CHAPTER
TWELVE
“Your tongue is . . . hard.” The bull-headed man grunted. “Do you ask my name?”
“For starters,” Surjan said.
“Doath.” The name sounded like the lowing of a cow.
“How many minotaurs live here?” Surjan pressed.
“Minotaurs?”
“With heads like cattle,” Marty explained.
Doath chuckled, a low, rumbling gurgle. “I would have said that the cattle have heads like ours. I do not know this word . . . minotaurs. Here they call us Ikeyu. In the east, by the sea, we are sometimes called Hathiru. I am a Hathir.”
Surjan looked up to find Marty’s gaze in the darkness. “Your Egyptians know cattle-headed people.”
Marty nodded, not wanting to say more. “How many Hathiru live here?”
“Twenty-three,” Doath said. “If you’re hungry, take a cow. I won’t tell. We lose cows to the wild dogs of the prairie all the time. And to . . . cats. But leave me in peace.” He chuckled again. “I would taste bad.”
“What do you Hathiru do?” Surjan asked. “Are you all herders?”
“No,” Doath said. “Some of us farm.”
“You’re just the working class of the Sethians?” Surjan shook his head.
Doath was slow to answer. “I do not understand those words. We work so that we can live. The work is hard. There are cattle to raise and protect and slaughter. There are crops to plant and manure and harvest. Is it not the same with your people?”
“Do you ever go to war?” Surjan inquired.
“Against wild dogs and cats, yes,” Doath said. “Against mankind, no. There is land enough and water enough and sky enough for all.”
“And the others?” Marty asked. “The Ametsu? How many Ametsu are there?”
“Here? Now there are four. Sometimes there are five, or six.”
“Do they rule you?” Marty asked.
“They eat our food,” Doath said. “They protect us, when it is needed.”
“You’re a giant with horns as long as my leg.” Surjan snorted. “How often do you require defending?”
“Not often,” Doath admitted. “Sometimes, they kill us for our organs.”
“Livers,” Marty said.
“Yes.”
“And are there other kinds of people here?” Marty asked. “Mankind, or others?”
Doath hesitated. “Not here. The Ametsu have slave armies, but not here. In the east, by the sea.”
“And you Hathiru?” Marty pressed.
“We have no use for you.” Doath chuckled. “You are not very good workers, you are tiny, and you do not taste good.”
“What would your people do if there were no more Ametsu?” Marty asked.
“Work,” Doath said. “Eat. Live.”
“Is that all?” Surjan pressed.
“Well,” Doath said shyly. “Also, rut.”
Marty managed not to laugh.
“Dr. Cohen?” Surjan said. The formality was a sharp reminder of their situation, and that Marty was in some sense in command.
Marty had to remind himself that he was not negotiating with a ruler. Doath was no ambassador, there was no reason to be certain his information was reliable or that his characterization of his people’s desires and actions was accurate. He needed verification.
“Stay here,” he said to Surjan, speaking very carefully and deliberately in English. “Guard this prisoner. I will creep up to the wall and count.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Surjan said. “Dr. Cohen.”
“Stupid turns out to be almost entirely a matter of context,” Marty said.
“I don’t know any of those words,” Doath said. “Don’t kill me.”
“Don’t move,” Marty said, switching back into the instinctive human tongue of this millennium, “and we won’t have to.”
Surjan repositioned himself, tightened his grip, and reminded Doath that he was ready to strike with the ankh at a moment’s notice.
Marty went up the wall.
The boulders were easy; he fairly ran up them. The sandstone was barely any more difficult, and his vertical crawl quickly shot up the rock face. Even the bricks scarcely slowed him down. They were of stone, rather than mud, so their edges were firm and didn’t crumble when Marty put his weight on them.
In less than a minute, he was at the top of the wall. Looking down at Surjan in the shadow, he thought he’d climbed fifty feet, nearly straight up.
This sort of acrobatics hadn’t been any part of his Egyptology curriculum.
Were years of martial arts and conditioning paying off?
Or was this facility with climbing another strange effect of his being in this alien world?
