Inside Straight

by George R. R. Martin

  So, yeah…the riots.

  Things were quiet the first few days we were here. During the day we’d try to track down Fortune when we weren’t taking in the sights. At night, we pretty much stayed in the little faded hotel room with its yellow wallpaper and air-conditioning that smelled vaguely like fish, watching old American sitcoms dubbed into languages I don’t speak. The fifth day there was a news brief that broke in. It was local, and neither of us knew what the guy was saying, so I got online and looked it up on the CNN and Al Jazeera sites. Turned out there was a riot going on right here, near Cairo.

  A little background: After the Caliph got himself assassinated in Baghdad, the leaders of the Ikhlas al-Din called for retribution on the killers. And, hey, cool by me, I say. Someone offed the president, I’d be happy to see them strung up, and I didn’t even vote for the guy. “Root out the terrorists and the people who shelter them.” That was the slogan. Again, I’m all for it.

  On paper at least.

  The thing is, how do you know who the bad guys are? If a Muslim kills the president, does that make all Muslims bad guys? If a joker organization kills the Caliph, does that mean all jokers are guilty? If the Twisted Fists are a bunch of joker terrorists and the Living Gods are also jokers, does that make them allies?

  The answer is, apparently, yes.

  Through the night, other riots bloomed all through the Middle East. Alexandria, Port Said, Damietta. The temples of what they were calling the Old Religion burned. There was some particularly ugly footage of Hathor being pulled from her temple by the horns. The talking heads on CNN and Al Jazeera both talked about these being “spontaneous outbreaks.” Kamal Farag Aziz, the local Ikhlas al-Din strongman—added “of righteous wrath,” but the basic sentiment was the same. The fans of the Caliph were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.

  We found Fortune the next day in the Necropolis. The spontaneous outbreak of the previous night had been teams of well-organized men with guns and tasers, all wearing black fatigues and black-and-green keffiyeh, moving through the poorest parts of the city and slaughtering whoever crossed their paths.

  The Necropolis is a great, huge, sprawling suburb of the dead. Ancient mausoleums with whole families of squatters living inside. No food, little water. Squalor, though.

  Yes, most of the people living there are jokers, but some are just poor. John Fortune—Sekhmet, really—showed us a lot of bodies. Most of them were new. The Cairo police were around, too, allegedly taking statements, but most of what they did was assure people that the streets weren’t safe, that there weren’t enough police, that the time had come for the jokers to get out of town. Their eyes were flat, just like the beggars’ had been. That was when I figured out that what I’d seen in those children around the pyramids hadn’t been hunger at all. It was hatred.

  That night, Fortune and Lohengrin and I joined up with the local folks to patrol the Necropolis. There were a couple death squads we came across. But the graves here go on forever, and there were other groups we missed. The night after the riot, we lost another couple dozen people. They might be dead, they might have been taken prisoner, they might have done the sane thing by saying fuck this and heading south.

  Okay, so why south? What’s the silver lining? The jokers do have someplace to go. The farther up the Nile (which is to say south) they go, the more refuges there are for the Living Gods. The nearest big stronghold is Karnak. Already, the Necropolis is emptying. The jokers are putting what few belongings they have on carts or in grocery baskets, or tying them to their backs and walking south. There are other poverty-sick people swarming in to take over the prime gravesites, the mausoleums with the best roofs and the fewest bodies.

  The Egyptian army, seeing the mass flight, is offering what protection it can on the road. Fortune’s going, too. So’s Lohengrin. And so, God help me, am I.

  Internet access is what you could charitably call spotty out on the road. My cell phone does have upload options, if I can get a signal from a satellite. There are, I’m told, villages with land lines I could use to dial up if there’s nothing better.

  I may be a little scarce for a while, folks, but hang tight. This is news really happening, right now. And I’m going to tell you how it comes down.

  One side note. We were getting ready to head out, Lohengrin and me, and I said something about how well organized the “spontaneous outbreaks” all seemed to be. I just want everyone to be very clear that it was the German guy who brought up Kristallnacht.

  I wasn’t going to go there.

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  Crusader

  George R. R. Martin

  THE SHORTCUT IS A mistake.

