Inside Straight

George R. R. Martin Crusader

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.

The riders dismount. The daughter, brave and pretty, pleads with them. In Cairo they have many Muslim friends, she says. They have never done any harm to the people of Islam. The jackal with the rifle answers her. “You bow down to monsters accursed of Allah, and our Caliph’s holy blood is on your hands.” He swats at an insect buzzing round his head, a wasp that glimmers in the sun like an emerald with wings. “You would steal our lands from us, you and your demon gods. You think we do not see? We see. This is where you die. The sands will drink your joker blood.”

The wasp stings him in the neck.

Cursing, he swats at it, but the insect is too quick. It lands upon the rump of the nearest horse, and stings again. The horse rears up kicking. A second wasp appears. They fly around the jackals, darting in and out, landing on one man’s nose, another’s arm, stinging. One of the riders catches a wasp in his hand and crushes it between his fingers. He wipes the remains off on his pants leg, grinning. Only then does he hear the motorbike.

From the south the knight appears, bouncing over stone and sand, a plume of smoke and dust rising up behind him. Like an answered prayer he comes, his armor flashing in the sunlight, white and bright as mountain snow. Swan wings adorn his warhelm. On his breastplate shines the Holy Grail that Arthur sought and never found. When he lifts his hand a broadsword springs forth from his fingers where no sword had been before, a blade so white and sharp that for a moment it outshines the bright Egyptian sun.

“Deus Volt!” the knight roars as he comes on, and his cry echoes across the bare and boundless sands. The jackals break before it, running for their mounts. Only the rifleman lingers long enough to wheel his horse and fire, but when the shot rings harmlessly off the knight’s white armor, he lets the rifle tumble to the sand and races away after his companions.

The knight climbs off his motorbike. His sword and helm and armor melt away, dissolving as a morning mist dissolves before the rising sun. “No harm will come to you,” he says, as he pulls a handkerchief from his pocket to press against the old man’s bloody cheek. “Come with me. Your gods are waiting for you.”

The brave young girl plants a kiss upon his cheek. A wasp buzzes happily around them, and all is right in the red lands, on this day, for this one family…though, on the way south, they pass the corpses of others who were not so fortunate.

The shortcut is a mistake.

Klaus looked up from the screen. “It is good, Jonathan. It moved me, truly.” Deus Volt, he thought. God wills it. Those had been the words the old crusaders cried when they marched out of the West to free Jerusalem. He did not remember shouting those words at the jackals, or any words at all, but perhaps he would shout them next time. “Will they read this in Germany, do you think?” It pleased him to think that his father might read about his feats. His little brothers, too.

“All over the world. You wouldn’t believe how many hits I’m getting.” Jonathan was seated on an orange crate with his laptop balanced on his thighs. “I need to find some place to buy a trenchcoat. The trenchcoat guys get all the prizes. I could win a Pulitzer for this, if I only had a trenchcoat. This is a big story, and no one’s covering it but me.” A wasp landed on his cheek and crawled up his left nostril. That would have vexed most people, but Jonathan Hive took no notice. “I’m bearing witness for the world. Just call me Edward R. Hive.”

“Ja, only…I do not wish to spoil your prize, but that was not how it happened. You never stung the horse. There was no horse. They drove a four-wheel truck.”

Jonathan waved off his objection. “Trucks are boring. Horses are romantic. Some of the asswipes ride horses, right? Or camels. Would camels be better, do you think?”

“No. There was no pretty daughter either. If a pretty girl had kissed me, I would know.” Klaus tore a strip of peeling skin off his arm, frowning at the pinkness underneath. In Cairo he had slathered on sunblock whenever he ventured outside, prompting Jonathan to compare him to a housewife from a situation comedy, her face covered in cold cream. When sunblock became harder to find, he bought a straw hat off a peddler in a felucca, but his arms still burned and peeled. “And they had no grocery carts. How could they push grocery carts across the sand?”

“They were symbolic grocery carts. It’s a poignant image of displacement. The devil’s in the details, dude. Bottom line, these numbfucks wandered off into the desert and would have died if not for us. The rest is just some frosting for the strudel. Everyone likes frosting on their strudel. That, and sex. You have to have the pretty girl, she’s what sells the whole thing.”

Klaus peeled off the soiled T-shirt that he’d slept in, one of those Herr Berman had given him when he agreed to be a guest on American Hero. On the front was a picture of Diver, the dolphin woman. “You could just say the mother was pretty.”

“The mother had a mustache.” Jonathan closed his laptop. Both of his legs ended at the knee, and tiny green wasps were buzzing in and out of his ragged denim shorts. His sneakers, footless, had tumbled to the ground, acrawl with bugs—a few toes’ worth, at least. Thousands more were spread out over the better part of twenty kilometers on both sides of the Nile, watching everything and everyone. Even when Jonathan was with you, he could be a hundred thousand other places, too. “And speaking of girls,” he went on, “you were talking in your sleep last night. ‘Lili, Lili, where are you, Lili?’ Barf. I can’t believe that you’re still mooning over a one-night stand.”

“She was more than that to me.” Klaus grabbed his jeans and shook them. A scorpion tumbled from one cuff and scuttled off. “I dreamed I was at the Luxor, looking for her. Our suite went on and on. So many rooms, like a maze. I knew that she was lost, but still I searched, calling her sweet name.”

“I was having a nice dream, too. I was eating flapjacks with Simoon and Curveball in the Valley of the Kings. The Living Gods were making them. You should have seen Horus flip that skillet.”

“Flapjacks?” Klaus scratched at the stubble under his chin. He needed a shave. “What is flapjacks?”

“Pancakes.”

“The gods do not serve pancakes.”

“They would if they had some batter,” said Jonathan. “You woke me up with all your Lili, Lili moaning. Dude, what happens in Vegas is supposed to stay in Vegas, didn’t anyone tell you?”

“You would not say these things if you had met her.” Klaus pulled on his jeans and zipped them up. “She was beautiful.” He remembered the feel of her in his arms, the taste of red wine in her mouth when he kissed her. And her eyes. She had the most amazing eyes. “The smell of her hair…it fell all the way down her back, black as night—”

“Carpet matched the drapes, too, though mostly I was looking at her tits. You know, there are other girls.”

“Lili was a woman.” The first time Klaus had seen her, she had been standing under a hallway light fumbling for her room key, and something about it had reminded him of the girl beneath the lamplight in the old soldier’s song, so he had asked her if her name was Lili Marlene, and she had smiled at him and said, “Close enough.” That was all it took. He had made love to her three times that night, and when they were not kissing they were talking. Lili had been so easy to talk to, not like the other girls he had known. Klaus was sure they’d talked for hours, although the next day he could not seem to recall her telling him anything about herself, not even her real name. One moment she had been lying beside him, drinking wine from the minibar and laughing as he tried to teach her the lyrics to “Lili Marlene” in German, but then Jonathan had come stumbling into the suite, making noise and turning on the lights, and suddenly she was gone. Klaus had only taken his eyes off her for an instant, but …

“Oh, shit,” said Jonathan Hive. He was gazing off at nothing, and there was a distant, cloudy look in his eyes that Klaus had learned to recognize. “There’s trouble.”

