A pair of red-turbaned guards sat on rocks along the lip of the gully. One of them rose from his boulder perch and made his way through the cones and rocks, carrying some oily rags in one hand and bearing a torch, flaming like the sun, in the other. Methodically, the guard began setting fire to the rags ... and dropping them down into the cones.
A reedy voice to his right spoke to the Akkadian, almost casually: "Fascinating, isn't it?"
Turning his head slightly to one side was about the only movement Mathayus was capable of making, and he did so, taking in the sight of that horse thief, the one who'd been suspended over those flames last night, also buried up to his scrawny neck, beside the Akkadian.
"The smoke spooks the ants," the horse thief was saying, in a detached manner, "making 'em abandon their homes. You see?"
The guard was jumping back, as the huge insects, thousands of them, came boiling up out of the cones.
"All the sooner," the thief said, "to feast on our naked heads."
Mathayus had barely been listening to this, more intent on trying to free himself, though his struggling seemed in vain. "You find this funny, do you?"
"You're Akkadian, aren't you?"
"Yes."
"I heard the guards talking. I thought your kind was all dead."
"Not yet."
"Not till those ants get you, you mean?"
"Your humor eludes me."
"Name's Arpid. Honest man accused of theft. You are?"
"Mathayus ... Laugh at me, please. The anger may help me escape."
"I don't think so. You see, that's what I find funny. A pitiful specimen like me, and a brawny brute like you ... and yet I am about to escape ...
while you are about to die a horrible death, no doubt brought about by a dire destiny earned by you for leaving me to die last night!"
"You? You're about to escape."
"That's right. Men like you... all muscle, no brains ... poor man, you only see the surface, don't you?" The wispily bearded thief managed to nod toward the two guards seated on their rocks around the gully's edge. "They're just like you . .. While they were burying us, I was pretending to be a-sleep.. . only I was actually sucking air into my lungs, till they were the size of a camel's bladder."
The guard who'd been distributing the fiery rags to the anthills was now returning to his rock at the gully's edge. Mathayus watched as the man lifted a wineskin and drank. The other guard was examining the haul they'd made: a cache of weapons that had been Mathayus's ... including the massive bow, which the guard quickly discovered he couldn't begin to draw back.
A tiny smile etched itself on the Akkadian's lips, but it didn't last long: now, striding into the buried assassin's view, came rows of fire ants, an army marching from the surrounding cones with a single objective: Mathaysus's head.
"If you're going to escape," Mathayus said to his fellow prisoner, as the ants moved toward him, "what are you waiting for?"
"You see that one?" Arpid asked, referring not to one of the oncoming ants, but to the nearer of the two guards, the fellow drinking wine from a skin.
"What about him?"
"Nothing. Just, he's been drinking that yak piss for about an hour now, and very soon nature's going to run its course and . .. ah! What did I tell you."
The guard was rising from his rock, heading over to another pile of boulders; soon, he was relieving himself, his back to the prisoners down in the sandy gully.
"Damned if you weren't right..." Mathayus began, turning toward his fellow prisoner ...
... but he was talking to an empty hole in the ground! Arpid was gone, slithered up and out of that hole that would seem only large enough for a man's head. But if that slender fellow had truly filled himself with air...
And now Mathayus was alone down in the gully—or almost alone: he still had his friends, the fire ants, less than twenty feet away.
The Akkadian was as brave as any man in his world, but nonetheless, panic consumed him, in advance of the ants doing the same, and he struggled madly within his prison of sand, to no success.
"Hey!" someone yelled.
It was the guard, on his way back from his piss, having noticed the absence of the horse thief, Arpid. The other guard was busy, sitting on the ground, using his feet to try to draw back Mathayus's bow, still without any luck.
The guard moved a few feet down the slope, eyes searching a landscape littered with stones, skulls, ants and one buried-to-his-head Akkadian.
"Where did that little turd go?" the guard asked Mathayus, as if the prisoner weren't already busy staring at a moving mound of fire ants, fifteen feet away, the insects closing the distance at a slow but determined pace.
In fact, Mathayus didn't see, at first, Arpid coming up behind the red-turbaned guard, hauling a thick tree branch, which the thief swung into the back of the man's head, as if hitting a ball. The guard dropped onto the rocks, face first, dead to the world.
The other guard, his attention finally drawn away from the massive bow with which he was struggling, abandoned the effort and scrambled to his feet. But he wasn't quick enough, as another swing of the tree branch sent him toppling down the incline, into the gully, colliding with ... and knocking over .. .several of the massive anthills. Within moments the guard was blanketed with swarming insects, who seemed undeterred by the man's screaming and thrashing about.
Another tide of fire ants, however, was rolling in an inexorable black wave toward the Akkadian, steadily closing the distance ...
"Arpid!" Mathayus yelled. "Come on!"
The thief was now sitting on the same rock the knocked-cold guard had been, sipping from the fellow's wineskin, enjoying a long, slow pull. When he'd finished the drink, he wiped his skimpily bearded face with the back of a hand, and glanced down at Mathayus with an expression that said, Oh—are you still here?
"Get me the hell out of this!" the Akkadian yelled, ants marching toward him.
Arpid arched an eyebrow, perched casually on the rock. "And why should I do that?"
Stunned by this response, Mathayus stared up at him for a moment, then howled, furiously, "Because if you don't, I'll kill you!"
Two ants, real leaders among their species, had gone out on a scouting mission, and were climbing the Akkadian's head; he shook it violently, and they responded with stings and bites.
Arpid shook his head in mock sympathy. "You're going to have to survive those hideous bugs to do me any harm ... and that doesn't seem likely. You see, skeletons don't get up and walk around, much less kill someone."
And indeed that swarm of ants had devoured the flesh of the fallen guard, leaving him a pile of bones draped with precious few shreds of flesh.
"Isn't that disgusting?" Arpid said, and shivered.
"Get... me ... out... of... here!"
Arpid seemed to be considering that possibility. He plucked a torch from the sand, where one of the guards had embedded it, and took a few quick steps down into the pit. Then he paused.
"Mathayus ..."
"Yes!"
"What would you give me for helping you?"
"You'd bargain for my life! You little weasel..."
"Don't you know you get more with honey than vinegar? Ask your little friends ... they'll tell you— between bites."
Mathayus had managed to fling the two ants off himself, but the others were advancing, a grotesque battalion of antennae and bug eyes and pinchers. .. .
"Forget it," Arpid was saying, heading back up.
"Wait! Wait!"
Arpid stopped, turned, glanced back down the slope. Eyebrows lifted.
In the midst of a slow burn, Mathayus reached inside himself and found a smile. "Where are my manners?"
The swarm of flesh-eating death was less than three feet away, now. The Akkadian gritted his teeth and forced that smile onward....