“Why can’t they find their own shelter!” she screamed. Suddenly she had another thought. “It’s not poisonous, right?”
Qeskaant didn’t answer.
“Right?” She eyed him. His hand was edging towards his sword, but a swirl of sand blocked her view. She blinked. The blade sang through the air, cleanly slicing off the snake’s head, its body flopping on the ground.
“Right,” he said, grasping the limp hose of a body and holding it up triumphantly. “Now it’s not poisonous.”
Sarah felt the air swoosh from her like a popped balloon. Was she going to faint? But she couldn’t or the scorpions might swarm all over her and she wouldn’t even know it.
“Horned viper,” said Qeskaant, as if she wanted more information. “Kills quickly. But it tastes good. Like duck.”
“Or chicken?” she asked. It was probably something Matt would say to relieve the tension and keep her going. Right now, she had to be her own Matt.
“I don’t understand ‘chicken,’” said Qeskaant.
“What about scorpions? What do they taste like?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “Not very good.”
“But can you kill them anyway, with your sword?”
Qeskaant brandished his sword and smiled. “If you like, but it might just make them angry. You’re definitely not from this land. If you were, you’d know that we have much more to fear than these simple little creatures.”
“Oh,” said Sarah, as some scorpions on her leg advanced like an army—like the inevitable flow of time—onto her lap. “I really didn’t want to hear that.”
“Wolves have no qualms about attacking us,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard her. “Especially when they’re starving in the desert. Occasionally the jackals and hyenas will risk a human encounter. And we might come across a cobra, as well, particularly in moister areas like the oasis. Lions are often a danger—”
“Okay. Enough already. I get your point.” A scorpion had skittered up her chest and was now clinging to the tattered remnants of her shirt. “These things are not so bad. But I still don’t like them and I don’t want to be stung.”
The wind screeched and battered the tent. Sand sifted in greater amounts through the cracks and seams in the wall. Granules whipped into her eyes again. She needed to cover them. Except that she didn’t want to cover them, because then she wouldn’t be able to see the scorpions.
“Relax,” said Qeskaant. He leaned forward and, using the hilt of his sword, swept the scorpions from her shirt and leg back onto the ground. Then he threw sand at the entire horde, making them back away. Several retreated under the tent flaps and left them alone. A few bristled, but he removed a sandal, hooked them from the ground and flung them out of the tent.
Sarah gaped and stared at him. “You, you . . . you could have done that sooner.”
Qeskaant grinned and, despite the swirling sand, she could see a glint of mischief in his eyes. “Sometimes you have to look at things from every angle, and see how far they go before you take the appropriate steps. Besides, I was having too much fun.”
She couldn’t believe this. She’d been abducted and forced to travel countless kilometres through the desert, exhausted, dehydrated, and now terrified by scorpions and snakes and this Medjay thought it was all a joke.
“Oh, you—men are all alike!” she shrieked, and hurled a scoop of sand at him.
Chapter 19
Disaster Averted, or Not
Matt took a deep breath as he waited for Taharqa’s decision. This could be it: the end or the restoration of their timeline.
“I will take my army and approach the Medjay,” Taharqa said. “Either we persuade them to join us or we defeat them, but at least we’ll be more prepared to battle the Assyrians.”
Matt exhaled slowly. Would there be a crack of electricity and a great rush of air like a hurricane as the failsafe opened a wormhole? Would he be swept back to Isabelle, along with Sarah? Or would he simply dissolve, become nothing? Would his dad and Nadine crumble in front of his eyes?
The air was still. Nothing happened.
Taharqa rose and waved to the priests that they were dismissed. They grumbled. Bakket eyed him malevolently, but Taharqa wouldn’t budge. “It’s the responsible decision and I stand by it.”
“And this boy had no influence?” snarled the priest.
“I listen to everyone’s opinion, but what this boy wants is insignificant compared to what I need to do. He’s a welcome addition to my army, but that is all.”
“Then why do you keep him at your side?”
