CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
This time the priest brought the pot over to the palanquin and held it below Narmer’s face. The king spat blood directly into the pot, which reeked of death and corruption.
Then the priests levered Narmer back onto the palanquin. His breath had become a constant rattle.
“This is why I must keep my men from seeing me,” Narmer rumbled. His words came slower by the minute. “A king can only reign as long as he inspires confidence. No one seeing me now would believe I could defeat the Nine Bows, or the kings of the Lower Black Land, or the Children of Seth. No one would think I could hold on to life until the setting of the sun. And they would be right.”
“What is the illness that plagues the king?” Gunther asked the two priests. Lowanna leaned at his shoulder, listening. “How does it kill?”
“We have no name for it.” The blockheaded priest shook his head. “It turns his insides all to blood. He is rotting alive.”
“We are wasting time!” The rotund priest stamped his feet. He looked at the guards as if to give them an order, but only scowled.
“Show them my feet.” Narmer grinned the ghoulish grin of a little boy excited about something disgusting. “If you can stand it.”
“I’m a healer,” Gunther said.
One of the priests peeled back the sheet from Narmer’s feet. The king’s feet and legs were black and necrotic. Herbs were packed in bundles around the flesh, but the stink that rose off Narmer’s uncovered body nevertheless nearly knocked Marty unconscious.
The rot ran up Narmer’s legs in black and yellow streaks. His shanks were hairless and withered, and the skin hung loose on his bones, as if the flesh was all gone.
“This is the true majesty of mankind,” Narmer moaned. “Death. Our common lot, our royal cloak, our universal end.”
“What do you think?” Marty murmured to Gunther, drawing him and Lowanna to one side.
“I’m not a medical doctor,” Gunther said. “I’m only trained as a military medic. This isn’t something I can run an IV for or stitch up. My only options are, you know, I can do things.” He wiggled his fingers. “And what I can do, I’m not really sure that I can do anything about that. And besides, I don’t even know what that is on his legs. Leprosy? Isn’t leprosy a bacterium or something? So I don’t know, as long as we’re taking long shots, maybe we try François’s uh, penicillin? But does leprosy make you cough like that? Can he have leprosy and also tuberculosis? Is it gangrene?”
“We had a camel that had a section of foul-smelling blackened skin like that.” Lowanna wrinkled her nose. “It was gangrene, and we had to put him down.”
Gunther shook his head. “If it’s gangrene, I think he’s a dead man. Look how far up his legs it’s gone. We’re not going to amputate his torso.”
“Yes, but the things you can do,” Marty said. “Your gifts.”
“We can try,” Lowanna said. “This is the Narmer, isn’t it? We have to try. It’s like if we could save Churchill’s life in 1939, or if we could stop Martin Luther King from getting shot. Without this guy, there’s no Egypt as we know it.”
“You think the bread mold, too?” Marty asked.
Gunther shrugged. “We try that, too. Why not? It’s like that wizard Wagguten told us, try everything, you never know what’s going to work.” He buried his face in his hands. “I can’t believe I’m taking professional advice from a wizard.”
“Not professional advice.” Marty grinned. “Magical advice. And magic is really more of a hobby for you.”
“I feel so much better.”
“I’ll help,” Lowanna said. “I can heal, too.”
“I know you can,” Gunther said. “And if some dormouse or passing squirrel tells you what plagues the king, and how to remedy it, please don’t hesitate to pass the information on to me. Sincerely. Anything that may help.”
Gunther laid his hands on the king’s legs, one hand on each shin. Lowanna put both her hands over his sternum, as if she were going to give him CPR.
Marty and the others stepped back.
“They say no incantations,” the blockheaded priest muttered.
His colleague shrugged.
Light trickled down Gunther’s and Lowanna’s arms like running condensation down a window, pooling in the king’s sheet and seeping through into his body. Marty stepped back, found he was fidgeting, and crossed his hands in front of his body to hold them still.
The light from the procedure—Marty couldn’t quite bring himself to think of it as a spell—cast black shadows across the faces of the two priests. Their mouths were open in astonishment, their eyes black pits.
And they were fidgeting, too.
