Dawn Crescent (2010) by David Dvorkin

Author:David Dvorkin [Dvorkin, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: middle east, war, iraq, alternate history, bush, desert storm, khafji, quayle, saddam hussein, old man of the mountain, hashashim
Publisher: David Dvorkin
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

*

Time passed. The temperature rose as the sun climbed higher. The square was flooded with daylight. The concrete grew hotter. The crowd kept swelling, flowing into the square, the people pressing ever more densely against each other.

At nine, figures appeared on the platform. Speakers set on posts along the encircling arms of the river crackled to life with the first of a series of speeches.

The amplified voices echoed from the buildings across the river, booming, unintelligible, cacophonous. Harry frowned and concentrated but could understand only a word here, a phrase there. He looked at the faces of the crowd around him — the men’s faces, the only ones visible. They were covered with sweat already, as was his own, but they seemed oblivious to physical discomfort. All conversation in the crowd had stopped. They stared, strained, toward the raised platform, focused entirely on it, oblivious to him and to each other.

What were they feeling? What were they hearing?

What was he missing?

Even now, even here, he stood apart.

The heat grew intense. The sun baked down, and the reflected heat radiated up from the concrete. His dark clothes clung to him, soaked with his sweat. The booming, echoing speeches reverberated in his head, making him dizzy. The crowd pressed in even more tightly. Soon, Harry thought, it would become impossible to escape.

Harry could hardly breathe. He was suffocating in the heat, the stench of close-packed, sweating bodies, the airlessness, the miasma of human breath. He felt faint, lightheaded. Unconsciously, he leaned against one of his neighbors. The other man seemed not to notice. Harry felt detached from himself, from his body, from his past and his world. He was part of a great ocean of human feeling, carried along by history’s tides.

A vast moan arose from the crowd. The Grand Master, now the Caliph Rashid, had appeared on the stage.

Ali listened carefully, but Rashid’s words, like those of the other speakers before him, were almost unintelligible. Somehow, despite that, the great force of his personality came through. Ali was glad he could understand so little of the speech. He feared that if he could hear all of it clearly, he might fall under Rashid’s spell again.

As far as Ali could tell, the speech was a mixture of history as interpreted by the Hashashim, stories of oppression of the Arabic peoples by Westerners, a promise of total victory over those oppressors, and a description of the glorious future for all citizens of the Caliphate that would follow that victory.

This went on for almost an hour. When it ended, Ali realized he was disappointed. He had expected — feared — something new, stirring, not this rehash of old ideas and announcements. If this was the best Rashid could do, and on such an important occasion, then perhaps there was little to fear from the Grand Master after all!

Then he looked around at the crowd, at the adoration in the men’s faces and the women’s postures, sensed their transport, and he understood that Rashid was even more dangerous than he had thought.

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