“Because he amuses me,” said Taharqa.
Matt thought he should feel insulted, but for some reason he didn’t. The last thing he wanted was to influence a leader’s decision about a battle or war. Not this time, anyway. He’d rather be the prince’s fool than the prince’s advisor. He was pretty sure that neither his father nor Nadine had changed Taharqa’s mind either. This was what he’d wanted all along, so it had to be the right thing. But, nothing had happened. What did that mean?
Maybe they hadn’t reached the crucial moment. Maybe this wasn’t where life as they knew it ended or resumed.
After the priests had filed out, Taharqa turned to Matt and smiled.
“I lied,” he whispered. “You had the best counsel of all and I took your advice.”
Matt felt as if a bucket of ice water had been dumped on his head. “You-you listened to me? I just told you to go with your gut.”
Taharqa frowned.
“I mean ‘instinct,’” Matt explained.
“Exactly,” said Taharqa. “Sound advice. Now I think we should all bed down for the night. Tomorrow we’ll be taking the direct desert route, north, to my fortifications by the Second Cataract.”
“We’re heading north?” asked Matt. “Isn’t that what your uncle wanted anyway?”
“My uncle wanted me to keep going, straight up the Nile to the pyramids,” said Taharqa. “But we’ll make a stop that will be momentous. Trust me.” He patted Matt on the back, then turned and clapped his hands. Two men appeared instantly at his summons. “Take Matt, his father and— Do you want me to house the woman separately? She might find a nice bed of straw in the stable more suitable to her . . . current condition.” He indicated the flecks of vomit still clinging to her toga.
Matt smiled. “Yes, that would be perfect.”
“Matt,” Nadine protested. Her scowling face made her look even more hideous.
“Let Nadine stay with us,” said Matt’s dad, quite forcefully, looking the prince in the eye this time. “We have much to discuss.”
Taharqa met his gaze and nodded briefly. “If Matt agrees.”
“Matt? Let’s not be petty.”
Matt rolled his eyes, but turned to Taharqa and said, “Fine. She can stay. Just, maybe have someone bring some water, so she can clean up. She really stinks.” He wanted to add, ‘I don’t just mean that literally,’ but he didn’t.
The prince left instructions, then said good night and let the servants lead them to a luxurious—for the time period—chamber at the end of another long hallway. The room was furnished with strange-looking beds, fur-lined mattresses topped by neck supports—curved wooden devices for lying flat on one’s back rather than using pillows. They brought bowls of water and linen cloths to wash up—which Nadine hastily made use of. They also set ceramic pitchers painted with black-bodied bees and silvery ankhs, and containing beer and milk, on the small gold-plated tables.
“Matt,” said his dad, when the servants had departed. He sat beside Matt on one of the beds. “I can’t believe we’re finally together, even though the circumstances are desperate. I’ve wanted to talk to you for so long.”
A thrill coursed through Matt at his father’s words, but it was immediately deflected by a rush of anger. “You can blame her for not being able to,” he said, pointing to Nadine, “but you don’t seem to want to.”
Nadine paused in the circular strokes of her
washcloth and scowled at him.
“I am angry at her. I was . . .” His father’s words petered out. “She did some reprehensible things, but, perhaps they were for extenuating—” He must have noticed Matt’s frown. “—for good reasons,” he amended.
“Good reasons?” said Matt, staring at his dad, unable to keep his mouth from dropping open. “What reason could there be to stuff you into a time machine and leave you trapped in other worlds? What reason could there be to keep us separated all our lives?”
His father looked down and didn’t respond.
“He was arrogant, Matt. Just like I tried to tell you,” said Nadine, answering for him.
Matt whipped his head around and glared at her. “You don’t have any right to criticize. You, of all people. Arrogant? All you wanted was power and glory. You trapped him and took it for yourself. You had money and a time machine and you—”
“Hid it,” said Nadine.
“What?”
