CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
Marty and the crew left Narmer’s camp briskly. Surjan took point, spear held with practiced grace in a position that looked casual, but would allow him to bring the weapon to bear quickly. Marty brought up the rear. He’d have said he wanted to defend their exit if asked, but also he was in shock.
François carried the banner, which seemed to droop before Marty’s eyes.
Narmer. The Narmer.
Dead.
Was it Marty’s fault?
He had difficulty breathing, and twice had to stop and lean forward, resting his elbows on his knees while he fought back the urge to vomit.
A mournful wail rose behind them, filling the air like the slow-motion explosion at the end of an action film. Marty picked up the pace to catch up to the remainder of his crew, worried that the weeping might be following by the thudding of sandals in pursuit.
But no one chased them.
For all the shouting and recriminations of the fat priest, he wasn’t sending soldiers. Marty joined the others in saluting the guards at the picket, and then they crossed over the spiked ditch and bank.
Three hundred yards of no-man’s-land felt like a hundred miles, but they finally reached their own camp as the sun fell beneath the horizon. Munatas and two of Idder’s archers waved them through.
“We should break camp now,” Surjan said. “We need to leave, before Narmer gets a successor, and the new man decides to cement the loyalty of his troops by making an example of us.”
“Surjan is right,” François said.
“We didn’t kill the king.” Gunther staggered as if carrying a heavy burden.
“What will you do to prove your innocence?” Surjan asked. “Roll the surveillance footage? Call in the forensic crime scene team? Or just pit your word against the word of the king’s own priests and bodyguards, who were present at his grim murder by the strange foreigners?”
Gunther reached out to pat Surjan on the shoulder. “I’ll ask my champion to fight for me, in a trial by combat.”
Surjan clapped his hand to Gunther’s, trapping it in place. “Your champion won’t help you then, if you don’t listen to him now. We need to get out of here.”
“Where to, by God?” Kareem asked. “We have nothing in this world.”
“We can make our fortune,” François said. “In a million ways, at least.”
“Selling penicillin,” Lowanna harrumphed.
François shrugged. “Healing people. We could be legends.”
“We should dissolve the host,” Gunther said. “Send them all home. Maybe even take them home ourselves. They didn’t come for this. They certainly didn’t come to be part of a pharmaceutical company.”
“The healer doesn’t like a little competition, eh?” François grunted. “We could strike gold in San Francisco. Or oil in the Persian Gulf.”
They hadn’t come for this.
“I need to think,” Marty said.
“Are you okay?” Gunther asked.
“I . . .” Marty sucked at his teeth. “I feel like I just killed Santa Claus. Or Winston Churchill in 1939. I don’t know what I did, or what went wrong, but I think I might be the man who wrecked the history of the world.”
“That’s awfully grandiose for one man,” François said quietly. “And it’s wrong. I don’t think they could have got to the healing spring anyway, and besides, it looks like it wouldn’t have saved the old boy. At worst, you’re an ordinary man who had the extraordinary experience of meeting Santa Claus. Or Winston Churchill, in 1939. And then you had some ordinary bad luck and maybe made an ordinarily bad decision, together with your friends.”
“Yes, but what do I do now?” Marty asked.
“What you can’t really avoid doing,” François said. “You continue living, and making more decisions, and hoping that some of them turn out okay.”
“That’s good advice for a kid who just got dumped by his first girlfriend,” Marty said. “I’m not sure that it’s any use for the man who just killed the King of Egypt.”
“If you really want to lay blame,” François said, “the penicillin was my failure, and so was the ankh. All you did was recite the Gettysburg Address. And frankly, I put you up to that, too.”
Marty grunted, but he wasn’t sure whether he was conceding, disagreeing, or just making a sound to indicate he was still standing there. He found he had no more to say. He turned and left the camp.
He walked slowly, feet heavy as lead. The sharpshooter on watch at the edge of camp nodded to him, and so did the spearman standing beneath the bone-thin tree two hundred feet out into the night.
He trudged on, watching the fires of both camps recede and become twinkling orange gems. When he stopped, he was on the crest of a low dune, facing north and west and feeling the glow of starlight on his face like a bath of dew. In the distance, he heard the rumble of thunder, and beside him, he heard a soft exhalation. Only then did he realize that Lowanna was with him.
