by Jim Johnson
Another bandit, one wearing a pretty necklace he must have stolen from Mama Sitre, said, "You know Meret, boss. He got it in his mind to have a little fun with a few of them villagers. He kept Pashet and Uni with him.”
Scar swore. “That useless sand-packer. Get this camp moving, Belko. Start back toward the quarry. Master Deshi’s angry enough as it is at the delay. Don’t make it any worse by dawdling.”
Scar turned toward the wagon full of bodies. Ruia receded away from her vantage point and clamped her hands over her mouth again, hoping he hadn’t seen her.
“Gods dammit. You were supposed to keep the prisoners alive. The Deshi needs living slaves, not a bunch of stupid, mindless laborers.”
The bandit named Belko opened his mouth to speak, but Scar raised a hand in warning. “I don’t want the details, Belko. Save your excuses for Master Deshi.” He shook his head and then nudged his horse toward the edge of camp. He glanced to the east, toward the slow-rising sun peeking over the horizon. “Assuming they didn’t spend the night in the village, Meret and the others can't be that far away—maybe a couple hour's ride. We’ll go retrieve them.”
He stared at the other bandits around him. “In the meantime, get these wagons moving. Roll as fast as you can toward the quarry, but set up camp if you don’t think you can get there before moon-up.”
Scar took one more look at the wagon of bodies, then rode to loom over Necklace-stealer, the man he’d called Belko. “And no more killings. Any of your men so much as touch one of the prisoners, you shoot that bastard and add him to the stack of dead. He’d be more use to us as a construct than a breathing soldier.”
He gave Belko a long look then added, “Got it?”
Belko, looking sufficiently chastised, nodded and then turned his attention to the ground. Scar pulled his horse’s head around and rode toward the edge of the camp, waving for his two silent companions to join him.
Ruia watched them ride off, silently praying thanks to the goddess Mayat that she hadn’t been seen. After a long moment, she also added her thanks to Djehuti, scribe of the gods, for her newfound ability to understand the Hesso words. She shook her head, not sure what to make of it. Whatever the case, the whispers in her mind had quieted down again, and the strange pulling sensation from her stomach had eased. The feeling was replaced by one of surprising hunger, and her stomach lurched and roiled, reminding her that it had been nearly a day since she had last eaten.
She peeked out through the dead limbs of the adults and watched the men left behind start to break up the camp. A couple stood guard over the two covered wagons while the rest gathered supplies and readied horses. Two more muttered amongst themselves as they headed into the trees.
As she took in the state of the camp, she suddenly realized that she would have no better opportunity to make a run for it. All of the bandits in the camp were occupied with one task or another, and it would be much harder to make an escape once the caravan was underway.
Her mind racing with ideas, she cast her eyes around the cramped confines of the death wagon. She had to find something—there!
Poor dead Yuti was stretched out next to her, partially leaning up against Papa Intef’s still form. Ruia steeled herself, then reached over and started unbuckling the girl’s sandals. The cold, clammy flesh made her shiver, and she bit down on her lip to keep from making a noise.
Her hands shook with anger as she undid one buckle, then another. Yuti didn’t deserve what had happened to her—none of them had. She’d find a way to strike back at these foul men.
But this sandal! It took some careful maneuvering and a little brute force to pull the sandals off Yuti, but once she had them in hand, it took her no time to buckle them onto her own feet.
She pushed her way through the bodies to the edge of the wagon, and paused in a mix of wonder and terror. Her da’s body was wedged into one of the corners of the wagon, a couple other bodies perched on and around him.
Tears welled in her eyes as she took in his broken form, his strong arms that had once held her in comfortable hugs and the large, clever hands that had shown her how to bait a hook and gut a fish. He had a terrible bloody hole in his chest. His eyes were open and unfocused, his headcloth a mess of bloodstained fabric.
She stared at him in silence, her thoughts a mix of sorrow and vengeance. She leaned in close to him and rested her forehead against his cold, stubbled cheek, remembering better days when that cheek had been warm and full of laughter.
