Things were quiet the first few days we were here. During the day we'd try to track down Fortune when we weren't taking in the sights. At night, we pretty much stayed in the little faded hotel room with its yellow wallpaper and air-conditioning that smelled vaguely like fish, watching old American sitcoms dubbed into languages I don't speak. The fifth day there was a news brief that broke in. It was local, and neither of us knew what the guy was saying, so I got online and looked it up on the CNN and Al Jazeera sites. Turned out there was a riot going on right here, near Cairo.
A little background: After the Caliph got himself assassinated in Baghdad, the leaders of the Ikhlas al-Din called for retribution on the killers. And, hey, cool by me, I say.
Someone offed the president, I'd be happy to see them strung up, and I didn't even vote for the guy. "Root out the terrorists and the people who shelter them." That was the slogan. Again, I'm all for it.
On paper at least.
The thing is, how do you know who the bad guys are? If a Muslim kills the president, does that make all Muslims bad guys? If a joker organization kills the Caliph, does that mean all jokers are guilty? If the Twisted Fists are a bunch of joker terrorists and the Living Gods are also jokers, does that make them allies?
The answer is, apparently, yes.
Through the night, other riots bloomed all through the Middle East. Alexandria, Port Said, Damietta. The temples of what they were calling the Old Religion burned. There was some particularly ugly footage of Hathor being pulled from her temple by the horns. The talking heads on CNN and Al Jazeera both talked about these being "spontaneous outbreaks." Kamal Faraq Aziz, the local Ikhlas al-Din strongman—added "of righteous wrath," but the basic sentiment was the same. The fans of the Caliph were mad as hell and not going to take it anymore.
We found Fortune the next day in the Necropolis. The spontaneous outbreak of the previous night had been teams of well-organized men with guns and tasers, all wearing black fatigues and black-and-green keffiyeh, moving through the poorest parts of the city and slaughtering whoever crossed their paths.
The Necropolis is a great, huge, sprawling suburb of the dead. Ancient mausoleums with whole families of squatters living inside. No food, little water. Squalor, though.
Yes, most the people living there are jokers, but some are just poor. John Fortune—Sekhmet, really—showed us a lot of bodies. Most of them were new. The Cairo police were around, too, allegedly taking statements, but most of what they did was assure people that the streets weren't safe, that there weren't enough police, that the time had come for the jokers to get out of town. Their eyes were flat, just like the beggars' had been. That was when I figured out that what I'd seen in those children around the pyramids hadn't been hunger at all. It was hatred.
That night, Fortune and Lohengrin and I joined up with the local folks to patrol the Necropolis. There were a couple death squads we came across. But the graves here go on forever, and there were other groups we missed. The night after the riot, we lost another couple dozen people. They might be dead, they might have been taken prisoner, they might have done the sane thing by saying fuck this and heading south.
Okay, so why south? What's the silver lining? The jokers do have someplace to go. The farther up the Nile (which is to say south) they go, the more refuges there are for the Living Gods. The nearest big stronghold is Karnak. Already, the Necropolis is emptying. The jokers are putting what few belongings they have on carts or in grocery baskets, or tying them to their backs and walking south. There are other poverty-sick people swarming in to take over the prime gravesites, the mausoleums with the best roofs and the fewest bodies.
The Egyptian army, seeing the mass flight, is offering what protection it can on the road. Fortune's going, too. So's Lohengrin. And so, God help me, am I.
Internet access is what you could charitably call spotty out on the road. My cell phone does have upload options, if I can get a signal from a satellite. There are, I'm told, villages with land lines I could use to dial up if there's nothing better.
I may be a little scarce for a while, folks, but hang tight. This is news really happening, right now. And I'm going to tell you how it comes down.
One side note. We were getting ready to head out, Lohengrin and me, and I said something about how well organized the "spontaneous outbreaks" all seemed to be. I just want everyone to be very clear that it was the German guy who brought up Kristallnacht.
I wasn't going to go there.
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15. Crusader
Crusader
George R.R. Martin
THE SHORTCUT IS A mistake.
The road runs along the west bank, following the course of the Nile. Once chariots carved deep ruts in its surface, and priests and pharaohs and Roman legionnaires moved along it, but now it carries cars and trucks and yellow school buses. Semis belch diesel as they roar past palm trees and fields of sugar cane.
The family has neither truck nor chariot, only a pair of wire grocery carts stolen from some Cairo supermarket, piled high with clothes and toys and pots and all the rest of their worldly possessions. A small boy rides in one shopping cart, a crippled old man in the other. The mother and the father push, and from time to time the daughter lends a hand. She is twelve and already taller than her parents, a slender girl and pretty.
They have been walking for days, every day and all day, pushing the rattling carts down the two-lane road, part of the great river of refugees flowing from the delta down toward Karnak, Aswan, and Abu Simbel, stopping only at night to rest exhausted in some nearby field. All that long way they have stayed on the road, never straying far from the column. Every day Karnak is a little closer. In Karnak they will be safe, the old man promises. Their gods are strong in Karnak. Anubis will open the way for them, Horus and Sobek and Taweret will defend them. There will be food for everyone, beds to sleep in, shelter from the sun—but only when they reach the temple, the glorious New Temple.
The talk along the road is that Karnak lies no more than a day and a half ahead, as the ibis flies, but the road follows the river, so when the Nile loops east the road loops as well. That is when the whisper goes up and down the ragged column, passed from mouth to mouth. There is a quicker way, a shorter way, just leave the road and cut due south, and you'll shave twenty kilometers off your journey. Twenty kilometers is nothing for a man in a car, but for a family pushing two old shopping carts it is a long way. The daughter's feet are blistered, the little boy is sunburned, and the father's back aches more with every step. Small wonder that they leave the road to take the shortcut.
Since the dawn of time, Egypt has been two nations, the black lands and the red. The black lands along the Nile are rich, wet, fertile, and well peopled. The red lands beyond are harsher, a sere and savage wilderness of sand and stone and scorpions baking beneath the merciless Egyptian sun.
That is where the jackals find them.
Far from the road, they sweep down upon the family as they cross a fissured plain of red stone and hard-packed sand. One has a rifle, the other two long knives. One rides a red horse, one a black, and one a dun. All wear the green-and-black keffiyeh of Ikhlas al-Din. They are lean men, black of hair and eye, with short beards and sun-browned skin. To western eyes they are indistinguishable from those they hunt, but they know the red lands as the family from Cairo does not. They know the red lands as only a jackal can, and like jackals, they sniff behind the herd, waiting to descend on stragglers.
There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no one to hear a cry for help. The mother wraps thin arms about her daughter, and the old man begins to pray. He prays to Set and Sobek, to Hathor and Horus, to Anubis and Osiris, prays in the same Arabic tongue the riders speak. Yet, when they hear his prayer, it whips them to a fury. "There is no god but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet," one cries. He springs from his horse, kicks over one of the family's shopping carts, and slashes the old man across the face, opening his cheek to the bone. The praying stops. There is no sound but for the faint buzzing of a wasp, and the soft patter of blood falling on sand baked hard as brick.