."

  "Sidon, Tyre, and all the cities of Phoenicia have a history of peace," said another old man. "We have been through other threats worse than this and overcome them."

  Several sick and lame people began to approach, opening a path through the crowd, touching Elijah's garments and asking to be cured of their afflictions.

  "Before advising the governor, heal the sick," said the high priest. "Then we shall believe the gods of the Fifth Mountain are with you."

  Elijah recalled what the angel had said the night before: only those powers given to ordinary people would be permitted him.

  "The sick are asking for help," insisted the high priest. "We are waiting."

  "First we must attend to avoiding war. There will be more sick, and more infirm, if we fail."

  The governor interrupted the conversation. "Elijah will come with us. He has been touched by divine inspiration."

  Though he did not believe any gods existed on the Fifth Mountain, the governor had need of an ally to help him to convince the people that peace with the Assyrians was the only solution.

  AS THEY WALKED to their meeting with the commander, the high priest commented to Elijah, "You don't believe anything you just said."

  "I believe that peace is the only way out. But I do not believe the top of the Fifth Mountain is inhabited by gods. I have been there."

  "And what did you see?"

  "An angel of the Lord. I had seen this angel before, in several places I have been," replied Elijah. "And there is but one God."

  The high priest laughed.

  "You mean that, in your opinion, the same god who sends the storm also made the wheat, even though they are completely different things?"

  "Do you see the Fifth Mountain?" Elijah asked. "From whichever side you look, it appears different, though it is the same mountain. Thus it is with all of Creation: many faces of the same God."

  THEY CAME TO THE TOP of the wall, from which they could see the enemy encampment in the distance. In the desert valley, the white tents sprang into sight.

  Some time earlier, when the sentinels had first noted the presence of the Assyrians at one end of the valley, spies had said that they were there on a mission of reconnaissance; the commander had suggested taking them prisoner and selling them as slaves. The governor had decided in favor of another strategy: doing nothing. He was gambling that by establishing good relations with them, he could open up a new market for the glass manufactured in Akbar. In addition, even if they were there to prepare for war, the Assyrians knew that small cities will always side with the victor. In this case, all the Assyrian generals desired was to pass through without resistance on their way to Sidon and Tyre, the cities that held the treasure and knowledge of his people.

  The patrol had encamped at the entrance to the valley, and little by little reinforcements had arrived. The high priest claimed to know the reason: the city had a well, the only well in several days' travel in the desert. If the Assyrians planned to conquer Tyre or Sidon, they needed that water to supply their armies.

  At the end of the first month, they could still be expelled. At the end of the second month, Akbar could still win easily and negotiate an honorable withdrawal of the Assyrian soldiers.

  They waited for battle to break out, but there was no attack. At the end of the fifth month, they could still win the battle. "They're going to attack very soon, because they must be suffering from thirst," the governor told himself. He asked the commander to draw up defense strategies and to order his men into constant training to react to a surprise attack.

  But he concentrated only on preparations for peace.

  HALF A YEAR HAD PASSED, and the Assyrian army had made no move. Tension in Akbar, which had grown during the first weeks of occupation, had now diminished almost entirely. People went about their lives: farmers once again returned to their fields; artisans made wine
, glass, and soap; tradesmen continued to buy and sell their merchandise. Everyone believed that, as Akbar had not attacked the enemy, the crisis would soon be settled through negotiations. Everyone knew the governor was chosen by the gods and that he always made the wisest decision.

  When Elijah arrived in the city, the governor had ordered rumors spread of the curse the foreigner brought with him; in this way, if the threat of war became insurmountable, he could blame the presence of the foreigner as the principal cause of the disaster. The inhabitants of Akbar would be convinced that with the death of the Israelite the Universe would return to normal. The governor would then explain that it was too late to demand that the Assyrians withdraw; he would order Elijah killed and explain to his people that peace was the best solution. In his view, the merchants--who desired peace--would force the others to agree to this idea.

  During these months, he had fought the pressure from the high priest and the commander demanding that he attack at once. The gods of the Fifth Mountain had never abandoned him; now, with the miracle of the resurrection last night, Elijah's life was more important than his execution.

  "WHY IS THIS foreigner with you?" asked the commander.

  "He has been enlightened by the gods," answered the governor. "And he will help us to find the best solution." He quickly changed the subject. "The number of tents appears to have increased today."

  "And it will increase even more tomorrow," said the commander. "If we had attacked when they were nothing but a patrol, they probably wouldn't have returned."

  "You're mistaken. Some of them would have escaped, and they would have returned to avenge themselves."

  "When we delay the harvest, the fruit rots," insisted the commander. "But when we delay resolving problems, they continue to grow."

  The governor explained that peace, the great pride of his people, had reigned in Phoenicia for almost three centuries. What would the generations yet unborn say if he were to interrupt this era of prosperity?

  "Send an emissary to negotiate with them," said Elijah. "The best warrior is the one who succeeds in transforming an enemy into a friend."