Flames of Fitna (Book 4 of Hanthalah)

Chapter 1

I remember the suffocating stench; the still, unclean, foul air. The sweltering heat beneath layers of garment and armor. The almost reflexive motion of wrinkling my nose at the behest of sweat, muck and shit. I remembered the den of scum.

I longed for it.

Nostalgia, irksome and incessant, ravaged me as I hovered over the steel gateway embedded into the ground. I was pondering my reality. Who I was now that I had been shown the error of my ways.

Now that I had everything stripped from me. It was then that I realized the important things in life.

They were those earthly joys the Arabs of old idealized so. They were bravery, hospitality, strength, generosity. And above all...

The warmth of a united family.

But as I stared down at the clandestine entrance to the pits, where no doubt slave gladiators labored beneath foot as I toyed with my existential crisis, I knew there was only one way to drench the raw pain baking within me.

I knew I needed the elation of the kill, the rush of flowing blood. The battle drunkenness.

But was that the man I wished to be now that I had achieved epiphany? Would those I had alienated accept the brutal behemoth they had come to resent?

I knew that glory and riches were temporary now; prone to eradication. What outlived a man was his legacy. His reputation. And what better legacy and reputation than the fruit of his loins learning at his feet? Setting an example for all to follow so that Arabs generations from now may think 'what a wonderful seed!'.

And when they traced back the lineage of those who sowed good in the land, they would find Hanthalah ibn Ka'b at its root.

But it was unbearable. The agony. The torment ripping me apart. No father deserves to bury his own child, much less spectate, helpless, as not one, but rather two, perish before his own eyes.

I did not even have that luxury of closure. I did not bury either. We had never recovered the remains of Sa'ad, my young boy, whom had plummeted from a cliff. 'Abd al-Ka'aba, my eldest, was rotting at the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Not even beer proved a match for the pain.

I need this, I thought. I deserve this. Anything to conquer my affliction, if only for a moment.

I reached for the grate, bracing myself for the heaving of metal and the subsequent influx of foul stench.

It was then that the call to prayer shook me from my trance.

It was Friday. It was noon. The people of Damascus would be gathering in the great mosque right now in preparation for the Friday prayers and the sermon that predates it.

I hurried away from the grate, clutching the stick hung around my neck. Though I did not know whether the gods occupied a place in my heart any longer during that crisis, I kept that token of good fortune on my body at all times.

And to keep up appearances, mine was to perform the required Islamic prayers in the place of worship all five times a day. It would not do to incur any more unnecessary problems on my person.

The massive complex of the great mosque was teeming on the noon of that Friday, as was characteristic of it during such events. It was an impressive feat of construction undertaken by the Romans, I remember thinking to myself every time I laid eyes upon it.