Lords of the Black Sands

by J. Edward Neill

  “She controls the eyes.” Keshiaa glanced skyward.

  “Enough of them to make a difference,” Thessia added. “When auntie died, Mariya stepped in. She knows how to make the eyes go blind. She knows how to trick Menkaur’s scientists. You have to help us. Please…I beg you.”

  Keshiaa folded her arms. What darkness moved behind her eyes, Thessia could never have known.

  “I have a letter.” She tugged a tiny square of folded paper from her gauntlet. “It’s written in the old language—in Arabi. Take it to Mariya. Please. I beg you.”

  After a long, hard look into the caravan, Keshiaa snatched the paper and dropped it into one of the dozen pouches circling her waist. She looked unhappy to do it, her eyes full of judgment.

  “Go from here, Thess.” She waved her arm. “I’ll do this thing if I can, but I don’t want to see you again. What you’ve done…we all know about. What would your mother say? All those who’ve come before you…their hearts would break if they knew your betrayal. Now go. And pray Menkaur doesn’t catch you. No matter his son’s love for you, they’ll pull your bones apart if they find you dressed like this.”

  “Thank y—” Thessia tried.

  “Go.” Keshiaa waved again, and turned her back forever.

  20

  He held a length of tarnished bone up to the clouded sky.

  And he considered how much it would hurt to drive its sharpened end into his heart.

  An hour before dusk, atop the most barren, stony, wind-blasted lump of rock in the world, Galen lurked atop a grey boulder and gazed into nothing. His belly rumbled—he hadn’t eaten in weeks. His beard, having taken a decade to grow just a few inches long, fluttered in the hollow breeze. For the first time in ages, he felt tired and hungry. His joints were sore, his eyes bleary in the wind, his hands as dry and cracked as the shattered stones upon which he lived.

  His immortality, unquenched by blue liquid, had begun to fade. By his estimation, if he decided not to skewer himself with the bone, he might live another hundred years.

  Maybe only ninety.

  Or maybe just one.

  How long had he existed in the rocky, desolate badlands?

  How far away was the sea?

  The Pyramid?

  The rest of the world?

  He’d crossed the strait between Japas and the mainland so long ago, he’d forgotten the answers. And now, atop his tomblike hill, he meditated his days away and spent his nights searching for nothing.

  At least his view was good.

  To the south, a range of gargantuan mountains thrust out of the earth. Their shadows were all-powerful, especially at twilight, during which he liked to sit and gaze at the grey-topped peaks until the darkness arrived.

  To the north and east were more hills like his own. Shallow streamlets twisted around the hills’ stony bottoms, the grey waters still carrying the reek of the holocaust which had poisoned their source.

  And to the west lay the desert. The arid sands, blasted black by the Pharaoh’s ancient weapons, swept across a barren plain untouched by human feet for many centuries. In the low shadows of mountains whose crowns had been torn away, the poisoned earth stretched far longer than the small stretch of dry sand he and Elly had crossed.

  Elly.

  He thought of her often, but not in a way he wanted. Dreams of her were often mingled with those of his mother, and it seemed to him they had both died the same. He saw them burning in his sleep, screaming for mercy, crying out to ears which would not listen.

  Dead…all the same, he too often thought.

  The price for helping me.

  Rather than remember the love he’d felt for Elly, he embraced the darkness of her loss. Thoughts of justice, vengeance, even memories of her kindness fell away. And he dreamed instead of a lightless world, a place in which bright souls like Elly would never think to arise, lest they be swallowed up in the gloom of human despair.

  Why strive for goodness?

  It’s pointless.

  It ends the same.

  That night, like so many hundreds before, he lingered atop his boulder and waited for the sun to dip beneath the clouds. The crackling fire he’d laid in his stony hut died at his back, and the familiar pangs of hunger reached out to him. His hunger was strongest at night, just like his emotions.

  It was then, moments before the red sun sank into the arid west, he spotted someone in the distance. Whoever it was wore shaggy furs like his own, crude sandals made of animal leather, and a drab scarf which caught in the wind and danced like a spirit in the coming dark. Alone, the figure walked in the valley between two stony hills, taking small leaps to cross the grey-watered streams.