  The road runs along the west bank, following the course of the Nile. Once chariots carved deep ruts in its surface, and priests and pharaohs and Roman legionnaires moved along it, but now it carries cars and trucks and yellow school buses. Semis belch diesel as they roar past palm trees and fields of sugar cane.

  The family has neither truck nor chariot, only a pair of wire grocery carts stolen from some Cairo supermarket, piled high with clothes and toys and pots and all the rest of their worldly possessions. A small boy rides in one shopping cart, a crippled old man in the other. The mother and the father push, and from time to time the daughter lends a hand. She is twelve and already taller than her parents, a slender girl and pretty.

  They have been walking for days, every day and all day, pushing the rattling carts down the two-lane road, part of the great river of refugees flowing from the delta down toward Karnak, Aswan, and Abu Simbel, stopping only at night to rest exhausted in some nearby field. All that long way they have stayed on the road, never straying far from the column. Every day Karnak is a little closer. In Karnak they will be safe, the old man promises. Their gods are strong in Karnak. Anubis will open the way for them, Horus and Sobek and Taweret will defend them. There will be food for everyone, beds to sleep in, shelter from the sun—but only when they reach the temple, the glorious New Temple.

  The talk along the road is that Karnak lies no more than a day and a half ahead, as the ibis flies, but the road follows the river, so when the Nile loops east the road loops as well. That is when the whisper goes up and down the ragged column, passed from mouth to mouth. There is a quicker way, a shorter way, just leave the road and cut due south, and you’ll shave twenty kilometers off your journey. Twenty kilometers is nothing for a man in a car, but for a family pushing two old shopping carts it is a long way. The daughter’s feet are blistered, the little boy is sunburned, and the father’s back aches more with every step. Small wonder that they leave the road to take the shortcut.

  Since the dawn of time, Egypt has been two nations, the black lands and the red. The black lands along the Nile are rich, wet, fertile, and well peopled. The red lands beyond are harsher, a sere and savage wilderness of sand and stone and scorpions baking beneath the merciless Egyptian sun.

  That is where the jackals find them.

  Far from the road, they sweep down upon the family as they cross a fissured plain of red stone and hard-packed sand. One has a rifle, the other two long knives. One rides a red horse, one a black, and one a dun. All wear the green-and-black keffiyeh of Ikhlas al-Din. They are lean men, black of hair and eye, with short beards and sun-browned skin. To western eyes they are indistinguishable from those they hunt, but they know the red lands as the family from Cairo does not. They know the red lands as only a jackal can, and like jackals, they sniff behind the herd, waiting to descend on stragglers.

  There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no one to hear a cry for help. The mother wraps thin arms about her daughter, and the old man begins to pray. He prays to Set and Sobek, to Hathor and Horus, to Anubis and Osiris, prays in the same Arabic tongue the riders speak. Yet, when they hear his prayer, it whips them to a fury. “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet,” one cries. He springs from his horse, kicks over one of the family’s shopping carts, and slashes the old man
across the face, opening his cheek to the bone. The praying stops. There is no sound but for the faint buzzing of a wasp, and the soft patter of blood falling on sand baked hard as brick.

  The riders dismount. The daughter, brave and pretty, pleads with them. In Cairo they have many Muslim friends, she says. They have never done any harm to the people of Islam. The jackal with the rifle answers her. “You bow down to monsters accursed of Allah, and our Caliph’s holy blood is on your hands.” He swats at an insect buzzing round his head, a wasp that glimmers in the sun like an emerald with wings. “You would steal our lands from us, you and your demon gods. You think we do not see? We see. This is where you die. The sands will drink your joker blood.”

  The wasp stings him in the neck.

  Cursing, he swats at it, but the insect is too quick. It lands upon the rump of the nearest horse, and stings again. The horse rears up kicking. A second wasp appears. They fly around the jackals, darting in and out, landing on one man’s nose, another’s arm, stinging. One of the riders catches a wasp in his hand and crushes it between his fingers. He wipes the remains off on his pants leg, grinning. Only then does he hear the motorbike.