“Oh, da. What have they done to you? To all of us?” She focused on his face and lifted a hand to close his eyes, then with a flash of inspiration, gently unwound his headcloth and wrapped it loosely around her own neck. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to get help and come back for you all, living and dead. I love you, da.” She rested a hand over the ugly hole in his chest, and pretended for a moment that he was healthy and whole, and merely sleeping.
Then she took a deep breath and returned to her new reality. Her da and ma were dead, along with many of her fellow villagers. And yet many were still alive, prisoners of these foul men. It was time to run from this place, to get help.
She turned away from her father’s body and looked out of the wagon, around her immediate area of the camp. Seeing no one focusing on the wagon, she marshaled her strength and leaped out. Her sandaled feet hit the cold ground and she ran as fast as she could toward the nearby trees.
She had nearly gained the cover of the trees when she heard a voice cry out to her left, close to the river.
Ruia didn’t stop. She turned away from the voice and followed the river. Based on the direction of its flow, opposite to her movement, she knew she was moving generally southward. She breathed a sigh of relief. South was toward the fort, and far beyond that, her village.
More cries sounded from behind her, but she didn’t dare slow to turn and look. She ducked down lower into the overgrowth among the trees, but kept moving.
Sounds from ahead stopped her in her tracks, and she crouched down to ground, finding a hollow in a tree to press against. She extended her hearing as far as she could. The voices ahead of her sounded really close.
She willed herself to calm down and controlled her breathing, feeling like she was getting used to being very quiet.
A man’s voice sounded from nearby, in Hesso again. She focused on her amulet and on the whispers in her mind, and felt a pulling sensation in her gut once more. The words again became clear to her. “Was sure I’d heard something over here. Let’s check it out.”
Another voice responded, “Come on, we’ve got to get these things back to camp. Stupid idiots go wandering off by themselves at night.”
The first one replied, “We should tie them up like the mules that they are.”
Ruia stayed crouched, even as the bushes near her rattled with the sound of their passing. They were just a few feet away.
“Here, I found the path. Let’s get back to the camp.”
Ruia risked rising up a bit on her haunches and peered through the thin foliage. Two rough bandits, dressed as the others in leathers and plain headcloths, had a long line of rope between them to which leads were tied to a trio of those ugly unliving creatures. The creatures made no voice as they shuffled through the bushes.
One of the men paused and scanned the trees around him. Ruia focused on hiding and kept silent. She felt another drain from within and wondered if it was somehow related to her lifelong talent at hiding. Questions rolled around in her mind but no answers came to her.
The man finished his scan, and, apparently satisfied, waved at the other man. They resumed their trudge through the bushes back toward the camp. She breathed a sigh of relief. She didn’t understand what the whispers and the drain on her ba might mean. Perhaps it was divine Anubis helping out a lost soul, or perhaps just her imagination. She rubbed at the knot on her head. She had been hit pretty hard. Maybe she was just imagining things.
She glanced at the river through the trees. One thing she wasn’t imagining was tha
t she was free. Free to go where she wished and free from those awful creatures.
Images of the dead bodies she’d spent the night with sprang to mind, and she knew what she had to do. She had to find some way to save the rest of her friends. She couldn’t count on Necklace-stealer to keep the word he’d given to Scar. It was all too likely that more of her friends would die, before they reached whatever quarry they were being taken to.
She had to find some way to save them all. She considered her meager prospects, then settled on the only real choice available to her. She’d run to Fort Sekhmet and beg the soldiers there for help. The captain and his men were occasional traders with the village, and she remembered that her village’s elders had a decent relationship with the soldiers. But even if they didn’t, she knew it was their job to protect the province’s citizens from harm. She was sure they would help her rescue her villagers.
With that goal set firmly in mind, Ruia wrapped her father’s headcloth around her aching head, bound up her braided sidelock, and then ran south along the river shore, hoping to reach the fort in time to save her people.
CHAPTER 10
THE SUDDEN NEED TO BREATHE PULLED Tjety out of the formless black. He convulsed on the ground, lungs tearing at his chest to fill. Taking a thick breath, he coughed up dust into the fabric still wrapped over his mouth and nose. All sense of time and place vanished. All he could do was curl up into a ball on the ground and try to find air, to cough and clear the grimy shit out of his lungs.
