He checked the angle of the sun. A figure on a ridge was silhouetted against the horizon. David shrugged at the distant Faris and climbed into his nest.
Cool sand carpeted the base of his fort. Barely three hours into his strange vision quest, his throat already scratched with thirst and his stomach burned with hunger. The sun dipped below the horizon and the red light, hazy with fine blowing sand, decayed into night. The temperature grew comfortable, and his robes at last began to dry of sweat. In his makeshift bed, shrouded by soil, he listened for scorpions.
Chapter Nineteen
In his crater, David shifted and pulled his robes tighter. When a stone rattled down a rock ledge, he peered over his sandy rampart and searched for stalking snakes, scorpions, or wild dogs. Only shadows lengthened under the moon, and he slumped back.
Scorpio’s tail curled in the sky. The constellations made their slow precession into the Age of Aquarius. The Age of Matter. Technology battles waged in America. Hungry Asian countries grabbed for resources. It was an appropriate moniker for the era. The battle for matter. The battle to matter.
The hole in his stomach had grown. A thick paste filled his mouth that he struggled to swallow. When he meditated on his hunger, a shiver broke his concentration, and he sighed. Each time he stared into the hunger-hole, his body shuddered and rebelled.
I have to connect … have to connect ... the pail—remember the pail. He pictured Askari drawing the bow, aiming it in the pail’s general direction, the slow arc of the arrow and Askari calling to it, the arrow changing course, and the pail exploding. David began his mantra. Power of the pail. Pail, pail, pail. Power.
Scorpions approached in silence. Their eight legs disturbed only grains of sand. Unlike a herd of camels, a clutch of hens or a murder of crows, no name exists for a group of scorpions. If scorpions arrived in groups, it wasn’t due to any instinct other than the hunt for food. Had David seen their arrival, he might have called them a scream or a sting of scorpions. He might have screamed himself.
A dozen scorpions, yellow and black, climbed David’s carefully constructed walls. Some slid backwards and toppled onto their backs. Only one, a scarlet scorpion, took the ridge at a conservative angle, slowly spiraling upward in a patient march, its tail poised, the red tip glistening like a drop of blood—a distant brother of the scorpions that had stung and stung David’s father.
Faris’s hands balled into fists, his back to David’s fort, which lay across the desert bowl. That Askari would initiate the stranger and not him. That companions must only reach Fullness—Void was power too. Faris raged not simply at these hypocrises; another, brighter fire blazed. He trudged along a rocky ledge and kept from the treacherous sands. The sun’s final rays had bled from the sky and his steps quickened as he scanned for shelter. His initiation would happen even if he needed to complete it himself. The dark companion would avenge Haidar.
When the companions attacked the Temple of Seth, Faris had traced Askari’s connection through the tunnels to Haidar. While Haidar’s attention was on a snapping crocodile, the pharaoh’s staff rose at his back. In the deir’s inner sanctum, Faris’s physical body had squeezed tears from beneath clenched lids, but Faris’s spirit had no eyes to shut.
Haidar’s skull had collapsed under the pharaoh’s blow. Clods of mealy brain fell to the floor. The djed staff’s sweep sprayed blood. Faris cringed from the pharaoh’s criminal hulk and his foul psychic scent. Realizing that the battle was doomed, Faris then gathered those willing and returned to the deir, crippled by loss.
Those companions who had accepted his Void skill as a bridge survived. Thus, they had already accepted his initiation as a companion; for them to think otherwise was betrayal. He had only to complete the ritual. That the foreigner would also be initiated cheapened the brotherhood. But Faris would become something greater.
The pharaoh’s knowledge of the Shemsu Hor attack nagged at Faris as he surveyed an outcropping sheltered from the wind and too steep for predators such as scorpions. He sat and the heat stored in the layers of stone seeped into his thighs. His mind cleared of concerns outside his control.