  Galen clutched the bone. Days ago, he’d pulled it from the corpse of a mountain goat and sharpened it on the rocks. Without his swords, he’d made a hundred bone daggers just like it, several of which he kept hidden beneath his ratty cloak.

  Come closer, he wanted to say to the approaching figure. I’ve been meaning to see how sharp this really is.

  Meandering up the broken rocks beneath his hill, the figure made a slow ascent. Galen squinted and saw the figure was a teenage boy, skinny as a twig, dusted grey with powder from the dry, desolate hilltops.

  Galen considered many things: frightening the boy away, killing him, perhaps even using his bones to make more knives.

  But in the end, he hunkered atop his rock and waited.

  The boy arrived. His face was dark and dirty, his eyes bleary from the wind. Galen reckoned he must’ve come from the village many miles south. A few hundred people lived there, subsisting off grey water, roots, and goat meat.

  “Don’t come any closer,” he said when the boy was forty steps away. He’d laid the sharpened bone across his lap, and his eyes sparkled in the dying sunlight.

  The boy, almost brave until then, looked fearful. “Are you—? Are you him?” he called up to the hilltop. His language was of the old world, of a people called the Hindi. Galen’s mother had made him learn the Hindi tongue long, long ago.

  “Yes. I’m me,” said Galen. “What brings you to my rocks, little one?”

  The boy pulled some of his scarf away. The skin beneath the scarf was cleaner. His chin and cheeks were sallow, and his eyes dark.

  “My father sent me,” the boy managed. “He wants me to—”

  “What’s your name?” Galen cut him off.

  The boy swallowed hard.

  “Anik, son of Rauthi, son of Muha—”

  “You’re lying to me, Anik,” said Galen. “I don’t like liars. You shouldn’t lie to any man, especially me, especially not tonight.”

  Anik searched the rocks surrounding his sandaled feet. The shadows had begun to pool, and the stars winked through the broken clouds.

  “Wh—why not tonight?”

  Galen smirked.

  “I’m in a mood.” He toyed with the sharpened bone. “It’d be easy tonight. Easy to kill. Easy to pluck out a liar’s tongue and feed it to the buzzards.”

  The boy gulped. His fear was visible, glistening on his forehead in small, crystalline beads.

  “Whoever sent you here wasn’t your father—but instead a great fool,” Galen continued. “Why in the dark? Why not in the daylight? Was it an accident, Anik? Are you a slow walker? Or do you need the dark to do something…unsavory?”

  “I—I didn’t want to come.” Anik stared at the ground. “I was afraid. Everyone in the village, they know who you are.”

  Galen wasn’t surprised. Even in the great desolation between nothing and nowhere, he could not escape himself. The villagers had likely noticed him not hunting, not drinking from the streams, and not sleeping. Perhaps one among them was wiser than the rest, and knew stories the others did not.

  I don’t belong here, and they know it.

  What was it Elly said?

  A wolf among the sheep.

  “What do you want, Anik? Tell the truth.”

  The boy hung his head. “Someone in my village wants to meet
you. Please, I beg, don’t ask his name. I don’t know it. No one does. He came from the west. He wanted us to lead him here, but our elder…he said you would kill us if we brought a stranger to your hut. So…they sent me.”

  Galen leaned back atop his boulder. The boy had spoken the truth, and an intriguing one, at that.

  “Tell me, Anik, what does this stranger look like? Does he speak Hindi? Is his skin dark like yours— golden—or is he pale?”

  The boy looked up at him. “Golden. Yes…he speaks Hindi. But he doesn’t sound like us.”

  The night stood on a knife’s edge. In a few moments more, the sun’s last light would vanish in the west. Galen waited for it to happen, leaving young Anik to tremble into the shadows.

  And then, beneath the stars, he rose up.

