As he stood there, absorbing the heat of his personal tomb, the crowd seemed to fade from the landscape.
This was supposed to be a day of great celebration for both Ebla and its leader. However, Sultan Omay sin-Khalam's thoughts were not on this day, but on another. Long ago...
MAY 7, 1984. THAT WAS the date everything had changed. It was then that he had discovered the lump.
The small nation of Ebla, which was nestled in the desert north of Lebanon, did not have many doctors. The best in the country resided in the Great Sultan's Palace itself. But even though they were the best doctors in Ebla, the sad fact was they were still not very good.
Perhaps at one time the sultan's doctors had been good. But Sultan Omay sin-Khalam had been as healthy as a horse all his life. Even at sixty years of age, he'd had no need for doctors.
Years before, the sultan's advisers had hired several of the finest Eblan-born and Western-educated physicians money could buy. A staff of ten was kept on duty full-time in case of emergency. But aside from the handful of scrapes and bruises that had resulted from a few riding accidents, they went unused for decades. Over the years the doctors-who were all older than the sultan at the time they were engaged in service-passed away. As the men had died off, they were not replaced. By the time Omar discovered the lump in his armpit, there were only two doctors left.
That fateful day the sultan sat in the airconditioned coolness of his private infirmary. Although it was the 1980s, the room seemed to have been locked in time somewhere just after the Second World War.
Neither of the two remaining doctors seemed certain how to run the antiquated X-ray machine. They fussed around it like a pair of elderly sisters who had been asked to cook Thanksgiving dinner for the entire family and had forgotten how to start up the gas oven.
Eventually the sultan lost his temper. "Enough!" Sultan Omay barked.
Though startled, the men seemed relieved to abandon the old device. The sultan was sitting on a lovingly preserved black-leather examining table. It looked like a museum piece. The doctors approached their nation's ruler.
Omay was stripped down to the waist. His skin was dark, his chest broad and coated with a thick blanket of coarse black hair. Only lately had some gray begun to emerge.
"Could you raise your arm again, please, O Sultan?" one doctor asked.
The sultan did as he was instructed, although he released an impatient sigh.
The doctor probed the lump with his fingers. He frowned gravely as he turned to his colleague. The second doctor was frowning, as well.
"How long has this been here?" the first doctor asked.
"I only just noticed it," the sultan said.
"Hmm," said the doctor. His frown grew even deeper. It seemed to extend down onto his wattled neck.
"It is not normal?" the sultan had queried. "Normal?" asked the doctor, surprised.
"No. No, it is not normal." He probed the armpit some more. The sultan winced. The area was growing tender to the touch. It had not been so that morning.
"It is not right," said the first doctor.
"No, it is not," agreed the second.
"What must I do?" asked Omay.
"Go to England," the first doctor instructed firmly.
"America is better," reminded the second.
"America is best," agreed the first. "But Ebla is not on good terms with America."
The sultan listened to them with increasing agitation. These two were already sending him off to treatment in the hated West and neither one of them had yet told him his suspicions.
Omay slapped his hand loudly on the examining table. The two old men stopped chattering, turning their wide, rheumy eyes on the leader of Ebla. There was a look of sad fear in their bloodshot depths. "What is it?" Omay sin-Khalam demanded. The answer they gave shocked him. Lymphatic cancer.
Younger doctors were immediately brought in from abroad. They echoed the prognosis of the older physicians. It was cancer. The sultan, who had never been sick a day in his life, was suddenly faced with the grim specter of the most frightening of diseases.
Since the time of the revolution against Great Britain almost twenty years before, Ebla had been involved in the shadow campaign of terrorism against the nations of the West. It had joined Iran, Libya, Iraq and Syria in condemning the imperialism of America in particular. This secret war had claimed many victims over the years-nearly all of them innocent civilians. But with his diagnosis came the dawning of a new reality for Sultan Omay. To the shock of all outside observers, he publicly denounced the use of terror to achieve political ends. In particular he condemned state-sponsored terrorism, singling out countries he had once called allies. In a move that shocked the Arab world, he even announced that Ebla would now recognize the sovereign state of Israel.
It was a conversion unlike any since Saint Paul on the road to Damascus.
The change was heralded as a breakthrough in relations between the Mideast and the West. Sultan Omay was lauded for his new ideals. Gone were the condemnations of the now repentant advocate of terror. Banished forever. Laurels took the place of denunciation.
Of course, the hospitals of the West were opened to him. His cancer was treated in New York. Further proof of his spiritual rebirth was the fact he used Jewish doctors almost exclusively.
The worst of the cancer was removed surgically. Directed-radiation treatments were followed by months of chemotherapy. Even more radiation followed. At first the team of doctors who now ministered to the ailing monarch was not optimistic. But the doctors weren't familiar with the indomitable spirit of the leader of Ebla.
Despite all expectations save his own, Omay fought the cancer. And won. The particularly vicious form of the disease he had been suffering from went into complete remission. Yet another rebirth for the charmed sultan of Ebla.
Some skeptics thought that with his clean bill of health would come a resurgence of the sultan's former self. They were pleasantly surprised that they were wrong. Over the next decade of his life Omay fought harder than anyone else for the Mideast peace process.
It was easy to fall into the role of Great Peacemaker. After all, he was an international celebrity. Omay was applauded in newspapers. He was an honored guest at signing ceremonies at the White House. He spoke regularly at the United Nations.
There were times when he almost fooled himself into thinking that he had changed.
During this phase of the sultan's life, Ebla became increasingly isolated from its Mideast neighbors. The land that had once been an ally was now looked upon with deep suspicion.
Radical fundamentalists at home blamed Ebla's decline in the Arab community on Sultan Omay. Threats both internal and external multiplied at a rate nearly rivaled by the cancer he had battled. As a result it was no longer safe for the sultan to go out in the streets without armed escort. The Fishbowl was the most obvious example of the perilous world Omay had created in his own backyard....
STANDING BEHIND his sheets of bulletproof glass, Omay looked out across the low concrete buildings of Akkadad, the Eblan capital. The squat structures baked in the orange fire of the setting sun.
The chanting had begun anew. "Omay! Omay! Omay!"
He didn't respond. A speaker system had been installed when the Fishbowl was first built so that his voice could carry out across the square. He rarely used it. An address by the sultan generally brought a more hostile reaction from a crowd than his security people liked.
Below, the people were packed into Rebellion Square like cigars in a humidor. They looked up at him, eyes alight with patriotic fervor. Guns were raised defiantly. A few shots rattled in the distance.
They chanted not for him, he knew, but for the glorious revolution against the West, now thirty years gone. The recent anniversary was cause for national celebration. But if given half a chance they would gladly turn their weapons on him.