“Did I ever announce it to the world? Did I stand in front of a flurry of cameras? Did I try to win the Nobel Prize?”
“No,” said Matt, sifting through her words. “Because they would have found you out. They would have realized it wasn’t your machine and tried to discover what had happened to dad.”
“If that’s what you want to believe,” said Nadine. “But I knew this would happen.”
Now what was she talking about? “What would happen?”
“Time, Matt,” said his dad, placing his hand on Matt’s shoulder. “Disruption. Alteration. Disaster. What we—I—brought about,” he said sadly.
“No,” said Matt, shaking his head. “You’re a genius. It was because she trapped you, because she was with you. This never would have happened—”
“Wouldn’t it?” asked Nadine. “Do you think your genius father would have sat on his brilliant machine and left it alone? Do you think he never would have travelled into the past, just to see what it was like, in this world and in others? Look what you’ve already done.”
Matt couldn’t stand her self-righteous statements anymore. “What I’ve done? All I’ve done is try to rescue my father. With good consequences, too. Stopping a war. Saving agents. What did you do? You sent him into the very past that you say you were trying to protect. How does that make any sense? You can’t believe a word she says, Dad.”
“Okay, I admit, it was a stupid thing to do. I thought he’d only be trapped in one place and time. I never thought it would cause the wormhole to become unstable and transport him to different times and places.”
Matt gritted his teeth, almost ready to explode. Why wasn’t his father saying anything? He should be as mad as Matt was at Nadine for what she’d done. But he stayed quiet with just a partial gleam in his eye that might mean a flare of temper. Finally he did say something.
“You may be right, Nadine, but it’s worse than a death sentence, to leave someone stranded in a strange world or different time period, far from everything they’re familiar with.”
“Murder,” said Matt. “Just as bad as murder.”
Nadine paused and coloured slightly. “Look, I’m not a killer. But I knew that you wouldn’t consider the consequences. You wouldn’t listen to me, just like you didn’t listen to your secretary, and you didn’t listen to your newborn’s cries. You were swayed, seduced by the magic of your great machine, the things you could accomplish, not once wondering whether they should be accomplished.”
His father sagged again. “What you did was wrong,” he said, “but what I did was far worse.”
“No,” said Matt. He couldn’t believe his father was letting this witch get to him. He wasn’t that bad a husband, or father. He might have been distracted, but he’d done something no one in the world had done. Who could blame him for getting caught up in it? But he wouldn’t have used his machine to do anything destructive. And he would never willingly have abandoned his family. Nadine had robbed them both of a life together. Softball tournaments. Hockey games. Sitting in front of the TV watching movies and eating popcorn. A normal life. She was the evil one. Couldn’t he see that?
“She shoved Sarah and me into the time machine, too,” he said. “Right into history.”
“I had to stop you,” she snarled. “From trying to rescue him, just like you’ve been doing, and interfering in history, just as you seem determined to do. If he came back . . . He told me he would never destroy the machine. I’ve been working for the past thirteen years, trying to determine how to destroy it without causing a space-time rift. I couldn’t let you bring him back, but I couldn’t think of any other way to stop you, except killing you. And I couldn’t do that.”
“Right,” said Matt. “Except you did try to do that. You put a gun to Sarah’s head. You would have shot her.”
“You made me desperate,” said Nadine. “You kept meddling with time. But I still couldn’t do it.”
“Shut up!” yelled Matt, standing up now and facing her. “Shut up! You’re lying. I know you are.”
“Matt,” said his father sternly, grasping his arm in a pincer grip. “Calm down. I know this is hard to understand . . .”
“Hard?” said Matt, rage roiling in his gut. “Hard? Try impossible.” He shook his arm from his father’s clutch and ran into the hallway. He had to get away from them, from all the heartache and hurt. He had to get away from Nadine. But more than ever, to stop the knife from plunging through his chest, he had to get away from his father.
