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"I am half a man. I am the son of an angel by a human woman."
Hale recalled the giant Nephelim in the Book of Genesis, who were supposed to have had children by the daughters of men. He had read speculations that the Nephelim might have been fallen angels.
"Human enough to have survived the doom of your kingdom," Hale observed. He didn't change his expression, but he had to run his tongue around the inside of his mouth to be sure he had not actually eaten something, and he wished he had brought his water bottle with him when he had walked away from his camel-for his mouth was fouled with the woody taste of dry, long-stale bread.
The red lips smiled in the black beard, exposing white teeth, though there was no change of expression in the watchful eyes. "Human enough for half of me to have survived."
Hale breathed in and out through his open mouth, trying to lose the taste. "How did the...the killing stone...kill your people?"
A'ad stared at Hale as if at an idiot. "Know, O man, that it fell upon them. It, and others like it." He shook his head, then dipped his fingers over his right knee, by the blinking parrot's head. "Do try this meat. You have never tasted anything as exquisite as the seasoning of this dish."
"Akh al-Jahala!" cawed the parrot. The phrase meant brother of ignorance.
Oddly, this scene felt familiar in an agent-running context; and Hale realized that it was like debriefing an Arab agent who has lost respect for the handler and is about to stop cooperating. Get what you can, fast, he thought.
"Do you know about another kingdom of your father's tribe," Hale asked as he obediently pretended to pick a bit of meat out of an imaginary dish over the parrot's head, "on Mount Ararat-in what you would know as the land of Urartu, a peak called Agri Dag, the Painful Mountain? I believe the tribe survived the great flood because their kingdom was at the top of the mountain."
A'ad bin Kin'ad scowled, and Hale actually rocked back away from the rage that burned in the golden eyes.
"Great flood?" the king roared. "I am crippled, and my lands are dry desert, because of my denial of your one god. I evaded his wrath, half of me at least evaded the full killing and damning extent of his wrath, but the rivers of my kingdom are parched valleys now, my vineyards and pastures are dust under the sand! You are a man, but the ghosts of my people could see that you have not the black drop in the human heart. You talk to me about floods! In what flood did you wash out the black drop, as I, being half-human, never could?"
Hale just stared expressionlessly at the king of Wabar, ready to swing the rifle butt up very hard indeed under the man's chin if he should spring at him. He was to doubt it later, but in that moment Hale was bleakly sure that the man was referring to Original Sin, from the consequences of which Hale had supposedly been saved by baptism.
Abruptly the king relaxed and smiled. "But you need food. Taste that meat-the animals were fattened on pistachios."
Hale remembered the taste of bad old bread in his mouth, and irrationally he dreaded putting into his mouth the handful of air he held.
He hesitated. "What animals?" he asked.
"Eat. Would you dishonor my table?"
Hale looked over his shoulder when he heard boots chuffing in sand, and relaxed to see bin Jalawi just stepping up to the tumbled stones below the ledge, holding his rifle casually since Hale appeared to be at ease.
When he had clambered up onto the wide ledge, bin Jalawi swiveled his impassive gaze from the black-bearded king of Wabar to the parrot to the miscellaneous fowls in the cave. "Salam 'alaikum," the Bedu said, formally, cutting a quick, questioning glance toward Hale.
"Indeed peace is on me," said the king of Wabar, "because of who my father was. I am A'ad bin Kin'ad."
Bin Jalawi's eyes widened; clearly he believed it. "There is no might nor majesty except in God the most high and wonderful!" he exclaimed, using a common Arab phrase to express awed surprise.
"Yahweh, Allah, Elohim," spat the king. To Hale he said, strongly, "Eat the flesh, damn you. Be a man, and nothing more."
Hale shuddered and flicked his right hand as though throwing something away, resolving to wash that hand soon, in water, or whiskey, or gasoline.
"This place is a ruin, my lord," said bin Jalawi to the king. "Will you come away with us, on one of our camels?"
"O calamity!" shrilled the parrot, spreading its orange-spotted green wings and fluttering up into the air.
"To where?" asked the king in a voice as deep as rumbling in a desert well. "'To the house no one leaves, where the mute crownless kings sit forever in deepest shadow and have dust for bread and clay for meat, and are clothed like birds in robes of feathers; and over the bolted gate lie dust and silence'?"
Hale recognized the man's words as the text of a Babylonian description of the afterworld, preserved in the Assyrian Gilgamesh clay tablets. He straightened his legs and slowly stood up, without taking his eyes off of the king of Wabar.
"Shall I walk?" demanded the king, opening the front of his embroidered red robe and flinging it back over his shoulders, scattering the clamoring chickens behind him. "Shall I ride a camel?"
Hale had flinched back with a smothered cry. The king's naked body from the waist down was made of rough black stone, with no seam or crack visible where white skin bordered black petrification-and millennia of sandstorms had grotesquely eroded the contours of the stone. The genitals were gone, and the projecting stone knees and thighs had been weathered flat, so that they looked more like frail flippers than a man's legs.
The robe must have been heavily padded, for the king's chest was just white skin sagging over ribs and collar-bones and prominent shoulder sockets; and the king's beard was patchy and white now. Hale could not see the robe on the cave floor, and he was suddenly sure that it had never been real.
"Stay," whispered the king through a toothless mouth. "Die. Learn to relish our food." One grimy, stringy white hand reached behind himself, and then he was holding a steel dagger by the point and nimbly cocking it back over his shoulder to throw.
