While his city mourned, Bilal was a ghost sailing south.
He traveled with Tariq's merchant fleet, his face hidden beneath a coarse linen hood. The journey took months.
When they reached the Mediterranean, the blistering heat was a shock to a body adapted to the Norwegian freeze.
In the markets of Italy and the Byzantine edges, he didn't buy gold. He bought dirt.
He purchased massive quantities of Pozzolana—volcanic ash. The local merchants laughed at the giant barbarian buying ship-loads of grey dust.
But Bilal knew the chemistry. When volcanic ash, which is rich in reactive silica and alumina, is mixed with quicklime (calcium hydroxide) and water, it triggers a chemical reaction.
It creates calcium silicate hydrate. It doesn't just dry; it cures. It creates a rock that gets harder over time, even underwater.
It was the forgotten secret of the Roman Empire, and Bilal was bringing it to the Viking Age.
With the cargo secured and sent ahead on merchant cogs, Bilal continued to Arabia to fulfill his duty to his soul. He arrived in Mecca.
Standing before the Kaaba in the Ihram garments, the 105kg Warlord wept. He prayed for forgiveness for the deception, for the blood on his hands, and for the safety of his wife and daughter.
It was on the return journey, crossing the harsh, unforgiving sands of the Syrian desert, that the world was reminded of what he was.
A band of Bedouin raiders, desperate and ruthless, ambushed their caravan. They slaughtered the guards of a smaller traveling family before turning their curved swords toward Bilal's group.
Bilal did not draw a sword. He didn't need to.
As a raider lunged at him, Bilal stepped off the center line and drove his shin into the man's thigh. The biomechanics of a 105kg master kickboxer pivoting through a target generated the force of a falling tree.
The raider's femur snapped instantly. Bilal spun, his elbow crashing into the temple of a second attacker, dropping him like a stone.
He moved with a brutal, terrifying economy of motion. Within twenty seconds, three men were dead, and the rest were fleeing into the dunes, screaming about a Djinn made of muscle and shadows.
Bilal stood breathing heavily, his legs splattered with the blood of the raiders.
Then, he heard the whimpering.
Beneath a torn tent, a little girl was hiding next to the bodies of her slain parents. She was no older than four. Her skin was olive, her dark eyes wide with unadulterated trauma.
Bilal felt the ghost of a memory. A seven-year-old girl in the freezing mud of Norway.
He knelt in the sand, wiping the blood from his face. He held out his massive, calloused hand. He spoke in soft Arabic. "You are safe, little flower. Come."
He hired a wet-nurse from the caravan to care for her. He named her Nura. Light.
He had come to the desert to cleanse his sins, but he was returning with a new soul to protect.