The craft, apart from the dazzling light that flowed from it, appeared to be constructed of imported wood in the Egyptian style, fifty feet long or so, and high at bow and stern, superbly built in every detail. At the approximate center of the deck was a small house-like structure, big enough for eight or ten people to have crowded into it. But most of the space inside the house was taken up by what Montgomery assured her was the bier of the sun god Ra.
"The Boat of Millions of Years," Monty whispered now. "That's the formal name for this vessel we are on, my dear. Ra rides it perpetually, as you see." And he pointed toward the little open-sided house, in which there lay supine the body of a gigantic man.
The glare of light issued primarily from that man, or god, and especially from his face. It was very bright, but when you came this close it was nothing like the Sun. It was great enough to blind the human passengers aboard Ra's Barque.
"Fascinating!" For a long moment, staring through squinted eyes at the bier and its radiant occupant, Monty appeared to have forgotten her. Then he met Nicky's eyes again. "You know, for a long time I have wondered—what it must have been like to know oneself a god. I am beginning to understand it now. Here, this reality prevails. Not that of the archaeologist. Nor that of the twentieth century. Not Pilgrim's reality either, powerful though he may be in other worlds. Here Osiris rules, and Ra. Thoth, and Isis—and Khufu, yes, he too, though he is dead…
And I can be one of them and rule beside them. For a little time, at least. For long enough."
"I don't care. Rule what you want. But let me out of it."
"Oh no, my dear. You are going to be very much a part of it. As my subject. A very disloyal subject. I know your secret. Yours and Willis's. I saw you beside the marsh."
Nicky stared at him in bewilderment. "Beside what marsh? Monty—!"
"First I saw your khaki jacket, thrown aside in the tall grass. I think at that moment, even before I saw the other garments, and the rest, I already knew the worst. Even though we were engaged, you and I, you had always put me off. But you didn't put him off, did you? Not Willis. As always, he got what he wanted right away." For a moment the manner of an Egyptian god was not sustained. "Couldn't wait to rip your clothes off for him, could you?"
"Monty!" It was all totally inexplicable. All Nicky could think of was to tell him that he was crazy. But she didn't dare to say it, because it was so obviously true.
And now she was terrified. Because she knew she wasn't dreaming after all.
"I've been dealing with them for some hours now, you see," Monty was whispering in her ear. "I've begun to understand. These are more than apparitions, my dear. But not truly sentient beings; no, not yet, although to some degree they speak and interact with us. Later perhaps they will develop intellect. By then—I will be fully in charge."
The countenance of the god was still almost too dazzling to look upon; but squinting into the glare it was possible to arrive at the conclusion that the god was dead.
Nicky cried out in alarm and clutched at the wooden railing in front of her. Driven by oars in the hands of spectral, glowing rowers, the Barque had lurched into the sky.
Nicky, looking around wildly, saw the pursuing spaceship coming closer, and in a moment she had recognized it for what it was. Monty and Thothmes, who had both seen Pilgrim's ship before, shouted and waved their fists at it in challenge.
Pilgrim drove the ship steadily in pursuit of the Barque, but the Boat of Ra stayed well ahead. From scraps of English phrases Pilgrim uttered, Scheffler gathered that he was unable to obtain anything like the acceleration that he wanted.
"All right," the small man muttered. "We'll try a shot across their bows." But nothing much happened, as far as Scheffler could see. There was only a dim flickering across the leading edge of one fin on the spaceship, and Pilgrim murmured exotic words that could hardly be anything but oaths. Nothing at all happened in the region of the Barque, and Ra and his entourage paid not the least attention.
Or so it seemed at first. Then the Boat of Millions of Years returned fire. Blinding flame flared close around the ship, held away from the transparent hull by some protection of invisible force. The metered impact on the shields was enough to make Pilgrim visibly less eager to close the gap between the vessels.
Scheffler, looking over Pilgrim's shoulder at a recording of the enemy beams, was astonished to see little slow-moving rays with grasping hands on the ends of them.
