ROBERT SILVERBERG

  A HERO OF THE EMPIRE

  HERE I AM AT LAST, HORATIUS, in far-off Arabia, amongst the Greeks and the

  camels and the swarthy Saracen tribesmen and all the other unpleasant creatures

  that infest this dreary desert. For my sins. My grievous sins. "Get you to

  Arabia, serpent!" cried the furious Emperor Julian, and here I am. Serpent. Me.

  How could he have been so unkind?

  But I tell you, O friend of my bosom, I will employ this time of exile to win my

  way back into Caesar's good graces somehow. I will do something while I am here,

  something, I know not what just yet, that will remind him of what a shrewd and

  enterprising and altogether valuable man I am; and sooner or later he will

  recall me to Roma and restore me to my place at court. Before many years have

  passed you and I will stroll together along Tiber's sweet banks again. Of this

  much I am certain, that the gods did not have it in mind for me that I should

  spin out all my remaining days in so miserable a sandy wasteland as this.

  A bleak forlorn place, it is, this Arabia. A bleak disheartening journey it was

  to get here, too.

  There are, as perhaps you are aware, several Arabias within the vast territory

  that we know by that general name. In the north lies Arabia Petraea, a

  prosperous mercantile region bordering on Syria Palaestina. Arabia Petraea has

  been an Imperial province Since the reign of Augustus Caesar, six hundred years

  ago. Then comes a great deal of emptiness -Arabia Deserta, it is called, a grim,

  harsh, barren district inhabited mainly by quarrelsome nomads. And on the far

  side of that lies Arabia Felix, a populous land every bit as happy as its name

  implies, a place of luxurious climate and easy circumstances, famed for its

  fertile and productive fields and for the abundance of fine goods that it pours

  forth into the world's markets, gold and pearls, frankincense and myrrh, balsams

  and aromatic oils and perfumes.

  Which of these places Caesar intended as my place of exile, I did not know. I

  was told that I would learn that during the course of my journey east. I have an

  ancient family connection to the eastern part of the world, for in the time of

  the first Claudius my great ancestor Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo was proconsul of

  Asia with his seat at Ephesus, and then governor of Syria under Nero, and

  various other Corbulos since his time have dwelled in those distant regions. It

  seemed almost agreeable to be renewing the tradition, however involuntary the

  renewal. Gladly would I have settled for Arabia Petraea if I had to go to Arabia

  at all: it is a reasonable destination for a highly placed Roman gentleman

  temporarily out of favor with his monarch. But of course my hopes were centered

  on Arabia Felix, which by all accounts was the more congenial land.

  The voyage from Roma to Syria Palaestina -- pfaugh, Horatius! Nightmare.

  Torture. Seasick every day. Beloved friend, I am no seafaring man. Then came a

  brief respite in Caesarea Maritima, the one good part, lovely cosmopolitan city,

  wine flowing freely, complacent pretty girls everywhere, and, yes, Horatius, I

  must confess it, some pretty boys too. I stayed there as long as I could. But

  eventually I received word that the caravan that was to take me down into Arabia

  was ready to depart, and I had to go.

  Let no one beguile you with romantic tales of desert travel. For a civilized man

  it is nothing but torment and agony.

  Three steps to the inland side of Jerusalem and you find yourself in the

  hottest, driest country this side of Hades; and things only get worse from

  there. Every breath you take hits your lungs like a blast from an oven. Your

  nostrils, your ears, your lips become coated with windborne particles of grit.

  The sun is like a fiery iron platter in the sky. You go for miles without seeing

  a single tree or shrub, nothing but rock and red sand. Mocking phantoms dance

  before you in the shimmering air. At night if you are lucky enough or weary

  enough to be able to drop off to sleep for a little while, you dream longingly

  of lakes and gardens and green lawns, but then you are awakened by the

  scrabbling sound of a scorpion in the sand beside your cheek, and you lie there

  sobbing in the stifling heat, praying that you will die before the coming of the

  fiery dawn.

  Somewhere in the midst of all this dead wilderness the traveler leaves the

  province of Syria Palaestina and enters Arabia, though no one can say precisely

  where the boundary lies. The first thing you come to, once across that invisible

  line, is the handsome city of Petra of the Nabataeans, an impregnable

  rock-fortress that stands athwart all the caravan routes. It is a rich city and,

  aside from the eternal parching heat, quite a livable one. I would not have

  greatly minded serving out my time of exile there.

  But no, no, the letter of instruction from His Imperial Majesty that awaited me

  in Petra informed me that I needs must go onward, farther south. Arabia Petraea

  was not the part of Arabia that he had in mind for me. I enjoyed three days of

  civilized urban amusement there and then I was in the desert again, traveling by

  camel this time. I will spare you the horrors of that experience. We were

  heading, they let me know, for the Nabataean port of Leuke Kome on the Red Sea.

