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CHAPTER
THIRTY-SEVEN

“Move them off the bank!” Marty shouted. “Isolate Seth! Isolate the big one!” Alone, maybe, Marty could find a way to take the giant Sethian down.

Surjan spat blood into the dirt. “This is not some judo match, Marty. It’s not about motion at this point. We grind on them and they grind on us, until one of us collapses into the sand.”

But Usaden bellowed a command, and his platoon marched sideways. Idder’s sharpshooters harassed Seth with a storm of hurled stones, which only caused it to roar and paw at the ground with its massive sandals.

But the few moments gained allowed Usaden’s platoon to swing around, turning to face Seth without turning their backs to the human enemies.

Most of Surjan’s spearmen now stood in a square atop the bank.

A couple of squads, and the sharpshooters, raced about in the general chaos.

Seth charged at Surjan’s lines again. It ran head-down, as if it intended to head-butt the front rank of the host. Perhaps because the way it ran limited its vision, or perhaps simply because of its indifference, it ground half a dozen of its own men to the ground. Their screams sounded both agonized and ecstatic.

“Hold the line!” Badis shouted.

The square of spearmen bent, sagged to one side, but held.

The host hunkered together behind their shields, spears thrusting forward. Seth crashed against them. Spears poked its chest and shoulders. Some snapped, some stuck. Several spearmen fell to their knees, planting the butts of their spears against the earth itself as the enormous beast-headed man threw its weight upon their shields. The line bowed.

“Skirmishers!” Surjan rushed forward with his long spear. Marty followed. Surjan stabbed at Seth’s face, and at the very last second, the giant ducked and twisted its head to one side. The sharpened tip of Surjan’s spear jabbed into Seth’s ear.

Those should have been soft tissues. The spear should have penetrated the monster’s brain, leaving it dead on the field. Instead, Surjan’s spear shivered into splinters and he was knocked to the ground.

The second rank of the formation stabbed repeatedly at Seth’s head and shoulders, striking him but doing no apparent damage. Tafsut had fallen out of formation, and she now appeared at Surjan’s side, stabbing the beast. Marty slipped forward and threw kicks against the beast’s wounded leg, trying to knock it down.

“Skirmishers!” he yelled, repeating Surjan’s cry.

“For Marty!” he heard Usaden bellow.

“For Narmer!” Marty bellowed back. And again, “For Narmer! For Narmer!”

“For Narmer!” the men in the square shouted, and they pushed.

As they pushed, sharpshooters arrived. Stones rained off the monster’s forehead, rattling down and bouncing off the taut leather of the shields. A stone struck Seth in the eye and another in the pink of its snout. Arrows mostly struck its hide and fell harmless to the earth, but several pierced its shoulder and stuck. It roared, seeming more irritated than wounded. Then it shook its head and leaped back, away from the shield wall.

Marty had no great skill with the spear, but he picked one off the ground, anyway, to use as a staff.

Then he saw the face of the man whose spear he’d taken—it was Munatas, the young Ahuskay warrior who’d explained trader tallies to him on the road.

There were numerous spears lying on the ground.

Among numerous bodies.

A few of them were Sethians, but the larger number by far were humans. Their bodies were trampled, mangled, torn apart, and even chewed on. But mostly they were impaled on spears.

Marty felt ill.

“You flee too fast, abomination!” he shouted. Then he struck Seth with his staff, two-handed, behind the knee.

Seth stumbled forward, catching itself on one knee and the knuckles of both hands. Marty struck it again, repeatedly, across the back of the head and on the spine. For a moment, Seth was silent, and Marty thought the giant might have finally tired, bowing to defeat.

But then Seth laughed.

Marty swung his staff and Seth whirled, viper-quick, and grabbed the staff in one hand.

Lightning crashed. It felt close, at the edge of the battlefield, and screaming came hard on the lightning’s heels. Rain slammed into Marty like a broad, flat hammer, soaking him instantly and sluicing through the sand and springing from the taut leather of his men’s shields like a New York City spring rain off the black umbrellas of its bankers.