  “You were wise not to bring him here,” he told the boy. “I would have killed you all. The stranger—he isn’t from the lands beyond the mountains. He’s from the desert kingdoms, Persi and Arabi. I only wonder who sent him and how he knew where to find me.”

  “How do you know?” asked Anik.

  I just do.

  Galen glanced skyward, to the half-clouded heaven in which the Pharaoh’s mechanical eyes floated beyond his sights. He’d long ago concluded the satellites hadn’t always been used as intended.

  Someone’s out there. Someone other than the Nemesis.

  Using Menkaur’s toys for something other than death.

  Using them to find me.

  …but not to kill me.

  “I’ll go to your village,” he said to Anik. “But not tonight.”

  Anik looked up from the rocks. Even in the starlight, Galen saw the boy’s surprise.

  “You will?”

  “I will,” said Galen. “Now run along. You know how to get home in the dark, right? Watch out for snakes. And coyotes.”

  …and great dark ships soaring through the night.

  * * *

  Many hours after Anik had scurried away into the foothills, Galen crouched alone in his hut. A weak fire crackled within a tiny ring of rocks, vomiting out more embers than flame. Galen held his sharpened bone above the smoldering mess, a skewered lizard dangling from its end. He bit the reptile’s burnt tail clean off, and he gazed ever deeper into the fire.

  How long had he sat, lost in thought?

  He couldn’t have said.

  His head ached. His heart thumped slowly beneath his ribs. He couldn’t conceive who the stranger in the village might be, only that he was a stranger, and that he was not to be trusted. The longer he dwelled on it, the wilder his guesses began to feel:

  He’s not the Pharaoh’s man. They’d have sent a ship if they knew I lived.

  It’s not Nem. He won’t come for me again. Not alone, anyway.

  It could be a Habiru lord…someone vengeful.

  No. Not the Habiru. They’re not tenacious enough to pursue me this far.

  He wandered through these and a thousand more possibilities. Each one, he exiled from thought after deducing its unlikeliness.

  The truth was—there was no one who cared about him anymore.

  In Japas, he’d effectively died.

  He finished his lizard in silence. Afterward, he smothered the embers with ashes and lay awake on the hut’s floor until dawn.

  He made no move toward Anik’s village the next day.

  Or the next night.

  Or for two nights more.

  Only on the fourth eve, after meditating long in the wind, dwelling in moribund silence beneath the cheerless sun, and sitting at peace in the lashing rain did he rise up and march down his hill. In his sandals, with his fur cloak riddled with hidden bone knives, he left his hut behind. He knew he’d never return. The stones had run out of secrets millennia ago, and had never once proven a soft place to sleep.

  In no great hurry, he shambled toward the mountains’ great grey shapes. In the dark, he saw them only by the stars they blocked and by the clouds gathering at their peaks. The village lay far short of the mountains, of course, and yet a part of Galen considered striding past everything, reaching the mountains, and scaling the highest peak alone.

  Wouldn’t be a bad way to spend ninety years, he imagined.

  …or a bad way to die.

  But when he smelled the smoke wending between the hills, and when he heard faraway voices bounding from Anik’s village, he remembered himself. If ten years of meditation among the hill’s voiceless rocks had taught him anything, it was that he was not dead.

  Not yet.

  As he walked through the night, gliding between the great rocky mounds and splashing across grey-watered streams, his mind wandered to places he didn’t desire. His sandals falling in the water sounded almost like a woman’s voice, while many of the shadows among the hills looked human.

  Elly, he remembered.

  You haunt me.

  Why?

  He closed his eyes and dreamed of Elia’s death. He’d done it too often, and he hated it. He swore he heard her cries, his name on her lips, carrying far on the night’s wind. She’d wanted him to save her. But he had been too busy chasing his immortality.

  And had left her to die alone.

  He cast Elly out of his mind, but no sooner did she fade than Galen remembered his mother. In his momentary dream, his hand was clasped with hers, and in the spaces between the hills’ shadows he saw himself walking with her. He and she had approached the Nile’s shore under a clouded twilight. She’d ushered him onto a skiff, said no words, and watched him float away.

  He’d seen her no more after that day.