The red scorpion breached David’s meager fort as the first rays of the new day crested a distant ridge. David’s breathing shuddered with cold, eyelids fluttering as he continued a fitful sleep. The scorpion teetered on the edge, ready for a mad descent, and its tail drawn up in preparation to sting. But then, the sun slipped over the segmented tail and it tensed, indecisive at the brink.
David grumbled and rolled in his pit.
The scorpion skittered back down the slope it had struggled so long to climb. As David’s eyelids cracked open, the scorpion scrabbled to shelter under a nearby rock shelf.
David sat erect, shivered, and stretched his arms to catch the full warmth of the sun. He smacked his lips and ran a pasty tongue across their cracked flesh. His throat constricted. He wanted to speak aloud, to test his voice, but didn’t want to seem delusional, if only to himself.
From under his robe, he withdrew a small cloth bag. He looked left and right: No one was watching. Inside the bag were two unleavened loaves and several dried dates. To David, there was fasting and then there was starving. Askari surely didn’t want him to die.
He had never liked dates, but he scraped the fibrous sweetness with his teeth and sucked the pits bare. The small moisture in the dates served only to whet his thirst. He stood and brushed the night’s sand from his robe. His fingers probed the crust from the corners of his eyes. Like a lizard soaking in the sun’s regenerative warmth, his blood began to flow. He shook out his anxiety over the desert’s callous nature.
Bracing his palm against the sun’s glare, he searched for better shelter. He sniffed. Later he would bury his body and cover his head with his robe. And when the heat grew uncomfortable, he slowly drizzled sand over his feet and shins, watching it sheet. With his torso buried, he pulled down the pit’s walls. The motion reminded him of how children had made snow angels in Canada. Worlds away.
As he cowered from the sun, a mesh of light filtered through the robe and over his face.
Across the sun-drenched bowl, Faris coasted on the connection. Askari had once told him that the Fullness was different for everyone. This was unfortunate, since he ached to discuss his experience, to describe how it swathed him in comfort, like a fetus in a womb. Still, he was disappointed; he could see the Fullness, even sense it, but not connect. He hauled on the cord of energy and tried to milk strength and nutrients that he knew pumped so close, but in vain.
Playing on the astral plane, twisting and turning, flipping above the Fullness, his desire to know its secrets burgeoned. His sinuses clogged, as if he had a terrible cold, but without the pain and discomfort. Voices swirled about him, voices he could not draw upon, not quite hear.
He reached toward the Fullness and pushed against its reddish lining, veined and tough but thin in spots. Against a translucent window, he pressed fingers. It grew sheer, like a leaded windowpane. Inside was a putrefied bowel, blocked with rot. He gasped. Each edge of the Fullness twisted into space, curled back upon itself, and slid under him to pass on again in a figure eight. The Void swirled and burped below, nothing and anything. His hands broke through the lining, and he recoiled. Through the punctures, Fullness dribbled into Void.
No!
But his palms were too small to stem the flow.
Faris struggled to maintain his grip, but the vacuum of the Void yanked, sucking not just the Fullness but him as well. It wrapped his ankles and hauled. He clutched at the Fullness’s lip and its power trickled over him into the cosmos. Without its oozing wound, he would have been lost. He now understood the purpose of the test. The Fullness stretched in an infinite yet closed loop, and perforations marred all its smooth curve, shedding voices and thoughts into Void. Fullness ever corroded until Osiris returned, once every five hundred years. It wa
s a finite resource, and in that knowledge he affirmed his duty to protect it.
He touched his chin to his chest and stared downward as he strained to hold on. He could sense the Void’s nature. It was not simply a nothing, it was anything, it was all else. If the Fullness that cascaded over him was a sort of universal consciousness, the Void represented a chaotic animal power. All else but that which makes humans different. He resisted a wild urge to plummet into it.
The Fullness tore wider, a ragged slash at his fingertips. He flipped into the spray of thought, and crawled up the stream until he lay on the ledge of Fullness, the connection still elusive, but feeling it trickling between his toes, through and over his form, out. Into the Void.