“Where?”

“The Valley of the Queens. John’s there.”

“I go at once.” Klaus pulled on a fresh T-shirt. This one had a picture of the Candle. “Where is my hat?”

“Never mind the hat,” said Jonathan. “Just go. I’m with you.” The meat of his thighs dissolved away, his shorts sagging empty as a swarm of green wasps filled the tent.

The temperature was well above a hundred Fahrenheit.

Sand and stone shimmered in the heat. A kite circled high above the Colossi of Memnon, riding the thermal that rose from those great ruined twins. Cracked and weathered by countless centuries of sun and wind, the huge stone pharaohs still seemed to exude power. Perhaps that was why the refugees had chosen to huddle around their broken thrones.

The camp went on as far as Klaus could see, an endless sprawl of displaced humanity sweltering beneath the Egyptian sun. A fortunate few had small tents like the one Klaus shared with Jonathan, but more were sheltering under cardboard crates or heaps of rags. In Cairo, even the poorest of them had tombs to sleep in, and tourists to beg for coin, but here they were exposed to all the elements, with no one to beg from but each other.

And every day the camps grew more crowded, their residents more desperate. This was not the biggest camp, either. The one along the riverbank covered twenty kilometers, and small groups of jokers had spilled over the hills to the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens.

The boys he’d hired to watch his motorcycle sprang to their feet at his approach. “We guard good,” announced Tut. His brother Gamel just held out a hand. Klaus dug a euro from his jeans. It was too much, but he felt sorry for the boys who had lost their mother to the knives of Ikhlas al-Din.

When he kicked the stand back and fired the ignition, the engine coughed and smoked before it caught. The bike was a fifty-year-old Royal Enfield that Sobek had sold him for seven times its worth. Every time he rode it, Klaus found himself pining for the R1200S sports bike that his sponsors at BMW had presented to him when he had signed to be their spokesman. He loved the deep, throaty growl the boxer engine made when he gunned it down the autobahn in the fast lane.

His BMW was in Munich though, and so he sat astride this relic with its bald tires, flaking green paint, and an exhaust pipe that looked to be made of solid rust. The bike’s gas gauge was broken, too, stuck somewhere just above empty even when the tank was freshly filled. I am running on fumes, he thought. Klaus prayed that it would be enough to take him through the hills, and down into the Valley of the Queens.

“You get them, Lohengrin!” Tut shouted, as Klaus fed some fumes to the engine. “You kill them good!”

Over ground like this, he dare not push the Royal Enfield too hard. Even at a sprinter’s pace it rattled so badly that he feared it might shake itself to pieces before he reached John Fortune. A nimbus of white light played about his head, took form, became a warhelm with a narrow eye slit and swan’s wings sprouting from the temples. A motorcyle helmet it was not, but Klaus had faith that the ghost steel would protect him in a spill.

Turning west and south, he wove a crooked path through the squalor of the camp, bouncing past the hulk of an abandoned school bus where a dozen families now were living. Behind the bus, the carcass of a dog was turning over a cook-fire that stank of burning camel dung. A cloud of wasps trailed after Klaus, glimmering and winking in the sunlight. A joker whose face had sprouted dozens of small heads threw a rock at them as they went by, and a dark-eyed woman with a child at her breast gave Klaus a lingering look, as if to say, You are not one of us. What are you doing here?

Some nights Klaus would ask that selfsame question as he twisted in his sleeping bag on the hard ground, wondering if that was a scorpion crawling up his leg or just another of Jonathan’s wasps. Barbarossa would mock at him for coming here, he knew, and most of the other aces of the Reichsbanner would consider him a fool. He had thought to find in them a modern Round Table, where heroes broke bread together and talked of righting wrong, but the only wrong they wished to right involved their tax rates. “You expected more, ja?“ Barbarossa said afterward, when he and Klaus escaped the feast for a beer garden in Heidelberg’s student quarter. “You are young. You will learn. It is all cartels and sponsors now. Mighty Euro and Mighty Dollar are more powerful than any ace on earth. They own us, ja.”

“Not me,” Klaus had insisted. “My honor is not for sale.”

Barbarossa pinched his cheek. “Keep your honor. It’s your smile they will buy, your big blue eyes and pale blond hair, and these apple cheeks of yours.”

He was right, and I was wrong. His first endorsement had been a local dairy that offered him five hundred euros to say their milk helped him grow up big and strong. Klaus had resisted at first, but his mother said he should do it for the children, that milk was good for children, and maybe they could go as high as a thousand euros. That was a lot of money, so Klaus drank the milk and smiled for the cameras. Other endorsements followed, until finally he signed with an agent and she brought him BMW. He loved his motorcycle, and loved the freedom that fame and money brought him, but sometimes at night he still felt like a fraud, no different from the hollow heroes of the Reichsbanner, who took adulation as their due but never did a thing to earn it. Yet, what had he done since Neuschwanstein? Nothing but smile and sign “Lohengrin” on pictures of himself. That was no life for an ace, or for a knight. There was no honor in it.

The road wound back and forth as it made its way through the hills down into the valley known as Biban al-Harim, where the tombs of eighty ancient Egyptian queens were sunk into the dry and stony soil. Klaus was banking round a curve and wondering how long his fuel would last when he heard the sound of gunfire ahead.

Jackals, was his first and only thought. That was the name that Jonathan had given to the rabble of Ikhlas al-Din, the Muslim fundamentalists who had been swept to victory in Egypt’s last election. It was not enough for them to drive the Living Gods and their worshippers from their homes. All the long way south, they had continued to hound the refugees, raiding their camps, picking off stragglers, even burning villages and poisoning wells along the way to deny them water, food, and fuel.

Even here, Klaus thought grimly, even now. Pale light danced around him, hardened, became breastplate, greaves, gorget, gauntlets. He leaned into a turn and accelerated, pushing the old motorbike as fast as it would go, and leaving Jonathan’s wasps well behind. A little farther on, he came upon a woman clutching her child by the hand as blood streamed down her face. She flinched at his approach, and Klaus did not have the time to set her fears at ease. He screamed past her, his armor shining. The gunfire grew louder, staccato bursts that echoed off the hills. He could hear other sounds as well, shouts and screams, the roar of some great beast and the chudder of a helicopter’s rotors.

The jackals had no helicopters. The army, Klaus thought, the army has moved in to stop them. For a moment he was relieved.

When the valley opened up before him, Klaus hit his brakes and swerved to a sudden halt in a spray of dust and pebbles. He let his helm dissolve for a moment to give himself a better view, but even so, it took him a long moment to understand what he was seeing. The camp down there was much smaller than the one by the colossi, and half of it was in flames, rag tents and cardboard shacks alike sending up greasy pillars of smoke into the sky. A truck was burning, too, a large flatbed with a green canvas awning. Corpses littered the ground. Through the smoke he saw armed men moving, dim shapes with automatic rifles in their hands. He heard rifles chattering, a woman wailing. Above it all the helicoper moved, firing at something on the ground.

