Daniel Abraham - Inside Straight

“The captain must have been Ikhlas al-Din. A member or a sympathizer.” Klaus remembered Meret from his last visit to the New Temple. A dark, slender woman, she’d had vines and lotus flowers growing from her head in place of hair. She was gentle, too, and even had some German. Who would want to kill such a woman? “It was a rogue unit,” he told John, hoping it was true. “This mad captain—we will report him to his superiors.”

“He’s dead,” said John. The scarab in his swollen forehead seemed to throb. “I tore his throat out.”

Klaus nodded. “We must get you back to the New Temple. Can you ride? Hold on to me. That is all you need to do.” One of the jokers helped him lift John Fortune onto the Enfield. “Hold me tight,” he told him. “It is not so far.”

They were walking down the hill road an hour later when they heard the roar of a truck coming toward them.

Klaus had been pushing the Royal Enfield along for almost a kilometer. Its tank had gone bone dry, but he could not bring himself to abandon it. When he heard the truck he let go of the handlebars and called up his blade and armor. He could feel the heat of Sekhmet beside him, and smell the sulfur stench of the smoke rising from her nostrils. John had changed back as soon as the bike had died, too weak to continue in his own flesh.

When the driver of the truck came round the rocks and saw them, he screeched to a sudden stop, his air brakes screaming like a chorus of damned souls. Behind the wheel, a man with the long snout and gray-green, scaly skin of a crocodile grinned at them. “Those motorbikes go faster if you ride them instead of pushing them along,” he called out. “So you are not dead. Good. Taweret sent me, to fetch her sister back. You can come, too.”

Klaus lowered his sword and let the ghost steel dissolve back into nothingness. Of all the Living Gods he had met, old Sobek was the one that he liked best. No more than five-six, the Egyptian had heavy shoulders, big arms thick with muscle, and the sort of hard, round belly that tells of a great fondness for beer. Where his fellow gods dressed like pharaohs in silken robes, golden collars, and jeweled headdresses, Sobek wore baggy pants, suspenders, and a stained photographer’s vest. His skin was cracked and leathery, more gray than green, and what he lacked in hair and ears he made up for in teeth. They were long and sharp and crooked, those teeth, stained brown and yellow by the rank black Turkish cigarettes he smoked.

Sekhmet sprang up onto the bed of the truck, and Klaus grabbed his motorbike in both hands and swung it up beside her, before climbing into the cab next to Sobek. “Meret is dead,” he told him, as he slammed the door. Behind them, Sekhmet curled up and began to lick her bruises.

Sobek put the truck in gear. “We know.”

“This time it was not jackals. The army—”

“We know that, too.”

“How? Jonathan? Did he send his bugs to you?”

“He called Horus on his cell phone.” Sobek wrenched the wheel around, and sent the truck roaring back toward the river. “They sent soldiers to the Valley of the Kings as well, and there we had no one to fight back. The generals say they sent the troops in to protect the sites against the vandals and tomb robbers who were threatening to despoil the graves of the pharaohs and their queens. Only terrorists attacked the soldiers, they say, that was how the fighting started. It was on the radio, and Al Jazeera. The Twisted Fists are the cause of all the blood-shedding.” He gave Klaus a sideways glance. “You two are the Twisted Fists. In case you were not knowing this.”

Klaus was shocked. “They call us terrorists?”

“Why not? You terrify the Caliph, I think. At night he dreams of the crusader’s big sharp sword and wets his bed. In the morning his wives all smell of piss.” He laughed. “General Yusuf has sent word across the river. Cairo wants you and Sekhmet handed over to him for trial. If we do that, he says, the rest of us may leave in peace. Leave for where, you wonder? Hell, I am thinking. Well, it does not matter. Taweret will never hand you over. Sekhmet is her sister, a fellow goddess. Your friend would turn into bugs and fly away, and you would make the white sword come and go chop, chop, chop.” Sobek drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other slamming at the horn, one of his foul black Turkish cigarettes turning to ash between his teeth.

“What will you do?” Klaus asked him.

“Go to Aswan. Where else? There are more of us in Aswan.”

“You mean to flee?”

“Flee or fight. Serquet can summon scorpions, Bast sees well in the dark. Babi is strong as ten baboons, and I have many teeth. The rest have no powers, only funny heads. The army, they have guns and planes and tanks. Guns and planes and tanks beat funny heads. So we flee. Aswan is a good place, I am thinking. How to get there, though? That is not so easy. Taweret has summoned the gods to meet upon the morrow. You and your friend may come as well, and we will talk about what must be done.”

“Ja,” said Klaus, but his tone was dubious. He thought of Tut and Gamel, of the families in the yellow school bus, of the joker man who had thrown the rock at him. It was a wonder that any of them had survived the journey down from Cairo. Aswan was two hundred kilometers farther on. “Many will die,” he said to Sobek. “If you are forced to leave this place…they do not have the strength. There is no food, no water. To make them march—this is murder. The world will not allow it.”

“The world is not here.” Sobek plucked the cigarette from his teeth and flicked an inch of ash out the window.

“The secretary-general has come to Cairo—”

“—waiting for the Caliph. They will have a nice talk while the freaks are dying. Later perhaps the UN will pass a resolution, and a year from now there will be sanctions, yes? The Caliph will tremble, but we will all be dead.”

Klaus scowled. It was too true. “America—”

“—is watching television. John told us. Plastic babies burning up in fires, actors robbing banks, lies and seductions and betrayals, good stuff to watch. Old Kemel was a fool to make us gods. He should have made us television stars, and then the world might care what happens to us. But no, we are only jokers dying in the desert, and none of us will win a million dollars.”

He was not wrong, Klaus realized. By then they were passing through the camp, and Sobek was forced to slow. His truck was of the same vintage as the motorbike, but unlike the Enfield, it could not weave through traffic. Instead, the crocodile god shouted in Arabic at the people in their way. Klaus wondered if he wasn’t screaming, “Gods coming through! Make way for the Gods!”

If so, no one was listening.

Klaus looked out at the people again as Sobek leaned on his horn. Aside from a few obvious jokers, most of them looked no different from the fellahin he had glimpsed working in the fields during their long trek south, or the men who had hunted them through the necropolis of Cairo. They are all the same, all Egyptian, all poor, the ones who pray to Allah just as hungry as the ones who pray to Osiris. “You are so much alike,” he said to Sobek. “Why do you fight? Why do you hate each other?”

“I do not hate Muslims,” Sobek insisted. “My father was Muslim. My mother was Muslim. My sisters were Muslim, my friends were Muslim, my wife was Muslim, everyone I knew was Muslim. Even I was Muslim. Not a good Muslim, it is true, but I always meant to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, my head began to pound one hot day as I worked a freighter, so I left the docks and went home early. My wife gave me a damp cloth to cool my fevered brow, and I went to sleep. When I woke I had the head of a crocodile.” He shrugged. “My wife fled screaming when she saw me. She was bringing me some mint tea in my favorite cup, and it shattered on the floor and scalded me. My sisters spat on me and called me foul, my doctor said the best cure for the wild card was a gun, my father told me his son was dead. When I went to pray to Allah, the imams said I was an abomination, but Kemel—Kemel found me passed out drunk in the City of the Dead, took me to his temple, fed me on mutton and lentils, and told me that I had become a god.” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew smoke through his nostrils. “It is better to be a god than an abomination. That is why I am no more a Muslim. But I cannot hate them, no. They are still my neighbors and my kin.”