“Ja,” said Klaus, but his tone was dubious. He thought of Tut and Gamel, of the families in the yellow school bus, of the joker man who had thrown the rock at him. It was a wonder that any of them had survived the journey down from Cairo. Aswan was two hundred kilometers farther on. “Many will die,” he said to Sobek. “If you are forced to leave this place…they do not have the strength. There is no food, no water. To make them march—this is murder. The world will not allow it.”
“The world is not here.” Sobek plucked the cigarette from his teeth and flicked an inch of ash out the window.
“The secretary-general has come to Cairo—”
“—waiting for the Caliph. They will have a nice talk while the freaks are dying. Later perhaps the UN will pass a resolution, and a year from now there will be sanctions, yes? The Caliph will tremble, but we will all be dead.”
Klaus scowled. It was too true. “America—”
“—is watching television. John told us. Plastic babies burning up in fires, actors robbing banks, lies and seductions and betrayals, good stuff to watch. Old Kemel was a fool to make us gods. He should have made us television stars, and then the world might care what happens to us. But no, we are only jokers dying in the desert, and none of us will win a million dollars.”
He was not wrong, Klaus realized. By then they were passing through the camp, and Sobek was forced to slow. His truck was of the same vintage as the motorbike, but unlike the Enfield, it could not weave through traffic. Instead, the crocodile god shouted in Arabic at the people in their way. Klaus wondered if he wasn’t screaming, “Gods coming through! Make way for the Gods!”
If so, no one was listening.
Klaus looked out at the people again as Sobek leaned on his horn. Aside from a few obvious jokers, most of them looked no different from the fellahin he had glimpsed working in the fields during their long trek south, or the men who had hunted them through the necropolis of Cairo. They are all the same, all Egyptian, all poor, the ones who pray to Allah just as hungry as the ones who pray to Osiris. “You are so much alike,” he said to Sobek. “Why do you fight? Why do you hate each other?”
“I do not hate Muslims,” Sobek insisted. “My father was Muslim. My mother was Muslim. My sisters were Muslim, my friends were Muslim, my wife was Muslim, everyone I knew was Muslim. Even I was Muslim. Not a good Muslim, it is true, but I always meant to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, my head began to pound one hot day as I worked a freighter, so I left the docks and went home early. My wife gave me a damp cloth to cool my fevered brow, and I went to sleep. When I woke I had the head of a crocodile.” He shrugged. “My wife fled screaming when she saw me. She was bringing me some mint tea in my favorite cup, and it shattered on the floor and scalded me. My sisters spat on me and called me foul, my doctor said the best cure for the wild card was a gun, my father told me his son was dead. When I went to pray to Allah, the imams said I was an abomination, but Kemel—Kemel found me passed out drunk in the City of the Dead, took me to his temple, fed me on mutton and lentils, and told me that I had become a god.” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew smoke through his nostrils. “It is better to be a god than an abomination. That is why I am no more a Muslim. But I cannot hate them, no. They are still my neighbors and my kin.”
This is so, Klaus thought, but your neighbors and your kin, they want you dead.
It was dusk by the time they reached the Nile. Across the river, Klaus could see the lights of Luxor coming on. Over there were colorful bazaars, air-conditioned hotels, five-star cruise ships, fine restaurants, holy mosques, a modern hospital, museums full of antiquities, hot baths, and service stations with all the oil and gas a motorbike could want. Two divisions of the Egyptian Second Army had surrounded Luxor to “protect” the city from homeless refugees and joker terrorists alike, while navy gunboats patrolled the Nile to deny them any hope of crossing. The tourist-haunted ruins of Karnak and Thebes were on the east bank as well, just north of the modern city, but those, too, had been declared off limits to the dispossessed.
Kemel, the founder of the movement to revive the Old Religion, had dreamed of restoring the ruined temples and making them seats of worship again, but the world’s archeaologists and the ministry of tourism had defeated all his efforts. The ruins were too valuable as ruins; tourists were the life’s blood of Egypt’s economy. Denied access to the ancient sites, Kemel had instead acquired land on the west bank of the Nile, and there erected the great complex called the New Temple, three hundred acres of shrines, altars, fountains, courtyards, gardens, and statuary, with half a dozen Living Gods in permanent residence.
