The Age of Ra

29. Delirious

David. Alone. Panting. Drenched in blood.

He didn't know how much time had passed. The field around him was crimson. Trampled wheat stems, dripping gore. Bodies sprawled everywhere.

David stood, trembling with exhaustion, the flail drooping from his left hand, the crook in his right almost too heavy to hold up.

The blood on him — how much of it was his own? He knew he had received wounds. How many? How bad? He couldn't bring himself to look. He couldn't bear to move his head, or dare to. Simply remaining upright was as much as he could manage.

The dead were heaped two high, three high on all sides. Nephthysians mainly, many of them still clutching their short swords. Gobbets of flesh littered the earth, scraps of entrail. A shambles. Blood had made black mud of the soil.

David fought to stay conscious. There were more Nephs out there, circling beyond the perimeter of the killing ground, wary, watchful. Would they keep their distance? Or would they pluck up the courage to step past the piles of corpses and come at him? He was the only one left. The others, the Freegyptians, were all gone. Saeed, Salim, both dead. The rest of the group likewise. If the Nephthysians decided to move in on him, that would be that. He didn't have the strength left to fight them. He couldn't kill any more of them. They would bring him down. Perhaps, right now, one of them was unshouldering his ba lance, in frank disregard for battlefield etiquette. Taking aim. Finger tightening on trigger. A single shot to the head, to end it all.

David didn't want to die. But he couldn't see what else he could do. He'd given everything he had. He'd watched himself, as though from a distance, laying into attacker after attacker. He'd been like a dispassionate observer, admiring his own technique. The use of the flail to distract and stun, the crook to deliver a disabling or killing blow. How well the army had schooled him. Those countless hours out on the training ground, repeating the actions and combinations till they were enshrined in his muscle-memory, being barked at by instructors because he wasn't keeping his guard up, wasn't putting his weight on the correct foot, wasn't doing this, wasn't doing that. All so that he could become the man who could do what he had just done — slaughtered scores of foes with brutal, unremitting efficiency. And now he was finished. Every part of him hurt, a symphony of pain, from the bassy throb of sore muscles to the sharp high notes of slashed skin. There was nothing else for it but to stand and wait. Wait for whatever came.

He was David Westwynter, the brother of the Lightbringer, not that anyone knew that apart from him and Steven. He was a long way from home and from the aegis of Osiris and Isis. He was a success as a warrior and not much else. That would have to be his epitaph.

Finally the Nephthysians came to a decision. They started to close in. He counted at least ten of them. They were faceless to him, not individuals, just people in identical uniforms and rectangle-and-semicircle-crested helmets. He couldn't hold it against them, what they were about to do, any more than the condemned man could hold it against the executioner for wielding the axe. They would kill him because they must.

How many times had he faced death in recent weeks? Stared it straight in the eye? So many times that he was getting used to it. Starting to get bored of it, even. If Anubis wanted him so badly, he should stop pussyfooting around and just take him.

The Nephthysians formed a semicircle in front of him, swords at the ready. Each seemed reluctant to step within range of David's weapons, as if hoping another would be the first to take the plunge. What was their problem? Couldn't they tell he was past being capable of defending himself? What did they need, an engraved invitation?

Then one of them fell down.

The rest turned, startled.

Another of them looked down to find that the end of a crossbow bolt had sprouted from his chest. He keeled over.

A third had a chin. Then he had no chin. His jawbone was ripped away by a bullet impact.

The remaining Nephthysians scattered, trying to find cover. Bullets and crossbow bolts blizzarded at them. David heard gunshots and a diesel engine. Then there were Freegyptians all around him, hounding the Nephthysians through the wheat, scything them down. To use range weapons in a hand weapon situation was dirty fighting, but they didn't care. He recognised the faces of several of his saviours. Zafirah's Liberators. And here came Zafirah herself, dishevelled, caked with grime, but still in command.

''This way,'' she told David. ''Come on. Don't just stand there. We have to fall back. The forward positions are overrun. There are Nephs everywhere. Come on!''

Jolting around in the back of a ZT. Zafirah saying that the Lightbringer had ordered a retreat to the second line of positions on the plain. Hold that line till sunset. The Nephthysians would most likely halt their advance then and everyone could retrench overnight.

David didn't care. He had just one question to ask.

''Do you love him?''

Zafirah seemed not to understand. He wasn't sure he had asked the question correctly. He tried again.

''Do you love him?''

Even to his own ears the words sounded nonsensical, as though phrased in a foreign language neither he nor Zafirah knew.

She stared at him.

''Look at you,'' she said. ''Delirious. You're barely here. We need to get you to the field hospital.''

Barely here. She was right. David felt like a passenger in his own body, much as his body was a passenger in the car. And to lapse into unconsciousness, to go from barely here to not here at all, was easy, akin to agreeing to let someone else be the driver for a while. A surrendering of control. A case of: go on then, why not?

Under canvas. A large marquee-like tent. A place that reeked of excrement and death. Cries of distress that came as regularly and insistently as the tolling of a bell. Bodies lying on blankets, arranged close-packed and neatly like the blocks of a parquet floor. Men and women moving among them, ministering — people David knew to have been doctors back in Luxor, nurses, even a couple of veterinarians.

Steven, talking to one of them in Arabic. About him. About David down here on the ground, who didn't know what time it was or how long he had been there or whether the lack of pain he was feeling was due to analgesics or not and, if not, whether that was a good sign or a bad one.

Steven squatting down next to him. Whispering.

''You're going to be fine, Dave. They'll take good care of you. It's blood loss. The faintness? The disorientation? Blood loss. Nephs cut you up pretty badly, but you'll be OK. Just lie there and recover.''

And with that, he was gone, quick as a snake slithering through grass.

And David slept.

Profoundly.