CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Marty frowned as he stared at the spot where Lowanna and the missing Neshili had been.
Surjan crouched low and studied the ground, shaking his head. “These tracks . . . there are too many.” He shifted his gaze to Marty and asked, “Does anyone know where they’ve gone?”
Marty shook his head. “Obviously, with your queen and her entourage missing, we can pretty much guess that Dawa went on her own volition to sacrifice to her goddess and Lowanna followed them.”
“I told that girl to wait for the new day,” Surjan grumbled, and shook his head.
Marty was standing with Surjan and Sharrum, at the head of a war party comprised of François, Gunther, Kareem, and twenty men with spears and bows. François had insisted they bring their bows, rather than the atlatls they had spent most of their lives using. When Surjan had asked him why, the Frenchman had said, “Fire faster, and more shots.”
That had settled the argument.
They were deep in the forest, with trees crowding in all around them. There was no path, but the ground was damp and preserved tracks well enough despite grass and other ground cover.
“It looks like our people might have been attacked by other Neshili,” Sharrum said. “Look at this track; it’s made by a sandaled foot. It is the same design as the ones we wear. Maybe Queen Halpa’s men? This one, on the other hand, is the imprint of a bare foot.”
“Queen Halpa,” Marty said with a grimace. “If you’re right, then it’s them and whoever else they’ve joined with.”
“So, who are the barefooted people?” Sharrum asked.
“I don’t really care who they are,” Surjan growled. “They kidnapped our people. Now they pay.” He panned his gaze across the team, looking at each of the original expedition members and said with an ominous tone, “We’ll use everything we have to get these people back.”
Kareem’s frown melted away only to be replaced with an enthusiastic smile. “By God.”
“First, we have to find these people,” Marty said as a loud squawk filled the air.
“Marty!” a voice cried. “Marty!”
Marty felt like he was being paged. He turned, looking for the source of the voice.
Marty! A parrot flew past overhead. It had the same green-and-yellow coloration as the one that had alerted him to Lowanna’s call for help.
The large bird banked and flew directly toward Marty as the linguist instinctively held out his arm to block the bird’s approach.
Instead of flying off, it landed heavily on his arm and gave out a loud squawk. Marty!
“I heard you!” Marty responded as he stared at the unexpected bundle of feathers perched on his arm.
The bird ruffled its feathers and returned his stare.
“Yes?” Marty wasn’t sure what to make of the visitor when the bird suddenly began speaking rapidly in chirps, head bobs, and the occasional squawk.
The others in the group simply stared as the bird began chattering at Marty.
Your woman sent me.
“I don’t have a woman,” Marty said, and then felt stupid. The bird must mean Lowanna. “Where is she?”
They have not eaten her yet.
“What?” Marty nearly threw the bird to the ground. “What do you mean, ‘yet’?”
“Marty, what is it?” Surjan leaned forward, looking as if he might tackle the bird.
Eaters of your people. Some are eaten. But not your woman. Your woman sent me. To guide you.
Eaten? Marty’s eyes widened.
The bird would have no idea who had been eaten and probably couldn’t even count how many. “Where are they?” Marty asked.
The bird shifted his gaze away from Marty and pointed his beak toward a low rise in the distance. At the top of the hill. Follow me.
“Show us!” Marty snapped his arm, intending to launch the parrot into the sky, but the bird dug in his claws and stayed clutched to him.
Your woman warns you. Other woman there. Angry woman.
Angry woman? Maybe Halpa?
“Will you fly now?” Marty asked.
The parrot took off and headed toward the hill Marty had indicated. “They’re captured by cannibals!” was the initial summary Marty shouted to the war party and he quickly filled them in on what the bird had told him as they chased after it.
It occurred to Marty, as he was racing toward the mound, ducking and dodging through bright green foliage with the war party at his heels, that the cannibals holding Lowanna might be waiting for him. Even though the parrot had obviously been sent by Lowanna, he and his team could still be running into a trap. Shortly thereafter, the parrot swooped low over his head and called to him.
Follow the stream! Use cliff.
With Surjan by his side, Marty echoed the instructions to him in a whisper, veered right, and began splashing through the shallow water, following the curve of the hill around to the other side. There the side of the hill was shorn away, leaving a granite cliff exposed. Marty stopped to examine the cracks in the rock, looking for the best handholds.
Surjan and François caught up, and the rest of the war band was only moments behind. They stood together and stared up at the rock. Marty could make out the ends of palisade walls, built right to the edge of the cliff. He also saw boulders, singly, like standing stones.
“I’ll take most of the men around front,” Surjan said. “We’ll attack the men on the wall.”
“With the bows and arrows,” François said.
“Fire faster,” Surjan said, “and more shots.”
