"Course not. Which means it's time for the three of us to follow the Yellow Brick Road to Aswan. Okay, you're the Tin Woodsman and John's the not-so-Cowardly Lion, so I suppose that makes me the Scarecrow, but who's Dorothy? Hey, I've got a great name for this tremendous historical event that we've all been swept up in. Mao did the Long March, the Cherokee had a Trail of Tears, and now we've got . . . drumroll, please . . . the Road of Woe!"
"The Road of Woe?" Klaus made a face.
Jonathan looked crestfallen. "You don't like it?"
"Is stupid."
"The Woeful Way? The Terrible Trek?"
"Is more stupid." Klaus started shoving clothes into his pack. He had a lot of American Hero T-shirts. "John says he will not go."
"Sekhmet says John will not go, you mean. How about the Big Shlep? The Hike Through Hell? Give me a little love here, I need something memorable, something crunchy that the blogosphere will chow down on."
"The Exodus."
"Been done. Ten plagues, ten commandments, a golden calf. The chariot race was cool. Yul Brynner as Moses. Or was it Telly Savalas? All bald guys look alike. Charlton Heston was Pharoah, I remember that much. 'So let it be written, so let it be done.' Maybe Terrible Trek deserves a second look."
"The Second Exodus."
"Not bad." Jonathan's wasps began to buzz more loudly. They did that when he got excited. "Not great, but maybe if I tweak it . . . Exodus II, the Sequel. Give the knight a sausage. Hey, did you bring back any food? Anything but lentils. Bearing witness for the world is hungry work, I could use"
The tent filled with sunlight.
Klaus threw up an arm to shield his eyes. For half a heartbeat he was blind, and when his sight came back to him there was a man standing over Jonathan Hive with a scimitar in his fist. Bugsy must have seen the menace there, because he raised his hands to protect himself. The intruder sliced them off.
Blood fountained from the sudden stumps, brighter than Klaus would ever believed. Red fire, he had time to think, but even as the words were forming the red was going green. The scimitar reversed its arc and came back in a golden blur to bury itself in Jonathan's skull. "Nein!" Klaus cried, moving at last, too slow, too late, but instead of the meaty thunk he feared there was only a furious buzzing as the blade split apart a ball of insects and ripped through an American Hero shirt and a picture of King Cobalt in his wrestling mask. Wasps exploded in all directions and fled headlong from the tent, and Lohengrin summoned up his ghost steel.
The stranger turned. He was a head shorter than Lohengrin, but his arms were lean and corded, his stomach flat, his chest broad. His pants were desert camouflage, his vest kevlar. Over it he wore a shining cloak of cloth-of-gold, fastened at his throat with interlocking green jade crescents. His skin was dark as oiled bronze, his beard red-gold. A keffiyeh concealed his hair. "You are the Crusader."
"I am Lohengrin. And you are Bahir." The beating of his heart had slowed and steadied. "The Sword of Allah."
"You know of me. I am flattered."
"I know you are a coward and a killer, a teleport who strikes down unarmed men from behind."
"Now I am less flattered. You talk too much. Killing should be a silent business." Bahir leapt forward.
He moved like a panther, his golden scimitar flashing. It slashed and spun and slashed again, quick as lightning. The first cut would have opened Klaus from groin to navel and the second would have taken off his head, but his armor turned both blows.
"You cannot do me harm," Klaus said. He raised his own sword and stepped forward, putting all his weight and strength behind his swing. Bahir vanished with a soft pop, and Klaus went stumbling, thrown off balance. Before he could recover, the Arab was behind him, hacking at his head, once, twice, thrice. As the third cut landed, Klaus was whirling, his own blade lashing out.
Bahir leapt backwards, but not before the tip of Lohengrin's sword-point sliced through his kevlar vest as if it had been made of gauzy silk, leaving a long thin slash that soon turned red. "You are quicker than you look," the assassin said.
"Ja." Klaus thrust. Bahir vanished and reappeared to his right, delivering a blow that would have taken off his sword arm at the elbow if he had not been armored. Klaus turned, and Bahir jumped again, slashed at a hamstring, and found armor there as well. Klaus swiveled. "Stand and fight," he boomed. "Take off that coward's armor," Bahir threw back.
Lohengrin chopped down with his broadsword. This time Bahir raised his scimitar in a parry. The white blade met the golden one, sheared through it like a guillotine through butter, and bit through cloth and kevlar into the flesh of Bahir's shoulder. A little harder and I would have his arm off. Blood welled as Klaus slid free his sword, but his finishing stroke met only empty air.
And suddenly the tent was dimmer, as if the sun had gone behind a cloud. This time the Arab did not reappear. Some spots of blood and half a scimitar remained beside the clothing Jonathan had left behind, socks and shoes and T-shirt, cut-off blue jeans, and a pair of crusty undershorts. Klaus looked for his friend's hands, but those had disappeared as well. Could Bahir have taken them with him as a trophy? He made one last circuit of the tent to make certain the assassin was not lurking in some shadow, but found only a scorpion and a few stray wasps of Bugsy's. Finally Klaus exhaled, and let his sword and armor melt away.
It was twenty minutes before those first few wasps were joined by others, and another half hour before enough of the small green bugs had gathered for Jonathan's head to reform. His hair was plastered to his scalp with sweat and his eyes rolled back and forth, looking this way and that. When Klaus lifted the head up by the hair and set it atop the orange crate, Hive's mouth opened and shut and opened again, but no sound escaped his lips. That came later, when enough bugs had assembled to make a throat, a set of vocal chords, and lungs. "Is he gone?" Jonathan wheezed at last. "What happened? Did you kill him?"
"I cut him, but he fled."
"I told you Egypt was a bad idea." The air was thick with wasps by then, crawling over one another and thrumming noisily as green chitin turned into clammy white flesh. "We could get killed, I said, remember?" His genitals took shape, small and shriveled. Arms and legs began to form. Thighs and calves, ankles and elbows, little pink toes with ugly yellow nails. His hands came last. To Klaus they looked no worse for having been severed, but Jonathan kept flexing his fingers and feeling his wrists, pinching and squeezing as if searching for a pulse. "That hurt," he said. "That really hurt. Some of me died. Some bugs."
"Ja." Klaus found himself staring. "Are those . . . are those your same hands? Or did you make new hands from different bugs?"
"How would I know?" Jonathan's voice grew shrill. "New bugs, old bugs . . . they're bugs. Do you think they have assigned places, like for a fire drill? Maybe I should name them all and take attendance, so I'll know which ones are tardy." He found his undershorts and pulled them on, one leg at a time. "He tried to cut my head off," he said, snatching up one sock. "Why me? What did I ever do to him? What if he comes back?"
"He will not come back. I frightened him away when I cut his sword in half." Klaus nudged the severed scimitar. "See how clean and sharp the cut is? His blade is no match for mine."
Bugsy flinched away from it. "What if he gets another sword? What if he comes back while we're sleeping?" He stood on one leg and yanked his sock on. "Where's the other sock? Did he take it? Maybe that's how he finds people, you know, like a dog. Bahir, that was Bahir, do you know how many men he's killed? He can go anywhere. There's no keeping him out. He killed a man in Paris, broad daylight, a Syrian general who'd defected to the west, he was eating a croissant on the Left Bank and suddenly this Bahir guy pops up behind him, removes his head, and takes it back to Damascus as a present for the Nur. It was in the news."