by Stephan Loy
Abadi brought out a leather pouch. From it he extracted a few strips of black, dried meat and offered them to Qebera. He also drew a waterskin from his robes and shook it at his guest.
“Thank-you,” Qebera repeated, and took a careful pull from the skin. He tried not to sicken himself with too much at once, or to insult his host by guzzling the precious desert commodity. He handed back the skin and took a bite of the meat. It was greasy, tasteless, and with a mixed texture of scorched splinters and gum. It was delicious.
“Are you a family man, Qebera of Abydos?” the Bedouin asked casually, the confident nomadic host.
The question distracted Qebera from the intimate glories of food. His mood darkened. “Yes,” he said. “I have five wonderful children, mostly babies. One is old enough to run the farm himself. And he does, with his mother’s help.” Qebera sighed. “Sanni, my wife. There is no woman more beautiful in this world.”
Abadi chortled and handed the skin across. “I’d wager my wife would challenge yours. She tends our herds at the greater camp. No tent is better stocked in milk and meat. In a way, I’m glad we stumbled upon your battle. It gives me an excuse to cut short this hunt and warn the Djafa. And, incidentally, to see my wife again.”
Qebera slumped like the whipped fighter he was. “I envy you, Abadi Saliim. I may never see my family again. A gulf of desert, armies, and gods stands between us. The farm is undoubtedly burned by now, stripped of every valuable. But Sanni has taken the children to Mahasna, where her mother keeps a home in town.”
Abadi took the waterskin. He capped it carefully before putting it under his robes. He watched Qebera with a sharpened eye, as if suspecting doom from his lips. “To Mahasna, you say? How long ago did they set out?”
Despite hunger, thirst and exhaustion, Qebera noticed the change in his host. “Four days, I think. It seems so long ago...”
“Tragedy often unfolds over days that seem like years. I suppose we so love adversity that we cannot let it go.”
“Adversity is no love of mine. As captain of the guard, I had never hurt anyone before four days ago. I had certainly never killed.”
The tent flap opened, and Naasir leaned in. A short conversation in Bedouin, and he disappeared again. Abadi turned back to his guest.
“I instructed Naasir to break the camp. He informs me this isn’t possible. The women are reluctant to leave before the meat is cooked. It might draw hyenas, you know.”
“Yes. Perfectly understandable.” Qebera didn’t care about meat or hyenas. He wanted to hear about Mahasna.
“It’ll be several hours while the stone ovens work. They want the meat good and dry before we leave. Some rabbit was on for dinner. Would you care for a bowl? And perhaps some camel’s milk?”
“You’re too kind.”
“Our fare is meager, just enough for the hunt, but you're welcome to share in it.”
“Thank-you, I’d be honored. And, Abadi, if it isn’t too much trouble: your people are famed for their travels. Have you any word of Abydos? Any word of Mahasna?”
Abadi grimaced, then scratched at his beard. “It’s trouble,” he said, “but I cannot deny even bad news to a guest. Abydos suffers greatly, as you can imagine. Your capitol city is enslaved and aflame, a home to death and misery. The rest of your kingdom...” He watched Qebera with narrowed eyes, a friend imparting the gravest of news. “You said adversity is no love of yours. I suspect she pines for you in secret. Mahasna, the town of your mother-in-law, was burned to the ground three days ago.”
Qebera recoiled. Burned to the ground? Sanni! He clenched his teeth to hold back a moan. He pressed his fists into watering eyes.
“I'm sorry to bring such terrible news,” the Bedouin said softly. “But, all news from Abydos is sad these days. Now my people know why.”
“Set will pay,” Qebera vowed.
Abadi frowned. “I’m sure you're right, my friend. But he won’t pay men such as you. Be careful of your feelings in this matter; hate is a killer to its host.” He leaned forward. His eyes searched for something in his guest, Qebera could not know what. “Some day he will pay, whether today or in a million years. Evil such as his cannot go unanswered. The one to come will right your monster’s wrongs. Not man, nor the petty shadows of pretender gods, but the one true creator and destroyer of worlds. On that day, your Set will understand; he will learn his place in the world.” Abadi nodded. He thrust a fist into the space between the two men, and shook it. “On that day he will know that godhood is more than kilts and pretty wigs.”
