"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."
"In Germany, too." It had happened while Klaus was still at Peenemunde. He remembered hearing Doktor Fuchs and Doktor Alpers arguing about whether such teleportation was truly instantaneous.
"I have to get back to D.C. I think I left my stove on. Paper Lion, that's all I wanted. No one ever tried to cut George Plimpton's head off, I would have heard about it." Jonathan snatched up a Curveball T-shirt and pulled it down over his head, but it was one of Klaus's shirts and much too big for him—and anyway, he pulled it on backwards. HELP IS WHERE THE HEARTS ARE, declared the slogan drooping down across his spindly chest. "Why come after me? You don't kill the press, it's in the rules. Don't they know the rules? Fortune's the one with the beetle in his head, and you're the hero with the big sword. So they come after the bug guy?"
"You blog, too. You bear witness to the world."
"So?" Jonathan spied something. "Oh, good, my other sock."
"So I am thinking—maybe there is something coming that they do not want the world to witness, ja?"
Jonathan looked up. His eyes got very big. "What's the German for oh, shit?" he said. He dropped his sock.
"Pack your things," Klaus told him. "We are going to the temple. John must know of this. Him, and Sekhmet."
Above, the sun blazed in the blue sky, with not a cloud in sight. Below, its twin burned bright in the still waters of the long reflecting pool that ran down the center of the hidden courtyard. Yet even with two suns, somehow the yard was cool.
In shady alcoves around its wide perimeter, the Living Gods of Egypt sat upon their thrones, listening as the argument raged on. Taweret was speaking now, the eldest of the gods resident at the New Temple, and their chief. The flesh-and-blood Taweret sat beneath a towering likeness of herself, attended by her retinue of nine dwarf priests clad in linen robes and gold collars. That flesh was gray and rubbery, her legs as thick as tree trunks, her head that of a hippopotamus, held up by a padded steel brace that kept the weight of it from snapping her neck. Jonathan had written that Taweret looked like a fugitive from Walt Disney's Fantasia who had traded her pink tutu for a jeweled collar and a silken robe. Fortunately, the goddess did not read English.
"What is she saying?" Klaus asked Sobek.
"She says she is too old and fat to fight, that bricks and stones are not worth dying for." Sobek took a pack of cigarettes out of his vest pocket, tapped one out, and lit it. "She was here with Kemel when he built the New Temple and it has been her home for many years, but Aswan has lovely temples, too. She has spent our treasure on a cruise boat to carry us to Aswan. The Pharaoh docks at Luxor now, but will be here on the morrow."
An uproar greeted that pronouncement. The child Little Isis sobbed and the grotesque four-headed Banebdjedet began to shout from all his mouths at once. Black Anubis leapt from his throne, brandishing a fist, and Red Anubis screamed at him. From the shadows at the foot of the pool came a rustle and a high-pitched ulullation as Serquet edged forward into the sunlight. She had the face of a beautiful young woman atop the body of a gigantic red scorpion, and the poison that dripped from her coiled tail smoked where it struck the paving stones. Everyone began to talk at once, until Horus slapped his wings together for silence, a sudden thunderclap so loud that it set the water in the pool to rippling.
He is angry, Klaus knew. He had only to look at the god to see that. Horus began to rant at Taweret.
"What flew up his butt?" asked Jonathan Hive.
"Taweret," answered Sobek. "Horus says that she is a frightened old woman whose cowardice shames us all. That it took Kemel nine years to build the temple, yet Taweret will abandon it in a moment. That we must fight for what is ours." The crocodile god took a deep drag on his cigarette. "He is always angry, Horus. He was a pilot, a colonel in the Air Force, very famous, but now . . ." He exhaled a plume of foul black smoke. "I have read how John Fortune's mother flies with—how do you say it, teke? Her wings are for steering. Horus has no teke. His wings are too big for him to fit into a cockpit, but too small to lift his weight. He cannot fly. How will he fight the army?"
Jonathan began to cough. "Can you blow that smoke the other way?" he asked. For once, he had no wasps flitting about him.
Instead Sobek blew a smoke ring. "I should have gone to America with Osiris," he announced. "I speak the English, I could be a greeter. 'Hello to you, good sir, and welcome to the Luxor. Good luck with all your gambling, madam. A woman, sir? Yes, I'll send one to your room.' Thoth married a showgirl, I could have done the same. I am much prettier than Thoth." He turned to where John Fortune stood, listening in grim-faced silence. "John, my friend, take me back with you to this other Luxor, where King Elvis rules. I wish to meet him."
John did not reply, but Bugsy did. "The king is dead," he said. "Just im-posters left."
Sobek shrugged. "Ah, well. I am too old for showgirls."
The wrath of Horus finally ran its course. Tawaret mumbled a reply in Arabic, looking as sour as a hippopotamus can look. Then some of the other gods stepped forward to say their piece, as Sobek translated. "Babi and the temple guard go where Taweret goes. Serquet means to stay and fight with Horus. She will summon a thousand of her small red sisters, she says. Bast says this is folly. She will go upriver on the Pharaoh. Min is not so sure. Unut believes we should send envoys to Cairo, to sue for peace." He dropped the cigarette, crushed it out beneath a heel.
"My heart would stand with Horus," Sekhmet said, in the voice of John Fortune, "but my head knows that Taweret is right. If we had the power of Ra—"
"If we had eggs we could have bacon and eggs," Jonathan muttered. "If we had bacon."
Klaus frowned. "What does that mean?"
"It means we're fucked."
Sobek nodded. "Aswan is our only hope."
"And if the army follows you to Aswan?" asked Klaus.
It was Sekhmet who answered. "South of Aswan there is only Abu Simbel, and Abu Simbel is not large enough to support a tenth our numbers. If they will not let us be in Aswan, then the Nile must run red with blood."
"I saw that movie," said Jonathan Hive. "Skip the blood, it doesn't work. Go straight to the death of the firstborn, maybe you'll get their attention."