As he got his senses about him and a drew a few decent breaths, he felt the heat of the sun on one of his legs, the one not buried in debris. He shifted his body, skittering small piles of pebbles and sand. Clouds of dust eddied all around him as he groggily got to his feet.
Tjety waved his hands in front of his face, then hissed from a sudden sharp pain from the wound in his arm. He grimaced at the gunshot. It was oozy and caked with drying blood and grime. He carefully probed the wound with his free hand, wincing at the sensations. He considered himself somewhat fortunate—while the wound was in his stronger gun arm, the bullet had passed clean through the meat of the bicep and hadn’t broken the bone. It might be salvageable. But, the wound was filthy and there was no telling what had gotten in there. He’d have to tend to it soon, before it turned foul.
He reached up with his good hand, pulled his headcloth off, and worked it into a makeshift sling. He carefully poked his wounded arm into it and tightened the knot. It wasn’t ideal by any means, but it’d serve well enough until he could take the time to properly tend to the wound.
Slowly, gradually, the dust settled enough for him to make sense of the changed landscape. One whole wall of the rocky den had collapsed, leaving a large cleft that opened to the sand dunes beyond. The nook where he had entered the small clearing was choked with rubble and swirls of sand. In a large pile of rock that must have detached and slid off the rock face, a hand poked out, scratched, bloodied, and filthy.
Tjety’s hand shot for his holster; but the sling fouled up the movement. He twisted his gun belt around so that his left hand could reach the holster, but found nothing inside it. He numbly recalled that his pistol had fallen out of his grasp at some point during the ground tremors. He checked for his khopesh and was gratified to feel it somehow still hanging from the scabbard tangled in his kilt. He drew it out of its scabbard with his good hand.
He shakily drew the blade and took a step toward where Meret lay buried, and realized he was dragging something behind him.
The death-rattler's broken form stretched out behind him, the sharp barbs contained in the tip of its tail hooked into his leather kiltings. He stomped a sandal onto the snake's body and made an awkward slash, severing the tail just above the rattle and the barbs. The snake’s body slumped to the ground. Grayish ichor oozed out of the stump. He sheathed his khopesh and gingerly reached down to extricate the rattle, careful to avoid the still-glistening barbs. Even dead, the creature’s poison would be lethal.
Disgusted, he tossed the rattle aside. He wiped his hand against his dirty tunic and then worked his way over to Meret. He grabbed Meret's wrist and pushed out with his weary senses for any signs of life. Blood pulsed thin and thready within Meret’s arm. Tjety called out to him and pulled at the man's arm.
A muffled groan sounded from within the pile of rocks. Tjety stared at the man’s hand. “Do I pull you out or leave you to rot?”
He mulled the question over, then shook his head. No, he had to get the man out and get some answers if he could. Leaving him buried here to die would be a waste of an opportunity. He reached down and shifted the rocks around Meret's body, working to free him from the rubble as best he could with one arm.
Meret mumbled in an incoherent mix of Kekhmetic and Hesso and a third strange tongue that was maybe something unique to his cult, or possibly a rough border dialect. Tjety’s training had taught him that multiple dialects had developed throughout the fluid border between Hesso-held land and Kekhmet proper. The mix of Hesso and Kekhmet cultures and peoples had been inevitable. As it was, the blended dialect hadn't worked its way south to the capital. No Rangers he knew of could speak it.
After several minutes of concerted, exhausting effort clearing rock, Tjety grabbed hold of Meret's free arm and roughly pulled him out of the rock pile. The bandit let out a cry of pain.
Tjety dredged up some reserves of strength and pulled him to his feet, put his good arm around Meret’s shoulders, and then half-carried, half-dragged him out of the broken den and toward the trader’s road. Heker was nowhere in sight—probably had run for cover during the earthquake.