Sanni readied herself to go. Her children were rested, and so might walk a while on their own. The previous day, her arms had flamed by evening as she carried first one and then the other child away from the corpse of Mahasna. She had ignored their laments of tired feet and hungry bellies until they were miles from the burned-out town. The girls had complained too stridently to feel her consuming fear; they hadn’t noticed the hints of death peeking from still-smoking doorways. Hordedev was a different matter. He still showed shock after their pass through his grandmother’s city. He had searched the first few houses for life, but offered to check no more. Even when faced with his grandmother’s home, he had declined to do more than peek through the doorway, and Sanni blamed him not one bit. The place was a skeleton of ash and blackened brick, just another murder in another dead town.
They rested far beyond that place. A broken shaduf at an abandoned farm had become a hospice to refugees, and newcomers were neither welcomed nor discouraged. Sanni rigged a meager lean-to from scraps found at deserted farms (without going inside the houses!), while Hordedev joined with three other men to attempt a repair of the smashed shaduf. A working water elevator would have eased the women’s chores, for they needed water for cleaning and cooking. It could also have wetted the farm’s neglected gardens through its network of adjacent irrigation ditches, therefore quenching the men’s need for order. But the wooden arm of the water elevator had been smashed by someone good at his work. It would lift no water that day, nor on any soon to come. The men gave it up for hunting fish in the Nile shallows.
Now the dinner of fish was over, as was the breakfast of scavenged bread. Sanni had filled a jar at an untended granary — insurance, however meager, against starvation. At least they might have bread for dinner. Tomorrow, who could say?
They left the fractured shaduf and its makeshift camp of refugees and began once more their trek downstream. Before, the walk had been difficult, marked by scorching heat, inadequate food, and the constant fear of Setim harassment. The way still afflicted them, but now it offered no hope at the end, no welcoming house of kin. They instead walked toward strangers and a mounting sense of doom. Stories arose of Setim death squads terrorizing the farms, and of soldiers snatching women for Setim rape camps. The security of the next town was so far away -- days and days away -- and on the wrong side of a possibly hostile river. They walked, they hungered, they ached to their bones from travel, but they did so without purpose. They simply, pointlessly ran.
“Mamma, where are we going?” Sanni’s oldest girl asked with dogged curiosity.
“The next town, Nefera,” her mother answered as she bore a child on each hip.
“Mamma, I’m tired. When can we stop?”
“Just a little farther. Be a big girl.”
“Mamma, why is all the food bad?”
“I cannot say. I ... just don’t know.”
Nefera's last question terrified Sanni more than the Setim who eyed them from the opposite bank, more than the smarmy characters lurking in weeds and collapsed brick enclosures, criminal opportunists looking for fattened prey. These were only humans, after all, their worst impulses predictably limited. But the dying farms with their irrigated crops strangely withered and black, these bore the curse of gods.
She trudged along the Nile’s west bank, stopping for quick rests, carrying on in the only possible direction. Her legs ached; her arms ached from carrying children; her soul ached for purpose, fo
r hope, and for the husband she could not hold. At night, her family stopped alone and made their camp back from the river. They watched for the Setim and other human predators, Hordedev always standing guard. He took that duty from manly obligation, but also because he, like his mother, could hardly sleep amid the growing death of nature.
They stopped at night among wilted vegetables, and broke camp surrounded by black, crunching husks unfit even for fertilizer. Drought did not explain this malady; the river ran wide and the ditches flowed with water, where anyone lived to work a shaduf. Where no one survived the Setim’s coming, the evidence hinted at refugee farmers doing what they could, unable to ignore the land in distress. Hordedev, too, did his part, watering plants that no one would eat, then watching them die as if fed with sand. The earth withered from a death of spirit, not a dearth of care.