“I’ll take the best climbers and go up the wall,” Marty said. “By the time we get to the top, you should be engaged.” He turned to the men. “Who here is a strong climber?”
He expected Kareem to be his first volunteer, and instead he couldn’t find the young Egyptian.
“Did anyone see where Kareem went?”
Kareem got himself up the cliff easily while Marty was jabbering with the warriors. The climb was child’s play, easy enough that near the top he slipped his ankh into his hand to arm himself.
Nearing the top of the cliff, he smelled roasting meat. His mouth watered.
He didn’t wait for Surjan’s men to provide a distraction, either, but just squirmed through the tall grass at the top of the cliff on his belly. Three dark granite stones squatted there in a triangular arrangement, a few steps from the edge, and a man with a spear leaning against his shoulder and a stone knife in his hand stood idly whittling at a scrap of wood. He wore a leather kilt and a leather strap from hip to shoulder, from which hung a pouch and two short javelins.
Kareem wriggled past the man, stood on the far side of the stones, and then stabbed the man high between his shoulder blades.
The ankh sliced through skin, tendon, and without resistance pierced between the vertebra, severing whatever connection the head had to the rest of the body.
The man’s limbs spasmed as his body pitched forward.
Kareem heard the phlegm-filled death rattle of the man’s last breath.
Easy.
The smell of food grew stronger. He hadn’t had a truly satisfying meal since Surjan’s coronation and wedding feast, and his belly rumbled.
Then he crouched in the shadow of the stone triangle to survey the space he had entered. A wooden palisade surrounded an area cleared of trees. The posts were ten feet tall and a parapet ran around the inside. The palisade made a horseshoe shape, with the cliff left undefended. Men stood on the parapet, spaced forty feet apart. They wore the same kilt and pouch as the man Kareem had just killed and were armed with the same knife and javelins.
Within the wooden walls stood a ring of granite stones. These looked ancient, something like the Nabta Playa stones, or the English Stonehenge. As a younger man, Kareem would have said they looked pagan, but he’d walked many strange roads in the last year. Some looked like fangs, individual sharpened teeth poking from the wet earth. Others were arranged in clusters or stacked in haphazard piles. Some had holes bored through them, but smoothly, in a fashion suggesting the holes had been drilled by the action of water.
Within the circle of the stones, Kareem saw skin tents and huts. He saw fighters, some armed and dressed in the local fashion, and some who were obviously Neshili. He recognized some of the faces from Nesha.
Traitors to their own people.
He saw meat on a spit, smelled it, and then recognized the meat.
Ammun.
That had been the man’s name. He was the genealogist and poet of Nesha, the fat fellow who seemed to know all about their history and stories. He turned over a fire now on a spit, the pole entering through his open mouth and emerging from . . . Kareem didn’t want to think where. His hair had been shaved before he’d been put on the spit or maybe it had already singed away, but Kareem didn’t smell burning hair.
He thought that his stomach should be churning in outraged revolt, but it didn’t.
Two men turned the spit with Ammun on it, and a third poked at his flesh with a knife. Other men loitered about, seemingly laughing at the dead man’s expense. The Neshili who had fled with their queen had somehow made common cause with these savages, and they were now preparing to eat their historian together.
Kareem had come first up the wall for one reason. Slipping unseen as the shadow of a passing bird, he began checking tents and huts. He peeked in through cracks and under lifted flaps, trying not to attract attention. He ignored a group of bound Neshili who didn’t notice him. They’d be saved or they wouldn’t, but they weren’t what Kareem had come for. He ignored unbound Neshili when he saw them, too. He was uninterested in inflicting justice on those who had fled with their queen. Surjan or Marty would see to that.
He heard shouting at the wall, telling him that Surjan and his men had begun their attack.
A weasel slipped into one tent as he approached. When he lifted the flap to look inside, he found Lowanna, lying on her side, wrists and ankles tied together, a gag in her mouth, and the weasel standing beside her head. Lowanna faced Kareem and looked him in the eyes.
He hadn’t come for her, either, but he couldn’t exactly ignore her. Carefully, he sliced off her gag and then freed her hands and ankles. She pointed past her feet at the tent’s door. Kareem slit the tent with the ankh and entered. Then he casually stepped over a number of Neshili prisoners and peeked through the door. A leather-kilted warrior stood at the tent door, his back to Kareem.
Moving like a shadow, Kareem jumped onto the man’s back, and from behind squeezed the guard’s windpipe, shutting it as he stabbed his ankh into one of the guard’s lungs.
The guard twisted as Kareem sliced sideways, puncturing the other lung and slicing the heart in half on the way. The man fell to his knees and shuddered. For the briefest of moments, it felt like the man’s life essence poured from him into Kareem, giving the assassin a euphoric rush that made him tingle from head to toe.
The body went limp and Kareem let the guard sink to the ground without a sound.