Marty couldn’t hear a sound but the rasp of the king’s breath. Gunther’s body began to spasm, as if he were having a seizure, or gripping an electrical cable with his bare hands. His head snapped back and forth and Marty stepped forward to catch his friend. Gunther yelled wordlessly, let go of the king, and staggered backward into Marty’s arms.
Lowanna collapsed.
Marty smelled ozone wafting off his friend. Gunther was awake but woozy, so Marty loosened his collar and patted him on the shoulder.
Surjan tried to minister similarly to Lowanna, but she brushed him off with a growl and climbed to her feet.
Marty stood and looked to the king. His face was peaceful, but when Marty lifted the sheet to look underneath, the king’s rotted feet looked no different.
And the stench of death remained on him.
“Is the king dead?” the fat priest asked, a look of horror on his face.
“Surely not!” The blockheaded priest bent to listen to the king’s breathing. “Not yet, he lives.”
“We must take him now,” the fat priest said. “We have wasted too much time with this delusional talk of tunnels and the Nine Bows and sailing the bark of the sun backward. The king is dying, and we may yet bring him to the healing spring!”
Lowanna took Narmer by the hand. “Your Majesty?”
Narmer made a thick rattling sound as he exhaled.
“He is dying!” the fat priest shouted. “Get these foreigners out of here!”
The two warriors stepped into the room. Marty grabbed the mace hanging on one warrior’s belt and pinned it in place. “Wait,” he said.
“Wait!” François removed from his shoulder bag a grass-wrapped parcel. The bread inside was invisible under a complete covering of green mold fuzz. “This is a medicine.”
“Leave it!” the fat one shouted. “We must go!”
“You must cut this into ten pieces,” François said. “He should eat one piece per day.”
“He can eat nothing,” the priest said. “Look at him. He expended the last energy of his life talking to you, and now he can do nothing but die. We must carry him as fast as we can to the healing spring.”
“The healing spring,” Marty said.
The warriors at the door relaxed, and Marty stepped away from them.
“We may have brought it with us,” François said. They locked eyes briefly, and Marty raised his eyebrows. “Where is this spring?”
“To the west,” the fat priest said. “There is a spring to the north of the trail. The sick and the frail are brought there to be healed.”
“Are they dipped into the spring?” Marty asked. “Or do they spend the night sleeping in a cave?”
“They sleep in the cave,” the blockhead said. “Do you know this place?”
“We know the place,” François said. “We brought its magic with us.”
“You have captured the spirit of the spring?” The fat priest frowned.
François set the mold down on the corner of Narmer’s bed and drew the flat box from his shoulder bag. “Yes,” he said. “It is in here, in the great symbol of life.”
“Wait,” Marty said.
“The ankh,” François said. “Symbol of life, and oaths. We met the spirit in the cave above the sacred spring. And we have bound the spring’s spirit of life by oaths into this talisman. You know this symbol, the golden ankh.” He opened the box with all the conspiratorial drama of a carnival barker, his eyes wide and gleaming. “We must touch this to the king’s skin, and he will be healed.”
“I do not know that symbol,” the fat priest said.
“We might be a little early for that,” Marty mumbled. “In five hundred years or so, they’d recognize it for sure.”
François was undeterred. “Remember this symbol, for it is the great loop of life.”
“It will heal the king?” the blockheaded priest asked.
“It has healed us,” François said. “It has made us younger, and cured our illnesses. It regrew my hair!”
He sounded more like a snake-oil salesman the longer he talked. If he was trying to use his hypnotic voice powers, he was failing. Maybe they were like Gunther’s healings, they only worked so many times a day. Marty gritted his teeth and tried to smile.
The fat priest reached for the ankh and Marty pulled it back. The priest scowled.
“Only the king may touch this.” François hesitated. Marty could see by the squint of his eyes that he was trying to work out how to explain that the priests shouldn’t touch the ankh without contradicting the claim that it had healed Marty. “It may harm as well as heal. Best not to provoke the spirit needlessly.”
“Is there a ritual?” the blockheaded priest asked.
“The king must grasp the ankh,” François said. “Touch it with his bare skin.”
The fat priest took Narmer’s hand in his own and opened Narmer’s fingers. Next to the corpulence of his priest, Narmer looked frail and brittle, just a bundle of sticks. Marty held his breath as François gently worked the staff of the ankh into Narmer’s palm and then the priest wrapped the king’s fingers shut.