Sometimes the family stopped among refugees driven from Abydos, Mahasna, and from the farms that stretched between towns. There the sad remnants of human society exchanged their tales of horror and did what they could to tend disgruntled bellies. Men fished the river while women hunted for sprigs of grain passed over by the unearthly blight. Searches of local granaries revealed only rot. Even the grass offered only desiccation. As time stretched on from the rise of Set, the great river itself gave fewer fish and cattle and goats dropped dead in the blackened fields. Soon, only vultures and beetles could count on a feast. The rest of mortal earth waited to die.
One night, Sanni noticed an unusual mood in the refugee camp they had joined. The people still starved and fretted over death, still told stories of Setim ambushes, slave raids, and rape gangs, but the young men in the mix showed something other than hopelessness as they gathered together. They looked businesslike compared to their slump-shouldered neighbors, and their talk held an edge in character with soldiers. These were not refugees, she realized. They had reached a limit that came first to men’s egos: they now saw their troubles as insult rather than fate. After days of shock and the fear of death, they had returned in anger to themselves.
Hordedev mixed with this simmering group and returned to his family a different, more pensive youth. He refused to speak of the meetings, and came to scorn his siblings’ enticements to play. More and more, he took to himself, impenetrable as a wall even to his mother. But Sanni saw the problem without her son’s help. Like any parent, she sought to snuff disaster at its roots.
“I don’t want you mixing with that bunch,” Sanni said after the third camp and the third group of men. “They’ll get themselves killed, and you along with them.”
“They aren’t criminals, Mother. They’re just disgusted with things as they are.”
“Hordedev, I need you. Help me get these children to Hammamiya--”
“And, if it, too, is burned to the ground? Is it Badari, Mostagedda, or all the way to Fayum?” His tone brimmed with bile. His hands grasped sand from the dying earth and wrung it as he might an enemy’s neck. “When do we stop running, Mother? When we drop in the sun from hunger? When Set is no longer amused by our fear?”
“Better to run than rest in the grave,” Sanni said. “No good comes of impotent hate. Will you fight the Setim, fight them with rocks and sticks? Will you fight Set himself when he comes to their rescue? Why should you die so pointlessly? Why should any of them, any of those boys, contemplate so meaningless an end?”
“Why, Mother?” Hordedev asked as if amazed at the question. “Why? Because we live here.”
Two days out from Hammamiya, Sanni fed her little ones a desperate meal of insect paste on stale, bug-eaten bread. The bread had come from the burned-out villa behind her, and the children had captured the insects themselves. Sanni fed them this awful dinner and wondered when she, too, might eat, or if her babies would soon go on without her.
She had sunk so far into despair that she barely noticed the first shouts of panic rushing through the camp. Then screams erupted, shocking her to alertness. People ran, but in no clear direction. Shouts fell upon one another, shouts of fear, of unintelligible hopelessness, and even shouts for blood. Sanni drew her girls to her to protect them from the frenzied crowd. Hordedev ran up to her, his face distorted by an evil glee.
“The Setim!” he shouted, and pulled at his mother’s arm. “They’ve attacked the camp on the upstream side. We have to hide the children!”
“We’ll run downstream,” Sanni cried. “They won’t chase us long.”
“They’ve already landed a boat downstream! Come on, they’ll be here any minute!”
Sanni boosted a child onto each hip and ran to keep up with her charging son, who carried the other two. She followed him through the villa’s gate amid a stream of panicked refugees. They ran around one side of the house, to the granaries burst days ago by axes. Other parents were there with their young, stuffing them into granaries and covering them with the mounded husks of dead grain.
“No, Hordedev! They’ll suffocate!”
“It’s only for a minute!” Hordedev boosted Nefera into a bin no one else had claimed. “They’ll be hidden better than us, in case the plan fails!” He dropped his other sister next to Nefera.