David tried mentally to burn a hole in the robe still covering his face. Maybe just knowing that the power existed was enough. Here I am, my body baking like roast pigeon in a clay oven. His mind pictured a table laden with roast meat and potatoes. He licked rough lips. The snack of bread and dates had only perpetuated his hunger and inspired his thirst. When he pictured the pail now, it appeared full of water.
Inwardly focused, all my outer senses blocked, but I can’t connect. He pushed onto his forearms, sand cascading from his chest. David muttered and rubbed his stomach. He cast long stares back toward the deir. He would have returned if not for the pail. Light was failing, and he would soon need to rebuild his fort.
As the sun had arced, his mind drifted—dehydrated and starved—from Zahara, her nakedness, and how she felt beneath him, to his murdered father and his grandmama still squirreled away, firmly ensconced in her life as a nun.
David’s brand ached, reminding him of his father’s disappointment. Anger burst in his mind, and he pushed at the walls of his pen. Remember the pail. Pail, pail, power in the pail. Maybe tonight. Tonight I can connect to the pail—pail. Tonight I’ll get to explode, too.
He embraced the mad thoughts, believing they drew him closer to the truth, to power.
He began to rebuild the small nest, unaware of the median eye which studied him from beneath a cool rock.
That night, the red scorpion started earlier. With the sun to bed, the scorpion skittered across the sands and began its deadly spiral. As the moon rose, it bested the fort and slid over its side. The man shuddered. It was from the cold and not the scorpion’s passage. Sand hid the man’s ankles and the scorpion slowly traversed the coarse robe until it reached bare neck. Its median eye swung from the crook of the man’s neck to his plump cheeks. The face had blistered where sun had touched too long, its rays having intruded through the mesh covering. The scorpion chose a raised bulge, full of fluid.
The stinger plunged through the blister.
David roared and clapped a palm over his cheek. He scrambled from his hole and stared at the offending scorpion. Already his face burned and swelled as the scorpion’s poison spread.
Caught by its own efforts, the scorpion scrabbled to escape the shallow grave.
Oh my god, am I going to die? the lucid portion of David’s mind asked. He sweated despite the cold.
“P, p, p, pail, power, pail.” David chuckled into the night.
Hunger and thirst were gone, cold was gone, just the scorpion remained, its sting and the pail … pail. His breathing grew labored, and he thought how his father had died by such poison. Suffocated. David’s vision faded in and out.
At some point later, he fell onto his side, oblivious to the edge of rock that jutted into his abdomen. In and out, his vision throbbed with his heartbeat. In and out. In. Out. In. Out. He imagined it was a code, a question, or a choice that the scorpion’s poison offered. The salty flow of his perspiration ebbed.
“P, p, p, pail” he wheezed. The In required focus to hold, constrained by rules and muscle. Out was chaos, a glaze of ease, fat with energy. Connection. Out, grab the energy, harvest it and bale it—pail it.
“Pail. Pail. Pail.” The voice was not his own, and David turned his head to see a tall, bearded man with fiery hair and eyes that glowed. Around him was a nimbus of shadow. The sand and rocks, the sky and stars, had retreated.
“David Nidaal, I am Pharaoh, leader of the Shemsu Seth.” Pharaoh’s speech rumbled like an avalanche. David’s physical body shook, and he could do nothing to still it.
“Pharaoh.” The thought formed in his mind, but not his lips. “P, p, pail.”
“You are powerful, David. Your connection to the Void is strong.”
David stared about him at the darkness and saw now that it held a texture, like a heart of tar that beat and shifted. He attempted to pull out of the Void, but he was caught. The sludge clung and mired him.
“Join me, and Zahara will be safe. Bring me the tablet and the deir’s vertebrae, and I will show you power.”
David’s mind whirled. He sensed energy; it was orgasmic in its intensity and filled his mind like a stuperous drug. He recalled Askari’s depression-slung eyes, the dead bodies, and the companions’ defeat.
“Zahara, David,” Pharaoh repeated.