Chapter 20
Confusion
Matt rolled around in the straw, trying to find release from the torment in his head. He was nestled next to Sarah—the horse—finding her company much more soothing than his father’s. All his life he’d dreamed of being reunited with his dad, but he’d never pictured it like this. His father was the hero—the creator, the genius, but above all, the kindhearted and righteous man who’d been ripped from him unjustly and cruelly. Nadine was the villain, the epitome of evil, the one who could never do anything out of unselfishness or generosity. Why had the lines become blurred?
Could his father have been so consumed by his desire to break the barriers of time that he’d never thought of what that might do? Had he been so crazy about his pet project that he’d cared little for Isabelle—Matt’s mother—or Matt himself? Could Nadine, despite her heartless and sometimes stupid actions, have been thinking of the greater good? Could she actually have been trying to save the world? Now this was a tough one. Could his father be the evil scientist and Nadine the 007 hero? No, it wasn’t possible. His dad had jumped in front of a bullet to save him. Nadine had tossed Sarah and him into the time machine, where they could have died. But, Anne Frank? Why had she wanted to rescue Anne Frank when they’d been trapped in occupied Holland?
Matt thrust the thought aside. She couldn’t be good. He’d lived his life hating her. At first, because she’d kept her distance and seemed to care little for him. Later, because he’d realized she could be downright nasty. And finally, when he’d found out what she’d done, because she’d stripped him of a family. No matter what excuses she came up with, she was still Nadine and he couldn’t forgive her. Besides, if he didn’t have Nadine to hate and his father to strive to save, what did he have left?
Sarah! He didn’t need a genius father to save or a villain to battle. He just needed Sarah.
“So you’d rather sleep with the horse,” said a voice from the door. Matt looked up, recognizing the voice, and then swiped at his grimy face. Taharqa’s strong features were captured in the flickering light of a torch set in a bracket on the wall.
“I . . . needed to get away, to think.”
“I could have thrown the woman in here to sleep and you could have kept the bed. I would have taken your suggestion over your father’s.”
Matt winced.
“Or is it your father you wish to escape from?”
“I-I don’t know.” He looked up into Taharqa’s wise, warm eyes. It was strange that the one friend he had wasn’t a fami
ly member but a young Nubian prince from the distant past. “What if everything you believed was wrong?” Matt blurted out.
Taharqa patted Sarah’s flank, shuffled in around her, and sat beside Matt on the bristly bed of straw. He cleared his throat and eyed Matt with a strange intensity. “Things are not always the way they first appear and people are rarely what we believe them to be. I certainly found that out with you.” He smiled and nudged Matt’s arm. “You’re definitely not a Medjay raider.”
“You can say that again,” said Matt. The only place he’d ever raided was the teachers’ lounge at Marshland Elementary.
“With you I learned quickly. With others . . .” The prince shrugged. “I once thought the priests of Amun knew everything. They communicate on a daily basis with the gods. They have the wisdom of the ages passed down to them through our countless libraries of scrolls. They brush up against the spirits of the ancient pharaohs in their temples in Thebes. But one day I was building a new temple made of sand. Just a simple plaything, but it inspired me. I thought that I could build these things one day—pyramids like the pharaohs of old did, monumental temples and statues. A priest came by and growled at me.
“‘What are you doing, boy? This is a waste of your time. You’re not a sculptor. We have dozens of sculptors with superior skill. You must practice with your bow. You must prepare to be an exceptional warrior and maybe even a king.’
“He crushed my temple under his sandal, stomped it to bits. ‘This is what you must learn to do,’ he said.
“So I’ve trained to be a warrior, and perhaps I am a skilled one. I might even be a great king one day. But none of these things give me joy. Sculpting—creating something of quality and beauty from clay and stone—that gives me joy. I’ll do my duty, but I have studied the texts too. I’m not a simple boy anymore, one who is always obedient to the priests, because I know the gods revel in our creative spirit and sometimes mourn our destructive nature. Everything I’d once believed—that the priests can make no mistakes, and that they speak with the wisdom of the gods on their lips—is wrong.”
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