by James Bennet
The Star was falling, falling.
The meteor shook off rock at the edge of space, a flaming Cinderella fleeing a ball. From his crystal prison, Ben watched the stars blink out, fading in the glare of the sun. Compressing air, dense and hot, bore in around his miniature self. He heard the residual rock burn up, searing away from his diamond cell. The meteor punched through the atmosphere and into the blue, shooting towards the earth. Clouds parted, their skirts singed. Continents rose in green-brown slabs, a patchwork grave yawning to meet him. The sea crept in and he thundered over it, leaving a storm in his wake.
Then the sky was full of serpents. They wheeled around him, a winged gyre. The beasts were all the colours of the rainbow, vibrant greens and deep blues. Yellows, browns and reds. Their flanks dazzled him through the molten facets, the glass walls around him. Far below them, a jungle spread, a lush forest carpeting the shore. And in that dark and tangled mass, there rose a temple – or perhaps a palace – thick stone pillars that held up the sky, monoliths with stern, forbidding faces, presiding over the land. He had glimpsed this place before, albeit in miles of endless sand, every surface carved with glyphs, every archway gilded. The temple called to him as if he had walked there himself, not just seen it in the Queen’s mind. As if he’d lived there under the reign of the gods, thousands of years ago.
The Star fell and the serpents screamed. Their grappling claws could not catch him, check his breakneck descent. His fire took them, crisping their wings and cracking their scales, changing all their colours to black. Bones sailed across the sun, a pall of ash and trailing smoke washing out over the ocean.
The Star shrieked over the temple, over the knotted branches and vines. A scorching line ran through the undergrowth, the trees bursting into flame. Rivers hissed into steaming plumes. Animals fell charred as they fled. The Star hit the earth with the sound of drums struck all at once by a giant hand. The surrounding jungle took to the air, leafy birds striving for the sky, boughs spread in supplication. Upturned earth swallowed the sun, buried the splintering light.
And with the light, fragments of memory.
Ben clutched his head, resisting the influx – the imploding pressure of remembered time, remembered aeons, flying like bullets into his soul.
A great ship with sails of flax, countless oars in the water. A tall woman standing on the deck, the breeze playing with her white cotton dress. The collar around her neck caught the sunlight, glinting with turquoise, garnet and gold. She wore a tall double crown on her head and Ben knew it was the Pschent. A cobra, ready to strike, coiled from the front of the crown, set next to a sharp-beaked bird, symbols of divine authority. Bracelets encircled the woman’s arms and wrists, adorning her sun-kissed skin. Ben gazed at this great pharaoh, this woman king from a distant land, and instantly knew her by name. Hatshepsut.
She alighted from the ship with a man by her side, a bald and barefoot youth robed in leopard skin, his ice-chip eyes belying his innocent face. The youth, a priest, gave his blessing to the land, kneeling to kiss the feet of another woman, one whose beauty and power Ben recognised, having felt the sting of both. Atiya. Queen of Punt. The Queen met the ambassadors with cool grace, her twirling hand a sparrow through the air.
What the hell am I seeing?
But he knew. In Club Zauber, the envoy had shown him the reliefs at Deir el-Bahari, a picture of the past in levitating cards. This was the arrival of Hatshepsut’s voyage, her royal ship landing in Punt three and a half thousand years ago. Its importance to Atiya shuddered through him. This was the source of her fury. The seed of all that came after…
The scenes accelerated, fuelled by rage.
The three of them were gathered in the temple, the Pharaoh, the Queen and the bald priest. They stood around what could only be the Star, a pulsating sphere in the middle of the chamber, set on a rough pedestal of rock. In the following image, the Pharaoh was presenting Atiya with a gift. The heqa-siin. The Jackal’s Crook. Sparks coiled and snapped off the priest’s mask, a silver veil holding wintry eyes. Holding secrets. Hunger. The reflections danced, painting a vague and carnal act. Atiya strewn naked on a bed somewhere, locked in passion with a young man, his back muscles taut with exertion. Then the priest again, standing in the temple and clutching the Crook, a trembling hand reaching for the Star. Its refulgence shimmered in the Pschent atop his head. Atiya entered under an arch, running down the steps towards him, her hands raised, her face drawn. The priest grinned, a dagger in his hand. A dagger that rose and fell, rose and fell, beads of blood staining the flagstones, bejewelling the blanketing darkness…
EIGHTEEN
The darkness of night, cold but earthly, replaced the whirling scenes.
