Keket laughed, but not with the same haughtiness as all the times before, when there had been a desert between us. “Goodbye, Sanura,” she said. She then pulled a crystal from around her neck, similar to the one Ramses had taken from her the day before. She waved her hand over it and uttered words in a language I couldn’t understand. There was thunder, but when I looked up, the sky was clear. The thunder was coming from underneath us. The ground shook and we knew what was coming.
“Mummies!” I said, but I was not afraid. We had fought mummies before and won. Mummies were slow and stupid. We could defeat them easily.
Or so I thought.
The ground in front of Keket opened and hundreds of mummies crawled out of the sand and began lumbering toward us. No wonder she had been so angry at my bother for wasting one of her crystals yesterday. He had only called forth a few mummies, but with her magic, she could call forth a whole army of them.
“May Sekhmet be with us!” I screamed as I held my khopesh aloft, and I could hear the army cheer behind me. “Let the blood of our enemies slake her thirst!” I then let out a war cry and spurred my horse to charge. Chike, Oringo, and Zakai gave orders to the army to follow me, and the four of us charged ahead into the sea of mummies.
Once we were among the mummies, Zakai and Oringo leapt from their horses and shifted into lions, clawing and biting the mummies that surrounded them, ripping them to pieces easily. From atop our horses, Chike and I slashed down at the horrid monsters, which were in all stages of decay. Some were still mostly flesh, and they moved more quickly and easily, though still stupidly, as though they were only trying to grasp at anything alive with no actual thought for how to fight. Others were little more than bones and wrappings, moving stiffly and slowly, but with gnashing jaws and clawing fingerbones. While individually they were easy to dispatch, the sheer number of them was overwhelming. As we fought, still more spilled forth from the rift in the ground. And still there in the distance, just outside the city gate, Keket stood smiling.
Behind me, the army clashed with the mummies, but the mummies began to overwhelm the human force. Even though we had fought mummies before, these were something different about these. I supposed that Keket’s power had grown significantly from the first time I fought the lone mummy in the grasslands outside Anwe village. I had been right in thinking that that mummy had merely been a test. It had been perhaps her first attempt at bringing forth a mummy from under Egypt’s vast desert. She had honed her abilities since then, learning how to bring forth an ever greater number of mummies and making them stronger and faster. Of course, they could not compare to the wit and agility of a living human, but any person can lose a battle when they are outnumbered or caught off guard…or pushed to the point of exhaustion.
As the battle raged on, the mummies never tired. They simply kept coming. Those that were injured in any way except losing their heads continued to fight. And new mummies continually took the places of those that were dispatched. How many people had been buried under the sands of Egypt in the last three thousand years? How much longer would my army last? My arms were already sore, and I could see Zakai and Oringo pausing to catch their breath. Behind me, hundreds of soldiers had already fallen. I still had thousands more, but any loss pained me greatly. While the mummies were expendable, the humans who fought for me were not. I realized that we were on the losing end of this fight.
I grabbed Chike by the shoulder. “Is the battle lost?” I yelled over the din.
“Yes!” he said as he continued fighting. “But not the war. We should fall back!”
My khopesh easily sliced through the neck of a mummy that had gotten too close to me. “But this is no human army. If we retreat, they will only follow us!”
Unfortunately, that gave Chike pause. He was a great general, but he had never fought an enemy that did not honor the rules of civilized combat.
“Then we fight to the end, Your Majesty,” he said, shrugging off his doubts and returning to the enemies that surrounded him. “It has been a pleasure serving you, My Queen.”
If I’d had a moment to stop, I am sure my eyes would have filled with tears at his loyalty. But we had to keep going. If we did not face Keket here, it would be another time. Another place. Today was as good a day as any to die, I supposed. At least I was surrounded by people loyal to me. People who loved me. Chike, my last friend in Egypt. Zakai, the strongest leader I had ever known. Oringo, the bravest of warriors. And Saleem…No! Saleem was not here! Where was he? I could not travel to the underworld without seeing him one last time.