Some of the wounded had rushed toward the nearest of the ancient tombs and were trying to tear down its steel scissors gate to seek refuge inside. Klaus saw three men appear behind them and open up, raking the refugees with bullets. Their bodies danced and jerked under the impacts, like marionettes gone mad.

And then the lioness appeared. Even from a distance she was huge, larger than a pony, almost as big as the draft horses that pulled his father’s wagon up the mountain. Flame swirled from her jaws as she leapt onto the soldiers. Two fell screaming, wreathed in fire. The third she opened from throat to crotch, tearing at his intestines until the helicopter’s shadow fell across them. Then she whirled to leap, but the copter was beyond her reach. Klaus saw her hammered to the ground by a stream of machine gun fire, heard her roar of pain, saw the bullets kicking up dust all around her as she turned and raced away.

Jackals do not have helicopters. Through the smoke and dust, Klaus could see the uniforms, patterned in the tan-and-dun of desert camouflage. Not jackals. Those are soldiers. It is the Egyptian army doing this. This time he would not be facing paint-ball guns, or the cheap Czech pistols of the Bavarian Freedom Front. The jackals had always fled before him after a perfunctory shot or two, but these men were trained and disciplined, and there looked to be a lot of them. But none with my armor.

At Peenemünde, the scientists had argued for months about the nature of that armor. Doktor Fuchs theorized that it was made of coherent light, Doktor Alpers suspected quantum particles, and Doktor Hahn coined the term “hardened ectoplasm.” Klaus did not understand half of what they said, so he went on calling it ghost steel. Even after six months of study, the scientists still could not say with certainty whether it was made of energy or matter, but their tests did show that it was impervious to knives, axes, bullets, flamethrowers, acid, shrapnel, lightning bolts, and everything else that they could find to throw at him. The Egyptian soldiers were not nearly as well-armed as the good doktors. There was nothing they could do to harm him.

Klaus fed the motorbike a little gas and gathered speed as he went rolling down the hill. Mists shimmered around his head and became his warhelm again, its wide white wings outstretched. When he raised his hand his sword appeared, shining bright. Today we will give Jonathan something true to blog about, he thought.

Afterward, Klaus could not have said how many men he had faced, or how many he had slain.

The smoke from the fires drifted everywhere, acrid and choking, so thick at times that friend and foe alike seemed to vanish and reappear like phantoms in a dream. Sounds echoed in his ears—screams, shouts, the whine of rifles and the chudder of the big machine gun, the chopping of the helicopter’s blades, Sekhmet’s terrifying roars. The she-lion was off to his right, behind him, just ahead; try as he might, Klaus could not find her. At times he could have sworn there were two of her.

He had no trouble finding the soldiers, though. The first man he slew was coughing when he emerged from the smoke, but as soon as he saw Lohengrin he raised his rifle. “Yield!” Klaus called out to him. “Throw down your weapon, and I will not harm you.” Instead the soldier dropped to one knee and squeezed his trigger. Klaus saw the muzzle flash. The round struck him near the temple and caromed off. “You cannot harm me,” he warned the man, his voice booming through his warhelm. “Yield.” The soldier fired again, and then a third time. By then Klaus was on top of him. When he swung his sword, the man raised the rifle to protect himself, but the ghost steel blade sliced through stock and barrel and opened him from neck to belly.

Klaus did not have the time to watch him die. Other soldiers had appeared by then, and they were firing, too. He gave them all the chance to yield. None did, though a few of them broke and ran when they saw him cutting down their friends. Perhaps they did not have the English to understand what he was saying. Klaus would need to learn the Arabic word for “yield.”

Riding through the smoke and slaughter like a ghost, Lohengrin soon lost all sense of time and place. No blood stained his ghost steel; his armor gleamed white and pure, unblemished, and his blade glimmered palely in his hand. “God wills it,” he remembered thinking—though, why any god would will such carnage, the white knight could not have said.

When the fighting ended, Klaus was hardly conscious of it. The fires had burned low by then, and a hot wind out of the red lands to the west had begun to dissipate the smoke. He realized suddenly that he could no longer hear the helicopter. Sekhmet had fallen silent as well. It had been a long while since he had last heard her roar. John, he thought.

Jonathan’s wasps had found him by then. They buzzed around his head, the thrum of their wings strangely reassuring. Klaus wondered how much Bugsy had seen of what had happened here. He turned his head, searching for the enemy, but all of the soldiers were dead or fled. Klaus let his sword and helm dissolve, but kept his body clad in ghost steel. “John!” he bellowed, rolling slowly across the battlefield. “John Fortune!”

In the end it was the wasps who found him, sprawled naked by the entrance to a tomb, where he had been protecting the jokers who had taken shelter within. John was drenched in blood, but none of it was his own. When Klaus tried to lift him he gave a gasp of pain. “My ribs,” he said. “I think they broke some. The bullets—they melt when they touch her flesh, but they still hurt. They hit like hammers.”

“You look ghastly,” Klaus admitted.

“I just tore a dozen men to pieces with my fingernails.”

“That was Sekhmet,” said Klaus. “She fought nobly.”

“With my fingers!” John’s skin was damp with sweat.

He looks forty years old, Klaus thought. His face had thinned to the point of gauntness, and he had lines around his eyes that had not been there in Hollywood. The red scarab that was Sekhmet sat above his eyes like some huge blood blister, making his forehead seem to bulge the way his famous father’s had bulged when he fought the Astronomer in the sky above Manhattan, a year before Klaus was even born. John’s skin had darkened, too; daily exposure to the harsh Egyptian sun had browned him several shades. That made him look more like Fortunato, too.

Some of the surviving jokers had emerged from the tomb. A hunchbacked woman with snakes for fingers offered Klaus a charred and torn blanket. He wrapped it around John Fortune to stop his shivering. His smooth brown skin was covered with dark bruises. Klaus unhooked his canteen from his motorbike to give him a drink of water. “Not too much, now,” he cautioned. “Sip.”

Between sips, John told him how the fight had started. The camp had been a small one, perhaps three hundred people, jokers and their families down from Port Said and Damietta. Even among the followers of the Old Religion, jokers were reviled if their wild card deformities did not mimic the old Egyptian gods, so these had chosen to take refuge in the Valley of the Queens, well away from the larger camps to the east. When word of them reached the New Temple, however, Taweret had dispatched the goddess Meret to bring them food, clothing, and medical supplies. John went with her, in case of trouble.

“When we first saw the helicopter, Meret waved to them,” John said. “She thought it was Ikhlas al-Din we had to fear, not the army. Then they touched down and the soldiers started pouring out. We did not know what to make of that. Meret told me to continue with the food distribution and went to speak with their captain. She was walking toward them when the soldiers opened fire. There was no warning, no reason given. They just started shooting. All I could think to do was let Sekhmet work the change, so we could fight them.” His voice was hoarse.