Ben sucked in the frozen air. He was back on the mountain. Back on the ledge. His return to the present squirmed through his guts like a seasick worm, and he fell retching to his hands and knees, the remains of Von Hart’s breakfast dribbling on to the snow. He wiped his mouth, tasting eggs, acid and loss. The high crags pressed against his skull, rebuking him for his absence, his departure from the here and now. Looking around, he half expected to see Lurkers shambling out of the rock face, their tentacles reaching to grab him. There was none. Whatever had drawn him into the Queen wasn’t magic as Ben understood it. It was raw elemental force. The puissance of gods.
Or perhaps ghosts. Atiya wasn’t fully in the world, only anchored here by human flesh. Small wonder she wasn’t subject to its laws. He turned to look at her and noticed his possession had sickened her too. She leant against a nearby boulder, using the rock to prop herself up. Her shoulders rose and fell with her breaths and her body was faint under the stars, its smoky substance dimmer than before. By now, Ben was familiar with psychic intrusion. He could have told her he knew the feeling.
When she met his gaze, her eyes glimmered, a dusky sheen of violation. Her voice limped across the space between them. “What…what did you see?”
“You tell me. A trailer for the Discovery Channel?” he said. Then, because it sounded so childish, “I saw a sky full of serpents. The Star…falling.”
“Then you have seen the death of my kind.”
“Dragons…”
She nodded. “The First Breed. The servants of Eebe.”
Eebe. God. Or what had once been a god, a higher cosmic entity belonging, perhaps, to a fallen and forgotten pantheon, way back in the day. Her fancy name for the first dragons, the ones who had somehow become extinct, tallied with the name that the Fay liked to call their supposed ancestors. The First-Born. Gods.…The connection was clear to him, and not just with his own insight; a residual impression coating his mind. They were a closed circuit sharing a current, a symbiosis of electricity and thought. The Queen drew part of her dialect from him – he understood that too, now – their discourse fuelled by her glimpses of the world. She surfed minds like radio channels, tuning in and out of modern awareness. And what, he wondered, had she learnt from him? The taste of Jack. Submission and loneliness. It hardly made her omniscient.
“The First Breed.” Ben felt slightly put out, understanding that he came from a second, and much later, attempt at the creation of his kind. And knowing that this, the warning she had given him – extinction, death – was all too real, a palpable threat rooted in fact. It was hard to keep petulance out of his voice. “But not the last.”
Atiya wasn’t listening to him. Her gaze was for the past, for the visions he had stirred in her.
“Seventy-three of us took to the sky that day,” she said. “In the panic and confusion, there was no time to think about what we were facing, what we might stand to lose. Only two of us remained behind. Parahu, my father, would not let me leave him when the Star fell. He was old and sick, and duty binds, although it kills me to know that it was the death of us…We stayed in the palace and watched, the Star, the comet, blazing out of the heavens as we prayed for the best. We watched the seventy-three fly up to the Star, watched as they formed a net with their wings, intending to slow the
comet’s descent, divert it into the sea. It was folly, of course. Our pride, our isolation, our belief in our power blinded us to disaster. The Star smashed through scale, horn and hide unchecked. We watched our friends and family die.”
Ben pulled himself into a crouch. Connections wove through the frosty space, prompting fragments of Von Hart’s insights. He would have offered Atiya sympathy, but he didn’t want to break the spell. Having come so far, chasing the mystery, he didn’t dare disturb her reverie. Perhaps she was tired, weary of secrets. Either way, they both knew what this was. A confession. A surrender. He wouldn’t distract her with words.
“Who knows why the Star fell? Was Eebe angered by his servants? Were the old gods dying and shedding their hearts? In those days, we believed that the cosmos hung on the love of the Bull and the Cow. Creation balanced on the horns of the Bull, who gazed forever at the Cow tethered before him. When the Cow turned her eyes away, there was destruction and chaos on earth. This is what came to pass.
