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CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN

Marty spoke gently to the refugees, asking where their village and kin were, and what had happened. The refugees for their part were adamant—they wanted to stay with Marty and become part of the host.

It took an hour for everyone to calm down, and for Gunther to bandage the injured. Whatever healing ability he had, it was only good for one or two uses before he had to rest. Lowanna helped him; Marty didn’t watch closely, but he thought she was doing more than merely applying bandages and packing poultices into wounds. Some of Gunther’s healing touch seemed to have rubbed off on her.

What was it Gunther had tried to do? Command the sha to stop in its tracks?

Marty and François examined the puddles left behind by the four Sethians and the two sha. They found kilts, sandals, weapons, and cloaks. They also found one of the Sethian medallions; Marty picked it up and put it around his neck.

When the wounded had all been counted and tended, Surjan came to report that they had suffered no deaths.

Marty felt a weight come off his shoulders.

He and François met with the leaders of the refugees, two women with elaborate tattoos covering their faces and necks. Marty tried one last time to ask the women if he could take them home, and they refused.

“Very well,” he conceded. “You may come with us. Let us go look at your former home and see if anything may be salvaged.”

They traveled half an hour, mostly eastward and then a few minutes to the north, following a valley that narrowed into a canyon and then opened into a stone bowl full of smoking ruins.

The women had been stone-faced until they reached this valley. Then several of them broke down into weeping and rushed to this pile of burning timbers or that, looking among the corpses, kissing and wailing over the dead.

At Marty’s request, Kareem and Lowanna kept the children out of the valley.

Two wet stains on the ground hinted that Sethians had been killed during the attack. Marty stopped counting the human corpses at fifty. They were beheaded, impaled, or sometimes just so peppered with wounds that they had exsanguinated. They didn’t look tortured, per se.

But he rolled over half a dozen bodies, and every single one had a slash across the abdomen over the liver.

“Is it worth opening a body?” Marty asked François.

“No,” François said. “They’re dead, let them lie. We know who killed them, it was the Seth-headed bastards. It looks like they were probably killed for their livers, but does it really matter? If you find that the corpses were all intact inside, and some just coincidentally had a similar external wound, would it change your course of action?”

“No,” Marty conceded. Though it might affect his picture of what he thought he knew about the Ametsu. Was it academic interest? Pointless? Maybe.

He chuckled, a grim, haggard sound.

“Let’s bury them,” François said. “Or burn them, or whatever their women prefer. It’s the decent thing.”

“Are you worried they might send more warriors?” Marty asked.

“I sort of hope they’ll send more.” François’s mouth was set in a flat line. “Give me thirty seconds with one of those bastards and a bomb, and I’ll start to feel a little better.”

Marty searched among the survivors until he found his two leaders again. He asked about treatment of the dead and they pointed to cave openings visible at the far end of the canyon, above a circle of standing stones. “We wrap and bury them,” they explained.

Lowanna took the lead in organizing the burials. She found wrapping cloths or created them out of the clothing of the dead. Together with the surviving women, and volunteers from the host, including Gunther, she cleaned the bodies with sand. They then packed them with a coarse yellow salt scratched from the ground at one end of the valley and wrapped them head to toe.

Surjan, Kareem, and the warriors guarded the entrance to the valley and also stood watch along the cliff tops above it.

What these people did was not mummification as the Egyptians knew it. The salt was not natron, and Lowanna didn’t remove any of the bodies’ organs. But, watching her work, Marty felt awe at the fact that he was witnessing something akin to mummification, close to Egypt, worked by some cousin folk of the Egyptians, before Egypt as a political entity had even begun.

He sat down and breathed deeply for a while.

The women sang dirges while Marty, François, and other volunteers carried the wrapped dead up long ladders. Inside a low-ceilinged cave illuminated by the orange rays of sunset bleeding in through the entrance, Marty saw stacks of the wrapped and withered dead, and piled more dead upon them. He filled several chambers with bodies, and by the time the work was done, the valley was cloaked in cold night.

Then Marty sat with François and drank. They sat among the stones, a circle of twelve megaliths each the height of a man. The valley walls were lower at this end—did the villagers use the stones to measure the passage of time by sighting along them to astral events at the horizon? Marty could ask, he had access to actual informants, but he found he wanted to sit and drink, instead.

They drank a thin, watery wine that the survivors produced for them. They lit no fire, and talked in between the sounds of children screaming, women trying to hush them, and the weeping of the women themselves.

“What will they do?” Marty wondered out loud.

“What humans have always done.” François sounded tired. “This is the ordinary state of humankind, Marty, and you know it better than I do. War, death, and destruction. And when things go too far south, you move. This was God’s command to Abraham. Lekh lekha, get up and get going.”

“You and I lived in a golden age,” Marty said.

“Better than a golden age. The platinum age. The diamond age. The best age there ever had been, to date, even though our teachers spent all their time trying to scare us witless about nuclear war or deforestation or whatever. But there never was a more peaceful time. It was never easier to get an education, or get good medicine.”