“What now?” the fat priest asked.
“We should definitely say a prayer,” François said. “An incantation. Do you know something appropriate, Marty?”
Marty drew himself to his full height, feeling deeply conflicted and guilty.
“Four score and seven years ago,” he said, forcing his thoughts to run along their natural English path. He spoke slowly and thoughtfully, doing his best imitation not of Abraham Lincoln, but of the animatronic Abraham Lincoln he’d seen at a state fair when he was nine. That ashen-skinned simulacrum had led him to memorize the entire Gettysburg Address and deliver it to his class for extra credit in history, and he’d never forgotten it. “Our fathers brought forth upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
The gold metal of the ankh appeared to melt in Narmer’s hand, leaving behind a familiar silver sheen. Marty watched as the particles of gold flowed onto the king’s skin as if they had a mind of their own. The golden hue the ankh had transferred to the king seeped into the man’s skin and vanished.
The priests’ eyes were fixed on the king’s hand. They saw what had happened, as well.
“Keep going,” François muttered. He slid the box away so that the ankh gently tumbled onto Narmer’s chest.
“Now we are engaged in a great civil war,” Marty said, “testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The glowing had stopped, along with Marty’s sense that the gold from the ankh was leeching into the king. He licked his lips and continued. “We are met on a great battle-field of that war.” The priests looked up at Marty anxiously. “We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.” Narmer grunted and lay still. “It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.”
Except it didn’t feel fitting and proper, it felt like a scam.
“The king is dead!” The fat priest dropped Narmer’s hand and pulled at his own hair. The ankh lay ignored, its gold sheen gone, leaving only a cold, dull silver object on the king’s chest. “The king is dead. You have killed him!”
Grandpa Chang’s voice projected in his head.
One moment can change a day, one day can change a life, and one life can change the world.
Marty’s hand began to shake. Did they just change the path of history? Was Ancient Egypt doomed by something he’d just done, or maybe not done?
“What?” François fumbled and dropped the box. It clattered dully on the packed earth floor. “No, wait a minute, that isn’t right.”
“You said the spirit could harm him as well as heal him,” the blockheaded priest said.
“I explained that poorly,” François said. “What I meant—”
“It has harmed him!” the fat priest shrieked. “It has killed him!”
“We could have taken the king to the healing spring.” The blockheaded priest shook his head in sorrow. “You took the king’s last moments and ate them up with your petition.”
Marty felt his breath coming short, and it was getting difficult to see. He hadn’t felt this much anxiety since . . . since . . .
“Seize them!” the fat priest shrieked.
The warriors had snaked their maces into their hands while Marty’s back was turned. One now grabbed Lowanna by her hair and held the mace over her, while the other did the same with Kareem.
“Cowards,” Surjan growled. “Put down the boy and the woman and I will kill you both with my fists alone.”
“Nobody needs to kill anyone.” Marty’s head was spinning. He had failed. Narmer was dead. He had come so far, he had arrived on time, and then Narmer had died.
He died only after telling Marty that the quest was pointless, because the tunnel would only kill him.
But that couldn’t be right, could it? Marty had seen his own hieroglyphs inside the tunnel. Didn’t that just have to mean that he was going to arrive, and to leave himself a message? And why would he do that if he knew that summoning himself only ended in death? And Narmer was meant to reunite both halves of Egypt. Regardless of what they’d done here, it must still happen . . . shouldn’t it?
He felt both paradox and parallel universe theory yawning like twin pits at his feet, and he was already short of breath and dizzy.
Lowanna slammed a vicious uppercut into the nose of the man holding her and sent him reeling back a step.
Kareem slashed at the soldier with his ankh and pulled away from his grip.
Both warriors raised their maces.
“We’ll leave,” Marty said. “We’re sorry. We’ll leave now.”
“Go!” the fat priest wailed. “Go, before I summon the warriors of the king and have you dragged to your deaths behind wild camels! Go, and may the gods spit upon you as you have spit upon our people!”
They exited the tent into darkness. Surjan took his spear from the table outside and François reclaimed Marty’s banner. Then they walked across the Egyptians’ camp in stunned silence.