The top of the wall was rough, with no parapet or breastwork. From this vantage point, Marty could see clearly that the two mastabas were of equal size and almost identical in appearance. The name “mastaba” meant “bench” in Arabic, but they had never looked like benches to him. They looked like bricks of butter, flat on top, straight on the two long ends, and on the short ends cascading down as if melting, or like the early precursors of pyramids. They amounted to rectangular buildings, one story tall, with accessible roofs. The mastabas were both dark. The farther mastaba from him had a tower that rose an additional twenty feet, with its staircase around the outside. The tower’s top was flat and open; Marty lay still, watching the tower until he was certain that there was no one on its top.
So they couldn’t defend the walls as such, but if the Sethians could hold the gate, and fire missile weapons from the top of that tower, the wall would still be a formidable obstacle. Especially in an age when no one had yet invented the catapult, the trebuchet, or even, as far as Marty knew, the battering ram.
Could he build a trebuchet if he needed to? Or could François, or someone else in the party figure that one out?
Something stank. Reeked. It wasn’t the cattle and Hathiru smell, which still reached him fifty feet off the ground, but something else.
Marty hesitated. He’d told Surjan he wouldn’t do anything stupid. But now that he was up here, he’d learned nothing new from climbing the wall. Something smelled bad, and there was a tower. But was Doath’s count correct? Were the Sethians armed? Were the Hathiru indeed nonhostile?
And he had also told Surjan that stupidity was a question of context.
In this context, Marty really needed more information.
He slipped down the wall. He climbed in the corner, where the brick met the cliff rising above the two mastabas and formed a deep well of shadow. The climbing was so light that after a couple of shifts from one hold to another, he simply ran down the wall.
Which, looking back up at it, was taller than he would have thought.
But he felt light and agile and alert.
He crept to the corner of the nearer mastaba. A closer look showed that each long side of the rectangle was pierced by a single monumental door. Marty sneaked to the door facing the cliff, which lay in thick shadow. He pressed himself against the cool stone and listened. He heard the loud breathing of many lungs, a rhythmic storm of wheezing bellows.
And the stink was worse. It was yeasty, and it had an oily reek. Was there something in it of beans?
How fast could he run? He’d had a lot of success climbing, and Marty had felt light on his feet since coming into the ancient world. Could he outrun a Hathir?
Probably, if they met each other by surprise, and Marty ran instantly.
Stupidity was always a question of context.
Marty slipped in through the door. He moved slowly into the first chamber and the sound of breathing sharply diminished. Bulky shadows loomed up on all sides of him, but they were completely still. Marty found himself virtually blind. He probed carefully with his fingers, discovering baskets that sagged heavy with things that felt like legumes and tubers and grains. He also found sealed jars that smelled of oil, vinegar, and even wine.
Doctoring an enemy’s drink was a staple of ancient wars, or at least a staple of ancient-world stories about war, which was not exactly the same thing. Marty tucked away the knowledge of this storeroom in his mind.
In the second room, the rotting stink punched him in both eyes, and Marty almost vomited.
It took him some time to understand the layout of the room. It contained a single enormous stone bowl, as big as a jacuzzi tub. The bowl filled almost the entire room, leaving scant area around the edges to walk. Whatever stank was contained in that bowl. It also emitted, Marty thought, faint warmth, and he would have sworn he could hear the sound of it bubbling. It was also the source of a faint glow that allowed him to make out the few details he could within the rooms.
He wasn’t brave enough to reach down into the gloop and touch it.
The structure consisted of three rectangular rooms, each connecting to the next in sequence. In the third and fourth rooms of the mastaba, he found sleeping Hathiru. He found too many to distinguish in the dim interior, heaped as they were over sleeping benches and in corners of the room and even in the middle of the floors. But Doath’s count of just over twenty seemed about right. All breathed deeply in sleep.
Their scent clogged his nasal passages. Would they smell him when they awoke?
He stood in the doorway upon exit, waiting to be certain he heard no sounds of discovery or pursuit. Creeping from one mastaba to the next, he paused to look out through the gate; the lone Sethian sentinel still stood his watch. From this angle, it looked even more as if the guard were leaning against the wall, asleep.