He’d lost his sense of the larger battlefield.

He was pretty sure he was losing.

Seth ripped the staff from Marty’s hands with a single violent tug.

Then it struck Marty across the face.

Marty sailed across the battlefield and crashed to the earth at the feet of his own men. He tried to stand and found he couldn’t. The world spun and vomit surged up from his belly, splashing on his own arms and legs as he tried to drag himself to his feet.

Seth sprang forward, and Marty saw death coming.

Sandals swept over Marty. He saw the soles, and mud, and kilts. And spears were being planted into the ground to either side of him, and he heard a crash and a heavy groaning sound as Seth slammed again into the line that had moved forward to enclose Marty.

Then Surjan was there, dragging Marty to his feet.

“For Narmer!” Surjan bellowed, and he pulled Marty away.

Seth’s warriors had regrouped and came charging forward. Marty’s men were off the bank and on flat ground now, and the enemy swarmed on all sides. Idder shouted directions to a platoon of skirmishers within the square formation and they unleashed a continuous volley at the Sethians’ auxiliaries. Men screamed and fell. Was that good? Marty wasn’t certain who was doing the dying.

And did it matter, really? The human levy massed under the Sethians wasn’t really Marty’s enemy. He wanted to rescue them, not kill them.

Only, they resisted rescue.

Surjan left him and returned to the fray, shouting at the top of his lungs. Lowanna was there, staring into the storm and mouthing something. Talking to animals Marty couldn’t see? François held a large ring that looked familiar to Marty, but he wasn’t sure why.

His vision was blurry. Was it the rain?

Or had he been hit on the head?

Marty realized he was lying down. He stood, looking for Kareem, and found the young man holding a spear and shield and standing in the battle line. The man beside Kareem went down, a Sethian spear through the center of his chest, and Marty felt sick.

Livers, François had said.

Kareem had seen a Sethian without a nose ring and struggling to breathe.

Was it possible?

Thunder crashed into Marty’s ears and behind it came the cacophony of battle. He heard the whir and snap of slings, the shattering of spears, and men chanting, “Narmer! Narmer! Narmer!”

How many of the men in the battle line had actually been followers of the dead king, and how many were simply chanting what Marty chanted? How could they possibly have seen in the would-be unifier of Egypt what Marty saw, from the perspective of five thousand years later?

Maybe the Sethians had a vulnerability. An Achilles’ heel of sort.

An Achilles’ nose ring, as it were.

He wished he had more to go on.

Marty heard screaming.

He looked for Kareem and didn’t see him. Had the young man fallen? Was he trampled?

And did he also hear trumpets? Or was that a ringing inside his own head?

“Hold the line!” Surjan bellowed. “Fighting withdrawal! Step! Step!”

Seth crashed against Surjan’s square. Ironically, what stopped the spear-warriors from being pushed up and over the bank into the ditch might have been the pressure of the Sethians’ own troops on the other side. The square bowed in, trembled, but held.

Human fighters with spears on the other side of the wall shrieked hideous threats and hurled themselves on the shields and spears of Marty’s host. Others raced toward the right wing and beyond, attempting to outflank the spear-fighters and being frustrated by their square formation.

Idder shouted commands and the skirmishers let loose on the outflanking soldiers, who melted like an April snow.

Arrows fell on the square, too, but the inner line of Surjan’s men kept their shields raised. Most of the arrows struck in the thick hide and stayed.

Seth roared and charged forward, spears poking it fruitlessly in the head and chest. At the same time, the enemy warriors on the bank gave way, and Surjan’s square moved—

But not all together, and the square opened at one end.

A platoon of enemy soldiers charged at the ragged opening. Where had they come from? Marty snatched another spear from the ground, but this one was already cracked in half. He ripped the two halves entirely apart and held them like fighting batons.

Leaving François, he charged toward the advancing flankers.

But Tafsut got there first. She ran at the head of a squad of warriors. Marty didn’t know all the host by name, but he knew their faces, and these men were strangers. They weren’t all armed with spears, either—some had maces and clubs, and at least one had a long bronze khopesh.

