Word Fulfilled, The by Bruce Judisch Page B

shut against a grain of sand that slipped in and lodged itself against his eye. He tried to shift his body but couldn’t move. Slowly, he lifted his head and shook it. A shower of fine sand flowed down the sides of his head. He pushed against the ground with his forearms and managed to free his shoulders. He shrugged off the thick blanket of sand with a twist of his torso.
    Jonah sat up and brushed the grit from his face before he attempted to open his eyes again. When he did, the bright blue afternoon sky nearly blinded him. The air was still, the earth quiet. He squinted around himself. The events leading him here slowly reassembled themselves in his mind. The scramble for cover, the storm, Akhyeshah.
    Akhyeshah.
    Jonah swiveled and stared at the ground beside him. There was only sand.
     
    Lll
    The evening sun kissed the western horizon, stretching Tadmor’s craggy shadow further across the sand dunes toward the eastern horizon. Twilight had painted the landscape a dull taupe by the time Jonah reached the city gate. He turned to look back along the road that led him here.
    There was no evidence of the sandstorm. The sky had cleared, and the sun that had resumed its onslaught with renewed vigor now settled toward its nighttime rest. The road lay undisturbed—rutted and rock-strewn, as it had been for days. It was as though nothing had happened.
    Most of his recollection after he lifted himself from the sand was fuzzy. He remembered little of the trudge back toward the road. He recalled the torturous climb through the ravines he had stumbled through in his haste to reach shelter from a storm he had no inkling was coming. The fierce blast of desert air sculpted elongated deposits of sand in the leeward walls of the rifts and left them treacherous to climb. The sandstorm left a different signature on the flatland, where the gale-force wind sandblasted the windward surfaces clean. Jonah shook his head. He wondered if such sandstorms were common in the desert, fearful he might be caught up in another without Akhyeshah’s savvy to forewarn him.
    Jonah was exhausted by the time he reached the roadway. He stopped and shaded his eyes to scan the path for any sign of his guide. There was none. No footprints. No movement.
    “Tadmor is near. Over the next rise.”
    The husky words echoed through Jonah’s mind, all that was left of his enigmatic, often annoying companion. The road ahead seemed impossible by himself, and Jonah longed for just one more clipped interruption, one more grunt that would mean he wasn’t alone. Akhyeshah must have gone ahead, but why? Why would he suffer Jonah’s belabored pace, when he could have made Tadmor at least a day faster on his own, only to abandon him almost within sight of the city? Akhyesha said he was from Tadmor. Perhaps Jonah could seek him out and ask why the intrigue.
    With a sigh, he turned and stepped through the entrance to the city. What met his eyes fell far short of his expectations. The ancient oasis town was a shadow of its former glory. For hundreds of years, the city had enjoyed celebrity as an enabler of east-west trade. King Solomon had built up the outpost when he recognized its strategic importance, but the splendor he bestowed upon Tadmor was no longer evident. The settlement was now little more than a scattering of sun-baked mud huts. Sickly palm trees dotted the landscape with their pale fronds drooped against the yellow sky. Vegetation once flourished along a broad river that gave life to Tadmor, but now its decrepit trees scarcely survived over the parched remains of a river swallowed long ago by the desert sands. Stone rings lined the tops of wells dug along the ancient waterway and pockmarked the landscape like ulcers.
    A few inhabitants took advantage of the cooler evening temperatures to sweep away the residue from the sandstorm. One man lifted a cover from the closest well and shook a cloud of sand into the air. He peered into the hole, Jonah supposed, to assess