As if he read my mind, I heard the roar from my missing lion king. Everyone else, even the mummies, seemed to hear him as well because there was a pause in the fighting as everyone turned toward the sound of the roar.
As I looked, I realized why the roar had been so loud. Saleem was not alone. Around him were hundreds of lions and lionesses, as if he had rounded up every lion in Africa!
Saleem roared again, giving a signal to the other lions to attack. The lions leapt forward, claws extended and fangs bared. The humans all scattered, getting out of the way of the ferocious beasts, but they need not have feared. The lions flew past them and crashed headlong into the field of mummies. Even though the mummies outnumbered the lions, the lions were bigger and stronger than humans, able to take down three, four, five mummies in a fraction of the time it would take a human soldier. In mere moments, the mummy force was being pushed back.
The human soldiers, bolstered by this sudden change in the course of the battle, cheered and charged back into the fray, proud to fight alongside the lions of Africa. I too seemed to have gotten a second wind, and I raised my khopesh high, letting out my war cry as I hacked my way to Keket, who was standing in the same spot as before, but her face was no longer triumphant.
“Is this all you have for me?” I yelled at her as I inched my way forward. “A bunch of dead bones? I have all of Africa behind me! I am the queen of Egypt! You will fall before me. I will pour out your blood to Sekhmet and hang your head upon her alter!”
“I have not lost yet!” Keket yelled back. She again uttered words I could not understand, raising her arms to the sky. Her eyes turned black as a thousand shades poured from her open mouth and into the mummies.
While the appearance of the mummies did not change, their mannerisms did. They shook their heads as though waking from a dream as a shade entered each one of them.
“Kill every human and lion still standing!” Keket screamed. The mummies then picked up weapons from the fallen soldiers and began to fight as though they were fighting for their lives.
“I don’t think these are merely dead bones anymore,” Chike said.
“How is it possible for her to recall shades from beyond?” I asked because that was what seemed to have happened. Keket had not just given movement to the mummies, but they now appeared to have had their reasoning returned to them. They began to fight with skill and a will to live.
“You are only just now questioning where her power comes from?” Chike asked with a chuckle.
I shook my head. How he had the ability to retain his good humor at a time like this was beyond me. But I could not dwell on that. The mummies were more difficult to fight now and we had to remain alert. But wits or not, we still had the advantage. The lions cared not for human fighting abilities and continued to tear the mummies limb from limb. I still had more soldiers behind us, many of whom had not even entered the battle yet because they were behind the main line. We continued to push forward, closer and closer to the great rift the mummies were appearing from. Closer and closer to the city gate.
Closer to Keket.
I kept my eyes on my goal. Even when I was struggling with more mummies than I could count, they were merely a distraction. I was going to reach Keket eventually. I just had to keep going.
Finally, after I hacked a mummy in two and then chopped off its head, there were no more in front of me. The only thing between me and Keket was the rift, and the m
ummies were no longer climbing out of it. I looked left and right and saw that all along the rift, the mummies were disappearing and only humans and lions were left standing.
I pointed at Keket from across the rift with my khopesh. “You have lost,” I said. “I am coming for you.”
She was panting, as though she had just endured a great battle herself and had not simply been standing there for the last hour or so that we had been fighting her mummy hoard. I realized that calling forth the mummies’ shades must have taken a great effort on her part. And it was an effort that had been wasted because now she was alone.
“I have already lost far more than you could ever imagine,” she said between heavy breaths. “I am older than you can count. I have endured the pain of losing parents, children, lovers. I am not Pashtun, though I assume their form. I am the last of my kind. You will never fathom the extent of my suffering.”
“You could have told me,” I said. “We did not need to be enemies.”