“The Star of Eebe. It was ruin. Death. A terrible power lived in the stone. It held the essence of celestial storms. No one could approach the crater where it fell or bear to hear its song. The earth itself shrank from it, the jungle burning, burning…For months, we mourned the loss of our kind and lived in growing fear. Fear for the survival of Punt. A wasteland was spreading out from the Star, consuming the rivers, the trees, the birds and beasts, the tribes who worshipped us. But Eebe heard our prayer and a stranger came to us, a sailor from the golden kingdom in the north. Because my father chose to spare him, news of our glory sailed across the sea.”
This story was fresh in Ben’s mind. The Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor. He nodded gently, willing her on.
“A year after the Star fell, the Great Pharaoh Hatshepsut arrived, to see the land of Punt for herself, this once-great land of serpents and ruin. Egypt was also touched by the gods, gods both numerous and complex. They were the Neteru, each one joined to an aspect of nature. There was Amun-Ra, the Father of the Sun. Neith, the Cosmic Virgin. And there was Anubis, the jackal-headed Judge of the Dead. The Neteru had placed magic beyond measure in mortal hands. The pharaohs raised temples from the sand and spoke with beings from distant stars. Their magic was the most powerful on earth.”
Ben, wrists tingling with the memory of that magic, could easily believe it. In the underground car park in London, hieroglyphs had held his transformation in check, binding him as if he were a man. His natural resistance to spells had meant nothing. Without the envoy’s arrival, Fulk would probably still be alive and wearing his hide about town. A shiver ran through him, slipping through the lull of the Queen’s contemplation.
“Hatshepsut, hearing of our plight, felt moved to share this magic. Accepting us as the last of a powerful, mythical race, the Pharaoh came to us in peace. She told us she would help. With the Star gnawing at the palace walls, we thought ourselves blessed to receive such guests. Hatshepsut, the Lioness, who ruled as a man and made consorts of kings. Her beauty put the moon to shame. Her kindness, the rain. And in her retinue there came a man, a young and handsome priest, wise beyond his years. Baba Kamenwati. A name that means darkness. A name that means death.”
Ben recalled the name. Professor Winlock had mentioned the priest at the British Museum, describing the breaking of his tomb. Kamenwati had been a notorious heretic, the leader of an underground jackal cult. In the tomb, Winlock had found strange and remarkable magic bricks, the little statues depicting demons instead of gods, an unprecedented find. Jaws, claws and fangs, chimerically fused with human physiques. Winlock said that the funerary priests had placed the bricks in the corners of the tomb to prevent the ba, the soul, from entering the Duat, the Ancient Egyptian underworld.
The last week had been a crash course in history, and none of it pleasant. The visions lingered, and Ben found that he could picture this man, this bald-headed youth in leopard skin. Baba Kamenwati. He had seen his face, the frost in his eyes. The ice-cold longing…
“We were blinded by need.” Atiya’s voice was a hush in the night, soft as the swirling snow. “Does the mouse turn to the snake in despair? The spider to the scorpion? Eager to please the Pharaoh, Kamenwati promised us deliverance. Only sorcery, he said, could subdue and control the power of the Star, and he prayed to Thoth for an answer. Thoth soon answered and damned us all. Kamenwati and his men sacrificed an elephant. From one tusk, the priest carved the heqa-siin, the Jackal’s Crook, binding it with spells. From Karnak silver he forged a mirror to the Pharaoh’s crown and bid Hatshepsut bless it with a kiss. Then, when the Crook and the Pschent were ready, the Pharaoh furnished me with this sacred regalia, symbols of my bond with Egypt.
“I am no coward, but when I entered the crater, my heart beat like a batar drum at a tribal dance. In order to wield the priest’s tools, I remained in human shape, forgoing the strength of serpents. In my hand, I clutched the Crook. The Pschent was on my head. I waded through the blackest ash and the earth trembled in time with my prayers, though I found myself unharmed. Thanks to the relics I bore, the Star’s ruin could not touch me, but its song was not silenced.” The Queen sighed, remembering. “How can I explain the struggle that day? The Star sang to me of other worlds, other times. The past, present and future. It sang a song that no one should hear and the land could not endure. The Pschent protected my mind from madness. The Crook was a…catalyst, drinking in the stone’s power. But the Star did not want taming. The stone crackled and spat, lashing out with biriq. Lightning licked the crater and scoured the sky. There, in the heart of the ruin, the Star and I did battle.”