A heaving sea of humanity surrounded the temple walls as they approached. Most nights the priests who served the Living Gods fed whatever beggars had turned up at their gates on lentils and spiced mutton, but not on this night. The temple gates were closed and barred, the road leading to them impassable.
Cursing, Sobek swung the truck off the road and took it wide around, bumping through a cane field to the back gate. Even here the crowds were thick, and they finally had to abandon the vehicle. When the people saw Sekhmet padding toward them, her tawny skin bruised but still aglow, they parted before her like the Red Sea. Some went to their knees, while others salaamed. Klaus followed behind her, all but unnoticed. At the temple gate the guardsmen moved aside when Sobek barked at them in Arabic and snapped his teeth. They reminded Klaus of the Pope’s Swiss pikemen; more ornaments than warriors, they carried tall spears and dressed as warriors of the time of Ramses the Great. No doubt the tourists loved them, but when Klaus tried to imagine them facing the soldiers he had fought today, it made an ugly picture.
Only when they were inside the temple grounds, hidden by the thick walls and velvet shadows, did the lioness halt, shimmer, and transform back into John Fortune. He looks stronger than before, Klaus tried to convince himself. When he spoke to Sobek in Arabic, however, he knew that it was still Sekhmet he was looking at. Sobek barked an order, and two acolytes came hurrying to help escort them to John Fortune’s quarters, while two more went in search of food and water.
John’s bedchamber was in the inner temple, off a corridor lined with ram-headed sphinxes where the younger priests and acolytes were quartered. Though not as large or grand as the suite that Klaus and Jonathan had shared at the Luxor in Las Vegas, the room did have a window overlooking the Nile. Klaus could see the lights of Luxor beyond the river, and the white sails of feluccas shimmering palely in the moonlight. A dozen wasps were crawling on the walls, glistening green; Jonathan was with them, watching.
“I leave him now,” said Sobek, as the acolytes were washing John and dressing him in a linen sleeping gown. “So should you. Eat first, you will be hungry. Then go. He needs to sleep.”
It was true. The body that John shared with the woman Sekhmet had not slept since the day they had burned his mother’s house down and melted her awards. Whenever John closed his eyes, Sekhmet opened them again; when she slept, he woke and took his body back. The flesh that they shared kept going night and day. It was a young body, strong and healthy, but all flesh must rest.
Now it was Sekhmet who was awake, with John asleep within. Klaus was just learning to tell the two of them apart. They spoke with the same voice, but different words. They had the same face, but not the same expressions. Sekhmet used her hands in speaking more than John Fortune ever had. If I had spent twenty years in an amulet, moving would feel good to me as well, Klaus reflected.
Temple servants brought them beer and bowls of lentil stew. Klaus ate it all, though he was sick of lentils. “Sobek intends to go to Aswan,” he said, tearing at a loaf of black bread.
“Sobek is a crocodile. I am a lion.” Sekhmet had eaten only a few bites. The outlines of the scarab were plainly visible through the swollen skin of John Fortune’s brow. “With the power of Ra we might have turned them,” she said, in a weary voice, “but we are only half of what we might have been.”
With the power of Ra, John
might have turned the world to ash. Klaus kept the thought to himself. He had read enough old legends to know that it was never wise to argue with a goddess. “The secretary-general is in Cairo. They say he helped end the fighting in Sri Lanka. If the United Nations will send help—”
“Would Germany allow United Nations peacekeepers upon its soil?” Sekhmet spoke with scorn. “Why should the Caliph do what your German chancellor would not? The United Nations was a bad jest when I went to sleep, and now that I am woken I find it is a worse one. Even Sobek has more teeth than this UN.”
Klaus studied his friend’s face. He is John, and he is not. “Sekhmet, my lady—might I speak with John?”
His eyes narrowed. “If that is your desire.” The words were curt. After a moment, though, the face before him seemed to soften. Klaus was still uncertain. “John?”
A wan smile. “Yes. I was dreaming.”
“A good dream?”