These were some of Narmer’s men who had stayed behind.

“Narmer!” Tafsut shouted. She carried a shield and spear and she made good use of them. There was no line to hold, but she flung herself into the enemy, slashing, tripping, and stabbing, and when her spear was left impaled through a dead warrior, she stooped and grabbed a short sword.

Behind the charging enemy came two Sethians.

Marty rushed to Tafsut’s aid. The Ahuskay warrior ducked under the swing of a Sethian ax and slashed the inside of the monster’s thigh. As Marty had seen far too many times, the blade didn’t cut the alien’s skin. Tafsut deflected a second swing by moving to intercept it early and batting it aside, and then stabbed the Sethian harmlessly in the side.

The wave of Narmer’s men broke on the two Sethians and ebbed back. The second Sethian seized a spearman bodily and hurled him into the ranks of his own comrades. Then he lunged to grab for Tafsut.

Marty arrived. He bent backward as if dancing the limbo to duck beneath the tossed spearman, then leaped over the swing of an oversized ax. Then he swung both his batons in a violent scissorlike motion, cracking them together on the second Sethian’s outstretched wrist.

The Sethian roared and turned to punch Marty. One on one, these ordinary Sethian warriors were simply not quick enough to hit Marty. Marty had become faster in his three months of traveling, training, and fighting his way across ancient North Africa. He ducked, then parried a second punch by slamming it aside with both batons held close together.

Then he heard Tafsut yell—a short, violent sound that ended in a choking noise.

His foe was lunging for him and Marty had no time to look at the other Sethian. Instead, he leaped forward and planted one foot on his opponent’s shoulder. As the Sethian dove to try to seize Marty, Marty propelled himself upward and backward using the Sethian’s own energy. He arced his back, imagining himself a leaping dolphin, hurling his body back toward Tafsut.

The Ahuskay warrior was bleeding from a bad gash in her leg, which dangled limply. Her Sethian foe had one hand around her neck and had her hoisted off the ground. It shook the woman and roared into her face.

Tafsut’s cheeks were purple and her eyes were rolling in her head.

Marty swung first one baton and, rolling over in midair, then the second. Both blows struck the Sethian in his nose ring. The first cracked the ring in half, and the second batted it out of sight, sending it flying in two fragments across the fray.

The lunging Sethian roared in frustration, missing Marty.

The Sethian who had Tafsut by the throat shrieked, an animal sound of terror, and slammed the woman against the ground.

Marty stepped over Tafsut protectively and slammed both his batons into the ringless Sethian’s belly. The Sethian gasped, coughed, and began to choke.

Kareem and François were right. There was something about the rings.

He shot a glance over his shoulder and saw that the square of spearmen had closed up again. Had Tafsut saved them from a rout?

But the square bowed on all sides.

Marty leaped to attack the second Sethian, aiming a barrage of pummeling blows at its muzzle. The Sethian swiped once with a hand, and then a second time, and then it put both hands over its face and started to stagger backward.

“Back, monster!” Marty shouted. “I know your secret!” He shouted just in case the Sethians could understand him, and also for the benefit of his host. Narmer’s men swarmed forward, dragging down the ringless Sethian. The other Sethian fled.

But at the same moment, Surjan’s formation collapsed.

“Hold the line!” Surjan shouted, as the square crumpled.

A few men formed up here and there in clumps, fighting back-to-back or in small rings. Others fell, ground under the feet of the Sethians, Seth itself, and their human levies. Still others simply evaporated, fleeing or falling or disappearing from Marty’s view.

Trumpets blew. Seth roared and lurched forward at its berserker pace, snapping up warriors and rending them with its jaws. Marty and the knot of warriors he was with formed up in a confused tangle, trying to stay over Tafsut to protect her as the host broke.

Kareem wiggled through the curtains of fighting men around them and tugged at Marty’s sleeve. “Tafsut,” he said. “Is she . . . ?”

Marty took advantage of a momentary respite in the fighting around him to kneel and check.

Tafsut was dead.


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Framed