“I don’t care,” Nate muttered. “I don’t care.” His eyes fell closed. The dose had been far too strong, but at this moment, he was carried on its blissful gray cloud.
Jean-Claude watched his former slave companion enter what was surely his last high. Quietly, he said, “I do.”
CHAPTER 45
2589 BC
Year 18 of Kinley Earth Survey
The most serious convulsion…was the fratricidal war between Osiris and Seth… From this…struggle the forces of the murdered Osiris, led by his son Horus, emerged victorious. Horus, avenger of his father, was ever afterwards held to be the pattern of the good son, and it was Horus who at the end of his life bequeathed the throne of Egypt to the line of human Pharaohs.
—Ancient Egypt: Its Culture and History
The house was a single story, built of wood, fine cedar imported by traders in the Delta. It was a rambling house with several enclosed courtyards. The roof was of bisected palm trunks, overlaid with a mud, straw, and sand cob. The roof rested on tall wooden pillars, carved like stylized sycamore trees, and beneath it, on the north, was open space, allowing the northern breezes into the house. There were many windows besides, and they had been built using clear sheets of crystal left over from the survey camp, set into frames that allowed them to be opened and closed. These windows were some of the few remaining artifacts from the camp. Most everything from the camp had been cannibalized and dismantled over the past years.
Inside the house were dozens of pleasant, cool rooms, most with brick or stone floors. The furniture was Egyptian, but had been made more comfortable by thick down pillows on the couches and chairs. There were bathrooms, very rare in most of the country, where sluices drew away the waste and diverted it into a small sewage system. It was, altogether, a lovely home. It sat on the border of a sprawling farm, and it belonged to the Lion.
On this afternoon, he strode back to the house through his fields of barley and corn and his vineyards of wine grapes, brushing the dust off of his coveralls. He was in his late thirties now. His face was lined from years in the sun, but other than this, there were not many other signs of aging. His shoulders were just as broad and his waist as trim as they had always been. He now kept his hair cropped short for coolness, and his face was cleanly shaven.
The Lion had moved to the country to build a farm that would be a model for future generations. As he made his way back to the house, his eyes roamed over the planted fields and the irrigation system he had spent years constructing. Until this farm, the Egyptians had only built canals to make transport easier. He was the first to build them solely for irrigation. Water was brought up from his new canals through ingenious water wheels. From there in was shunted into clay runnels, which spread it evenly throughout the fields. The workers supervised the plants, but did not have to spend the bulk of their time drawing water and carrying it by hand. As a result, they could farm a much greater acerage. The Lion had had almost ten years of excellent crops, even when the level of the seasonal Nile inundation had not met expectations.
The house sat on the western edge of the farm, close to the Nile, set in an enormous garden of trees and flowers and clear pools of water, which were his wife Ipwet’s love and work. The Lion reached the high wall that encircled home and garden and saw that the garden gate was ajar. This was unusual, but not unheard-of, and he stepped through into the shade of the trees without giving it much thought.
Crossing the garden, he saw that their two gardeners were already gone for the day. There was no sound but the tentative song of a few birds up in the fig trees. The Lion reached the back verandah. The doors here were open as well. He stepped into the cool and quiet of the house. The servants were gone. This was odd, but his wife sometimes sent them home, to their own cottages along the river, when she wanted an afternoon alone with her son and her husband. The Lion smiled to himself. There was nothing more pleasant than coming home to find the house empty, their six-year-old son napping, and his wife waiting for him in their sunny bedroom with a cool pitcher of tea.
“Ipwet!” he called, keeping his voice moderate so he would not wake Isha. There was no answer. He crossed the entry and moved into the dining area, a wide room with several windows and cushions on the floor. A few of these cushions were out of place, as though someone had gotten up quickly and scattered them.
“Ipwet,” he called again.
He moved through this room and out onto another porch behind, where a blue awning hung over cool brick paving stones. This was the most popular play place for Isha. But he was not there.