“It’s always been good for the rich,” Marty said, with a little more barb than he had intended.

“You sound a bit like Lowanna.”

“Sorry.”

“But that’s the damn point, Marty. It’s always good for the rich. The Godspeaker of Ahuskay is doing all right. King Iken, he was going to die of . . . whatever he had, but still, he had lived like a king. The guy has multiple women and a two-story house. The rich always do fine. The amazing thing about the time that you and I lived in, my dear Marty, was how great it was to be poor.”

“For the record,” Marty said, “I never spent my time trying to scare students witless about nuclear war. Or anything else.”

“That’s because you actually know your stuff,” François said. “Ideology is the refuge of the incompetent.”

“Sometimes I kind of like you,” Marty said.

“Sometimes I do, too.” François took a long drink.

“I guess what I really meant,” Marty said after some consideration, “is what are we going to do now?”

François grunted. “I tried to be leader. I’m pretty sure you won that contest. I’ve been trying to figure out my role since.”

“Help me. I’m a talk-about-things, consensus kind of leader.”

“That’s true. Or at least true enough.” François scratched his chin, and then his neck, and then scratched himself all over, as if he were ridding himself of some persistent pest. “Agh!” he finally cried. “I don’t know. We started with some volunteers who wanted to go kill Sethians. And then we developed into a war band, except a band with caravan drivers and merchants attached. And now women and children. We’re the children of Israel, we’re Battlestar Galactica.”

“True epic literature is always rooted in great human migrations,” Marty said. “From The Iliad to the stories of Jacob to the Shahnameh.”

“That’s your consolation?” François laughed. “That one of these people might write some really fantastic poetry some day?”

Marty shrugged. “Maybe that’s all there is, in the end.”

“No,” François said. “Hell, no. You . . . okay, we . . . are going to save these people. I can’t quite figure out this version of the fourth millennium B.C.E. we’ve wandered into. Is this an alternate universe, in which there are monsters? Or is this really our past Earth, and there were monsters here all along, and we didn’t know it?”

“Or was there always lots of evidence of monsters?” Marty suggested. “The cryptid people were right, after all. Maybe it’s the Egyptologists to blame. Maybe all that stuff that we read as mythology was history all along. It’s crazy if you think about it . . . so much evidence exists about what we’re seeing, drawings, stories, even in some cases oral traditions. We just didn’t believe it, because we never found a body.”

“Because these monsters melt into goo,” François said. “Which, by the way, suggests a body chemistry not of this Earth.”

“Aliens?” Marty took a long drink.

“You can’t say it isn’t possible.”

Marty shrugged. “Monsters, anyway. And we turned a blind eye to it, because we preferred automobiles and television and penicillin.”

“Don’t knock cars and TVs and medicine,” François said. “These people would kill to have those things, and rightly so. But it doesn’t matter what the answer is, we’re here and we have to decide how to react. It’s like the existentialists say, life is screwed up, so try to take on a noble cause.”

“That’s a pretty concise summary of existentialism.”

“I skipped those lectures and read other people’s notes. So we’re going to choose a noble quest. In fact, Marty, I think if you look into your heart honestly, you’ll see that we chose the noble quest a long time ago.”

“What do you mean?”

“We killed that first Sethian almost by accident,” François said. “Maybe . . . certainly, it was my fault. I was too eager, I wasn’t careful, and Abdullah died for my sin.” His voice dwindled to a thready rasp. “A day doesn’t pass that I don’t think about that, and wish that I could take it back.”

“I know,” Marty said. “Me too.”

“But then we got to Ahuskay. And they were scared. And you could have said, ‘Screw these people, let’s go. Our quest is to get to Egypt, or get home, or whatever.’ But you didn’t. And you didn’t hesitate, either. You jumped right in and said you’d fix everything.” François chuckled. “Hell, I was pretty sure for the first twenty-four hours that Badis was going to murder me. And fixing everything meant defeating that Sethian outpost. And beating those guys put us on the track where we had to defeat the Bastites, and everything else has basically just followed in a straight line. You committed to this fight back in Ahuskay, Marty, and you can’t back out now just because you see the stakes. In fact, you know what I think?”

“I’m learning quite a lot about what you think.”

“I think maybe the destruction of this village here was a message to us.”

“They stole their livers,” Marty said. “What’s the message?”

“Yeah, they stole their livers, but think back. At Ahuskay, the Sethians treated people like farm animals. Just harvest one or two, now and then. Why would they come to this village and wipe everyone out?”

“You think it’s a warning to me?” Marty asked. “To us?”

“I’m saying it’s definitely possible. To you, the warlord Dr. Martin Cohen, who has been rolling up their western network. What did you say they called you? ‘Merit Nuk Han’? The message is, ‘Stop now, uppity human, or we will do terrible things to you.’”