He turned to look at her, unsure what to say or ask.
She grunted.
It was permission enough to keep silent. Marty nodded.
What were his options? He could turn and go west, all the way to Ahuskay. He could take everyone home—well, almost everyone. Some members of his travelling folk band came from villages that had been destroyed. But they could continue to the homes of the others, and find lives as members of new tribes.
Leaving the Ametsu, presumably, still a threat.
And leaving Marty and his companions where, exactly?
Whatever the purpose of Marty’s vision, it hadn’t, after all, led them to a way to return to their own time. They were stuck.
He could take the people elsewhere. Maybe back to one of the unoccupied oases they’d encountered. They could start a new village. Marty imagined himself plowing and herding, and had a hard time seeing the image. He could teach, though. Or just think.
But either of those plans fundamentally assumed that the Sethians were done with Marty and would leave him alone. That they wouldn’t pursue him for the wounds he had already inflicted on them, and for the people he had rescued. Since they appeared to know him by name, it didn’t seem likely that they’d just let him go now. And if Marty took his people back to a village and left them undefended, then they were worse off for ever having met him.
They could keep on going, and just explore. Marty’s knowledge—modern man’s knowledge—about the fourth millennium B.C.E. was mostly a lot of blanks on the maps. How fascinating would it be to go peer into some of those blanks! To learn long-forgotten languages. To maybe leave written records. Even written records for his future self to find.
As he had, apparently, already done.
Or would do.
But would Badis want such a life? Would Tafsut?
Would Kareem?
And if he walked away, the Sethians could return along their western route and again subjugate and terrorize the villages Marty had freed.
He sighed.
He could become Narmer.
All that was known to the modern world about Narmer was that he had unified Upper and Lower Egypt. Narmer himself had referred to his struggles to do so, and the resistance of the inhabitants of the Delta. Marty could take on Narmer’s name—which was, after all, just a pair of hieroglyphs, a catfish and a chisel. In Narmer’s name, as Narmer, he could fight Narmer’s wars. He could unite the Egypts.
He could drive out the Sethians.
But could he? He’d had some success so far, but never against large numbers. The most Sethians he’d ever fought was four, together with two of their sha war-beasts. That had been enough of a touch and go battle that he didn’t relish the thought of fighting, say, ten of them.
And what if he reached this hypothesized Sethian headquarters, and there were thousands of them?
He would have died trying to rectify his mistake. That wasn’t nothing. It would be a death with integrity.
But even if he defeated the Sethians in all their strongholds, however many there were, that still left the tasks of unifying and governing Egypt. Tasks for which Marty was in no way qualified.
He could also walk away. Become a woodworker again. Make dining room sets for the discriminating buyers of the fourth millennium B.C.E.
Marty turned and looked back at the camps. They remained where they had been, but fires were dowsed now.
In mourning, probably.
He heard birds cry overhead. An army comes. An army comes at dawn.
He frowned and looked at Lowanna. She was staring up at the sky.
“Time to make some decisions,” she said.
Watch the flock of Two-Legs, Lowanna heard the bird overhead calling.
The Two-Legs will slay each other.
“Who is to watch the Two-Legs?” Marty asked.
“I believe they’re talking to each other,” Lowanna said.
“Why do they watch the Two-Legs?” Marty looked stricken.
“They’re carrion birds.”
Marty nodded. He trembled. “Maybe the birds are talking about Narmer’s army and our host?”
Lowanna threw back her head and called to the birds. “What Two-Legs? Does an army come? Does a flock come?”
A flock of Two-Legs comes from the east.
It comes with the rising of the sun.
“Men?” Lowanna cried. “Children of Seth? Do they have the heads of jackals?”
Two-Legs! Many, many Two-Legs!
Jackals with Two-Legs! Great jackals who stand like men!
They will all feed us their dead!
Lowanna turned to Marty. “A new army is coming. I think Sethians.”
Marty nodded. “I heard.”
They raced back to camp. Marty shouted the passwords before the sentry even called the challenge, and summoned companions as they sped to the campfires. “Surjan! François! Gunther! Kareem!”