“The captain must have been Ikhlas al-Din. A member or a sympathizer.” Klaus remembered Meret from his last visit to the New Temple. A dark, slender woman, she’d had vines and lotus flowers growing from her head in place of hair. She was gentle, too, and even had some German. Who would want to kill such a woman? “It was a rogue unit,” he told John, hoping it was true. “This mad captain—we will report him to his superiors.”

“He’s dead,” said John. The scarab in his swollen forehead seemed to throb. “I tore his throat out.”

Klaus nodded. “We must get you back to the New Temple. Can you ride? Hold on to me. That is all you need to do.” One of the jokers helped him lift John Fortune onto the Enfield. “Hold me tight,” he told him. “It is not so far.”

They were walking down the hill road an hour later when they heard the roar of a truck coming toward them.

Klaus had been pushing the Royal Enfield along for almost a kilometer. Its tank had gone bone dry, but he could not bring himself to abandon it. When he heard the truck he let go of the handlebars and called up his blade and armor. He could feel the heat of Sekhmet beside him, and smell the sulfur stench of the smoke rising from her nostrils. John had changed back as soon as the bike had died, too weak to continue in his own flesh.

When the driver of the truck came round the rocks and saw them, he screeched to a sudden stop, his air brakes screaming like a chorus of damned souls. Behind the wheel, a man with the long snout and gray-green, scaly skin of a crocodile grinned at them. “Those motorbikes go faster if you ride them instead of pushing them along,” he called out. “So you are not dead. Good. Taweret sent me, to fetch her sister back. You can come, too.”

Klaus lowered his sword and let the ghost steel dissolve back into nothingness. Of all the Living Gods he had met, old Sobek was the one that he liked best. No more than five-six, the Egyptian had heavy shoulders, big arms thick with muscle, and the sort of hard, round belly that tells of a great fondness for beer. Where his fellow gods dressed like pharaohs in silken robes, golden collars, and jeweled headdresses, Sobek wore baggy pants, suspenders, and a stained photographer’s vest. His skin was cracked and leathery, more gray than green, and what he lacked in hair and ears he made up for in teeth. They were long and sharp and crooked, those teeth, stained brown and yellow by the rank black Turkish cigarettes he smoked.

Sekhmet sprang up onto the bed of the truck, and Klaus grabbed his motorbike in both hands and swung it up beside her, before climbing into the cab next to Sobek. “Meret is dead,” he told him, as he slammed the door. Behind them, Sekhmet curled up and began to lick her bruises.

Sobek put the truck in gear. “We know.”

“This time it was not jackals. The army—”

“We know that, too.”

“How? Jonathan? Did he send his bugs to you?”

“He called Horus on his cell phone.” Sobek wrenched the wheel around, and sent the truck roaring back toward the river. “They sent soldiers to the Valley of the Kings as well, and there we had no one to fight back. The generals say they sent the troops in to protect the sites against the vandals and tomb robbers who were threatening to despoil the graves of the pharaohs and their queens. Only terrorists attacked the soldiers, they say, that was how the fighting started. It was on the radio, and Al Jazeera. The Twisted Fists are the cause of all the blood-shedding.” He gave Klaus a sideways glance. “You two are the Twisted Fists. In case you were not knowing this.”

Klaus was shocked. “They call us terrorists?”

“Why not? You terrify the Caliph, I think. At night he dreams of the crusader’s big sharp sword and wets his bed. In the morning his wives all smell of piss.” He laughed. “General Yusuf has sent word across the river. Cairo wants you and Sekhmet handed over to him for trial. If we do that, he says, the rest of us may leave in peace. Leave for where, you wonder? Hell, I am thinking. Well, it does not matter. Taweret will never hand you over. Sekhmet is her sister, a fellow goddess. Your friend would turn into bugs and fly away, and you would make the white sword come and go chop, chop, chop.” Sobek drove with one hand on the steering wheel and the other slamming at the horn, one of his foul black Turkish cigarettes turning to ash between his teeth.

“What will you do?” Klaus asked him.

“Go to Aswan. Where else? There are more of us in Aswan.”

“You mean to flee?”

“Flee or fight. Serquet can summon scorpions, Bast sees well in the dark. Babi is strong as ten baboons, and I have many teeth. The rest have no powers, only funny heads. The army, they have guns and planes and tanks. Guns and planes and tanks beat funny heads. So we flee. Aswan is a good place, I am thinking. How to get there, though? That is not so easy. Taweret has summoned the gods to meet upon the morrow. You and your friend may come as well, and we will talk about what must be done.”

“Ja,” said Klaus, but his tone was dubious. He thought of Tut and Gamel, of the families in the yellow school bus, of the joker man who had thrown the rock at him. It was a wonder that any of them had survived the journey down from Cairo. Aswan was two hundred kilometers farther on. “Many will die,” he said to Sobek. “If you are forced to leave this place…they do not have the strength. There is no food, no water. To make them march—this is murder. The world will not allow it.”

“The world is not here.” Sobek plucked the cigarette from his teeth and flicked an inch of ash out the window.

“The secretary-general has come to Cairo—”

“—waiting for the Caliph. They will have a nice talk while the freaks are dying. Later perhaps the UN will pass a resolution, and a year from now there will be sanctions, yes? The Caliph will tremble, but we will all be dead.”

Klaus scowled. It was too true. “America—”

“—is watching television. John told us. Plastic babies burning up in fires, actors robbing banks, lies and seductions and betrayals, good stuff to watch. Old Kemel was a fool to make us gods. He should have made us television stars, and then the world might care what happens to us. But no, we are only jokers dying in the desert, and none of us will win a million dollars.”

He was not wrong, Klaus realized. By then they were passing through the camp, and Sobek was forced to slow. His truck was of the same vintage as the motorbike, but unlike the Enfield, it could not weave through traffic. Instead, the crocodile god shouted in Arabic at the people in their way. Klaus wondered if he wasn’t screaming, “Gods coming through! Make way for the Gods!”

If so, no one was listening.

Klaus looked out at the people again as Sobek leaned on his horn. Aside from a few obvious jokers, most of them looked no different from the fellahin he had glimpsed working in the fields during their long trek south, or the men who had hunted them through the necropolis of Cairo. They are all the same, all Egyptian, all poor, the ones who pray to Allah just as hungry as the ones who pray to Osiris. “You are so much alike,” he said to Sobek. “Why do you fight? Why do you hate each other?”