And now in the west, ahead of the speeding Barque, instead of a mere curve of earth for the horizon, there arose a bifurcated mountain.
Pilgrim said: "At least we are not going to have to chase them around the earth. "
"Huh? Why not?"
"Because the version of the earth we have here is no longer round. This is more than ever the world of the collective mind of ancient Egypt. And I fear a quick collapse is now inevitable. A matter of hours at the most."
Scheffler grabbed him by the shoulder. "You said that it would last for years!"
"I was wrong." Pilgrim still sounded as imperturbable as ever. "It is frequently impossible to be accurate in such matters. And I can remember at least two other occasions in the past hundred years when I have been wrong."
The solar Barque of Ra was again descending majestically across the last strip of western sky, plunging now toward some kind of sunset.
Scheffler wondered if it would be the last sunset that this world ever saw.
Nicky closed her eyes momentarily as the Barque, bearing her with it, hurtled into the cavern that yawned ahead.
Then the lurching deck beneath her stabilized again. Nicky opened her eyes to see that everything was once more on an even keel.
Ra's glaring light had dimmed; the god on his catafalque now appeared more certainly dead than before, his lips shrunken, closed eyes sunken into his huge skull.
But Khufu was no more dead here than he had been in his tomb. In ba-form, hopping about the Boat like a pet bird, he moved in and out of Nicky's sight.
Looking ahead, Scheffler saw how the sky flamed red and orange around the spot where Ra and his Barque had vanished. A double-headed mountain reared up, where nothing of the kind had been before, against that artificial-looking sunset.
The sky itself now seemed unnaturally close ahead, as if it had become a curving wall. The spaceship did not reduce speed. Perhaps it could not. Pilgrim was going to chase the Barque into whatever convolution of the world might lie beyond.
Leaning back in his chair, he said: "If one pursues the sun beneath the western horizon, in the new logic of this world, what happens? What must be there? The Underworld, of course."
"I can't accept that," said Willis. He repeated it several times. "I can't accept it."
No one tried to argue with him.
Ahead of them, the Boat of Millions of Years had now vanished into darkness. The intensity of its solar rays had first diminished, then faded away entirely.
"There is still air outside the ship," Pilgrim reported to his twentieth-century crew members. "Of course; a breathable atmosphere must now fill this entire space. Scheffler, you will presently see a hatch appear in the bulkhead before you. Open it. Take up your rifle; we may presently be called upon to defend ourselves."
The translucent hull in front of Scheffler developed deep concentric grooves, and then a handle. There was now a circular door, with a grip that he could grasp and turn, easing the door open. The air rushing in and past him was no more than a moderate breeze. As if he had willed it, his seat lifted him forward, at the same time clasping him like an anxious parent. His arms cradling the Winchester were free.
Riding now in an open hatchway, more outside the spaceship than inside it, Scheffler aimed his weapon forward, but held his fire. The Barque had reappeared faintly visible by its own diminished light, and was now so close ahead that with Pilgrim's instrument he could distinguish Nicky on its deck.
Monty, crouching on the deck of the Barque of Ra, saw the developing logic of the changing
world about him, and had some idea of what to expect in the hours to come. And he was terrified; he knew the wild elation that grows sometimes from despair.
"Where are we?" Nicky demanded in terror.
Thothmes answered in Egyptian; it was left to Monty to put it into English: "We are entering the Underworld. This is the First Hour of the Night."
One after another the two craft, following the Sun's eternal path, passed between the two knees of the Mountain of the West. Far above, the twin peaks were still alight, as if in the afterglow of a sunset sky.
When Scheffler, now riding in his newly exposed position, turned his head to look back into the ship, he could see Pilgrim and his crew grappling again with their controls. But their efforts appeared to accomplish nothing. The ship continued on its steady course, and it was easy to deduce that its captain had lost all control over it, at least for the time being. Like one car on an amusement ride following another, Pilgrim's spaceship maintained its position behind Ra's Boat.