“Kate was in it. Curveball.” He sounded almost himself again, like the boy that Klaus had met on American Hero. Though John was almost two years his elder, somehow Klaus still thought of him as a younger brother, the same way he thought of Kurt and Konrad. “I shouldn’t be dreaming of her, though,” the boy went on. “When two wild cards get together…my mother told me of the risks as soon as I was old enough to understand. That’s why she was always frightened for me whenever I did anything that might have…whenever I did anything.”
“All mothers are fearful for their sons,” said Klaus.
“Not all of them keep a detective agency on retainer as babysitters, though.” John pushed a hand through his hair. “I’m surprised Mom hasn’t sent Jay Ackroyd to bring me back yet.”
“Perhaps you should go back. I did not like the way you looked today. Those bruises …”
“They’re fading.” John picked disconsolately at his bowl of lentils. “Bullets melt when they touch our skin.”
“Ja,” said Klaus, “but that is not to say they do not harm you. If you throw a rat in a canvas sack and beat on it with a club, the sack will not tear, but the rat will still be smashed. The bullets may be smashing you up inside. And if they shoot her lion with some larger round, a cannon or a rocket—”
“She’ll die, and I’ll die with her,” John snapped. “You sound like my mother now. She flies, you know. That’s her power. Bullets don’t bounce off her the way they bounce off you. She can’t shoot balls of fire or stop time or raise the dead, the way my father could. All she can do is fly. When she was my age, she had these claws made, like big steel fingernails, and whenever there was trouble she’d slip them on to fight. She fought the Astronomer and his crazy Masons, she fought the Swarm monsters, she even came to Egypt and fought the Nur’s people, with only wings and claws! I’m her son as much as Fortunato’s. I’m not going to hide away in some monastery for fear of who I am. If I die, I die. I’m staying.”
It was morning before Klaus returned to the tent he shared with Bugsy. By the time he had left John Fortune, the gates of the New Temple had been closed and barred for the night, and no amount of argument could persuade Babi and his temple guards to open them again. Klaus could have conjured up his broadsword and slashed apart the gates, just as he had once slashed apart the gates at Neuschwanstein, but he did not wish to offend John’s fellow gods. Instead, he had made his apologies to Jonathan’s bugs, and begged a bed for the night from the temple priests.
With his motorbike as dry as a mummy’s casket, he’d had no choice but to walk back from the New Temple, shoving his way through throngs of desperate refugees intent on going in the opposite direction. The whole camp was in turmoil, and many were leaving, getting away from here as far and fast as they could. The slaughter of the jokers in the Valley of the Kings and the smoke-laced struggle in the Valley of the Queens had become common knowledge. Even Tut and Gamel had heard the tales. When Klaus came trudging up, Tut wanted to know if Lohengrin had killed them all. Gamel was more concerned about the Royal Enfield. Who would pay them now, without a motorbike to watch? “In Aswan, I will buy another motorbike,” Klaus promised. “A big, fast one, all shiny.”
Jonathan was blogging when Klaus entered their tent. “The Crusader returns,” he said, without looking up from his laptop. “The talk is you and Fortune slew the whole Egyptian army.”
“A few soldiers only. More are coming. General Yusuf—”
“—has given the gods their marching orders, I know. I’m writing about it now. It won’t happen, though. Taweret will never abandon the New Temple. You can bet the farm on that.”
“I do not own a farm,” Klaus said, puzzled, “and if the army comes, the New Temple cannot be held.”
“Course not. Which means it’s time for the three of us to follow the Yellow Brick Road to Aswan. Okay, you’re the Tin Woodsman and John’s the not-so-Cowardly Lion, so I suppose that makes me the Scarecrow, but who’s Dorothy? Hey, I’ve got a great name for this tremendous historical event that we’ve all been swept up in. Mao did the Long March, the Cherokee had a Trail of Tears, and now we’ve got… drum-roll, please…the Road of Woe!”
“The Road of Woe?” Klaus made a face.
Jonathan looked crestfallen. “You don’t like it?”
“Is stupid.”
“The Woeful Way? The Terrible Trek?”
“Is more stupid.” Klaus started shoving clothes into his pack. He had a lot of American Hero T-shirts. “John says he will not go.”