“I do not hate Muslims,” Sobek insisted. “My father was Muslim. My mother was Muslim. My sisters were Muslim, my friends were Muslim, my wife was Muslim, everyone I knew was Muslim. Even I was Muslim. Not a good Muslim, it is true, but I always meant to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, my head began to pound one hot day as I worked a freighter, so I left the docks and went home early. My wife gave me a damp cloth to cool my fevered brow, and I went to sleep. When I woke I had the head of a crocodile.” He shrugged. “My wife fled screaming when she saw me. She was bringing me some mint tea in my favorite cup, and it shattered on the floor and scalded me. My sisters spat on me and called me foul, my doctor said the best cure for the wild card was a gun, my father told me his son was dead. When I went to pray to Allah, the imams said I was an abomination, but Kemel—Kemel found me passed out drunk in the City of the Dead, took me to his temple, fed me on mutton and lentils, and told me that I had become a god.” He took a drag on his cigarette and blew smoke through his nostrils. “It is better to be a god than an abomination. That is why I am no more a Muslim. But I cannot hate them, no. They are still my neighbors and my kin.”

This is so, Klaus thought, but your neighbors and your kin, they want you dead.

It was dusk by the time they reached the Nile. Across the river, Klaus could see the lights of Luxor coming on. Over there were colorful bazaars, air-conditioned hotels, five-star cruise ships, fine restaurants, holy mosques, a modern hospital, museums full of antiquities, hot baths, and service stations with all the oil and gas a motorbike could want. Two divisions of the Egyptian Second Army had surrounded Luxor to “protect” the city from homeless refugees and joker terrorists alike, while navy gunboats patrolled the Nile to deny them any hope of crossing. The tourist-haunted ruins of Karnak and Thebes were on the east bank as well, just north of the modern city, but those, too, had been declared off limits to the dispossessed.

Kemel, the founder of the movement to revive the Old Religion, had dreamed of restoring the ruined temples and making them seats of worship again, but the world’s archeaologists and the ministry of tourism had defeated all his efforts. The ruins were too valuable as ruins; tourists were the life’s blood of Egypt’s economy. Denied access to the ancient sites, Kemel had instead acquired land on the west bank of the Nile, and there erected the great complex called the New Temple, three hundred acres of shrines, altars, fountains, courtyards, gardens, and statuary, with half a dozen Living Gods in permanent residence.

A heaving sea of humanity surrounded the temple walls as they approached. Most nights the priests who served the Living Gods fed whatever beggars had turned up at their gates on lentils and spiced mutton, but not on this night. The temple gates were closed and barred, the road leading to them impassable.

Cursing, Sobek swung the truck off the road and took it wide around, bumping through a cane field to the back gate. Even here the crowds were thick, and they finally had to abandon the vehicle. When the people saw Sekhmet padding toward them, her tawny skin bruised but still aglow, they parted before her like the Red Sea. Some went to their knees, while others salaamed. Klaus followed behind her, all but unnoticed. At the temple gate the guardsmen moved aside when Sobek barked at them in Arabic and snapped his teeth. They reminded Klaus of the Pope’s Swiss pikemen; more ornaments than warriors, they carried tall spears and dressed as warriors of the time of Ramses the Great. No doubt the tourists loved them, but when Klaus tried to imagine them facing the soldiers he had fought today, it made an ugly picture.

Only when they were inside the temple grounds, hidden by the thick walls and velvet shadows, did the lioness halt, shimmer, and transform back into John Fortune. He looks stronger than before, Klaus tried to convince himself. When he spoke to Sobek in Arabic, however, he knew that it was still Sekhmet he was looking at. Sobek barked an order, and two acolytes came hurrying to help escort them to John Fortune’s quarters, while two more went in search of food and water.

John’s bedchamber was in the inner temple, off a corridor lined with ram-headed sphinxes where the younger priests and acolytes were quartered. Though not as large or grand as the suite that Klaus and Jonathan had shared at the Luxor in Las Vegas, the room did have a window overlooking the Nile. Klaus could see the lights of Luxor beyond the river, and the white sails of feluccas shimmering palely in the moonlight. A dozen wasps were crawling on the walls, glistening green; Jonathan was with them, watching.

“I leave him now,” said Sobek, as the acolytes were washing John and dressing him in a linen sleeping gown. “So should you. Eat first, you will be hungry. Then go. He needs to sleep.”

It was true. The body that John shared with the woman Sekhmet had not slept since the day they had burned his mother’s house down and melted her awards. Whenever John closed his eyes, Sekhmet opened them again; when she slept, he woke and took his body back. The flesh that they shared kept going night and day. It was a young body, strong and healthy, but all flesh must rest.

Now it was Sekhmet who was awake, with John asleep within. Klaus was just learning to tell the two of them apart. They spoke with the same voice, but different words. They had the same face, but not the same expressions. Sekhmet used her hands in speaking more than John Fortune ever had. If I had spent twenty years in an amulet, moving would feel good to me as well, Klaus reflected.

Temple servants brought them beer and bowls of lentil stew. Klaus ate it all, though he was sick of lentils. “Sobek intends to go to Aswan,” he said, tearing at a loaf of black bread.

“Sobek is a crocodile. I am a lion.” Sekhmet had eaten only a few bites. The outlines of the scarab were plainly visible through the swollen skin of John Fortune’s brow. “With the power of Ra we might have turned them,” she said, in a weary voice, “but we are only half of what we might have been.”

With the power of Ra, John might have turned the world to ash. Klaus kept the thought to himself. He had read enough old legends to know that it was never wise to argue with a goddess. “The secretary-general is in Cairo. They say he helped end the fighting in Sri Lanka. If the United Nations will send help—”

“Would Germany allow United Nations peacekeepers upon its soil?” Sekhmet spoke with scorn. “Why should the Caliph do what your German chancellor would not? The United Nations was a bad jest when I went to sleep, and now that I am woken I find it is a worse one. Even Sobek has more teeth than this UN.”

Klaus studied his friend’s face. He is John, and he is not. “Sekhmet, my lady—might I speak with John?”

His eyes narrowed. “If that is your desire.” The words were curt. After a moment, though, the face before him seemed to soften. Klaus was still uncertain. “John?”

A wan smile. “Yes. I was dreaming.”

“A good dream?”

“Kate was in it. Curveball.” He sounded almost himself again, like the boy that Klaus had met on American Hero. Though John was almost two years his elder, somehow Klaus still thought of him as a younger brother, the same way he thought of Kurt and Konrad. “I shouldn’t be dreaming of her, though,” the boy went on. “When two wild cards get together…my mother told me of the risks as soon as I was old enough to understand. That’s why she was always frightened for me whenever I did anything that might have…whenever I did anything.”

“All mothers are fearful for their sons,” said Klaus.

“Not all of them keep a detective agency on retainer as babysitters, though.” John pushed a hand through his hair. “I’m surprised Mom hasn’t sent Jay Ackroyd to bring me back yet.”

“Perhaps you should go back. I did not like the way you looked today. Those bruises …”

“They’re fading.” John picked disconsolately at his bowl of lentils. “Bullets melt when they touch our skin.”