“We were enemies long before we met that day in the market,” she said. “Nothing could have changed that. But I will admit that it was your kind heart that allowed me to carry out my plan. You took me right into the palace, within reach of the pharaoh. If you had not been such a sentimental fool, none of this would have happened. I suppose I should pity you for that.” Then she laughed.
“I don’t need your pity,” I said, realizing that there was no way that Keket and I would be able to come to a truce. She was not what I thought. She was ancient, as was her anger. “I only need your blood to offer as thanks to my goddess.”
“But I still have one more gift for you,” Keket said, her voice dripping with false kindness.
“Feel free to keep it,” I said.
“But she is dying to see you again,” Keket said. She moved aside and I saw another woman walking stiffly through the city gate toward me.
“No!” I gasped.
The woman held a khopesh in one hand and a short sword in the other. She wore the long white dress of one newly buried, her hair ornately plaited and her neck strewn with gold.
“Sanura…” Chika said in disbelief. “That can’t possibly be—”
“Anat,” I said. My dead step-mother.
14
My heart felt like lead in my chest as I looked at the still beautiful corpse of Anat, the late queen of Egypt. My father’s beloved wife. The woman who lovingly raised me as her own daughter after my birth mother died. Even though she had been dead for nearly a year by now, no expense had been spared in preserving her body. Had she remained undisturbed, she would have still looked the same in death as she did in life a thousand years from now.
She looked up at me, the black kohl around her eyes streaking her cheeks. Her lips dark blue. The white paint of her face cracked. Her dress was filthy and torn. She was hunched over, as though the weight of the gold necklace she wore was dragging her down.
I was frozen in shock. Horrified. Disgusted. Saddened. All of those things? None of them? I could not give voice to the millions of thoughts racing through my head until Chike fell to his knee beside me.
“My queen!” he said, kneeling, his sword before him.
“That…that’s not Anat,” I finally said stupidly. “I mean…her body. Not her…not her mind. It’s just Keket’s magic tricking us.”
Anat raised her head and looked straight into my eyes. I felt sick to the point of vomiting. Her eyes were not black like the others who had been possessed. They were the same lovely shade of brown I had looked into for comfort a million times before. As much as my mind wanted me to believe that this was not my Anat, my heart was broken.
“How could you do this?” I asked Keket. “She had no part in this. She was a kind, gentle soul. She never harmed anyone. How could you not let her rest and complete her journey to Aaru?”
“Because I knew that nothing would hurt you more than having to kill your own mother,” Keket said.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “Anat would never hurt me. She would never hurt anyone.”
“Really?” Keket asked. She looked at Anat and nodded. Without blinking, Anat pulled a dagger out from somewhere I didn’t even see. Before either of us could react, the dagger flew into Chike’s forehead and blood spilled forth.
A horrendous scream rent the air, and I didn’t realize it was mine until Chike fell backward and I collapsed by his side.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I cried as I held him, shaking him, willing him to wake up. But he was already gone.
“Sanura!” Zakai yelled. I turned and saw Anat jump over the ravine. She raised her khopesh over me to strike. I could only look up, my eyes wide, unable to truly understand what was happening. But then Zakai attacked, jumping through the air and taking Anat with him. When they crashed to the ground, Anat fell from his mouth and rolled away. One of the African lions then lunged at her from behind, but she spun around and with a single stroke sliced the lion in twain. She opened her mouth and let out a scream along with a putrid stench like the smell of a hundred decaying corpses left in the sun. The other African lions, upon smelling the stench, turned and fled the battleground. My human army as well, once they began coughing from the smell, backed away, unable to find their courage to fight. Only the lion kings and I were left to face Anat, and I did not think I had the strength to fight her either.
But how did Anat even learn to fight? She was not a warrior in life the way I was. She was delicate and demure. She did not even have the strength to lift a khopesh, much less wield one with such skill. I forced my mind and heart to reconcile. This creature was not Anat. It might look like her, but nothing more. It was not my sweet, loving mother. Anat would be appalled at the horror Keket had wreaked upon the land. And she would be disappointed in the man her son had become. No, Anat would never join forces with Keket against me. Keket must have given this corpse life and preternatural fighting abilities in an attempt to unnerve me. But so far, Keket had not been able to stop me, and neither would this fake Anat.