  Excellent, I thought. This Leuke Kome is the chief port of embarkation for

  travelers sailing on to Arabia Felix. So they must be sending me to that fertile

  land of soft breezes and sweet-smelling blossoms, of spices and precious stones.

  I imagined myself waiting out my seasons of banishment in a cozy little villa

  beside the sea, nibbling tender dates and studying the fine brandies of the

  place. Perhaps I would dabble a bit in the frankincense trade or do a little

  lucrative business in cinnamon and cassia to pass the time.

  At Leuke Kome I presented myself to the Imperial legate, a sleek and

  self-important young popinjay named Florentius Victor, and asked him how long it

  would be before my ship was to leave. He looked at me blankly. "Ship? What ship?

  Your route lies overland, my dear Leontius Corbulo." He handed me the last of my

  letters of instruction, by which I was informed that my final destination was a

  place by the name of Macoraba, where I was to serve as commercial representative

  of His Imperial Majesty's government, with the special responsibility of

  resolving any trade conflicts that might arise with such representatives of the

  Eastern Empire as might be stationed there.

  "Macoraba? And just where is that?"

  "Why, in Arabia Deserta," said Florentius Victor blandly.

  "Arabia Deserta?" I repeated, with a sinking heart.

  "Exactly. A very important city, as cities in that part of the world go. Every

  caravan crossing Arabia has to stop there. Perhaps you've heard of it under its

  Saracen name. Mecca is what the Saracens call it."

  ARABIA DESERTA, Horatius! Arabia Deserta! For the trifling crime of tampering

  with the innocence of his unimportant little British cup-boy, the heartless

  vindictive Emperor has buried me in this brutal netherworld of remorseless heat

  and drifting dunes.

  I have been in Macoraba -- Mecca, I should say -- just three or four days, now.

  It seems like a lifetime already.

  What do we have in this land of Arabia Deserta? Why, nothing but a desolate

  torrid sandy plain intersected by sharp and naked hills. There are no rivers and

  rain scarcely ever falls. The sun is merciless. The wind is unrelenting. The

  dunes shift and heave like ocean waves in a storm: whole legions could be buried

  and lost by a single day's gusts. For trees they have only scrubby little

  tamarinds and acacias, that take their nourishment from the nightly dews. Here

  and there one finds pools of brackish water rising from the bowels of the earth,

  and these afford a bit of green pasture and sometimes some moist ground on which

  the date-palm and the grapevine can take root, but it is a sparse life indeed

  for those who have elected to settle in such places.

  In the main the Saracens are a wandering race who endlessly guide their flocks

  of horses and sheep and camels back and forth across this hard arid land,

  seeking out herbage for their beasts where they can. All the year long they

  follow the seasons about, moving from seacoast to mountains to plains, so that

  they can take advantage of such little rainfall as there is, falling as it does

  in different months in these different regions. From time to tim

e they venture

  farther afield -- to the banks of the Nile or the farming villages of Syria or

  the valley of the Euphrates -- to descend as brigands upon the placid farmers of

  those places and extort their harvests from them.

  The harshness of the land makes it a place of danger and distress, of rapine and

  fear. In their own self-interest the Saracens form themselves into little tribal

  bands under the absolute government of fierce and ruthless elders; warfare

  between these tribes is constant; and so vehement is each man's sense of

  personal honor that offense is all too easily given and private blood-feuds

  persist down through generation after generation, yet ancient offenses never

  seem to be wiped out.

  Two settlements here have come to be dignified with the name of "cities."

  Cities, Horatius! Mudholes with walls about them, rather. In the northern part

  of this desert one finds Iatrippa, which in the Saracens' own tongue is named

  Medina. It has a population of 15,000 or so, and as Arabian villages go is

  fairly well provided with water, so that it possesses abundant date-groves, and

  its people live comfortable lives, as comfort is understood in this land.

  Then, a ten-day caravan journey to the south, through somber thorny land broken

  now and then by jutting crags of dark stone, is the town our geographers know as

  Macoraba, the Mecca of the locals. This Mecca is a bigger place, perhaps 25,000

  people, and it is of such ineffable ugliness that Virgil himself would not have

  been able to conceive of it. Imagine, if you will, a "city" whose buildings are

  drab hovels of mud and brick, strung out along a rocky plain a mile wide and two

  miles long that lies at the foot of three stark mountains void of all

  vegetation. The flinty soil is useless for agriculture. The one sizable well

  yields bitter water. The nearest pasture land is fifty miles away. I have never

  seen so unprepossessing a site for human habitation.

  You can readily guess, I think, which of the two cities of Arabia Deserta our

  gracious Emperor chose as my place of exile.