“Ja,” said Klaus, “but that is not to say they do not harm you. If you throw a rat in a canvas sack and beat on it with a club, the sack will not tear, but the rat will still be smashed. The bullets may be smashing you up inside. And if they shoot her lion with some larger round, a cannon or a rocket—”

“She’ll die, and I’ll die with her,” John snapped. “You sound like my mother now. She flies, you know. That’s her power. Bullets don’t bounce off her the way they bounce off you. She can’t shoot balls of fire or stop time or raise the dead, the way my father could. All she can do is fly. When she was my age, she had these claws made, like big steel fingernails, and whenever there was trouble she’d slip them on to fight. She fought the Astronomer and his crazy Masons, she fought the Swarm monsters, she even came to Egypt and fought the Nur’s people, with only wings and claws! I’m her son as much as Fortunato’s. I’m not going to hide away in some monastery for fear of who I am. If I die, I die. I’m staying.”

It was morning before Klaus returned to the tent he shared with Bugsy. By the time he had left John Fortune, the gates of the New Temple had been closed and barred for the night, and no amount of argument could persuade Babi and his temple guards to open them again. Klaus could have conjured up his broadsword and slashed apart the gates, just as he had once slashed apart the gates at Neuschwanstein, but he did not wish to offend John’s fellow gods. Instead, he had made his apologies to Jonathan’s bugs, and begged a bed for the night from the temple priests.

With his motorbike as dry as a mummy’s casket, he’d had no choice but to walk back from the New Temple, shoving his way through throngs of desperate refugees intent on going in the opposite direction. The whole camp was in turmoil, and many were leaving, getting away from here as far and fast as they could. The slaughter of the jokers in the Valley of the Kings and the smoke-laced struggle in the Valley of the Queens had become common knowledge. Even Tut and Gamel had heard the tales. When Klaus came trudging up, Tut wanted to know if Lohengrin had killed them all. Gamel was more concerned about the Royal Enfield. Who would pay them now, without a motorbike to watch? “In Aswan, I will buy another motorbike,” Klaus promised. “A big, fast one, all shiny.”

Jonathan was blogging when Klaus entered their tent. “The Crusader returns,” he said, without looking up from his laptop. “The talk is you and Fortune slew the whole Egyptian army.”

“A few soldiers only. More are coming. General Yusuf—”

“—has given the gods their marching orders, I know. I’m writing about it now. It won’t happen, though. Taweret will never abandon the New Temple. You can bet the farm on that.”

“I do not own a farm,” Klaus said, puzzled, “and if the army comes, the New Temple cannot be held.”

“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… drum-roll, 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 fiuntained from the sudden stumps, brighter than Klaus would ever have 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 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.”

“In Germany, too.” It had happened while Klaus was still at Peenemünde. 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 imposters left.”

Sobek shrugged. “Ah, well. I am too old for showgirls.”

The wrath of Horus finally ran its course. Taweret 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.”

So let it be written, thought Klaus, so let it be done. He had seen that movie too.

Nightfall found the three of them in John Fortune’s rooms, overlooking the Nile. Jonathan was on his laptop once again, checking flight times out of Egypt. “Fuck,” he kept saying, “I am so dead. Aswan is the closest airport that’s still open, would you believe it? And all the flights connect through Cairo!”

“Perhaps God does not wish for you to go,” said Klaus. “If you leave us, who will bear witness for the world?”

“Wolf Blitzer. Katie Couric. Jon Stewart. Geraldo Rivera. Okay, maybe not Geraldo, he couldn’t bear witness to his dick if he found it in Al Capone’s vault.” The laptop gave a cheerful beep. Jonathan punched a key, read the screen, scowled. “Oh, look, another girl who wants to have John Fortune’s baby. This one’s pretty cute, at least. Why do I even bother with e-mail? All I get is spam, and girls sending naked pictures to the two of you. What am I, your pimp? No offense to your father, John. How come none of these girls ever send me naked pictures?”

“You turn into bugs,” said John Fortune.

“Ja,” said Klaus. “And you are very small, where women want men to be large.”

“That’s cold,” said Jonathan, stung. “I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly normal, Nancy Heffermann told me so in junior high. Anyway, size doesn’t matter. I could show you sites—”

“I was speaking of your heart.” Klaus thumped his chest with a closed fist. “Here.”

“Leave him be,” said John Fortune. To Jonathan he said, “The Pharaoh will take you to Aswan. From there you can a charter a plane to Addis Ababa or Nairobi, and connect to a flight back to Europe. Take my Amex card, I won’t be needing it.”

“The black card? That’s…dude, I don’t know what to say.”

Klaus could not listen to any more. He turned for the door. “Lohengrin, wait,” he heard John say, but he was weary of waiting, tired of talk. Just now, he wanted quiet.

He found it in the maze that was the New Temple, wandering through moonlit gardens and down long marble corridors. Red lamps glowed along the walls, mimicking the light of torches. Temple guards and acolytes watched him pass in silence, and once he turned a corner and came upon Anubis, attended by half a dozen lithe young priestesses. The light was too dim for Klaus to say whether it was Red Anubis or Black Anubis, but from the way the jackal-headed god stared at him it was plain he was not wanted, so he made an awkward bow and backed away.

Finally he found himself in a cavernous hall beneath a towering sphinx. She had a lion’s body and a woman’s face, which reminded him of Sekhmet, but she had the wings of an eagle, too, and ram’s horns coiling from her temples. She was some god, he was certain, though Klaus did not know her name. He wondered if his own god would hear, if he said a prayer to this one. His family was Lutheran, though he had never been especially devout. Church was for Christmas and for Easter. “Father,” he said, in a soft voice, “hear me now. We are lost.”

A pair of slender arms encircled him, and two soft hands covered his eyes. “And found,” a voice whispered by his ear.

Klaus knew that touch, that spicy-sweet scent, that voice. “Lili?” he gasped, incredulous. “Can it be you?”

“Underneath the lantern by the barrack gate, darling I remember the way you used to wait,” she sang. “My Lili of the lamplight, my own Lili Marlene.” The lyrics he had taught her. Her voice echoed in the hall, low, smoky, intoxicating.

Klaus ripped her hands away, whirled, and took her in his arms. When he kissed her, her own mouth answered him, no less hungry. The dark red lipstick that she wore looked black in the gloom of the hall, but her eyes shone silver pale. Klaus kissed her on each eyelid and then again upon the mouth, picked her up bodily, whirled her in the air. Breathless with laughter, she demanded that he put her down, and Klaus obeyed. “You are here,” he said. “You are truly here, in Egypt. But…but how?”

A half-smile brushed her lips, full of mischief. “Ask me no questions and I’ll tell you no lies.”

“No. Truly. Lili, what could you be doing here?”

Her face turned serious. “I could ask the same of you.”

That confused him. “I came for John.”

“And I came for you.”

That made him happy. “I have dreamed of you. But how could you know where I was?”

“The whole world knows where you are, my gallant knight. Every time your friend Hive uploads a new installment of his blog, a million people read about your latest exploits.”

“A million?” Klaus had no idea. “So many?”