Plan? Sanni wanted to ask what plan, but parents loaded up granaries and shoveled handfuls of grain on their children. She saw old men and women, and youngsters too big to hide, running for the villa, wailing. She saw boys as young as Hordedev filling their arms with stones. She couldn’t think, couldn’t imagine what to do but run.
Run where? The desert? Into the arms of Set?
So, she lifted her girls into the granary. She draped their faces with lengths of linen torn from her own tattered dress, meager filters through which to breathe. She begged them not to cry as she shoveled grain to cover their bodies. Mortified, she keened as miserably as the others.
Hordedev rushed her into the house, promising that all would be well. He didn’t enter the place himself, but picked up an armload of brick at the doorway and ran for a breach in the property wall, then into the desert beyond.
Sanni tried to calm herself. Deep inside where it did no good, she cursed herself for a bawling woman. She knew Qebera would never approve. She was the steady one, the one who made things work. But this wasn’t a farm with its mundane needs she knew so well. This was the doorstep of hell.
The other refugees fled through the house, hiding behind columns and in dark back rooms. Sanni stood in the hall, trying to think for the first time in minutes.
She needed to guard her children.
She grabbed two bricks among many across the floor and made for the stairs. She took the steps quickly, then dropped to hands and knees as soon as she reached the roof. The sounds of a battle raged, a blustering, violent anarchy that Sanni, as a woman, had never been meant to hear. She crawled toward the worst of the noise, ignoring the hard, scratchy surface of the roof. The bricks in her hands made ringing clicks on the clay. She wondered in alarm if anyone would hear her and almost turned back, but for her children. She stopped at the edge of the roof, then peeked over the retaining wall, and saw.
Bodies littered the ground just beyond the villa’s gate, most of them refugee men. At least a dozen soldiers muddled about down there, mixed into a mob of rock-throwing youths. The rocks rang off leather shields and, sometimes, human heads. As Sanni watched, one determined soldier skewered someone on the point of a spear, a boy no older than her own. Soldiers back from the worst of the fray herded a clutch of women upstream, all the prisoners young, slim, and at least a little pretty. So, the rape camps were more than rumor.
One of the women broke away from her captors. She didn’t know where to run. She looked like a rabbit having slipped a lion’s jaws. She paid for indecision with a bashed-in head. The other women howled in terror at her death.
Sanni ducked her head and moaned. The next moment, without any warning, her gullet wrenched in heaves of nonexistent vomit. But she couldn’t just huddle there, trembling. She couldn’t cringe and cry like a girl, throwing up at every little thing. She for
ced a peek back over the wall and continued to follow the battle.
The refugees retreated in through the gate, hurling what rocks came to hand. The soldiers pursued, some breaking off into the house, raising a clamor of screams beneath Sanni’s feet.
Gods, keep them back, she prayed, and clutched her weapons till they bit into her fingers.
A band of youths went after the soldiers, erupting the house into still greater violence. The soldiers chased them back outside. Some hauled out another few women, adding them to those at the riverbank. The battle progressed around the house and into the yard where the granaries stood.
Sanni crawled to that edge of the roof and watched as the refugees retreated at a run, still pelting their Setim antagonists. The soldiers gave chase, intent on the blood of their presumptuous enemy.
They must have suspected something, perhaps an ambush from behind. Sanni watched in dumb horror as a trailing few Setim drove spears into the granaries, hunting for hidden attackers. They so frightened the children in two hiding places that the babies popped up scrambling, shrieking for their mothers. The Setim skewered them all.
They laughed about it, the motherless vermin, and moved to the next granary.
Sanni’s granary.
Sanni sprang to her knees, her eyes squinting in desperate concentration. She heaved first one brick, then the other. They arced to their marks, slow and impotent as feathers. She watched as the Setim stabbed at her grain, felt in her heart the spearheads take her children.
But submerged reason pointed out that no one sprang panicked from the grain. No one cried or squealed for Mother.
The first brick shattered a soldier’s head. The second struck the granary wall, then clattered into the dust. The second soldier jumped, looked up, and fixed Sanni in a hateful stare.
Then he died in a hail of stones.