He whistled out for Heker as he reached the road, then deposited Meret onto the ground only slightly more gently than he might have otherwise. Meret stretched out, bleeding and coughing. He didn’t look to be in any condition to offer resistance, but Tjety patted him down one-handed, just to be sure. He found a folding knife and a small leather satchel, and tossed them aside, several feet away.
Tjety glanced around the sunlit sand dunes and at the glittering river to the east, and mustered up the strength for two more concerted whistles. After a long quiet moment, he heard a whinny in response and then hooves hitting the dirt.
Heker jogged over one of the low hills between the road and the river and to him, fat droplets of water dripping from his mouth and nose. Tjety offered quick thanks to Mayat and then gave Heker a long rub along his neck, both to welcome him back but also to check for any wounds.
"Were you the smart one and went running when the ground started to shake?”
Heker nosed his chest in response, leaving a wet spot behind, then pricked his ears toward Meret as the man let out a low groan.
Tjety pulled a length of rope and a picket spike from the knapsack fastened to Heker's back. He hobbled Meret with the rope, who put up little complaint. It was probably an unnecessary gesture given his condition, but Tjety was inclined to be cautious. He shoved the picket spike into the ground some distance away and then tied the rope to it. He gave Heker an affectionate scratch on the flank. "Watch him. I'll be right back."
Heker gave him another snort that he fancied sounded like an affirmative. Tjety headed back to the remains of the rocky den. He wasn't about to leave his pistol behind.
Sunlight spilled over the rim of the shattered den as the morning form of the god Re made his way across the sky in his mighty sun chariot once again. In a glint of light off metal, Tjety found his pistol almost straightaway, grip buried under debris but the barrel out of the ground and pointing toward the sky. Perhaps the gods were humoring him or taking pity. Or maybe he’d just gotten lucky.
He picked it up and turned it over. Somehow it had survived the quake, though there were new gouges in the juniper grips, and the chambers and hexagonal barrel were completely fouled with grime. He'd need to spend some time properly cleaning it—time he didn't have right now. He managed to holster his precious weapon left-handed and picked his way out of the rocks. He returned to Heker,
who stood sentinel over Meret's prone form.
Tjety grimaced at the pain in his arm as he resettled it in the sling. He stared down at Meret. "What am I gonna do with you now, you son of a bitch?"
Meret opened his mouth as if to speak, then shut it and dropped his head back into the dirt. "Ya got me, Ranger." He wheezed, and turned his head to spit. He clenched at his thigh with both hands and groaned.
Tjety pulled his waterskin and medical kit off Heker’s back and took a knee. He poked around in the satchel one-handed, scrounging for some bandages. He glanced at Meret. “If I go and get some water, promise you won’t run off?”
Meret stared at him. “Fuck you.” He feebly kicked out his hobbled feet. “You know I ain’t going nowhere. ‘Sides, ya shot me, bastard.” Through gritted teeth, he muttered, “I’m afraid to stand up for fear of my leg falling off.”
Tjety glanced at Meret’s hands, clenched over his bloody and grimy kilt. “No less than you deserve. How many people did you kill in that village? How many more are suffering some other fate thanks to you?”
Meret shot a glance at him, then rolled over, pain etched on his face. Tjety stood up and made the short walk to the river. He knelt down and poured the contents of his waterskin over his head. He filled it, drank deeply, then filled it again. He sluiced water over his wound, regretting having drunk his medicinal alcohol. Should have kept it for what it was meant for. He’d remember that next time. He grit his teeth as he poured more water onto the wound, realizing that it was going to be a mighty struggle to clean it one-handed. He’d have to figure out the balancing act later.
He filled the waterskin once more and then limped back to Meret and Heker. Meret glanced up at him and then away, licking his crusty lips. Tjety leaned down and offered the waterskin. “Ain’t much, but it’s cold and wet.”
Meret glanced up with hate glittering in his eyes. Tjety thought the man might slap the waterskin away. But, the bandit pulled one bloody hand away from his leg and accepted the waterskin. He gulped greedily from it, then handed it back, half-full. Tjety moved away from him and wearily took a seat on the ground nearby. He cradled the waterskin in the crook of his slung arm, and fished around in his medical satchel again.