“This week. By next week it will be ten million, if Hive is still alive. No one likes to find bugs crawling through their dirty laundry, least of all a caliph.”

“The Caliph will be pleased, then. Jonathan is going home.”

“Is he? Clever lad. He’ll live to blog again. You should go with him, Klaus. And take your friend John Fortune.”

“John will not leave. The Living Gods are his people.”

“Sekhmet’s people, you mean.” She took his hand. “Klaus, you are being used. The Living Gods are no more gods than the characters at Disney World. We’ve known for half a century that the wild card has a psychological component, so it is hardly surprising that here in the shadow of the pyramids some of those afflicted should mimic the forms of Isis, Osiris, and the rest, but to suggest that they are those gods…Kemel, the man who started this cult, belongs up there with Joseph Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. Take a closer look at your new friends, love. They are very good at accepting offerings, you’ll find, but not quite so apt when it comes to answering prayers.”

This was a side of Lili that Klaus had not seen in America. There it had been all wine and kisses and laughter, and secrets whispered in the dark. Now she was confusing him. He was good at fighting with a sword, but not so good with words. “They are jokers, ja, I know, but the Muslims mean to kill them all—”

“Abdul-Alim means to kill them all, yes. He is desperate to prove himself a strong man and end the whispers that say he is a weakling and a fool. Do not paint all Muslims with the bloody brush. The situation is more complex than that. The Nur was the most charismatic leader Islam has produced since Baybars, yet it took him twenty years to unite all of Arabia and restore the caliphate. Abdul the Idiot will destroy it all in twenty months. When he falls, the rule will pass to Siraj of Transjordan, who is a moderate, a secularist, and a pragmatist. Prince Siraj is a good man. Under him, the Arabs will have peace and prosperity, the West will get its oil, and the Living Gods and their poor deluded worshippers will be left to live in peace.”

“Those that are not dead,” said Klaus.

“Those that are not dead,” she agreed. “First Abdul-Alim must fall, however. And your presence here has only served to prop him up. Nothing unites a quarrelsome people faster than a threat from outside. Do you know what they are calling you on Al Jazeera? The Crusader.”

“The crusaders were brave men,” Klaus said stoutly.

“I do not have time to argue Bohemond of Antioch with you, my sweet. Just take my word, ‘crusader’ is not a term of endearment in this part of the world. All you are doing is giving Abdul the visible enemy that he needs to stay in power. And now that Bahir has failed him, he means to send the Righteous Djinn against you.”

Klaus crossed his arms against his chest. “I defeated Bahir. I can defeat this djinn as well. I do not fear any foe.”

“Fear this one. Eighteen months ago, the Israeli ace Sharon Cream went missing. The strongest woman in the world, they say, yet when the Mossad found her body, it was gray and shriveled, like a fly after the spider has sucked the juice out of it. Her flesh turned to dust when they opened her for an autopsy.

“The Djinn’s first public appearance came a few weeks later. He lifted up an armored car and threw it forty feet. That was enough to earn him a place in the Caliph’s guard, but not enough to excite much interest in the West. Strongmen are a dinar a dozen, and the Nur had other aces in his service.

“He also had General Sayyid, the crippled giant, his right hand and closest friend. Even in his youth Sayyid had struggled to support his own weight, and twenty years ago an American ace shattered both his legs to pieces. He never walked again. No one was surprised when Sayyid finally passed away. The Nur gave him a lavish state funeral in Damascus, but his casket was kept sealed and he never lay in state. Among the mourners was the Righteous Djinn, grown to gigantic size. He stood thirty feet tall…and he had the strength to support that weight.

“Since then, several of the Port Said aces have vanished under mysterious circumstances, the heroes who turned back the Israeli armies during the wars of 1948. Old now, and sickly, but still… Kopf is one who is missing. In 1948 an entire Israeli army broke and ran from him, seized by a terror no one could explain. And now we hear reports that two of the Caliph’s brothers died of fear after a visit from the Djinn.

“You are seeing the pattern here, I hope. Your power is formidable, but you would do well to stay away from the Righteous Djinn, unless you mean to armor him in ghost steel.”

Klaus stared at her. “How could you know all this?”

“I had my own encounter with the Righteous Djinn. After that…let us say I took an interest in him. Never go to battle blind, mein Ritter. It pays to do your homework.” She slipped her arms through his and laid her head against his chest. “Come away with me, Klaus. I know a lovely castle on the Rhine. A roaring fire, a canopy bed, and me. What more could you desire?”

“Nothing,” said Klaus. “When this is done.”

“Now. This moment. Kiss me, and I’ll take you there.”

He wanted her as badly as he had ever wanted a woman. Yet, instead of taking her in his arms, Klaus stepped away from her and said, “Take me…how could you take me there?”

The half-smile returned, teasing. “I have my ways.”

Suddenly he understood. “You are an ace.”

“I abhor that word. So crass, so common, so American. I prefer to call myself a woman of mystery, thank you very much.”

The world shifted under his feet. Lili of the lamplight, he thought, our beautiful chance meeting, the night we spent making love and talking. All of it suddenly seemed unreal. He could feel it dissolving, melting away like his ghost steel after a battle. An ace, and here in Egypt. “What powers?”

“That would be telling. A gentleman never asks a lady her age, her weight, or whether she can fly. There are some who call me the Queen of the Night. Do you know your Mozart, love? The Magic Flute? No, you are more of a Wagner man, I think. The Ride of the Valkyries, ja? Let me be your valkyrie. I can promise you a ride that you will never forget.”

Klaus had wanted more than a ride. Klaus had wanted all of it, all of her. Now he was not sure. “When this is done—that will be the time for us. Not now. It is like our song, like Lili Marlene. He wants to be with her, the soldier, she is all he thinks about, but he must go to war, he must do his duty. His honor demands it. It is the same for me.”

“You’re wrong. This is not your country. This is not your fight. Go home, Lohengrin. You won’t find your grail in Egypt. Only your grave.” Lili stepped away from him. “I see I am wasting my breath. It is written on that stubborn German face of yours. Auf Wiedersehen, Klaus. I wish you well, truly…though, if I were you, I would start sleeping in my ghost steel. The next time Bahir comes for you, he may be in earnest.”

“Wait,” Klaus called out. “How can I reach you? Where do you live? Your name—is your name even Lili?”

“Close enough, darling. Try Lilith.” And she slipped into the shadows and was gone.

The noisy, crowded, festering camp that had sprung up around the Colossi of Memnon had blown away in less than three days. Only trash and night soil remained to show where thousands had lived, loved, and starved for weeks on end. Klaus would not have been surprised to see the colossi themselves rise from their ruined thrones and stride off toward the south.

“‘Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair,’” said Jonathan, as the two of them paused for a last look. “Lord Byron, man. I think he wrote it about these two guys. Bad boy Byron. He was like the Drummer Boy of the romantic poets.”