  But over the next many years he’d heard a thousand tales of the pyre the Pharaoh had lit beneath her.

  He dreamed these things as he walked.

  The memories delivered him to a dark, dark place.

  The night was still young when at last he arrived at the village’s outskirts. The sad place existed in a hollow between three hills. A hundred stone huts ringed a pool of water, whose subtle radioactive scent he caught in the wind.

  Hunkering high atop one of the three hills, he observed the village and its people for a while. He saw several men squatting around fires, talking, bickering, and coughing. They looked skinny, scabby, and malnourished.

  They looked miserable.

  Were I one of them…

  …I’d kill myself the moment I held my first knife.

  When he heard their voices, saw their slack faces, mostly hairless heads, and crooked jaws, he understood.

  They’ve been here so long, decay is all they know.

  He watched the people for a long, long time. Most were twenty-something and already decrepit. A few, including one frail woman he spied shambling from one fire to another, must’ve been nearly forty. The woman’s voice sounded firm, but the rest of her was skeletal, and her bald head gleamed with both starlight and firelight.

  He looked, but saw no sign of Anik or his stranger. The people were relaxed. Perhaps the nameless visitor had already left, fleeing the scablands ahead of the winter soon to come.

  Emerging from the shadows, Galen descended the rocks and walked straight for the village’s heart. A few people saw him come, but rather than cry out in alarm, they gazed with empty eyes as he passed. He heard their whispers at his back. Theirs was a broken form of the Hindi tongue, as rotten as their skin.

  He arrived at the pool of water. Beside it, two fires crackled, and some twenty people hunkered. Their faces red with firelight, it took them many moments to notice him, and many more to recognize he wasn’t one of them.

  Quietly, he pitied them.

  …and judged them.

  Low, they’ve fallen.

  Barely human anymore.

  Finally, one of the villagers clambered to his feet. Galen looked him up and down, searching for a weapon. But the skinny man had none. Fear of the Pharaoh’s decree had reached even into this wretched place.

  “You’re him,” exclaimed the man. “Him with the long life. Him from the sand.”
/>   The other villagers arose. Galen saw fear in their eyes, but also reverence. To them, he must have been something like a god.

  “Anik—where is the one called Anik?” he demanded.

  They looked worried by his question. The skinny man who’d stood first retreated from the others, waving his hands in submission, babbling words Galen couldn’t fully grasp.

  “…we were waiting.”

  “…the boy.”

  “…don’t kill us.”

  The skinny man hurried away, and Galen stood beside the water, gazing down at the villagers. They were puny compared to him, half his weight and on average a foot shorter. He wasn’t sure why, but as he looked into their yellow, cataract-riddled gazes, he wondered if it wouldn’t be kinder to destroy them.

  It would be easy, after all.

  They might thank me in the end.

  He showed them an unsettling smirk.

  All they did was whisper.

  Moments later, the skinny man emerged from the night with Anik in tow. The boy was taller than the other villagers, and it occurred to Galen he was the only one in the village who could’ve made the long walk to his hut. The boy might’ve well been king of the whole village had he wanted.

  “You?” said Anik when the skinny man led him closer. “You came? We thought—”

  “You thought I wasn’t coming,” Galen interrupted. “That I’d decided against it. No. I arrive on my own terms—that’s all. Where is your stranger? Or should I say strangers? Since your eyes tell me there’s more than one.”

  Anik looked afraid. The other villagers shied away.

  “Will you follow?” Anik beckoned.

  And so Galen did.

  Down through the shadows between huts, they walked. Anik led the way, stepping softly on bare feet. The other villagers, slow and stupid, followed Galen at a safe distance. Every time he looked back to them, he saw them tremble.

  He pitied them no more.

  Now he felt only disgust.

  At the largest of the village’s huts, Anik stopped. The entrance to the stone house was covered with a dry sheaf of leather, which creaked in the night’s wind.

  “In there.” Anik gestured at the entrance. The space beyond the leather sheaf was dark, so black even Galen couldn’t see what lay inside the house.