In rapt silence, Ben took in the revelation. He hadn’t thought of the relics as anything more than a trinity of symbols, dug up by archaeologists and put on display in exhibition halls, on museum shelves or in private collections, as Winlock had done with the Crook. Instead they were magical artefacts, belonging to this revenant Queen. Their potency slumbered, dulled by the passing of time, but he was beginning to grasp why Atiya wanted them back so badly. She wanted to reunite them. Awaken their power. More than this, he was beginning to dread how the CROWS had come to learn of these things.
Star, Crook and Pschent. Star, Crook and Pschent. A new flame will scour the sky, heaven-sent and hell-bent…
The witch’s prophecy had come true. The grin in the face of the Javits Center was laughing not at Ben’s ignorance now but at his fear, making him keenly aware that the Queen’s tale could mean the difference between life and death. He edged closer to her, his knees sliding through the slush. Her words were the cliff that Rose stood on. The sword dangling over his head.
“The stone changed me.” Atiya studied her palms, flexing her fingers. “Changed me for ever. As the sun sank and the Star grew quiet, I discovered its light inside me, married to my flesh. I was still one of the First-Breed, the serpent-born servant of a god, but now I was something else as well.” She closed her hands into fists. “The servant had become the equal of the master. I was…reborn a goddess. I could draw on the light and summon the storm. I could summon barwaaqo. I could summon the rain.”
Ben shivered. He remembered Khadra, the girl he had found locked inside the substance of the Queen, her words choking him with need.
The Queen will bring barwaaqo to us. The Queen will bring the rains.
“Such power has consequences,” Atiya said. “I did not think my union with the stone an event beyond recall. But I was wrong. The storm was in me and I was in the storm. Punt relied on my new-found influence and I drew clouds from the southern seas to wash away the ash. I paid no mind to the natural order. The love of the Bull and the Cow. And I paid no mind to jealous eyes…
“Once again, Punt flourished. Hatshepsut returned to her kingdom, and for several years we sent many tributes north, thankful for her boon. We sent unguents. Animals and plants. Ivory, silver and gold.
“Those plentiful years were not without sadness. My father, Parahu, welcomed the Reaper and so I was the last of my kind. The days of the Fi
rst-Breed, we serpent-born servants of Eebe, were coming to an end. Great empires rose across the sea. The gods slowly withdrew from the earth, and among the mortals there were some who would claim power in their absence. Some who would become kings. And kings who would be gods.”
The Queen paused, her sorrow a cloak thrown over her shame. Pride lingered in her eyes, but not without wounds, Ben saw, a dull blue sheen that shied from resting directly upon him.
“One day, Kamenwati returned to us. The priest arrived in a single ship, with only a simple crew. How could I have known that he sailed on ill winds, without the Pharaoh’s blessing? How could I have known about the rumours in the north, whispers of cults and heresy, of child sacrifice and dark arts? I greeted him as a saaxib, a friend. He came to us in peace, he said, to learn more about my people. For days he resided in my palace with everything that a man could wish for.
“It was not enough. Soon, drunk on wine in the late hours, the priest began to share his ambitions. Kamenwati worshipped death, and appointing himself as death’s ambassador he longed to escape his own ending. He dreamt of an immortal kingdom on earth, a kingdom to rival Egypt and Punt, to dwarf and shackle both the great realms and ascend to an authority yet unknown. In the name of Anubis, the jackal-headed god, he intended to betray his Pharaoh and defy the royal dynasty. He craved an Anubian empire, stretching from sea to sea, where life and death would depend on his will and no army would dare challenge him.”
Atiya looked up. She held herself in a vice-like grip, her shoulders shaking to the rhythm of her grief.
“He…he longed for my allegiance. He longed for the power of the Star. He thought he could break the gates of the Duat and establish his god here on earth.” The Queen slumped back against the rock, defeated by the memory. “And when I refused…”