The Ring of Solomon

been very silent, miss,’ he said. ‘I have scarcely heard a word from you all journey. Might I ask your name?’
    Asmira had long ago decided to avoid all mention of her real name and nationality, and had spent much of the journey devising an alternative. ‘I am called Cyrine.’
    ‘Where do you travel from?’
    ‘I am a priestess of the Temple of the Sun in blessed Himyar. I travel to Jerusalem.’
    The merchant stretched his boots out nearer to the flames. ‘Himyar? Where’s that?’
    ‘South Arabia.’ Himyar was in fact a small coastal kingdom west of Sheba, notable for goats, honey and its general anonymity, which is why Asmira had chosen it. She had never been there, and she doubted many other people had either.
    ‘What is your business in Jerusalem, to have come so far?’
    ‘I wish to see King Solomon. Our kingdom needs his help.’ Asmira fluttered her eyelashes a little, and sighed prettily. ‘I hope it will be possible to gain audience with him.’
    ‘Well, Solomon has daily councils, they say, where he listens to anyone who comes.’ The merchant drank deeply from his wine-skin. ‘Couple of farmers near Tyre, they had a beetle plague a year ago. Went to Solomon. He sent his demons; they killed the beetles. Problem solved. That’s what having a magic ring can do for you. Want some wine?’
    ‘No, thank you. Daily councils, you say? You think I could get in?’
    ‘Oh yes. Pretty girl like you, I’m sure there’s every chance.’ He gazed out into the dark. ‘I suppose, what with you coming from Arabia, you’ve not stopped here before.’
    Asmira was thinking about what to do when she arrived in Jerusalem. She would go to the palace and request immediate audience at the next day’s council. They would bring her before the king. And then, when she was standing before him, and they were waiting for her to make some grovelling request, she would step forward, throw back her cloak and …
    Expectation burned like fire across her chest; her palms tingled with it. ‘No,’ she said absently, ‘I’ve never been to Israel.’
    ‘No, I mean here .’ He gestured to the sandstone ridge above. ‘This place.’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘Ah!’ He smiled. ‘You see atop that spur, where a single column of sandstone rises? That’s a famous local landmark. Know what it is?’
    Asmira roused herself, looked up. The column was certainly peculiar, its strata bulbous and contorted, with several stunted protrusions at the summit. As she looked, the sun’s last rays, running like scarlet water down its flanks, almost seemed to give it form …
    ‘That, they say, is the afrit Azul,’ the merchant said. ‘A slave of Solomon in the early years of his reign. He tried to destroy the magic Ring, or so the story goes, and such was the result. Turned to stone and never moved again!’ He turned aside and spat into the fire. ‘Good thing too, I say. Look at the size of him. Must be twenty-five feet tall.’
    Asmira stared at the lowering pillar, conscious of a sudden numbness in her bones. She shivered; the night seemed newly chill. The rock rose up so high. It seemed almost to merge into the stars. And what was that? Could she see the traces of a vast and brutal face amongst the shadows near the top …?
    No. The wind and sand had done their work. The undulating surface no longer held expression.
    Drawing her cloak around her, she shuffled closer to the fire, ignoring further questions from the merchant at her side. Her stomach had turned to water, her teeth felt loose in her mouth. The fierce exultation in her heart had gone, snuffed out as if by a giant hand. All at once she truly understood the implications of what she was about to do. The scale of the transformed demon, its solid, blank immensity, brought home to her what all the fireside tales had not: the sheer contemptuous power of the man who wore the Ring.
    On the morning of the tenth day, the camel train reached a place where the sandstone hills pressed close upon the road. The upper reaches of the cliffs were bathed in sun; down in the gorge, where the camels walked, the light was grey and cool.
    Asmira had slept badly. The wave of fear that had broken over her the night before had drained away, leaving her dull and sluggish and irritated with herself. Her mother would not have reacted so to a simple lump of stone, nor would the queen expect it of her champion now. She sat hunched upon the camel, weighed down with gloomy thoughts.
    The gorge grew