“Sekhmet says John will not go, you mean. How about the Big Shlep? The Hike Through Hell? Give me a little love here, I need something memorable, something crunchy that the blogosphere will chow down on.”
“The Exodus.”
“Been done. Ten plagues, ten commandments, a golden calf. The chariot race was cool. Yul Brynner as Moses. Or was it Telly Savalas? All bald guys look alike. Charlton Heston was Pharoah, I remember that much. ‘So let it be written, so let it be done.’ Maybe Terrible Trek deserves a second look.”
“The Second Exodus.”
“Not bad.” Jonathan’s wasps began to buzz more loudly. They did that when he got excited. “Not great, but maybe if I tweak it… Exodus II, the Sequel. Give the knight a sausage. Hey, did you bring back any food? Anything but lentils. Bearing witness for the world is hungry work, I could use—”
The tent filled with sunlight.
Klaus threw up an arm to shield his eyes. For half a heartbeat he was blind, and when his sight came back to him there was a man standing over Jonathan Hive with a scimitar in his fist. Bugsy must have seen the menace there, because he raised his hands to protect himself. The intruder sliced them off.
Blood fiuntained from the sudden stumps, brighter than Klaus would ever have believed. Red fire, he had time to think, but even as the words were forming the red was going green. The scimitar reversed its arc and came back in a golden blur to bury itself in Jonathan’s skull. “Nein!” Klaus cried, moving at last, too slow, too late, but instead of the meaty thunk he feared there was only a furious buzzing as the blade split apart a ball of insects and ripped through an American Hero shirt and a picture of King Cobalt in his wrestling mask. Wasps exploded in all directions and fled headlong from the tent, and Lohengrin summoned up his ghost steel.
The stranger turned. He was a head shorter than Lohengrin, but his arms were lean and corded, his stomach flat, his chest broad. His pants were desert camouflage, his vest Kevlar. Over it he wore a shining cloak of cloth-of-gold, fastened at his throat with interlocking green jade crescents. His skin was dark as oiled bronze, his beard red-gold. A keffiyeh concealed his hair. “You are the Crusader.”
“I am Lohengrin. And you are Bahir.” The beating of his heart had slowed and steadied. “The Sword of Allah.”
“You know of me. I am flattered.”
“I know you are a coward and a killer, a teleport who strikes down unarmed men from behind.”
“Now I am less flattered. You talk too much. Killing should be a silent business.” Bahir leapt forward.
“You cannot do me harm,” Klaus said. He raised his own sword and stepped forward, putting all his weight and strength behind his swing. Bahir vanished with a soft pop, and Klaus went stumbling, thrown off balance. Before he could recover, the Arab was behind him, hacking at his head, once, twice, thrice. As the third cut landed, Klaus was whirling, his own blade lashing out.
Bahir leapt backwards, but not before the tip of Lohengrin’s sword sliced through his kevlar vest as if it had been made of gauzy silk, leaving a long thin slash that soon turned red. “You are quicker than you look,” the assassin said.
“Ja.” Klaus thrust. Bahir vanished and reappeared to his right, delivering a blow that would have taken off his sword arm at the elbow if he had not been armored. Klaus turned, and Bahir jumped again, slashed at a hamstring, and found armor there as well. Klaus swiveled. “Stand and fight,” he boomed. “Take off that coward’s armor,” Bahir threw back.
Lohengrin chopped down with his broadsword. This time Bahir raised his scimitar in a parry. The white blade met the golden one, sheared through it like a guillotine through butter, and bit through cloth and Kevlar into the flesh of Bahir’s shoulder. A little harder and I would have his arm off. Blood welled as Klaus slid free his sword, but his finishing stroke met only empty air.
And suddenly the tent was dimmer, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. This time the Arab did not reappear. Some spots of blood and half a scimitar remained beside the clothing Jonathan had left behind, socks and shoes and T-shirt, cut-off blue jeans, and a pair of crusty undershorts. Klaus looked for his friend’s hands, but those had disappeared as well. Could Bahir have taken them with him as a trophy? He made one last circuit of the tent to make certain the assassin was not lurking in some shadow, but found only a scorpion and a few stray wasps of Bugsy’s. Finally Klaus exhaled, and let his sword and armor melt away.
Inside Straight Page 28