Declare

honey’s wonderful,” he said. A flat piece of peasant bread and a silver fork and tablespoon lay on the tray in front of him, and when he saw the Khan using his own spoon to ladle food onto a similar piece of bread, Hale began doing the same.
    The Khan was squinting at Hale across the crowded, steaming tray. “In England people do not suffer from the honey fits,” he observed. “Bad headaches, then fall down like a dead man, and wake again healthy as a horse when the night comes. Even up here in the mountains it is uncommon—once when I was a child the children all got ill of it, and some of the men went down to the hills to search out the plant the bees had made the honey from. Those men are still alive today, black-haired and fathering sons! Even we children who only ate the honey are all still alive. This is what year?”
    Hale swallowed a mouthful of roasted lamb. “This is 1948,” he said.
    “I was already a young man of fighting age when your Light Brigade charged against the Russian guns at Balaklava. I was there, at Sevastopol.”
    Hale realized that his mouth was open, and he shut it. The Battle of Balaklava had happened… ninety-four years ago. He remembered Claude Cassagnac’s question to Elena, in the Paris cellar in 1941: Thistles, flowers—plants; did Maly ever talk about such things with you, my dear? And he realized dizzily that he believed what this Kurd chieftan was telling him. “What—plant,” he asked hoarsely, “did the bees make the honey from?”
    “Ah!” said the Khan, raising his white eybrows. “You thought I was thanking you for the rifles!” He laughed. “And I do! But six years ago your Theodora caused the English in Iraq to put out King Nebuchadnezzar’s fire in the mountains. The Magians, the fire-worshippers, they were dispersed from their monastery there, and so the angels on Agri Dag were left without their beacon and their human allies. And now the Russians have a man with them who they believe can get the angels to open the gates of their city.” He set down a quail breast to clap his hands. “You will meet my wife.”
    Hale controlled his surprise. The Kurds, like the Bedu, were Sunni Moslems, and they nearly never introduced their wives or daughters to newly met Westerners.
    A black-haired woman in baggy blue trousers stepped into the room from the inner doorway, and Hale didn’t look squarely at her until his host had caught his eye and nodded toward her.
    She was dark-eyed and stocky—her hairline was hidden by a row of gold coins that hung on fine chains from a braided cap, and the buttons on her short woolen jacket were mother-of-pearl. She returned Hale’s gaze impassively.
    “Sabry also was one of the children who ate the honey,” said Siamand Khan. “Show Hale Beg the back of your jacket,” he said to her.
    The woman turned around, and Hale saw gold embroidery that traced a complicated figure, with loops at the sides and curled, drooping S-shapes at the top; and after a moment he recognized it as the stylized image of a flowering plant.
    “It is an old, old design among my people,” said the Khan softly. “It is the amomon .” He waved at his wife, and she bowed and with-drew into the farther room.
    “Is it a… thistle,” said Hale carefully.
    “You have heard of it.”
    “I think so, just a little—a Hungarian Communist is supposed to have known about it. Uh, and the Russian secret service killed him.”
    “Some of the Russians want it, but are afraid of it; the secret police, the Cheka, are just afraid of it. When the angels die,” the Khan said quietly, glancing toward the cloth-covered windows, “they go down to the house of darkness, whence none return, where their food is clay, and they are clothed like birds in garments of feathers.”
    Hale shivered, for he had heard of this ancient Hell only three months ago, from the half-petrified king of Wabar.
    “But,” the Khan went on, “their strength they cannot take with them to a place of such weakness, and so the strength disperses— but only their own kind can use it. Some of the angels, when they were thrown down from Heaven at the beginning of the world, became this plant, the amomon . These are very much asleep, ordinarily, bulbs that lie under the ground no livelier than rocks—but when the strength of killed angels washes over them, they sprout, and bloom.” He bared his white teeth in a smile. “And the bees make the poisoned honey from their blooms, and we