M. Scott: The Coming of the King

‘They’re not after the train,’ Mergus said.

Thirty-two pregnant camels were worth ten times that many horses or half a thousand head of sheep. No sane man would kill them; certainly they would not be allowed to stampede into the hyena-ridden hinterlands.

Another camel died, bellowing. Mergus spat. ‘They’re man-hunting,’ he said. ‘They’ve come for someone. Us.’ This was arrogance: the presumption that no one else in the train was worth the kind of silver that had bought this raid. He believed it to be true.

Pantera nodded, absently. His gaze was fixed on the hostile desert.

Mergus bit back the question that jammed his tongue; no point now in asking how anyone knew they were there, and not safe, either. The tribesmen who owned the camels said that the ghuls who stalked the desert could take unspoken thoughts and give them shape. Mergus made the sign against evil behind his back, to ward them off. He risked another look round the rock lip that guarded his head. An arrow chased him back.

‘How many of them are there?’ Pantera asked it as he might have asked for the price of new arrows, and not cared the number of the answer.

‘Nine different voices,’ Mergus said. ‘Two different fletchings on the arrows, but there could be more than two archers.’

‘That’s what I thought: a dozen to begin and now nine. Let’s suppose they know who they’re after. If I attract their fire, will you mourn my death loudly?’

A shadow crossed Mergus’ heart. ‘Very loudly,’ he said, and tried to smile.

Pantera’s grip on his shoulder was quickly gone and then the man himself was gone, firing his arrows, killing some, angering the rest and making of himself a target when he could have been hidden. Mergus pressed his shoulder into the shelf of hard rock and breathed air that stank now of blood and sweat and split guts and his own fear.

‘Aaaaaaah!’ A high cry, not like Pantera at all, unless the wound were mortal ‘Are you hit?’

‘No.’ Blood ran a river down Pantera’s left arm where an arrow had run too close. He slumped against the rock. ‘Mourn for me,’ he said. ‘Loudly.’

‘He’s dead! Sebastos is dead!’

Mergus howled fit to draw back the dawn-hunting jackals. He drew his palm up Pantera’s arm and smeared the blood along his hooked Saba knife and then across his lips and one cheek, as if he had cut the throat of a brother out of kindness, and, out of love, had kissed him.

He ran out into the gully, stabbing the air, as one mad with grief. The desert had become a charnel house. Three bodies lay where there had been one. Another horse lay dying, stiff-legged, choking on its own blood. But the death was all done by bowmen; no one had fought hand to hand yet. Mergus searched the line of the arrow-fall, saw a fissure not unlike the one he had just left and charged it, screaming.

They thought him mad, and so he was mad, and god-held, as some men are in battle, who can run into certain death and yet not die. Mergus sprinted towards the tip of an arrow that was sighted on his heart and the man holding it lost the will to loose, dropped his guard and turned and tried to scramble out of the back of a fissure. He died with Mergus’ curved knife slicing past his ribs to the pumping muscles of his heart.

Out of such courage are losing battles turned to victory. Two of the Saba brothers still lived — Ibrahim and Ilias. Of the remaining ten — nine — living outriders, eight were able to fight and two of those were armed with bows. They came together in the gully, battle-mad and ready to die.

‘We will avenge your brother, and ours.’

Ibrahim’s heavy hand fell on Mergus’ shoulder where Pantera’s had lately been. Mergus did not shake him off or point out that Pantera had never been his brother and was certainly not his lover, which is what they thought.

When they joined the camel train, Mergus and Pantera had been, to all outward appearance, strangers to each other. They had joined on different days, in different languages, with different past histories to tell. But enough of those histories had been in common for it to be natural that they formed a friendship on the course of the month’s journey from the Saba homelands and they had done so, until the brothers had begun to call them bedfellows, not sure if it were true or not, and Mergus had laid bets with himself as to how long it would be before Pantera found it useful to let the other men believe that line had been crossed.

It had not happened yet, and now he was supposed to be dead. Too late, Mergus regretted that he had not thought to ask Pantera what he planned to do in his new role as an undead ghul.

‘Eight are left against us.’ Sanhef, the smallest, wiriest of the outriders slid back into the gully, having been sent out to spy. ‘They’re trying to decide whether to ride away or attack us in here. They have no bowmen left. Mergus killed the last.’

‘And we have two.’ Ibrahim’s smile split his beard.

Let them go, Mergus said, in the cool sanity of his mind. Let them carry news of Pantera’s death to whoever paid them. This is what they came for.

In the insanity he must play, bereaved of his brother, his maybe-but-not-yet lover, he whistled up his mare and mounted at the run and unslung his bow and joined Ibrahim and Ilias in their charge along the gully. As one of the two living bowmen, he took the left flank. The other took the right. The remaining six men held the centre, long blades thrust out, cleaving the air with bloodied iron. They were eight against eight, but their eight thirsted for vengeance and the enemy wanted only the silver they thought they had earned.

It was a rout: horses screamed ahead as Mergus and the men about him emerged from the valley. Three of the enemy died to arrows, none of them living long enough to answer questions. The rest escaped. They were chased awhile, but not for long; it mattered more to round up the camels.

Twenty-six camels were left alive out of thirty-two, which was a miracle. Mergus saw them tethered, saw men begin to butcher those that had died, setting the meat to hang over a smoking fire, and went back to find Pantera.

Who had gone.

There was no sign of a body in the fissure, but no sign either of a living man so that Mergus wondered whether there had been another wound besides the one he had seen, and if he should begin to search for a body.

His mourning was becoming real by the time Pantera returned at dusk. By then, the dead horses had been burned, graves had been dug for the men of the camel train, and the bodies of their enemies had been mutilated beyond recognition so they could never return as undead spirits.

‘You’re not dead!’ Mergus greeted the spy with a joy that was not exaggerated. And then, because he had lived all his life in war and battle and his eye saw some things first, ‘There’s blood on your hands.’

‘Not mine. A man I stopped. Is that bakheer? Can we really spare it?’ This last in the Saba tongue to the overjoyed brothers, doubly pleased now, at his embracing of their gift. Bakheer: a delicacy made from the small intestines of a cow camel calf, pickled in brine, wine vinegar and herbs to a secret recipe known only to the Saba women who made it.

Ibrahim and Ilias had brought it out of their stock to feast their dead brother and so the rest must eat with them and not vomit at the taste, which was one to endure, not to savour. At the sight of it, Pantera gave a smile so broad it lit the fire, for which Mergus, in retribution, gave him a double helping of the foul intestinal mess.

Later, when the feasting was done, and the correct words spoken in honour of the dead, and their spirits sent to the light, and not the darkness, that the ghuls and ifrit and other djinn might not harry them; when the living had bound their wounds against scorpions, which were said to suck blood in the night, and against the flies, which certainly would do so in daytime, Mergus sat with Pantera and asked the question that had stayed all evening unsaid.