“Ipwet? Isha?”
There was no reply. He moved across the porch to a door at the opposite end leading back into the house. There, he saw his son’s favorite crocodile doll lying discarded. He picked it up and smiled. The Lion had made it for Isha himself. It was wooden, and the great mouth hinged open and shut, and the tongue could loll out. He began to tuck the doll into one of his pockets, when he saw that his hand had a smear of red across it. He looked at the red and rubbed his fingers together. It was blood. There was more on the underside of the doll, a thick smear of it. His stomach jolted. He quickly scanned the room and, to his dismay, saw more blood, spattered on the floor inside the doorway. He ran inside, following the spatters, ducking into the nursery. In here were signs of a struggle. A ceramic vase was broken on the floor. A wooden chair was overturned.
“Ipwet!” He called her name frantically. “Isha!”
He passed through the nanny’s room. There was nothing in there. He passed back out and ran down a wide hallway to his own apartment. In the sitting room were more signs of a struggle, and there was a small pool of blood on the floor. He burst through the far door to the bedroom.
He found them there. They were laid out side by side on the floor, their throats bloody, pools of blood beneath them, blood on their clothing. His wife’s beautiful black hair was matted with it. The Lion fell to the floor between them. He slid a hand under her head and frantically felt for a pulse at her neck. She was already cold.
“Ipwet! Ipwet!”
He turned to his son. The little boy’s face was gray. The Lion again felt for a pulse, but Isha had been dead for some time.
“Isha!” He grabbed up the little body and hugged it to him. The boy’s cold face touched his neck, and the Lion felt his gorge rise. He bit his lip, looking at their faces. He was unable to believe that they were dead, unable to believe that they had been attacked and killed while he was away in the farthest field, unable to believe that he had felt no worry or danger at all while they were dying, that he had walked into the house minutes ago thinking of the warm embrace of his wife. He doubled over.
“Ipwet!” He clutched her hair, feeling the stone floor against his forehead. His skin was in her blood. It was all over his clothes now and in his hair.
It was some time later that he found himself standing up and staring at the wall. A long sheet of papyrus hung there, pinned by a knife whose blade was covered in streaks of dried blood. He studied the pictographs:
He stared at the notice for several minutes. At last, a single word passed his lips: “Father…”
The next morning, the Lion entered the Captain’s receiving room in the palace at Memphis. It was a great open chamber with high windows and murals of Osiris on the plaster walls. The Lion had shaved and washed himself scrupulously. He was dressed in native clothes, a short skirt of white linen, modestly unadorned, a leopard skin wrapped around his shoulders and chest, two small silver necklaces, and a few bracelets on his arms. He wore a formal wig of a light-brown color, the straight tresses of which were arranged to frame his face and fall down in back below his shoulders. He had applied kohl to his eyes in the fashion of the nobility, making his handsome face look softer. Aside from his lighter skin and his blue eyes, he was the image of a typical nobleman.
His father had not yet arrived, but the Lion was already kneeling on the floor, his arms stretched out before him, his forehead resting on the
ground in a gesture of complete prostration.
He held the position without motion. There were two guards in the room, and they stared at him uncertainly. It was not the attitude they had expected.
After a long wait, the Lion heard the footsteps. A door opened on the other side of the room, and feet entered—four guards and his father. He watched the feet of his father approach him and stop a few paces away. With his head on the floor, he could not see the Captain’s face, but he could imagine him standing there, arms akimbo, staring down at his son.
Without looking up, the Lion cried out, “Father! What have I done to offend you so grievously?” He spoke in the local tongue. His father replied in their native Kinley language so the guards would not understand.
“What have you done? What have you done?” He had expected the Lion to charge in in a rage. He had not foreseen this submission. “A group of pilgrims came to your house last week, asking after your lineage, asking for an audience with my son. You sent them away, telling them they were mistaken, telling them they should examine their gods more closely!”