Marty slipped into the door of the second mastaba. The layout seemed to be exactly the same, but there were two immediate differences. First, the stench—both of the vat with the unknown stinking contents, and of the Hathiru—was greatly diminished. Second, there was more light.
This time it came from the ceiling. Marty had to squint to puzzle out what he was looking at, and finally guessed that it was a phosphorescent stone, perhaps set behind a lens. It cast enough light that he could see more details than in the other building.
He heard breathing, but it wasn’t as labored as the sounds the Hathiru made. He eased into the first room and found a chamber with a single large wooden bedframe raised two feet off the floor on four legs as thick as the pylons holding up Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco; Marty didn’t think he could wrap his arms all the way around one of them. Cushions were piled on the bedframe and a Sethian lay stretched out across it, snoring gently toward the glowing stone in the ceiling. Spears leaned against the wall beside a narrow chest, and Marty examined them.
Should he take a spear and impale the sleeping Sethian?
But if the Sethian made a noise and woke the others, he would be outnumbered three to one, by dangerous creatures who could have killed his entire crew. He’d kicked the Ametsu in the face and scored a lucky blow, but how lucky could he get against three of them?
He could stab one and flee.
But then Surjan and Kareem and Badis would all be taken by surprise. And the only way to flee seemed to be back up the canyon, pursued by determined foes with longer legs.
How much time remained until dawn? Could he bring back his three companions? Each could take a spear, and with a coordinated strike, they could kill the Sethians in a single instant. If Doath was telling the truth about the Hathiru, and every indication seemed to be that he was, then the cow-headed men might at best welcome their liberation, and at worst—
Marty heard footsteps.
He slid under the bed.
Heavy feet trod into the room. In the pale, bluish light filtering down from the phosphorescent stone, he saw the advance of sandal straps wrapped around enormous calf muscles, and feet that wore the sandals. A cloak drifted along the floor behind the calves, and the butt of a staff—or spear?—thumped beside the right foot.
The feet and cloak and staff all stopped beside the bed.
How good was the Sethians’ sense of smell?
He heard a voice, deep and rumbling. He didn’t understand the words. Then the voice again, and finally, the bed rattled. A second voice joined in, this one snapping and reproving. Two more feet touched the floor as the awakening Sethian sat up. The first Sethian then walked away.
Marty tried to breathe. He’d heard old stories from his grandfather about monks who could apparently go without breathing for extended periods of time because they had learned to inhale and exhale through their ears, their eyes, other bodily orifices, and even through their skin itself. It was mystical nonsense, of course, but in that moment, Marty pressed his lips shut and tried to breathe silently through the pores of his skin.
Was that the gray light of early day seeping in at the door?
The Sethian stood, snapped out wolfish noises that sounded like curses, and took something out of the chest. A cloak fell about his feet, and then he took up his spear and stumped out, following the first Sethian.
Marty slid out from under the bed as if he had wheels under his ankles and shoulders. Before he’d come to a stop he rolled, springing to his feet and racing for the door by which he’d entered. The way was clear, so he moved out into the courtyard, picking up speed.
He’d never tried parkour, but he’d seen some of those athletes climb the corner connecting two walls by leaping from one wall to the other and back several times, jumping higher each time. Marty was dizzy from breathlessness and fear, so he wasn’t quite sure how he did it, but suddenly he was at the top of the wall, sitting astride it and preparing to drop down the other side. Had he climbed? Leaped? Parkoured?
Surjan was shaking his head in disapproval as Marty slid down the outer wall.
“Stupid,” he muttered, when Marty reached him.
“I learned a lot,” Marty said, “but now we have to run.”
Surjan looked down at the Hathir. “You remember what I told you.”
They raced across the fields and the pasture full of cattle. Light glinted off white horns and pelts now. Was Marty also visible? He didn’t dare look back. With better light, he and Surjan now found an easier scramble up the short wall on the other side, rejoining Badis and Kareem.
“My bread is also moldy,” Kareem complained. “It tastes terrible.”
“Keep it for François,” Surjan muttered. “He likes it that way. He’s convinced it’s science.”
“But now we need to run,” Marty said. “Fast.”