I pushed myself to my feet, determined to fight this false queen. Keket was still my enemy. Still the real person I wanted to fight. Anat was just another obstacle to that, and I would overcome this as well.
I held up my khopesh and gripped the hilt. I dug my foot into the sand. Anat seemed surprised that I was preparing to fight her. She gave a nod as though she respected my decision, then she took a battle stance as well.
We ran at each other and our swords clanged, bouncing off each other and sending us both backward. She swung high, but I ducked low. I swung for her ankle, but she jumped and pivoted, never losing her balance. She pulled out another dagger—this time I saw that she had several hidden in a holster along her back—and thrust it toward me. I dove out of the way, rolling across the sand, but I struggled to get back on my feet quickly enough. It had been a long day and I had already been fighting for hours. I didn’t realize until that moment how exhausted I was becoming.
Oringo jumped at Keket and I cried out, terrified that she was going to kill him as easily as she had the other lion, but he was too quick and strong. He caught her off guard, grabbing her arm and shaking her vigorously, causing her to drop her short sword. She swung at him, but she only caught him with the flat side of her khopesh. She did not cut him, but it was enough to force him to let go. He had at least injured her, and black wine seeped from the wound. Zakai then crouched down to take his turn at her, but I stopped him.
“No!” I said. “She is here for me.”
Zakai growled at me in his displeasure. I knew he wanted to defend me, or at least fight by my side, but I couldn’t risk his life. He finally acquiesced, but he stayed on the defensive, ready to pounce in my protection if needed. I nodded my thanks at him and then raised my khopesh at Anat again.
Since Oringo had already injured her left arm, she was no longer wielding two swords, but only her khopesh in her right hand. I hoped that was enough to put us on even ground. I attacked first to draw her back into the battle. I wante
d to see what I was up against. Anat deflected my attack easily, but she did not retaliate. She stepped away and mumbled something to herself, but I could not make her words out.
“Do you have something to say before I send you back to Duat?” I asked her, but she only smirked at me. Then, she did step forward, striking down. I deflected her attack and lunged forward, but she was just out of my reach.
“No!” Anat said through gritted teeth. “Kill her!”
“What?” I asked, putting distance between us. “What did you say?”
“I’m going to kill you,” Anat finally said, but the voice did not sound like Anat. It was deep and raspy, but I supposed that was normal for someone who had gone without drink for a year while trapped in a tomb.
“Then get on with it,” I said, provoking her. She snarled and started to run toward me, but she suddenly stopped, as though she had run into a wall.
“I won’t…let you…” Anat said, but this time, the creature had the higher, more pleasing voice of Anat that I remembered.
“A…Anat?” I asked with some hesitation. It had to be a trick or a ploy of some kind. That creature was not Anat. It couldn’t be.
“Sanura,” Anat said. “I…I won’t let her hurt you.”
“W-w-what?” I asked, my eyes darting to Keket. The smugness was gone from her face and she looked as though she was about to run.
“Sanura…” Anat said again, but then her voice changed again and she charged at me. “I’m going to kill you!”
I swung to the right, deflecting the attack, and spun to the left. I kicked Anat away from me to keep her at a distance. Something strange—well, more strange than usual—was happening to her. She turned to face me.
“Kill me!” Anat said in her normal voice.
“What?” I screamed.
“Now!” Anat said. “Before the demon Keket put inside me takes over again.”
My mouth gaped. So that was how Keket had been able to bring the corpse of Anat back to life and give it fighting powers. She had summoned a demon and put it inside my mother. But Anat was in there too! If Anat’s spirit was still inside her, maybe she could be saved.
The Queen of Egypt Page 11