“I only told them the truth as I know it,” the Lion replied, again in the local tongue. He kept his head on the floor. “Why have you punished me in this way?”
The Lion’s use of the local tongue, and thus his refusal to keep the conversation private from the guards, coupled with the reminder of what he had said to those pilgrims, filled the Captain with new anger. He bent down and ripped off the Lion’s wig. He grabbed his natural hair and forced the Lion to look at him. The Lion saw that his father was dressed in the fashion he had worn for years, a white robe, trimmed in gold, with his gray hair oiled and braided behind his head. He had gained weight recently.
With their faces only inches apart, the Captain hissed, “I warned you. So many times! Your mother warned you. You left me no choice.”
The Lion stared back at him, his head held in place by the Captain’s fistful of his hair. Slowly, in the Kinley language, the Lion said, “And you leave me no choice.”
Before the Captain could react, the Lion shifted his weight backward, pulling his father toward him, pulling him off balance. The Captain fell onto his son, and the Lion grabbed him by the throat with one hand.
The guards snapped into action, moving forward, but the Captain was now covering the Lion’s body. The Lion shoved his free hand down the waistband of his skirt and withdrew the gun that had been overlooked by the Captain’s guards. The weapon was small, fitting easily in the palm of his hand. It was one of several weapons he had secreted from the camp years before and laid away against an uncertain future.
As the guards paused, unsure how badly the Lion could hurt the Captain, he secured the gun in his hand and slipped his arm around his father’s back. Then, still holding the Captain as a shield, he pressed the trigger. A jagged blue bolt of electricity shot out, finding the heart of the nearest guard with perfect accuracy. Without hesitating, the Lion swung the gun in an arc across the room. The guards tried to run, but he downed all six of them before they could take five paces.
The Lion pulled his father harder, unbalancing him again. With a quick shift of weight, he flipped over and pinned him to the floor.
“How dare—” the Captain started. The Lion punched his neck, cutting him off and sending him into a paroxysm of gasps. The Lion lunged up to his feet and ran to the far door, sliding the heavy board into place to lock it. He could hear other guards running up as he did so. He crossed the room and locked the second door.
Then he turned and saw the Captain getting to his feet. He had drawn a knife and stood facing his son.
“You cannot do this.”
The Lion felt rage nearly blind him. He ran at him, slamming his shoulder into his father’s abdomen, thrusting him back across the room and into the wall. The Captain slashed at him with the knife, but he was weak from years of being a god. The Lion batted the knife from his hand, grabbed his father’s shoulders, and shoved him back into the wall.
“I can do this!” the Lion screamed at him. “I can do this! I have stood idly by for years and years. I have thought that I could ignore you. I have made excuses for your insanity. I am a coward!”
There were guards shouting outside. The door shivered under an impact. They were trying to break in.
“They will come through that door, and they will kill you.”
The Lion punched him in the face. “You killed my wife and my son! Your own grandson! I came home to find them cold and lying in their own blood. He was just a boy…”
The door shook again.
The Captain was bleeding from his nose, but he spit at the Lion. “You spoke against me! You think my position here is easy to maintain? All I have ever asked of you is loyalty.”
“Loyalty? This from a man who sends minions to murder his son’s son.” Tears ran down his cheeks.
Both doors shook.
“Your actions called for payment at a certain price.”
The Lion gripped his father’s neck and thrust his head into the wall again. “Do you remember me at age six, Father? I know you loved me then. Do you remember what that love was like?”
The Captain felt himself choking. Through his constricted throat, he whispered, “You cannot kill me, Lion.” In his voice was the quiet certainty of a man who was never denied in his smallest wish.
“You’re human, Father!” the Lion yelled. With his hand, he wiped blood from the Captain’s nose and held it up for him to see. “Blood. Your blood. Human blood. Red, like mine. Like my son’s. Like anyone’s. You’re not a god.”
The doors shook again. Then there were shouts among the guards.