In his heart, David knew that the companions were already lost. His only reasonable course was to save Zahara and learn all he could of this mystic energy. Something bothered him, though; his gut told him he needed more. He needed protection or would risk being killed as soon as the Shemsu Seth had the tablet, just as Faris and Askari had told him. In all his life, the only true power he’d known was knowledge. He must translate the tablet.
The knowledge that he would betray the Shemsu Hor tugged at his conscience even in his dizzy, poisoned mind. If the Void and Fullness are real, then so is the threat of the Fullness’s demise, heaven’s demise. Pharaoh’s success.
“You cannot touch the Fullness, David. Only the Void.”
David’s thoughts contorted with toxins. An image of his twisted brand bloomed and chased away the face of Askari’s disappointment. He was a game piece, shuffling around the Senet board.
“I can teach you to control it.”
I started on the wrong Senet square. I choose the ankh, the key of life. He stared into the luminous eyes of the Pharaoh. Pharaoh placed a hand on his shoulder and then faded away.
At the bottom of the pit, the scorpion burned. No sun threatened the horizon, but the temperature was higher than any rays of desert light. The scorpion wanted darkness, but would not die in sunlight. This heat it feared. It scrambled for the wall and stared up; David’s swollen face grinned down. He held a long thin stick that stabbed the scorpion’s back. Its stinger curled and repeatedly struck its own carapace, beating, stinging, until it crumpled, legs balling like a dead spider.
Chapter Twenty
The stone colonnades of Luxor Temple, lit from below, vaulted like the pillars of Shu, god of air, to the heavens. Ramesses II stared from the cracked throne that flanked the gate, stony eyes lingering on Faysal, one of the companions selected to reclaim the missing pieces of the Osiris.
A small brown companion, Faysal’s skin was the color and consistency of aish baladi dough kneaded too long. A red granite obelisk blocked his view of the statue’s twin. In ancient times, the obelisk’s peak would have been tipped with electrum, a blend of gold and silver, the seventy-five-foot rod reflecting the sun and moon to guide worshippers like a church steeple. A ray of Re. The French had its sister in the Place de la Concorde in Paris, guiding cars around a traffic circle.
The Avenue of the Sphinxes guarded Luxor Temple’s outer pylon. Great palm trees ran the length of the sand-brown complex, their fronds black against a sky bruised by the lights of the surrounding city. Faysal crouched behind the haunch of a sphinx and watched the guards.
The white uniformed soldiers were a small matter. Although more particular than those who shepherded tourists in and out of forbidden areas, they still operated under the same principles, which made Faysal’s entry a question of adequate baksheesh.
&
nbsp; He was glad to be away from the deir and death. He smiled; the reflex as out of place as always. One of the eldest companions, he was not surprised he had never reached the exalted status of high priest. Even in the darkness, his smile shone, supercilious, but not purposefully so; his was an expression of constant cheerfulness, which in time had marked him a fool. A fool whose task was to claim Osiris’s heart! His smile twisted. Faysal’s connection to the Fullness had always been weak, useful only for telepathy.
His hand shook as he reached for the sphinx’s paw. He noted the tremor of age and fatigue. Of late, he wanted little more than to lie down and rest, to join his brothers in the Fullness.
Faysal peeked around the chin of Amenhotep III, the pharaoh whose face adorned the sphinxes of Luxor. A cigarette burned in the shadow of the pylon. Faysal stepped into the pools of light that spilled between each pair of sphinx and strode down the avenue as if he were Amenhotep III himself.
“Tisbah ‘ala kher.” Faysal smiled.
“Wenta bikher,” the guard replied formally. His gun, scratched and worn, was leveled at Faysal’s gut. It looked very functional.
“I’m sorry, pasha, but I am conducting research on an area of the temple difficult to view during the daylight. The relief is so shallow it requires special lighting. Could you humor an old man and allow me entry?”
“The temple is open nights until eight PM.” The guard straightened and peered into the shadows beyond Faysal.
The old bull and the young one scratched their hooves on the earth.
“These walls are filled with tourists then who crowd the sacred symbols. They are distracting.”
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