Lowanna faltered, letting Marty run on ahead.
The other camp—Narmer’s men—was dissolving.
She saw men in small groups, shouldering their gear, crawling over the ditch and bank and simply walking into the desert. The guards at the entrance were gone. The fires were doused, but in the light of the moon and stars and through the gap in the bank she saw men raiding their own army’s supply depots to take food and water. They squabbled over loaves of bread and strips of dried meat, and all the while the army bled men into the night.
She hurried to join her friends.
“Tomorrow, there will be more thinking to be done,” Marty said. He stood on a stone to speak to the crew, but also to Badis and Tafsut and Udad and Idder and Munatas and some thirty other warriors. Everyone within the sound of his voice was listening to him, and others were flocking to hear. “Tomorrow, we will have to decide what it means that we have formed together as a host. Is this a people? What future shall we fight for?
“But when today’s sun rises, we do not have time to ask these questions. Today’s sun brings with it an army of enemies. The Ametsu, the Children of Seth, are not simply some other people with whom we have misunderstanding. They are not cousins, who steal our sheep and want to marry our daughters. They are monsters who herd us like cattle and eat our flesh.
“And we must stop them. Behind us, between us and our people, there is no one. There is no other defender. If we do not stop the Ametsu, no one else will do it. They will rage across two thousand miles of path and destroy every human settlement they find. So we must stand. We have trained for this, and we are ready. We have mighty warriors and mighty weapons. And we have a great host of allies—François and I will go consult with the men of Narmer and agree on a plan of action. We have an hour or two before dawn to prepare.”
“I will go speak with the men of Narmer,” François said.
“I will go with you,” Surjan added.
Lowanna pointed. “The men of Narmer are gone.”
The man scrambling over the defense had disappeared. Through the gap in the bank, all lay still and dark.
“No,” Marty murmured. “They were so many.”
“They were Narmer’s men,” Gunther said. “Without Narmer to lead them, they went home.”
“I will round up those who remain. They’re better off with us as a reserve force or auxiliaries than running away into the desert.” Marty marched into Narmer’s camp at a rapid pace. François followed.
Lightning flashed on the northern horizon. Lowanna felt a prickle of electricity run up along her spine, and her breath filled her lungs with nervous energy.
The sky in the east was turning from dark indigo to a deep royal blue. The smudge of a marching army furred the horizon, under the dust cloud thrown up by its own feet. How numerous were they?
Surjan gave Usaden and Badis orders and went to join Marty. The Ahuskay and Jehedi warriors barked at the host, driving them to their pallets to recover spear and shield or sling and rejoin their files. Gunther approached Lowanna, shaking his head.
“This is my fault,” he said.
“Everyone feels like it’s their fault,” she told him. “Marty sure does. I feel like it’s my fault, too. But it isn’t. François . . . I don’t always agree with the way he thinks, but he has the right of this. Shed no tears, not right now. None of us killed Narmer, we all tried to save him. And there’s nothing we can do about it now, anyway, except stand and fight.”
“Or in my case,” Gunther said with a sudden boyish grin, “stand and heal.”
“Who do you think you’re fooling? I saw you smash that Sethian’s head in with a rock.”
“So push our feelings back to tomorrow, then?” Gunther asked.
Lowanna nodded. “At least until then.”
“Sounds healthy.”
François and the others returned with a crowd of men. They were armed with spear and shield, and there were officers among them, so they even moved in something like formation. There were few of them, though, maybe only fifty—the large mass of the army had disappeared, along with the officers, the herald, and the prince.
The priests had gone, too. Had they taken Narmer’s body with them?
The eastern sky showed a stripe of burnt orange between a blue-gray plain and a blue-gray sky. As Lowanna looked, the approaching army seemed to spill out of the orange band like smoke pouring from a fire.
Marty returned to Lowanna and shook his head. “I’m not sure I can get used to hearing animals talk.”
“Well, we know who the cool kids are,” she said.
“I feel so excluded,” Gunther complained.
Marty laughed. “Can you find a bird,” he asked Lowanna, “and ask it to count for us? I want to know something more specific than ‘there are lots of them, and not very many of us.’”
“I don’t know how high birds can count,” she said. “But I’ll ask.”