  "Why," said I to Nicomedes the Paphlagonian, who was kind enough to invite me to

  be his dinner guest on my second depressing night in Mecca, "would anyone in his

  right mind have chosen to found a city in a location of this sort?"

  Nicomedes, as his name will have indicated, is a Greek. He is the legate in

  Arabia Deserta of our Emperor's royal colleague, the Eastern Emperor Maurice

  Tiberius, and he is, I suspect, the real reason why I have been sent here, as I

  will explain shortly.

  "It's in the middle of nowhere," I said. "We're forty miles from the sea and on

  the other side there's hundreds of miles of empty desert. Nothing will grow

  here. The climate is appalling and the ground is mostly rock. I can't see the

  slightest reason why any person, even a Saracen, would want to live here."

  Nicomedes the Paphlagonian, who is a handsome man of about fifty with thick

  white hair and affable blue eyes, smiled and nodded. "I'll give you two, my

  friend. One is that nearly all commerce in Arabia is handled by caravan. The Red

  Sea is a place of tricky currents and treacherous reefs. Sailors abhor it.

  Therefore in Arabia goods travel mainly by land, and all the caravans have to

  pass this way, because Mecca is situated precisely at the mid-point between

  Damascus up north and the thriving cities of Arabia Felix down below us, and it

  also commands the one passable eastwest route across the remarkably dreadful

  desert that lies between the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea. The caravans that

  come here are richly laden indeed, and the merchants and hostelkeepers and

  tax-collectors of Mecca do the kind of lively business that middlemen always do.

  You should know, my dear Leontius Corbulo, that there are a great many very

  wealthy men in this town."

  He paused and poured more wine for us: some wonderful sweet stuff from Rhodes,

  hardly what I would have expected anyone in this remote outpost to keep on hand

  for casual guests.

  "You said there were two reasons," I reminded him, after a time.

  "Oh, yes. Yes." He had not forgotten. He is an unhurried man. "This is also a

  sacred city, do you see? There is a shrine in Mecca, a sanctuary, which they

  call the Kaaba. You should visit it tomorrow. It'll be good for you to get out

  and about town: it will make the time pass more cheerfully. Look for a squat

  little cubical building of black stone in the center of a great plaza. It's

  quite unsightly, but unimaginably holy in Saracen eyes. It contains some sort of

  lump of rock that fell from heaven, which they think of as a god. The Saracen

  tribesmen from all over the country make pilgrimages here to worship at the

  Kaaba. They march round and round it, bowing to the stone, kissing it,

  sacrificing sheep and camels to it, and afterward they gather in the taverns and

  hold recitations of war poetry and amorous verses. Very beautiful poetry, in its

  own barbarous fashion, I think. These pilgrims come here by the thousands.

  There's money in having the national shrine in your town, Corbulo: big money."

  His eyes were gleaming. How the Greeks love moneymaking!

  "Then, too," he went on, "the chieftains of Mecca have very shrewdly proclaimed

  that in the holy city all feuds and tribal wars are strictly forbidden during

  these great religious festivals. -- You know about the Saracens and their feuds?

  Well, you'll learn. At any rate, it's very useful to everybody in this country

  for one city to be set aside as a place where you don't have to be afraid of

  getting a scimitar in your gut if you chance to meet the wrong person while

  crossing the street. A lot of business gets done here during the times of truce

  between people from tribes that hate each other the rest of the year. And the

  Meccans take their cut, do you follow me? That is the life of the city:

  collecting percentages on everything. Oh, this may be a dismal hideous town,

  Corbulo, but there are men living here who could buy the likes of you and me in

  lots of two dozen."

  "I see." I paused just a moment. "And the Eastern Empire, I take it, must be

  developing significant business interests in this part of Arabia, or else why

  would the Eastern Emperor have stationed a high official like you here?"

  "We're beginning to have a little trade with the Saracens; yes," the Greek said.

  "Just a little." And he filled my glass yet again.

  The next day -- hot, dry, dusty, like every day here -- I did go to look at this

  Kaaba of theirs. Not at all hard to find: right in the center of town, in fact,

  standing by itself in the midst of an empty square of enormous size. The holy

  building itself was unimposing, perhaps fifty feet high at best, covered

  completely by a thick veil of black doth. I think you could have put the thing

  down in the courtyard of the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus or any of Roma's

  other great temples and it would utterly disappear from view.

  This did not seem to be pilgrimage season. There was no one around the Kaaba but

  a dozen or so Saracen guards. They were armed with such formidable swords, and

  looked so generally unfriendly, that I chose not to make a closer inspection of

  the shrine.

  My early wanderings through the town showed me very little that indicated the

  presence of the prosperity that Nicomedes the Paphlagonian had claimed was to be

  found here. But in the course of the next few days I came gradually to

 

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