The Pharaoh had departed two days ago, carrying Taweret, most of the other gods, and almost all the priests. She was a large and luxurious boat, rated at five stars by the ministry of tourism, so the Living Gods had found room on her to take abroad five hundred of their followers. They would have taken Jonathan as well, but he did not turn up to board. “I overslept,” Hive kept insisting. “What, am I the first guy who ever missed a boat?” He blamed his cell phone. “Fucking alarm never went off. If I get killed, someone needs to sue Sprint.”

Yesterday Sobek had departed, accompanied by Red Anubis, Min, Unut, Thoth, and several others. The crocodile god had managed to piece together a convoy of seventeen large vehicles: moving vans, semis, school buses, cattle trucks, flatbeds, dump-trucks, and the like. Somehow he’d struck a deal with General Yusuf and obtained petrol enough to get them down to Aswan, two hundred kilometers to the south. Then he crammed them full with children, as many as each vehicle could carry. In some cases he had to tear them from a mother’s arms, but most parents were eager to find their sons and daughters a place on one of Sobek’s trucks.

Gamel and Tut were among the last to climb aboard. “We stay with Lohengrin,” Gamel insisted. “Watch motorbike. One euro.” Klaus slammed the gate shut on his protests, and slapped the truck to send it off. The smaller children were weeping when the convoy finally began to roll. Jonathan took pictures of their tear-streaked faces with his cell phone.

The congestion was horrendous, both lanes thick with old cars, bikes, motor scooters, rusted vans and panel trucks, even taxicabs. Some drove along the shoulders, while others straddled the center line, advancing with fits and starts, bumping people out of the way. Abandoned vehicles sat rusting on both sides of the road, a few squarely in the middle. The ones that had not been abandoned quite yet were all honking angrily at the tangle of foot traffic, like a flock of huge steel geese. Klaus had become convinced that every car in Egypt had its horn wired to its brake pedal, so any stop or slowdown produced a blast of noise.

They saw four women and a boy trying to pull a horse wagon of the sort his father used to carry tourists up the mountain. Jonathan took a picture with his cell phone. They saw a mother with three infants on her back, and a man with a wrinkled old woman slung across his shoulders. Jonathan snapped them both. They even saw a thin young girl pushing a wire grocery cart as tall as she was. Inside it was a squalling infant with a missing leg, on a bed of rags. “A poignant image of displacement,” said Jonathan, as he took the picture. Hundreds clutched backpacks, suitcases, and bundles, and all of them were shoving, stumbling into one another in their haste to get away. Some appeared to be near the point of collapse. Klaus had seldom felt so angry or so helpless as he did watching the human river flow past him. He wondered how many would live long enough to see Lake Nasser.

“It’s time.” John Fortune was mounted on a l ong-necked Arabian mare, a lean red horse bred for the desert sands.

Klaus mounted up beside him on an Arab mare as black as the Egyptian night, while Jonathan climbed gingerly onto an old dun-colored gelding. Hive had his legs today, but under his keffiyeh both his ears were missing, along with his pinkies, ring fingers, and two toes off each foot. Klaus had not inquired about his genitals, although it struck him that Jonathan had sent out more wasps than could be accounted for with just some toes and fingers.

The horses were a parting gift from Sobek. “They will not run out of gasoline, at least,” the crocodile god had told them. John Fortune turned out to be a skilled rider. He’d gotten a pony for his seventh birthday, he told Klaus, and had taken riding lessons all through his teenage years. “Never rode without a helmet, though. Mom was afraid that if I fell it would trigger my wild card and turn me into a bowling ball with tentacles.”

Or a fire-breathing lion. Klaus was good with horses too, though these spirited Arabians were more temperamental than his father’s huge German plow pullers.

Sobek had seen to their clothing, too, providing them with Bedouin garb better suited to the red lands than denim cutoffs and American Hero T-shirts. “Hey, cool, Lawrence of Arabia,” Jonathan had enthused when the three of them donned their Arab clothing for the first time. In his blog he wrote that John Fortune made a good Omar Sharif and Lohengrin could pass for Peter O’Toole on steroids, but “Anthony Quinn I’m not, though I did like him in that Zorro the Greek flick.”

The whole world was moving south, but the three of them rode north. Jonathan’s wasps had seen detachments from the Egyptian Third Army moving rapidly down the Nile. They had guns and tanks and planes, just as Sobek had foreseen. Wherever they encountered jokers they shot them out of hand. With them came the jackals of Ikhlas al-Din, flying the flag of the caliphate.

“We cannot hope to win this fight,” John Fortune told them, when they stopped for a drink of cool water late that afternoon. “There are too many of them, and only three of us. All we can hope to do is confuse them, delay them, and buy some time for our own people. We need to dart in, sting them, then turn and fly away to sting again somewhere else, like Jonathan’s wasps.”

“Ja,” said Klaus. “Sting and run. I understand.”

“Righto,” said Jonathan. “But you know, sometimes when you sting someone they swat at you. Just thought I’d mention that. Sometimes all the wasps don’t make it back.”

John Fortune nodded thoughtfully. “Jonathan, it was brave of you to stay, but—”

“I overslept,” said Bugsy. “That’s all it was. I missed the bloody boat, so what the hell. Missus Hive’s little bug is in. Fucker tried to cut my head off!” He scratched under his keffiyeh. “I’m thinking tanks. If I can find some way to get inside, twenty, thirty wasps could really mess up a crew. Sting their hands, their arms, their faces. Crawl inside their pants and sting their dicks. I’ll lose some bugs, but there’s more where they came from. You think if I fly down that big cannon on the turret, I’d pop out inside the motherfucker, or what?”

“Try it. Let us know.” John smiled. “Too bad Rustbelt isn’t with us. He’s the guy you really want for tanks.”

As the sun was sinking in the west, Jonathan reported that the advance units of the Third Army had left the river. “Where the road makes its big loop, they’re cutting straight across the desert. Armored cars, tanks, infantry. Apaches, too. Fuck it, I hate helicopers. The backwash blows my bugs to hell and gone.”

The three of them undressed in silence, and stowed their Bedouin garb in their saddle rolls. Klaus stripped down to shorts, T-shirt, and sandals. John and Jonathan got naked. By then they could see the dust of the advancing column with their own eyes. “This is really stupid,” said Hive. “Did I mention that? Fucking cell phone.” Then he vanished, and in his place a venomous green cloud uncoiled in the air like some huge, smoky python. John was gone as well. The horses whickered in fear when the lioness appeared, but she did not linger long. Across the sands she ran, bounding toward the foe. The swarm followed.

Klaus was the last. Against the red of the setting sun, the white of his ghost steel shone as pure as hope. On his left arm a shield appeared, in his right hand a gleaming sword. Before the light was gone, he meant to carve up half a dozen tanks.

“Deus Volt,” Lohengrin cried, as he strode into the red lands, following the lioness and the wasps. He was no hollow hero. None of them were hollow heroes. And this night, if God willed it, they would teach the foe that the shortcut was a mistake.