Marty’s mouth tasted terrible. He wanted to vomit, but he leaned forward and spit a long string of acidic saliva into the sand. “You’re right, we’re committed. I’m committed. I don’t know whether this is an alternate universe to our own, or if maybe we’re learning some surprise history lessons. But in a fight between human beings and anything else, I’m on the side of human beings.”

“Me too,” François said. “We all are. Even Lowanna, though I think she might feel conflicted sometimes.”

“So do we send a message back?” Marty asked.

“Too late,” François told him. “You already sent it. You killed the raiding party. Including their dogs. So the raiders won’t come back and the home base will sit around wondering what happened. That’s a message, and you’ve also knocked them off balance.”

“What do you think the home base looks like?” Marty asked.

“I’m starting to think it might be the pyramids.” François snorted. “Joke’s on you and Gunther, you’ve been studying aliens all these years and never knew it.”

“The guy on TV with the crazy hair was right.”

“Actually, I don’t think their home base can be that big,” François said. “I mean, think about the size of their outposts. Groups of four or five. That’s not a colony, that’s just a few people to hold the fort. I think if they were really numerous, we’d have seen more of them.”

“We’ve just been following this one trail,” Marty said. “There might be another string of outposts down into Nubia, and another one out across Mesopotamia.”

François clapped Marty on the shoulder. “So if we’re stuck here and can never go home, we have a life’s work. Breaking up all the other Sethian networks.”

“But the goal isn’t really to defeat them all, we just want to get home to our own time—”

“Marty . . .” François shook his head and gave him a sad smile. “You’re ever the optimist. I don’t think there’s any going back.” He held up his hand as Marty opened his mouth to retort. “And if there is, great, but we can’t assume there’s an easy way back out of this. We’ve got to assume we’re stuck.”

“What if peace could be made?” Marty wondered.

“They eat our livers,” François pointed out. “Tell me what you think the terms of the peace would be.”

“I’m just . . . I hate fighting.” It wasn’t entirely true. But he hated the suffering of innocents.

“Good,” François said. “But I don’t think we’re destined to make peace with these bastards.”

“Because they eat our livers?”

“Because there are none in our time.” François shrugged. “Something wiped them out. Something wiped them out before written history started, or at least reduced them to the level of cryptids. I’m inclined to think the something was Kung Fu Cohen.”

They sat in silence a while. The cries and weeping had quieted, and the smoking had mostly subsided.

“The aliens aren’t even the weirdest thing,” Marty said. “Not for me.”

“So you agree they’re aliens.”

“Working hypothesis.”

“How anything can be weirder than the melting monster-headed aliens, I don’t know.”

Marty sighed. “When I was a kid, I made up a hieroglyphic script. When I was first getting excited about Egypt, I’d been to a museum exhibit, I learned how hieroglyphs worked, and I went right home and made my own.”

“Gunther told me.”

“Yeah,” Marty said. “Well, here’s the part Gunther doesn’t know. Back there at the dig site, in the tunnel. You remember how Gunther pointed out some odd writing to me in the corner, and that writing told me how to open up the wall?”

François nodded. “Wait . . . you’re not saying . . .”

“That writing was in English,” Marty said. “Using a hieroglyphic script only I can read, because I made it up.”

“No way.”

“If Gunther had looked more closely, he would have noticed that the script included pictures of ballpoint pens and a guitar.”

François laughed. “And you didn’t think to tell anyone?”

“Things happened fast,” Marty said. “And I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

“Liar,” François said. “We’ve had multiple conversations to sit down and inventory our discoveries and powers and whatnot. You had plenty of opportunity to tell someone.”

“I found it embarrassing,” Marty admitted. “I don’t know why. Because, I don’t know, this thing I made up as a kid showed up at a dig site . . . But . . . I felt . . . I don’t know, it seemed to me I should tell someone.”

François shook his head. “Maybe Gunther’s right and we are in the Twilight Zone.”

They drank some more.

“I don’t think the Sethians took anything other than livers,” François said. “So in the morning, we should collect what we can make use of.”

“Loot the place?”

“No, it’s the opposite of looting. The rightful owners are part of our tribe now. Let’s conserve what is ours, for the good of our people.”

“Our tribe.” Marty shook his head. “Wow.”

“We should get this written down when we can,” François said. “I mean, in hieroglyphs. If I die, I want you to put an account of this great migration on the wall in my tomb. But maybe make my part sound more noble than it really was.”

“You discovered penicillin,” Marty said. “Or at least you tried to. So maybe you healed a king. That’s pretty noble.”

“Don’t forget the bombs,” François said. “I’m grinding the powders even finer than before. The next batch will work even better, you’ll see. This is my true calling. I’ll be the Alfred Nobel of the fourth millennium.”

“In the morning, we’ll gather up what we can use here,” Marty said. “And I want to send Lowanna on ahead.”

“To scout?” François asked.

“Yes. The animals will help her. They tell her things I’d like to know.”

“I know they do,” François said. “So there’s some competition for what’s the weirdest part of this whole experience.”


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