  From the south the knight appears, bouncing over stone and sand, a plume of smoke and dust rising up behind him. Like an answered prayer he comes, his armor flashing in the sunlight, white and bright as mountain snow. Swan wings adorn his warhelm. On his breastplate shines the Holy Grail that Arthur sought and never found. When he lifts his hand a broadsword springs forth from his fingers where no sword had been before, a blade so white and sharp that for a moment it outshines the bright Egyptian sun.

  “Deus Volt!” the knight roars as he comes on, and his cry echoes across the bare and boundless sands. The jackals break before it, running for their mounts. Only the rifleman lingers long enough to wheel his horse and fire, but when the shot rings harmlessly off the knight’s white armor, he lets the rifle tumble to the sand and races away after his companions.

  The knight climbs off his motorbike. His sword and helm and armor melt away, dissolving as a morning mist dissolves before the rising sun. “No harm will come to you,” he says, as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket to press against the old man’s bloody cheek. “Come with me. Your gods are waiting for you.”

  The brave young girl plants a kiss upon his cheek. A wasp buzzes happily around them, and all is right in the red lands, on this day, for this one family…though, on the way south, they pass the corpses of others who were not so fortunate.

  The shortcut is a mistake.

  Klaus looked up from the screen. “It is good, Jonathan. It moved me, truly.” Deus Volt, he thought. God wills it. Those had been the words the old crusaders cried when they marched out of the West to free Jerusalem. He did not remember shouting those words at the jackals, or any words at all, but perhaps he would shout them next time. “Will they read this in Germany, do you think?” It pleased him to think that his father might read about his feats. His little brothers, too.

  “All over the world. You wouldn’t believe how many hits I’m getting.” Jonathan was seated on an orange crate with his laptop balanced on his thighs. “I need to find some place to buy a trenchcoat. The trenchcoat guys get all the prizes. I could win a Pulitzer for this, if I only had a trenchcoat. This is a big story, and no one’s covering it but me.” A wasp landed on his cheek and crawled up his left nostril. That would have vexed most people, but Jonathan Hive took no notice. “I’m bearing witness for the world. Just call me Edward R. Hive.”

  “Ja, only…I do not wish to spoil your prize, but that was not how it happened. You never stung the horse. There was no horse. They drove a four-wheel truck.”

  Jonathan waved off his objection. “Trucks are boring. Horses are romantic. Some of the asswipes ride horses, right? Or camels. Would camels be better, do you think?”

  “No. There was no pretty daughter either. If a pretty girl had kissed me, I would know.” Klaus tore a strip of peeling skin off his arm, frowning at the pinkness underneath. In Cairo he had slathered on sunblock whenever he ventured outside, prompting Jonathan to compare him to a housewife from a situation comedy, her face covered in cold cream. When sunblock became harder to find, he bought a straw hat off a peddler in a felucca, but his arms still burned and peeled. “And they had no grocery carts. How could they push grocery carts across the sand?”

  “They were symbolic grocery carts. It’s a poignant image of displacement. The devil’s in the details, dude. Bottom line, these numbfucks wandered off into the desert and would have died if not for us. The rest is just some frosting for the strudel. Everyone likes frosting on their strudel. That, and sex. You have to have the pretty girl, she’s what sells the whole thing.”

  Klaus peeled off the soiled T-shirt that he’d slept in, one of those Herr Berman had given him when he agreed to be a guest on American Hero. On the front was a picture of Diver, the dolphin woman. “You could just say the mother was pretty.”

  “The mother had a mustache.” Jonathan closed his laptop. Both of his legs ended at the knee, and tiny green wasps were buzzing in and out of his ragged denim shorts. His sneakers, footless, had tumbled to the ground, acrawl with bugs—a few toes’ worth, at least. Thousands more were spread out over the better part of twenty kilometers on both sides of the Nile, watching everything and everyone. Even when Jonathan was with you, he could be a hundred thousand other places, too. “And speaking of girls,” he went on, “you were talking in your sleep last night. ‘Lili, Lili, where are you, Lili?’ Barf. I can’t believe that you’re still mooning over a one-night stand.”

