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Lawrence dreamt of fire. It was in his lungs, a taste of the burning desert permanently inscribed on his insides. When he opened his eyes, he saw that it was all around him too. In a pin-wheeling, tumbling inferno, it turned the sky into a red, orange, red, orange, red, orange maelstrom. It licked at his skin, kissed at his brow; a violent, vengeful seraphim. He was on the rolling wave of it. Like the tugging crest and fall of the sea, he was swept up in its tide. Every time he tried to fight it, he was only pulled further in.
He was suspended on the cusp. Beneath his feet, a hundred miles separated him from the ground. Horses and humans the size of ants swarmed in the tortured land around a white-washed city. From this height, he could see the scale of their destruction – the districts razed to black ash; the piles of corpses attracting flies on street corners; the pops and cracks of guns, and the slash and glitter of swords. Blood washed through the sand – a red stream that did not stop until it reached the ocean’s edge. The foam crashing upon the shore was tainted with crimson seeds.
Aqaba. Here was the treat he had delivered to them. In the heat of the streets, it had tasted so sweet. Now, it only crunched like dry bone in his mouth.
He tried to look forward, out to the horizon. There must have been something out there, something that made all this destruction look worthy, more like the promise of a noble death. But the sun was a red monster in the sky, swarmed by black clouds. The conflagration did not cool. It only dragged him down, wrenching him beneath the wheels of this chariot of fire. He fell, down through the layers of the dream, plummeting towards the ashen minarets and collapsing domes.
He awoke with a strangled shout. For a moment, the fumes stung in his throat. Through the window, he could see a glow in the night - a scarlet ghost as the waterfront houses burned out their last breaths. He reached for his chest, a lingering memory of being impaled on those towers. Crushed red petals fell from his fist. They smeared on his palm like blood.
“Aurens?” A dark spectre appeared in the ajar doorway. Ali wandered into the shaft of moonlight. Lawrence felt the touch of his thawb upon his bare ankles, and knew he was real. “Are you well?”
Lawrence cleared his throat, embarrassed at the show of weakness. “A dream,” he said.
“And not the kind where we are delivered to Damascus under the sun.” Ali sat beside him, crossing his legs neatly. He noticed the ruined petals in Lawrence’s hand, and scooped up the remains. “Dreams come from without, Aurens, or they come from within. Which was this?”
“You didn’t strike me as a philosopher, Ali.” He slowly sat up, surprised at Ali’s gentility as he gave him his hand. A short time ago, he would have never willingly offered his aid to him. “Well, it cannot be a prophecy if the events have already passed. I dreamt that Aqaba was burning.”
Ali glanced out the window. “Aqaba is burning, Aurens. We set the fire, but we will quench it before the night is over.”
“I was burning with it. I fell. From the sky, like Icarus or Phaethon.” He shook his head. “If this was a classical myth, the singers would tell my story as a ballad, a warning to coming men.”
“This is not a song, Aurens.”
“I know.” Lawrence discarded the rest of the petals. Now the fever of the battle had abated, the emptiness within him was threatening to return. He had filled it with the hope of the coming conquest, the promise of salvation, through the inferno of the Sun’s Anvil, further back from his passage from Cairo, even further to the first step he had taken off of England’s dreary shores. But it was itching at him again, an unwelcome shadow. He had felt immortal when the gates of Aqaba had burst open for them. So too had that faded.
“You are the one who tells me that nothing is written,” Ali continued. “No dream is more dangerous than what you will let it do to you. And that is in your hands, Aurens. Surely you would tell me that.”
It is not only the dream, he wanted to say. Those images had latched onto something festering in his mind - thoughts and worries turning into bloody scenes. “Those who dream by night awake to find it was vanity,” he murmured to himself. “But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men. For they may act on their dream with open eyes - to make them possible.”
He could not allow the visions to mar him. A commander could not let his men see past the shield of his armour. And yet as he tried to stand, he felt his legs were unsteady, the tug of the fall still in his bones. Ali was there again, a hand beneath his arm. “Aurens, you are not well,” he said lowly. “How can I help you?”
“It is not something you can heal,” Lawrence said, trying to keep his voice light. “There is still much to do before morning. Where is Auda?”
“Collecting his promised gold. I do not trust that Howeitat.”
“We still need his men, Ali. Come. I have to plan.”
He left the abandoned house, feeling Ali hesitate. He turned to see him still in the doorway, backlit by the bloody fires, the lingering ghost of his dream. He stopped, blinked, thinking it might all fade to shadow and he would be back home. But Ali was still there, and Aqaba still burned.
Nothing is written, he told himself.