“I am a god,” the Captain said. In that moment, he could not feel fear, he could not feel danger, he could only feel himself as Osiris, invincible.
“Then the god dies.” The Lion shoved the barrel of the gun into his father’s neck. He pressed the trigger, letting go of his body as he did so. There was a blue light at the tip of the gun, where it was wedged into the Captain’s skin, and the Captain’s body shook in random, wild jerks. His face contorted horribly. The Lion kept his finger on the trigger, sending a continuous bolt into him. A second or two would have been enough to kill any man, but the Lion could not release his finger. It was after a full minute, when there was a wet burning smell and curls of smoke, that he finally managed to command his hand to let go.
The Captain’s eyes were frozen open, lifeless, but still twitching slightly. As the Lion pulled the gun away from his father’s neck, the Captain slid down the wall and collapsed onto the floor. The Lion knelt beside him, feeling for his breath and pulse. There were neither. He stared at the Captain, thinking how prosaic and anticlimactic it was to see him lying there dead. After all the years building to this moment, it was so simple and quick. And right. Above his dead body sat the great Osiris of the mural, bearing the Captain’s face, gazing out with equanimity on all that passed before him.
The Lion turned from the his father. Only one of the doors was now shaking. The guards had concentrated their efforts. The Lion checked the gun. Its charge, drawn from kinetic energy of the user as well as sunlight, was still nearly full. It and the other weapons the Lion had taken were the only ones left from the survey crew’s original stockpile. The others had been used over the first years of the survey and had eventually broken and been discarded. He was, therefore, more powerfully armed than any opponent he might face outside the doors.
As the far door continued to shake under impact from outside, the Lion grabbed his father’s robe and dragged his body to the opposite door. Drawing on all of his considerable strength, he picked up the body and propped it up in front of him. As quietly as he could, holding his father’s body against him, he released the locking board on the door and pulled it open.
There were two guards on either side of the doorway. They turned and saw the distorted face of their Lord Osiris standing there. Before they could move or speak, the Lion shot them. The rest of the guards were on th
e other side of the receiving chamber, still attacking the door. The Lion eased his father to the ground, straightened his own clothing, then quickly ran down the empty corridor before him. Before the rest of the palace servants understood what was happening, he was outside, running through the gardens and away.
The tapestries were burning. The rooms of the temple were scorching hot and full of smoke. Guards ran from room to room, some trying to save others, some trying to save themselves. Those of the priestesses who were sober were also running. Many men and women, overcome by smoke inhalation, were lying or crawling on the floor. Others lay on couches or floor cushions, carried away on their opiate reveries, unable to mentally connect the heat and smoke to real danger.
The Lion walked from room to room, a torch in his hand, setting everything burnable aflame. There were no means of quick long-distance communication in Memphis. Thus, the Lion had been able to run, unobstructed, from the palace, out of the city, to the desolate outlying spot of his mother’s temple. He had killed a few guards at the outer doors and inside, and then the burning had begun. He had started with the rooms around the perimeter, burning toward the center of the building. He had torn off the leopard skin around his chest. His short blond hair was matted with sweat, and it stuck up wildly from his head. Barefoot and barechested, with only his skirt wrapped around him, he moved through the temple, bringing destruction.
There was screaming up ahead. His pushed his way through the great copper doors, where his own likeness had been replaced with the likeness of his half brother Khufu, pushed his way into his mother’s bedchamber.
She lay on her bed, crying. The chamber was full of smoke from surrounding rooms. Several young women were screaming in a corner. They were all drugged, and the screams were high and insane. The Lion touched the torch to the nearest hangings, the beautiful tapestry renditions of his mother and father embracing each other. They sprang into flame. At the sight of new fire, one of the girls became partly lucid. She tugged the hand of another. When the second girl would not get up, the first ran, throwing open a door that led into a neighboring room, also ablaze. She plunged in regardless, trying to find the way out.