  “She was more than that to me.” Klaus grabbed his jeans and shook them. A scorpion tumbled from one cuff and scuttled off. “I dreamed I was at the Luxor, looking for her. Our suite went on and on. So many rooms, like a maze. I knew that she was lost, but still I searched, calling her sweet name.”

  “I was having a nice dream, too. I was eating flapjacks with Simoon and Curveball in the Valley of the Kings. The Living Gods were making them. You should have seen Horus flip that skillet.”

  “Flapjacks?” Klaus scratched at the stubble under his chin. He needed a shave. “What is flapjacks?”

  “Pancakes.”

  “The gods do not serve pancakes.”

  “They would if they had some batter,” said Jonathan. “You woke me up with all your Lili, Lili moaning. Dude, what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas, didn’t anyone tell you?”

  “You would not say these things if you had met her.” Klaus pulled on his jeans and zipped them up. “She was beautiful.” He remembered the feel of her in his arms, the taste of red wine in her mouth when he kissed her. And her eyes. She had the most amazing eyes. “The smell of her hair…it fell all the way down her back, black as night—”

  “Carpet matched the drapes, too, though mostly I was looking at her tits. You know, there are other girls.”

  “Lili was a woman.” The first time Klaus had seen her, she had been standing under a hallway light fumbling for her room key, and something about it had reminded him of the girl beneath the lamplight in the old soldier’s song, so he had asked her if her name was Lili Marlene, and she had smiled at him and said, “Close enough.” That was all it took. He had made love to her three times that night, and when they were not kissing they were talking. Lili had been so easy to talk to, not like the other girls he had known. Klaus was sure they’d talked for hours, although the next day he could not seem to recall her telling him anything about herself, not even her real name. One moment she had been lying beside him, drinking wine from the minibar and laughing as he tried to teach her the lyrics to “Lili Marlene” in German, but then Jonathan had come stumbling into the suite, making noise and turning on the lights, and suddenly she was gone. Klaus had only taken his eyes off her for an instant, but …

  “Oh, shit,” said Jonathan Hive. He was gazing off at nothing, and there was a distant, cloudy look in his eyes that Klaus had learned to recognize. “There’s t
rouble.”

  “Where?”

  “The Valley of the Queens. John’s there.”

  “I go at once.” Klaus pulled on a fresh T-shirt. This one had a picture of the Candle. “Where is my hat?”

  “Never mind the hat,” said Jonathan. “Just go. I’m with you.” The meat of his thighs dissolved away, his shorts sagging empty as a swarm of green wasps filled the tent.

  The temperature was well above a hundred Fahrenheit.

  Sand and stone shimmered in the heat. A kite circled high above the Colossi of Memnon, riding the thermal that rose from those great ruined twins. Cracked and weathered by countless centuries of sun and wind, the huge stone pharaohs still seemed to exude power. Perhaps that was why the refugees had chosen to huddle around their broken thrones.

  The camp went on as far as Klaus could see, an endless sprawl of displaced humanity sweltering beneath the Egyptian sun. A fortunate few had small tents like the one Klaus shared with Jonathan, but more were sheltering under cardboard crates or heaps of rags. In Cairo, even the poorest of them had tombs to sleep in, and tourists to beg for coin, but here they were exposed to all the elements, with no one to beg from but each other.

  And every day the camps grew more crowded, their residents more desperate. This was not the biggest camp, either. The one along the riverbank covered twenty kilometers, and small groups of jokers had spilled over the hills to the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

  The boys he’d hired to watch his motorcycle sprang to their feet at his approach. “We guard good,” announced Tut. His brother Gamel just held out a hand. Klaus dug a euro from his jeans. It was too much, but he felt sorry for the boys who had lost their mother to the knives of Ikhlas al-Din.

  When he kicked the stand back and fired the ignition, the engine coughed and smoked before it caught. The bike was a fifty-year-old Royal Enfield that Sobek had sold him for seven times its worth. Every time he rode it, Klaus found himself pining for the R1200S sports bike that his sponsors at BMW had presented to him when he had signed to be their spokesman. He loved the deep, throaty growl the boxer engine made when he gunned it down the autobahn in the fast lane.