With his skin tingling from the incident, he eagerly looked for his next victim.
He glanced at Lowanna and paused . . . In the dimly lit tent, the dark woman was limned with a preternatural glow that he’d never noticed before. And suddenly it vanished.
Kareem blinked, shook his head and asked, “You can free these others, right?” He didn’t wait for an answer. These people were not his problem.
He snuck out of the tent and in the next tent he found Queen Halpa dallying with a man. It took Kareem only a moment to recognize the lucky fellow—he was Sapal, one of the three elders the party had met that first morning at Muwat the fisherman’s hut. Peeking under the flap, he saw them lying on cushions and talking, faces close together. Light came from candles sitting on a flat stone at the head of the tent. Kareem was behind the queen, and could just see the outlines of the wall-like elder on the other side of her curves.
“It was a stroke of genius to turn these primitives on your own people,” Sapal said.
“They aren’t my own people,’ the queen told him. “My own people came with me.”
Kareem had imagined achieving this moment would have been more difficult. Without hesitating, he rolled under the tent flap and clamped his left hand on the queen’s mouth, silencing her. Pulling himself forward, he plunged the ankh in his right hand into Sapal’s forehead.
The minister’s eyes opened wide as his body convulsed.
Sapal fell backward, the head wound making a sucking sound as it tried to take the ankh with it.
Tightening his grip, Kareem ripped the ankh free and the elder died silently on the ground, staring blankly up at the ceiling, probably never actually even seeing Kareem before the fatal strike.
The queen struggled but he was stronger than she was. She slapped him, to no avail. Her eyes stared wildly at him as she scratched at his face.
“This gives me no joy,” he lied. “But you do not get to escape me twice, cow.”
With one quick move, he sliced off her head.
Marty reached the top of the cliff before the warriors on his squad. Even Sharrum—strong, agile, and apparently motivated—was no match for Marty’s preternatural climbing prowess. Leaving his ankh in his belt for backup in a truly difficult fight, Marty ran headlong into the stockade of the cannibals.
He stepped over a dead sentinel. Two men challenged him with spears; he easily took the weapon from one and used it like a staff, battering the other man’s spear from his hand and then beating them both like dusty carpets until they turned and fled. Snapping the spear over his knee, he advanced with a fighting club in each hand. A warrior in a leather kilt emerged from a tent to take three rapid blows to the face, rendering him unconscious. Then Marty hurled the stick with the spearhead still attached, sinking it into the sternum of a man with an atlatl filled with a javelin who was directing his attention at Marty.
“Where were you?” Lowanna’s voice tore into Marty like a buzz saw and then she burst from a tent. Neshili women poured from the tent in her wake, picking up weapons from fallen warriors and crashing into other tents. They were mostly keeping their voices down, arming themselves and freeing each other without attracting the attention of the crowd of warriors around the fires in the center of the compound, or the men fighting on the palisade walls.
Lowanna wasn’t. She was shouting.
“Maybe you can hold this complaint until later,” Marty suggested.
“Oh, it’s a complaint, is it?” Lowanna howled. “You knew those women were going to go out and do their dance to Flower Girl, and you let them!”
“Surjan told them no!” Marty said back, still trying to keep his voice down. “How much more ‘no’ do I need to say than what their king said? The answer was no, and they went anyway!”
“You knew I would have to follow them!” Lowanna snapped. “You knew I’d be in danger!”
“How was I supposed to know they’d do this?” Marty yelled back, finally losing volume control.
She slapped his chest. “Maybe stop them before they left? Maybe explain to them the risks, not let them go running out on their own?”
“They’re adults!” Marty cried. “Or at least mostly adults! Am I supposed to babysit everyone, forever? Is that my job, babysitter for life?”
“Dawa isn’t an adult! Dawa is a teenager!”
“Dawa is the queen!” Marty protested. “Of all people, I couldn’t stop her! I’m not sure Surjan could even stop her. Unless you’re suggesting maybe I should have knocked her out!”
“Yes!” Lowanna agreed. “Next time, knock her out.”
Marty stared at Lowanna and nearly burst out laughing.
As others were fighting, the two of them were bickering like teenagers. “This isn’t the time,” Marty said. “At least I got your bird’s message, and here I am.”
A look of something similar to tenderness crossed Lowanna’s face and for a moment Marty thought she might hug him. Then she hit him again instead.
“They’re coming!”
This was Dawa’s voice. The queen was freed, and maybe all of her Flower Girl worshippers—eyeballing without counting, Marty thought he saw thirty Neshili or so in the knot around him. Only half a dozen had spears, and they were all collapsing in around Marty.
They were closing in around him because a wall of warriors advanced on them, grim looks on their faces. They were a mixed band of Neshili and cannibals, and their spears were lowered for business.