The Boat was undoubtedly floating now, bobbing briskly along through water that looked as real as any Nicky had ever ridden. The water felt real too, and surprisingly cold, when an occasional drop flew up from one of the spectral rowers' oars. Under the impetus of those wooden blades the vessel flew along a narrow and nameless river, going downstream between dark barren shores. On both banks gray slopes came slanting down, slopes that grew ever steeper as they receded from the banks. On each side they made great hills whose upper slopes became sheer cliffs before they vanished at last in utter darkness.
Gradually Nicky became aware that the space through which the vessels now passed, one after the other, was not a canyon but an enormous hall, with a roof of darkness so intense that it looked palpable.
Inside this cavernous chamber, Ra's light dimmed even further; he took on more than ever the aspect of a dead body.
Behind the Barque, the spaceship had now settled into the stream also. Nothing that Pilgrim could do at the controls would alter matters. At length he gave up trying and sat back to contemplate the situation.
Outside the ship, but drawing closer, there sounded a murmuring as of thousands of voices. Down the gray sloping banks on either side of the narrow river there rushed cavorting hordes of two-legged shapes, vaguely manlike but inhuman.
"The apes," Montgomery Chapel breathed, more to himself than any other hearer, as he observed this phenomenon. "We are indeed in the hall of the First Hour." Thothmes, his eyes half closed, muttering incantations, crouched beside him.
"What does that mean?" Nicky screamed at them. No one answered.
Nicky still stood beside the bier of Ra, holding on with both hands to a rail that felt as if it were made of solid wood.
The thronging apes reached the river but stopped there, lining both banks. After them came the singers. These were a marching faceless throng in Egyptian dress, who followed the boat of Ra along the land. Their music went up weirdly into the endless darkness overhead.
And then the music of the singers faded, as the globe of Ra's fading illumination left them behind in total darkness; and now out of the darkness ahead appeared new anonymous crowds of humanoid figures, to hover along the shores of the swift silent river, and mark the silent passage of the Boat. The faceless rowers of the Barque labored on, continuing to ignore their living human passengers.
Montgomery was peering out eagerly from the prow, when he sensed the presence of a tall figure beside him. He turned and addressed it, bowing unconsciously. "Khufu. Great lord Pharaoh. Where is the place of our revenge to be?"
The tall gray man raised an almost skeletal arm, and pointed straight ahead.
Scheffler, on the following spaceship, saw much the same things as did Nicky in the Boat ahead. But the spaceship, moving in the darkness behind Ra's shrunken globe of light, had so far been ignored by the creatures and human shapes lining the dark shores of this land. Until now, at least, all activity of the spectral inhabitants had centered upon Ra in his passage.
Now the Barque had entered a transitional tunnel of darkness. For Nicky sound and light vanished utterly, except for a glow in the near vicinity of the god's own person. Even the senses of touch and of identity grew uncertain. She clutched more fiercely than ever at the solid wood of the rail, but there were moments when she thought that she could feel it changing.
How long she endured this passage through a black cavity she could not tell. But at length Ra's ship emerged once more into a vast open space, as large as the one before. But here the upper reaches of the hall, or cave, were suffused with bright gray luminescence.
"It is the Second Hour of the Night," breathed Monty in the prow.
There was enough light now for Nicky to make sure that the spaceship was still following. She could even see a figure she took for Scheffler, rifle in hand, riding in the nose. And she thought that the speed of both craft had increased.
Gradually, far ahead, a distant throne, a distant figure, became visible.
"Osiris," said Montgomery Chapel. He turned and looked at Nicky. "The weigher of hearts. He presides over the place of justice."
The distant throne came closer rapidly. Nicky saw a bearded man, or mummy, of gigantic stature with the White Crown on his head.
The Boat was slowing to a stop. Spectral attendants swarmed aboard, and the living human passengers were being taken ashore.
There was a confused passage through a ghostly throng, during which Nicky lost sight of Monty and Thothmes both. Only the grips upon her arms, the land beneath her feet, were solid.
In a moment more she stood before Osiris. Monstrous beings, with heads of bird and beast on human bodies, crowded in between her and that terrible throne. Nicky screamed, and screamed again.
And now Montgomery Chapel, seeing her being brought to stand beside him, knew what his revenge was to be.
TWENTY-ONE
Suddenly, as he craned eagerly forward to see the outcome of Nicky's judgment, Montgomery felt an iron grip clamped suddenly upon each of his own arms. He was dragged ahead into confrontation with jackal-headed Anubis and his tall golden balance scale. Knowing what would come next, he cried out with the sheer horror of anticipation.
There was no blade, or butchery. But Montgomery Chapel felt an opening of his chest. And he felt and saw his heart, or a red throbbing image of his heart, taken from the center of his body by the god's hands, and placed upon one pan of the balance, whose other pan held only a feather.
And Montgomery screamed again, seeing the scale tip the wrong way.
To no avail. Attendants of irresistible strength were hustling him away.
Now another god-figure loomed before him. The voice of ibis-headed Thoth shrieked at him like that of any angry bird: "You have falsely accused this woman before the gods."
"Not falsely!" he shrieked. "No, no! I saw her. I saw her rutting with my brother. I saw—"
"And you falsely accuse a man, also. And you have invaded the tomb of Pharaoh, with intent to steal. Worst of all, you have wasted the precious gift of life, squandering the days of your youth, maturity and age in nothing better than the plotting of revenge. Now there is no more of life for you to waste."
And Montgomery saw the Devourer, big as a Nile hippo, gray as mud from the bottom of the river, lumbering toward him out of darkness. Its breath was of the tomb, its shape of nightmare. Crouching on four mismatched legs, it extended the ten talons of a leopard's forepaws, and opened crocodilian jaws.
But at that moment, a form draped in white linen stepped between Montgomery Chapel and the beast. The arm of a goddess intervened, holding him back from doom.
He looked up wildly and recognized the goddess Isis. Only for a moment he had thought, looking at her face, that she was Nicky.
"Now you shall repay," the goddess whispered. It sounded like a curse, dooming him to some fate more terrible than being eaten. Her eyes, more sapphire-blue than Nicky's ever were, glowed at him.
The grip of Isis pulled him free from the grasp of
the Devourer's claws. A thrust of her arm sent him staggering away. With a desperate effort Montgomery regained his balance, and ran with all his strength.
Scheffler, when he saw Nicky being dragged from the Barque, raised his rifle. But at that moment tall rocks along the shoreline came into position to block his aim. When the way was clear again, Nicky was nowhere to be seen.
Willis too had seen her being carried off, and was already shouting at Pilgrim to do something. But the little man, looking maddeningly relaxed, only spread his hands in an exaggerated gesture of helplessness.
The three men argued, Willis and Scheffler shouting, Pilgrim speaking calmly despite their interruptions. His gold was still aboard the Barque, as far as he could tell, and he was going after it. There appeared to him to be nothing he could do about Nicky's problems. It was not his fault that she was here. If Scheffler and Willis wanted to jump ashore and try to help her, they were welcome to give it a try.
Before Scheffler had time to think about the possible consequences, he was standing on gritty rock beside the river, rifle in hand and pistol at his belt. Willis, white knuckles gripping a huge rifle, was at his side; behind them the spaceship was drifting away, following Ra's Boat at the pace of a fast walk.
It was the sound of voices, human and inhuman both, voices roaring, pleading, cursing in English and in unknown tongues, that led them to the scene of judgment. Looking down from a small rise in the dark contorted landscape, Scheffler saw how Nicky stood helpless amid magisterial monsters, gods and goddesses.
A thing with the head of an animal reached forward and tore open her khaki jacket; then the clawed hand poised again seemingly about to tear her heart from her breast. Scheffler heard the double-barreled elephant gun in Willis's hands go off almost in his ear; the twin explosions of his own weapon followed an instant later.
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